ster of
the "Antigone" of Sophocles and of the goddesses of Phidias. This
exact and demonstrated divination of bygone sentiments has, in our
days, given a new life to history. There was almost complete ignorance
of this in the last century; men of every race and of every epoch were
represented as about alike, the Greek, the barbarian, the Hindoo, the
man of the Renaissance and the man of the eighteenth century, cast in
the same mold and after the same pattern, and after a certain abstract
conception which served for the whole human species. There was a
knowledge of man but not of men. There was no penetration into
the soul itself; nothing of the infinite diversity and wonderful
complexity of souls had been detected; it was not known that the moral
organization of a people or of an age is as special and distinct
as the physical structure of a family of plants or of an order of
animals. History to-day, like zooelogy, has found its anatomy, and
whatever branch of it is studied, whether philology, languages or
mythologies, it is in this way that labor must be given to make it
produce new fruit. Among so many writers who, since Herder, Ottfried
Mueller, and Goethe have steadily followed and rectified this great
effort, let the reader take two historians and two works, one "The
Life and Letters of Cromwell" by Carlyle, and the other the "Port
Royal" of Sainte-Beuve. He will see how precisely, how clearly, and
how profoundly we detect the soul of a man beneath his actions and
works; how, under an old general and in place of an ambitious man
vulgarly hypocritical, we find one tormented by the disordered
reveries of a gloomy imagination, but practical in instinct and
faculties, thoroughly English and strange and incomprehensible to
whoever has not studied the climate and the race; how, with about a
hundred scattered letters and a dozen or more mutilated speeches, we
follow him from his farm and his team to his general's tent and to his
Protector's throne, in his transformation and in his development, in
his struggles of conscience and in his statesman's resolutions,
in such a way that the mechanism of his thought and action becomes
visible and the ever renewed and fitful tragedy, within which wracked
this great gloomy soul, passes like the tragedies of Shakespeare
into the souls of those who behold them. We see how, behind convent
disputes and the obstinacy of nuns, we recover one of the great
provinces of human psychology; how