of the people who worshiped them, he is
profoundly impressed with the conviction that they excelled in the fine
arts, and in the coarse vices of heathenism. When he visits the
Coliseum, that vast ruin declares that the wealth of an empire, once
devoted to the gratification of the most savage passions, has been
diverted into some other channel. When he visits the catacombs, and
reads long lines of heathen epitaphs, with their despairing symbols of
broken columns, extinguished torches, and their heart-breaking
"Farewell! an eternal farewell!" and then turns to the monuments of only
two centuries later, and reads, "He sleeps in the Lord," "He waits the
resurrection to life eternal," recording the hopes of whole generations
of survivors, he can not doubt the truth of the written records of the
conversion of the Roman Empire.

There is, moreover, another kind of contemporary history not so
connected and regular as the formal diary or journal, which does not
even propose to relate history at all, but is for that very reason
entirely removed from the suspicion of giving a coloring to it; which,
at the cost of a little patience and industry, gives us the most
convincing confirmations of the truth, or exposures of the mistakes of
historians, by the undesigned and incidental way in which the use of a
name, a date, a proverb, a jest, an expletive, a quotation, an allusion,
flashes conviction upon the reader's mind. I mean contemporary
correspondence. If we have the private letters of celebrated men laid
before us, we are enabled to look right into them, and see their true
character. Thus Macaulay exhibits to the world the proud, lying, stupid
tyrant, James, displayed in his own letters. Thus Voltaire records
himself an adulterer, and begs his friend, D'Alembert, to lie for him;
his friend replies that he has done so. Thus the correspondence of the
great American herald of the Age of Reason exhibits him drinking a quart
of brandy daily at his friend's expense, and refusing to pay his bill
for boarding. In the unguarded freedom of confidential correspondence
the vail is taken from the heart. We see men as they are. The true man
stands out in his native dignity, and the gilding is rubbed off the
hypocrite. Give the world their letters, and let the grave silence the
plaudits and the clamors which deafened the generation among whom they
lived, and no man will hesitate whether or not to pronounce Hume a
sensualist, or Washington the no