natures; the popular poem, the social favorite,
the _cause celebre_, what pulpit, bar, peasant and beau, doctor and lady
_a la mode_ do, say, and are, then and there, must coalesce with
the battle, the legislation, and the treaty,--or these last are but
technical landmarks, instead of human interests.

Even our most generalized historical ideas are made emphatic only
through association and observation. How the vague sense of Roman
dominion is deepened as we trace the outline of a camp, the massive
ranges of a theatre, or the mouldy effigy on a coin, in some region
far distant from the Imperial centre,--as at Nismes or Chester! How
complete becomes the idea of mediaeval life, contemplated from the
ramparts of a castle, in the "dim, religious light" of an old monastic
chapel, or amid the obsolete trappings and weapons of an armory! What
a distinct and memorable revelation of ancient Greece is the Venus or
Apollo, a Parthenon frieze or a fateful drama! The best political essays
on the French Revolution are based on the economical and social facts
recorded in the Travels of Arthur Young. The equivocal action of
Massena, when he commanded Paris against the Allies, is explained in
the recently published letter of Joseph Bonaparte, wherein we learn his
deficiency of muskets. Humboldt accounted for the defects of Prescott's
"Conquest of Mexico" by the fact that the historian had never visited
that country. Napoleon gave a key to the misfortunes of Italy, when he
said, "It is a peninsula too long for its breadth." And the significance
of the Seven Years' War is expressed in a single phrase by Milton's last
biographer, when he defines it as the "consummation politically and the
attenuation spiritually of the movement begun in Europe by the Lutheran
Reformation."

Indeed, so intimate is the connection between private life and public
events, between political and social phenomena, that the historical mind
finds material in all literature, and the very attempt to keep to a high
strain and to bend facts to theory limits the authenticity of professed
annalists. What Macaulay says of an eminent party-leader is modified to
those who have studied the character through his memoirs or writings.
The charming narrative of Robertson, the characterization of Hume, the
stately periods of Gibbon, fail to win implicit confidence, when the
scene, the age, or the personages described are known to the reader
through original authorities. When Banc