We are convinced that, as far as the institution is to rely for its success on public patronage, it will not be disappointed. If once successfully in operation, and brought before the public eye, it cannot fail of exciting a very general sympathy, which, in this country, has never been refused to the calls of humanity. No one, we think, who has visited the similar endowments in Paris or in Edinburgh will easily forget the sensations which he experienced on witnessing so large a class of his unfortunate fellow-creatures thus restored from intellectual darkness to the blessings, if we may so speak, of light and liberty. There is no higher evidence of the worth of the human mind than its capacity of drawing consolation from its own resources under so heavy a privation; so that it not only can exhibit resignation and cheerfulness, but energy to burst the fetters with which it is encumbered. Who could refuse his sympathy to the success of these efforts, or withhold from the subject of them the means of attaining his natural level and usefulness in society, from which circumstances, less favourable to him than to ourselves, have hitherto excluded him?

IRVING'S CONQUEST OF GRANADA.*

OCTOBER, 1829.

ALMOST as many qualifications may be demanded for a perfect historian, indeed the Abbé Mably has enumerated as many, as Cicero stipulates for a perfect orator. He must be strictly impartial; a lover of truth under all circumstances, and ready to declare it at all hazards: he must be deeply conversant with whatever may bring into relief the character of the people he is depicting, not merely with their laws, constitution, general resources, and all the other more visible parts of the machinery of government, but with the nicer moral and social relations, the informing spirit which gives life to the whole, but escapes the eye of a vulgar observer. If he has to do with other ages and nations, he must transport himself into them, expatriating himself, as it were, from his own, in order to get the very form and pressure of the times he is delineating. He must be conscientious in his attention to geography, chronology, &c., an inaccuracy in which has been fatal to more than one good philosophical history; and, mixed up with all these drier details, he must display the various powers of a novelist or dramatist, throwing his characters into suitable lights and shades, disposing his scenes so as to awaken

* "A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada. By Fray Antonia Agapida." 1829: 2 vols., 12mo. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Carey.

and maintain an unflagging interest, and diffusing over the whole that finished style, without which his work will only become a magazine of materials for the more elegant edifices of subsequent writers. He must be-in short, there is no end to what a perfect historian must be and do. It is hardly necessary to add that such a monster never did and never will exist.

But, although we cannot attain to perfect excellence in this or any other science in this world, considerable approaches have been made to it, and different individuals have arisen at different periods, possessed, in an eminent degree, of some of the principal qualities which go to make up the aggregate of the character we have been describing. The peculiar character of these qualities will generally be determined in the writer by that of the age in which he lives. Thus, the earlier historians of Greece and Rome sought less to instruct than to amuse. They filled their pictures with dazzling and seductive images. In their researches into antiquity, they were not startled by the marvellous, like the more prudish critics of our day, but welcomed it as likely to stir the imaginations of their readers. They seldom interrupted the story by impertinent reflection. They bestowed infinite pains on the costume, the style of their history, and, in fine, made everything subordinate to the main purpose of conveying an elegant and interesting narrative. Such was Herodotus, such Livy, and such, too, the earlier chroniclers of modern Europe, whose M

pages glow with the picturesque and brilliant pageants of an age of chivalry. These last, as well as Herodotus, may be said to have written in the infancy of their nations, when the imagination is more willingly addressed than the understanding. Livy, who wrote in a riper age, lived, nevertheless, in a court and a period where tranquillity and opulence disposed the minds of men to elegant recreation rather than to severe discipline and exertion.

As, however, the nation advanced in years, or became oppressed with calamity, history also assumed a graver complexion. Fancy gave way to reflection. The mind, no longer invited to rove abroad in quest of elegant and alluring pictures, was driven back upon itself, speculated more deeply, and sought for support under the external evils of life in moral and philosophical truth. Description was abandoned for the study of character; men took the place of events; and the romance was converted into the drama. Thus it was with Tacitus, who lived under those imperial monsters who turned Rome into a charnel-house, and his compact narratives are filled with moral and political axioms sufficiently numerous to make a volume; and, indeed, Brotier has made one of them in his edition. of the historian. The same philosophical spirit animates the page of Thucydides, himself one of the principal actors in the long, disastrous struggle that terminated in the ruin of his nation.

But, notwithstanding the deeper and more comprehensive thought of these later writers, there was

still a wide difference between the complexion given to history under their hands and that which it has assumed in our time. We would not be understood as determining, but simply as discriminating their relative merits. The Greeks and Romans lived when the world, at least when the mind was in its comparative infancy-when fancy and feeling were most easily, and loved most to be excited. They possessed a finer sense of beauty than the moderns. They were infinitely more solicitous about the external dress, the finish, and all that makes up the poetry of a composition. Poetry, indeed, mingled in their daily pursuits as well as pleasures; it determined their gravest deliberations. The command of their armies was given, not to the best general, but ofttimes to the most eloquent orator. Poetry entered into their religion, and created those beautiful monuments of architecture and sculpture which the breath of time has not tarnished. It entered into their philosophy; and no one confessed its influence more deeply than he who would have banished it from his republic. It informed the souls of their orators, and prompted those magnificent rhapsodies which fall lifeless enough from the stammering tongue of the schoolboy, but which once awaked to ecstasy the living populace of Athens. It entered deeply even into their latest history. It was first exhibited in the national chronicles of Homer. lost little of its colouring, though it, conformed to the general laws of prosaic composition, under Herodotus. And it shed a pleasing grace over the so

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