may rush--in its
vacancy, and be made to feel;--in its blindness, and be made to
see;--in its fear, and find countenance;--in its weakness, and be
rendered strong;--in the humility of its conscious baseness, and
be lifted into gradual excellence and hope!"--(P. 24.)

Here is truth and eloquence, at one blow, enough to stagger the
strongest of us. "It is the artist only who is the true historian," he
again resolutely affirms. We should apprehend that, unless history
were allowed to stand on a separate basis of its own, supported by its
own peculiar testimony, it could be of little use even in enlarging
the boundaries of art. History is said to enable the artist to
transcend the limits which the modes of thought and feeling of his own
day would else prescribe to him. But if the rules by which we judge of
truth in history be no other than those by which we judge of truth or
probability in works of fiction, (and to this the views of Mr Sims
inevitably conduct us)--if history has not its own independent place
and value--it can no longer lend this aid--no longer raise art above,
or out of the circle in which existing opinions and sympathies would
place her. Each generation of artists would not learn new truths from
history, but history would be rewritten by each generation of artists.
How, for example, could a Protestant of the nineteenth century, with
whom religion and morality are inseparably combined--with whom
conscience is always both moral and religious--how could he, guided
only by his own experience, represent, or give credit to that entire
separation of the two modes of feeling, moral and religious, which
encounters us frequently in the middle ages, and constantly in the
Pagan world? Surely a fact like this, learned from historical
testimony, has a value of its own, other and greater than any
fictitious representation which an artist might supply. But even this
fictitious representation, as we have said, would grow null and void
if not upheld by the independent testimony of history; the past would
become the attendant shadow merely of the present.

We have the old predilection in favour of a _true story_, whenever it
can be had. Mr Sims has written some tales under the title of "The
Wigwam and the Cabin." They seem to be neither good nor bad;--it would
be a waste of time to cast about for the exact epithet that should
characterise them;--and in these tales we live much with the early
settlers and th