white paper, a good pen, a capital style, every means of saying
everything, but nothing to say. What, again, if something would happen,
and then one could describe it? Something has happened, and that
something is History." To feel fully the difference between a formal,
mechanical annalist and the revival of the past through poetic or
artistic sympathy, it is only requisite to turn from some dry chronicle
of political vicissitudes, duly registered by a dull, matter-of-fact,
conscientious antiquary, to the fresh classical or colonial romance, of
which such graceful and well-studied exemplars have been produced by
Lockhart, Bulwer, D'Azeglio, Kingsley, Ware, Longfellow, and other
bards and novelists. While the attempt, by intensity of description and
brilliant generalities, to impart to veritable history the charm we
accept in the historical romance, has caused many an old-school reader
to place Macaulay's fascinating volumes, called "The History of
England," on the same shelf with works of fiction,--Aytoun, Hugh
Miller, and William Penn's champions have given special meaning to
this principle or prejudice, whichever it may be, by challenging the
delightful author to the test of fact.

[Footnote B: Bagehot.]

In statesmen, or those who have excelled in political writing, the
ambition to write history, the desire to illustrate and record national
events, is not only a natural, but an auspicious feeling; and so it is
in educated poets in whom the sentiment of patriotism or the narrative
art gives scope and glow to such an enterprise. That Fox and Bacon,
Milton and Swift, Mackintosh, Schiller, and Lamartine, should have
partially adventured in this field seems but a legitimate result of
their endowments and experience, however fragmentary or inadequate may
have been some of the fruits of their historic studies.

When an enlightened and executive or speculative man is an obvious part
of the history of his own times, his chronicle must have a certain
significance and value. Raleigh, when he wrote the "History of the
World" in prison, gave hints by which subsequent and less obsolete
annalists have wisely profited. The scholar and the patriot coalesced in
the mind of Camden, prompting him to rescue and conserve the materials
of English history and note the fading traditions,--a purely antiquarian
service, which only those can appreciate who seek authentic data of
the far past. Such as cavil at the legal tone and crude arrangem