scend upon it like a hawk. You may require some time to study its vicinity, to look back and consider what brought the stream to this point. But your main investigation will be not by exploring to a source, but by following the stream in its onward and downward current. In the present age one must be ignorant of much if he would be proficient in something.

Our chart of history opens like an atlas; it presents page after page of equal size, but with a lessening area for the sake of an increasing scale. One page exhibits a hemisphere, another a continent, another a nation; others, in turn, the state, the county, the municipal unit. From a world we may thus reduce the focus, until we have mapped within the same spaces a town or city, or even a single house; from a population of millions we may come down to a tribe, a family, or even (as in a biography) to a single individual, and we retrace the human course accordingly. Or we may trace backwards, as the genealogist does, in an order reverse to biography or general history. As we have projected, so we work, we investigate. In such an atlas as I am describing, how different appear both civil and physical configurations at different epochs. Compare, for instance, a map of the United States of our latest date with earlier ones in succession from 1787. Not only in national names and boundaries do they differ, not only in the obscure or erroneous delineation of lakes and rivers in unexplored regions, but in that dotting of towns and cities, that marking of county divisions, which positively indicates the advance of a settled population and settled State governments. Maps of different epochs like these, where they exist, are part of a permanent historical record.

Involved in the study of any civilization is the study of its religion, of its literature, of its political and military movements, of the appliances of science, of the changes and development of trade, commerce, and industries. Each of these influences may be traced apart, or their combined influence may be shown upon the course of some great people. In this present enlightened age, nations intersect one another more and more in their interests, and you may feel the pulse of the whole civilized world through the daily press. How different the task of preparing such a history as the nineteenth century requires, from that of ancient Athens, of China, of mediæval Britain, of early America. But in all tasks unity and selection should be the aim, and above all circumscription. One

must measure out his work with exactness, make careful estimates, and work the huge materials into place, besides using his pencil with the dignity and grace of an artist. In a word, he should be an architect. It is because of this union of the ideal and practical that Michael Angelo deserves the first place among men distinguished in the fine arts. And for this reason, too, we may well rank Gibbon as the foremost among historians; as greater, indeed, than Thucydides, Sallust, or any other of those classical writers who have so long been held up for modern reverence. And this is because, with skill equally or nearly as great as theirs, he conceived and wrought out a task far more difficult. In historical narrative the greatest triumph consists in tracing out and delineating with color and accuracy a variety of intricate influences which contribute to the main result. And who has done this so well as the author of the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," that greatest of all historical themes, that most impressive and momentous of all human events? See the hand of the master unfolding the long train of emperors and potentates; painting the revolt and irruption of distant nations, of remote tribes; gathering upon his canvas the Greeks, the Scythians, the Arabs, Mohammed and his followers, the fathers of the Christian Church, the Goths and northern barbarians who were destined to shape the civilization of modern Europe; leading his readers with stately tread through the whole grand pathway down which the highest type of a pagan civilization sank slowly into the shades and dissolution of the dark ages. I will not deny that Gibbon had faults as a historian; that his stately pomp might become wearisome, that he partook somewhat of the French sensuousness and skepticism which surrounded him as he labored. But of his profound scholarship and artistic skill there can be no question. Contrast with a task like his the simple narrative of some brief strife under a few heroes or a single one-like the history of the Peloponnesian or Jugurthine war, or like that of the Cortes invasion of Mexico which our own Prescott has so admirably described-and see how immense is the difference. Yet I would not be understood to disparage these other writers with simpler subjects. They have instructed and interested posterity and their own times; their fame is deservedly lasting; there is room in historical literature for them and for all. And our Anglo-Saxon appears to be. of all historical explorers, the best adapted to portray the man

ners and events of foreign nations and distant times. Thucydides and Xenophon wrote each of his own country alone; and so did Sallust, Livy, Tacitus. But Gibbon perfected himself in a foreign literature and tongue so as to write of other lands; and so, too, did our Prescott and Motley.

