the
Anglo-Saxon mind, on some sides comparatively deficient in plastic and
inventive power, as well as in that of abstract thought, seems to
possess in a peculiar degree the faculty of comprehending, representing,
and idealizing the varied phases and incessant motion of human life and
character. In science it excels less in the discovery than in the
application of laws. In what may be termed "pure art," music, sculpture,
painting, except where the representation of the Beautiful is
subservient to that of the Real, lyrical and idyllic poetry, and all
departments of literature in which fancy predominates over reason, it
must yield the palm to the genius of Italy, of Germany, of Spain. But in
the drama, in the novel, in history, and in works partaking more or less
of the character of these, its supremacy is established. Shakespeare and
Chaucer are at once the greatest and the most characteristic of English
poets; Hogarth and Wilkie, of English painters; Fielding, Scott, Miss
Austen, Thackeray, and others whose names will at once suggest
themselves, of English writers of fiction; Gibbon, Macaulay, and
Hallam, of English historians. The drama, in its highest forms, belongs
to the past, and that past which was at once too earnest in its spirit
and too narrow in its development to allow of a less vivid or a more
expansive delineation. Fiction, to judge from a multitude of recent
specimens, seems at present on the decline, with some threatenings of a
precipitate descent into the inane. History, on the other hand, is only
at the outset of its career. Its highest achievements are in all
probability reserved for a still distant future, when loftier points of
view shall have been attained, and the haze that now hangs over even the
nearest and most conspicuous objects in some measure dissipated. Its
endeavors hitherto have only shown how much is still to be
accomplished,--how little, indeed, comparatively speaking, it will ever
be possible to accomplish. Not the less, on this account, are the
laborers deserving of the honors bestowed upon them. Every fresh
contribution is a permanent gain. Even in the same field the results of
one exploration do not interfere with or supersede those of another.
Robertson has, in many respects, been surpassed, but he has not been
supplanted, by Prescott; Froude and Motley may traverse the same ground
without impairing our interest in the researches of either.

These four distinguished writers have a