, but they did the reverse. Their great object was to bring the
eye so close as to see the whole virtues or vices of the principal
figures, which they exhibited on their moving panorama; and in so
doing they rendered it incapable of perceiving, at the same time, the
movement of the whole social body of which they formed a part. Even
Livy, in his pictured narrative of Roman victories, is essentially
biographical. His inimitable work owes its enduring celebrity to the
charming episodes of individuals, or graphic pictures of particular
events with which it abounds; scarce any general views on the progress
of society, or the causes to which its astonishing progress in the
Roman state was owing, are to be found. In the introduction to the
life of Catiline, Sallust has given, with unequalled power, a sketch
of the causes which corrupted the republic; and if his work had been
pursued in the same style, it would indeed have been a philosophical
history. But neither the Catiline nor the Jugurthine war are
histories; they are chapters of history, containing two interesting
biographies. Scattered through the writings of Tacitus, are to be
found numerous caustic and profound observations on human nature, and
the increasing vices and selfishness of a corrupted age: but, like the
maxims of Rochefoucault, it is to individual, not general, humanity
that they refer; and they strike us as so admirably just because they
do not describe general causes operating upon society as a body--which
often make little impression save on a few reflecting minds--but
strike direct to the human heart in a way which comes home to the
breast of every individual who reads them.

Never was a juster observation than that the human mind is never
quiescent; it may not give the external symptoms of action, but it
does not cease to have the internal action: it sleeps, but even then
it dreams. Writers innumerable have declaimed on the night of the
Middle Ages--on the deluge of barbarism which, under the Goths,
flooded the world--on the torpor of the human mind, under the combined
pressure of savage violence and priestly superstition; yet this was
precisely the period when the minds of men, deprived of external vent,
turned inwards on themselves; and that the learned and thoughtful,
shut out from any active part in society by the general prevalence of
military violence, sought, in the solitude of the cloister, employment
in reflecting on the mind itself, and the g