her pursuits. Oxen are fattened into
plethoras to encourage agriculture, and men of station dress like
grooms, and bet like blacklegs, to keep up the breed of horses. It is
true that such evils will happen when agriculture is encouraged, and a
valuable breed of horses cherished; but they are the consequences, not
the cause of such a state of things. So the disciples of the old
philosophers drank hemlock to acquire pallid countenances--but they are
as far from obtaining the wisdom of their masters by this adventitious
resemblance, as the antiquarian is from the historian. To write well
about the past, we must have a vigorous and lively perception of the
present. This, says Dr Arnold, is the merit of Mitford. It is certainly
the only one he possesses; a person more totally unqualified for writing
history at all--to say nothing of the history of Greece--it is difficult
for us, aided as our imagination may be by the works of our modern
writers, to conceive. But Raleigh, whom he quotes afterwards, is indeed
a striking instance of that combination of actual experience with
speculative knowledge which all should aim at, but which it seldom
happens that one man in a generation is fortunate enough to obtain.

From the sixteenth century, the writers of history begin to assume a
different character from that of their predecessors. During the middle
ages, the elements of society were fewer and less diversified. Before
that time the people were nothing. Popes, emperors, kings, nobles,
bishops, knights, are the only materials about which the writer of
history cared to know or enquire. Perhaps some exception to this rule
might be found in the historians of the free towns of Italy; but they
are few and insignificant. After that period, not only did the classes
of society increase, but every class was modified by more varieties of
individual life. Even within the last century, the science of political
economy has given a new colouring to the thoughts and actions of large
communities, as the different opinions held by its votaries have
multiplied them into distinct and various classes. Modern historians,
therefore, may be divided into two classes; the one describing a state
of society in which the elements are few; the other the times in which
they were more numerous. As a specimen of the first order, he selects
Bede. Bede was born in 674, fifty years after the flight of Mahomet from
Mecca. He died in 755, two or three years after the vic