The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3,
September, 1862, by Various

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Title: The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862
Devoted to Literature and National Policy.

Author: Various

Release Date: February 22, 2007 [EBook #20647]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE

CONTINENTAL MONTHLY:

DEVOTED TO

LITERATURE AND NATIONAL POLICY

VOL. II.--SEPTEMBER, 1862.--NO. III.

* * * * *

HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE.

The death of Henry Thomas Buckle, at this period of his career, is no
ordinary calamity to the literary and philosophical world. Others have
been cut short in the midst of a great work, but their books being
narrative merely, may close at almost any period, and be complete; or
others after them may take up the pen and conclude that which was so
abruptly terminated. So it was with Macaulay; he was fascinating, and
his productions were literally devoured by readers of elevated taste,
though they disagreed almost entirely with his conclusions. His volumes
were read--as one reads Dickens, or Holmes, or De Quincey--to amuse in
leisure hours.

But such are not the motives with which we take up the ponderous tomes
of the historian of Civilization in England. He had no heroes to
immortalize by extravagant eulogy, no prejudices seeking vent to cover
the name of any man with infamy. He knew no William to convert into a
demi-god; no Marlborough who was the embodiment of all human vices. His
mind, discarding the ordinary prejudices of the historian, took a wider
range, and his researches were not into the transactions of a particular
monarch or minister, as such, but into the _laws_ of human action, and
their results upon the civilization of the race. Hence, while he wrote
history, he plunged into all the depths of philosophy; and thus it is,
t