Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 328, February, 1843 - Various

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of both countries may not improperly be said to have begun. To the student of that history, however, one consideration must occur, which imparts to the objects of his studies an interest emphatically its own. It is this: he has strong reason to believe that all the elements of society are before him. It may indeed be true that Providence has reserved some yet unknown tribe, wandering on the banks of the Amour or of the Amazons, as the instrument of accomplishing some mighty purpose—humanly speaking, however, such an event is most improbable. To adopt such an hypothesis, would be in direct opposition to all the analogies by which, in the absence of clearer or more precise motives, human infirmity must be guided. The map of the world is spread out before us; there are no regions which we speak of in the terms of doubt and ignorance that the wisest Romans applied to the countries beyond the Vistula and the Rhine, when in Lord Bacon's words "the world was altogether home-bred." When Cicero jested with Trebatius on the little importance of a Roman jurist among hordes of Celtic barbarians, he little thought that from that despised country would arise a nation, before the blaze of whose conquests the splendour of Roman Empire would grow pale; a nation which would carry the art of government and the enjoyment of freedom to a perfection, the idea of which, had it been presented to the illustrious orator, stored as his mind was with all the lore of Grecian sages, and with whatever knowledge the history of his own country could supply, would have been consigned by him, with the glorious visions of his own Academy, to the shady spaces of an ideal world. Had he, while bewailing the loss of that freedom which he would not survive, disfigured as it was by popular tumult and patrician insolence—had he been told that a figure far more faultless was one day to arise amid the unknown forests and marshes of Britain, and to be protected by the rude hands of her barbarous inhabitants till it reached the full maturity of immortal loveliness—the eloquence of Cicero himself would have been silenced, and, whatever might have been the exultation of the philosopher, the pride of the Roman would have died within him. But we can anticipate no similar revolution. The nations by which the world is inhabited are known to us; the regions which they occupy are limited; there are no fresh combinations to count upon, no reserves upon which we can depend;—there is every reason to suppose that, in the great conflict with physical and moral evil, which it is the destiny of man to wage, the last battalion is in the field.

      The course to be adopted by the student of modern history is pointed out in the following pages; and the remarks of Dr Arnold on this subject are distinguished by a degree of good sense and discrimination which it is difficult to overrate. Vast indeed is the difference between ancient and modern annals, as far as relates to the demand upon the student's time and attention. Instead of sailing upon a narrow channel, the shores of which are hardly ever beyond his view, he launches out upon an ocean of immeasurable extent, through which the greatest skill and most assiduous labour are hardly sufficient to conduct him—

      "Ipse diem noctemque negat discernere cœlo,

      Nec meminisse viæ, mediâ Palinurus in undâ."

      Instead of a few great writers, the student is beset on all sides by writers of different sort and degree, from the light memorialist to the great historian; instead of two countries, two hemispheres are candidates for his attention; and history assumes a variety of garbs, many of which were strangers to her during the earlier period of her existence. To the careful study of many periods of history, not extending over any very wide portion of time, the labour of a tolerably long life would be inadequate. The unpublished Despatches of Cardinal Granvelle at Besançon, amount to sixty volumes. The archives of Venice (a mine, by the way, scarcely opened) fill a large apartment. For printed works it may be enough to mention the Benedictine editions and Munatoris Annals, historians of the dark and middle ages, relating to two countries only, and two periods. All history, therefore, however insatiable may be the intellectual boulimia that devours him, can never be a proper object of curiosity to any man. It is natural enough that the first effect produced by this discovery on the mind of the youthful student should be surprise and mortification; nor is it before the conviction that his researches, to be valuable, must be limited, forces itself upon him, that he concentrates to some particular period, and perhaps to some exclusive object, the powers of his undivided attention. When he has thus put an end to his desultory enquiries, and selected the portion of history which it is his purpose to explore, his first object should be to avail himself of the information which other travellers in the same regions have been enabled to collect. Their mistakes will teach him caution; their wanderings will serve to keep him in the right path. Weak and feeble as he may be, compared with the first adventurers who have visited the mighty maze before him, yet he has not their difficulties to encounter, nor their perils to apprehend. The clue is in his hands which may lead him through the labyrinth in which it has been the lot of so many master-spirits to wander—

      "And find no end, in boundless mazes lost."

      But it is time to hear Dr Arnold:—

      "To proceed, therefore, with our supposed student's course of reading. Keeping the general history which he has been reading as his text, and getting from it the skeleton, in a manner, of the future figure, he must now break forth excursively to the right and left, collecting richness and fulness of knowledge from the most various sources. For example, we will suppose that where his popular historian has mentioned that an alliance was concluded between two powers, or a treaty of peace agreed upon, he first of all resolves to consult the actual documents themselves, as they are to be found in some one of the great collections of European treaties, or, if they are connected with English history, in Rymer's Fœdera. By comparing the actual treaty with his historian's report of its provisions, we get, in the first place, a critical process of some value, inasmuch as the historian's accuracy is at once tested: but there are other purposes answered besides. An historian's report of a treaty is almost always an abridgement of it; minor articles will probably be omitted, and the rest condensed, and stripped of all their formal language. But our object now being to reproduce to ourselves so far as it is possible, the very life of the period which we are studying, minute particulars help us to do this; nay, the very formal enumeration of titles, and the specification of towns and districts in their legal style, help to realize the time to us, if it be only from their very particularity. Every common history records the substance of the treaty of Troyes, May 1420, by which the succession to the crown of France was given to Henry V. But the treaty in itself, or the English version of it which Henry sent over to England to be proclaimed there, gives a far more lively impression of the triumphant state of the great conqueror, and the utter weakness of the poor French king, Charles VI., in the ostentatious care taken to provide for the recognition of his formal title during his lifetime, while all real power is ceded to Henry, and provision is made for the perpetual union hereafter of the two kingdoms under his sole government.

      "I have named treaties as the first class of official instruments to be consulted, because the mention of them occurs unavoidably in every history. Another class of documents, certainly of no less importance, yet much less frequently referred to by popular historians, consists of statutes, ordinances, proclamations, acts, or by whatever various names the laws of each particular period happen to be designated. That the Statute Book has not been more habitually referred to by writers on English history, has always seemed to me a matter of surprise. Legislation has not perhaps been so busy in every country as it has been with us; yet every where, and in every period, it has done something. Evils, real or supposed, have always existed, which the supreme power in the nation has endeavoured to remove by the provisions of law. And under the name of laws I would include the acts of councils, which form an important part of the history of European nations during many centuries; provincial councils, as you are aware, having been held very frequently, and their enactments relating to local and particular evils, so that they illustrate history in a very lively manner. Now, in these and all the other laws of any given period, we find in the first place, from their particularity, a great additional help towards becoming familiar with the times in which they were passed; we learn the names of various officers, courts, and processes; and these, when understood, (and I suppose always the habit of reading nothing without taking pains to understand it,) help us, from their very number, to realize the state of things then existing; a lively notion of any object depending on our clearly seeing some of its parts, and the more we people it,

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