ork. Thousands of
such cumber the shelves of libraries and fill the pages of
catalogues,--dusted once a year, perhaps, to verify a date, to
authenticate the details of a treaty, or fix the statistics of a war,
but never read consecutively and with zest, because there was no genuine
relation between the writer and his book. He undertook the latter in
the spirit of a mechanical job; industry and learning may be embodied
therein, but no moral life, no human charm; yet the work is cited with
respect, the author enrolled with honor;--whereas, had he sought
in poetry or philosophy, in a novel or a drama, thus to occupy and
celebrate himself with literature, the failure would have been signal,
the attempt ignominious. There is, indeed, no safer investment for
middling literary abilities than History; for, if it fail to yield any
large harvest of renown, it is comparatively secure from the assaults
of ridicule, such as make pretension in other spheres of writing
conspicuous.

Even in what are considered the successful exemplars in this department
of literature, the errors incident to artificiality, the conventional
forms of writing, are patent. Only in passages do we recognize that
beauty or truth, that reality and genuineness, which so often wholly
pervade a poem, a story, a memoir, or even a disquisition: at some
point, the flow incident to wilful instead of soulful utterance becomes
apparent;--ambition, pride of opinion, love of display somewhere
manifest themselves. It has been said that the chief element of Hume's
mental power was skepticism; and, singular as it may appear, his doubts
about what are deemed the vital interests of humanity gave a charm to
his record of her political vicissitudes; while he made capital of
touching "situations," he displayed his own strength of intellect; but,
with all this, did not write complete and authentic history. And when
analyzed, what was the _animus_ of Gibbon's elaborate chronicle? He
"spent his time, his life, his energy," says a severe, but just critic,
"in putting a polished gloss on human tumult, a sneering gloss on human
piety." And who has not felt, in following Macaulay's animated periods
and thorough exposition and illustration of some event, trait, or
economy,--in itself of little importance and limited value,--how much
better it would have been to reserve his brilliant descriptive and keen
analytical powers for the grand episodes, the prolific crises, and the
leading char