given them their due place, nor assigned them their proper weight. He
lived and died in comparative retirement; and he was never able to
shake himself free from the prejudices of his country and education,
on the subject of Romish religion. Not that he exaggerated the abuses
and enormities of the Roman Catholic superstition which brought about
the Reformation, nor the vast benefits which Luther conferred upon
mankind by bringing them to light; both were so great, that they
hardly admitted of exaggeration. His error--and, in the delineation of
the progress of society in modern Europe, it was a very great
one--consisted in overlooking the beneficial effect of that very
superstition, then so pernicious, in a _prior age of the world_, when
violence was universal, crime prevalent alike in high and low places,
and government impotent to check either the tyranny of the great or
the madness of the people. Then it was that superstition was the
greatest blessing which Providence, in mercy, could bestow on mankind;
for it effected what the wisdom of the learned or the efforts of the
active were alike unable to effect; it restrained the violence by
imaginary, which was inaccessible to the force of real, terrors; and
spread that protection under the shadow of the Cross, which could
never have been obtained by the power of the sword. Robertson was
wholly insensible to these early and inestimable blessings of the
Christian faith; he has admirably delineated the beneficial influence
of the Crusades upon subsequent society, but on this all-important
topic he is silent. Yet, whoever has studied the condition of
European society in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, as it
has since been developed in the admirable works of Sismondi, Thierry,
Michelet, and Guizot, must be aware that the services, not merely of
Christianity, but of the superstitions which had usurped its place,
were, during that long period, incalculable; and that, but for them,
European society would infallibly have sunk, as Asiatic in every age
has done, beneath the desolating sword of barbarian power.

Sismondi--if the magnitude, and in many respects the merit, of his
works be considered--must be regarded as one of the greatest
historians of modern times. His "History of the Italian Republics" in
sixteen, of the "Monarchy of France" in thirty volumes, attest the
variety and extent of his antiquarian researches, as well as the
indefatigable industry of his pen: hi