Here let us observe how much easier it is to be graphic, to interest and attract the reader, when one's story has simple unity and relates to personal exploit. Biography, or the study of individual leaders, is at the foundation of the narratives which are most widely read and most popular; in the Bible, for instance, in Homer, in the wars of Alexander, Cæsar, or Napoleon. Biography excites interest because it develops, as in the reader's own experience, the growth of a certain individual life to which all other lives bear but an incidental relation; and for this reason, too, biography is partial. The modern temperament, however, leads us to investigate, besides, the growth of the people who were ruled, the development of their laws, manners, customs, and institutions. In either case the interest that moves the reader is human. That military and political course of a community with which history is chiefly engrossed moves far differently, to be sure, under an absolute monarch than in a democracy; in the former case foibles and caprice are those of a person, in the latter they are those of a whole people. Yet we observe in all but the ruder ages of mankind the refining influence upon rulers which is exerted by philosophy, by religion, literature and the arts. Note this, for example, under the reign of Solomon, of Pericles, of Alexander, of Constantine; and yet it is a lasting regret to posterity that out of epochs like theirs so little is left on record concerning the daily lives and habits of the people they governed. That must be a rigid tyranny, indeed, whose government has not recognized to some extent the strong though insensible force of popular customs. Custom constantly crystallizes into laws, which the legislature, the court, or the monarch stamps with authority; and thus are local institutions pruned and trained like the grape-vine on a trellis. We find in the most primitive society wills and the transmission of property recognized; buying and selling; trade and commerce (whence come revenue and personal prosperity); marriage and the seclusion, greater or less, of the family circle. How seldom has the reader associated all these with the wealth of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, with the vicissitudes of Croesus, the volup

tuous pleasures of Xerxes, Cleopatra, or the later Cæsars; and yet it is certain that unless the subjects of monarchs like these had pursued their private business successfully, amassed fortunes of their own, brought up families, and increased in numbers, the monarch could not have been arrayed with such luxury; for royal revenues come from taxation, and the richest kings and nobles take but a percentage from the general wealth. The customs of one nation are borrowed by others; Moses, Lycurgus, Solon, among the great lawgivers, framed codes each for his own people after observing the institutions of other and older countries, and considering how best to adapt them. Government has rightly been likened to a coat which is cut differently to fit each figure, each nation; and, more than this, the garb itself may differ in pattern, since the object is to clothe different communities appropriately to the tastes and habits of each. We shall continue to regret, then, that the ancient writers have left us so little real illustration concerning the habits of these earlier peoples-how they worked and sported, and what was their intercourse and mode of life. Research in archæology may yet supply such information in a measure; and of the institutions, the embodied customs, we have, fortunately, some important remains. No contribution survives, more valuable to this end, than the books of Roman jurisprudence which were compiled under Justinian. Though one of the lesser rulers of that once illustrious empire, he has left a fame for modern times more conspicuous than that of Julius or Augustus Cæsar; aud this is because he brought into permanent and enduring form for the guidance and instruction of all succeeding ages the wisest laws, the best epi tome of human experience, the broadest embodiment of customs, which ever regulated ancient society in the mutual dealings of man and man.

As for the progress of our modern society which emerges from the mediæval age succeeding the Roman collapse, its advance in knowledge and the arts, in the successive changes of manners and pursuits, there is much yet to be gathered and exposed to view for illustration; though with respect to England we owe much to Macaulay for setting an example of investigation upon that broader line which Niebuhr and others of his school had initiated for Roman history. And Macaulay achieved the additional triumph of making such investigation attractive. Statutes and judicial reports (to quote Daniel Webster) are overflowing fountains of knowledge respecting S. Mis. 170——4

the progress of Anglo-Saxon society, from feudalism down to the full splendor of the commercial age. And from the modern invention of printing, let us add, and particularly since the growth and development of the modern press, we find (with all the faults of fecundity and fallibility which are peculiar to journalism) a picture of the world's daily life set forth which far surpasses in its vivid and continuous delineation any collection of ancient records. Our modern newspaper may pander for the sake of gain; it may avow no higher aim in affairs than to please a paying constituency; and yet, for better or worse, it wields and will continue to wield an immense power. The reporter may be brazen-faced, inclined to scandalous gossip and ribaldry; the news may be spread forth disjointed, founded on false rumor, requiring correction; editorial comments may be willfully partisan, or thundered from the Olympus height of a safe circulation; but, even at its worst, so long as it is duly curbed by the laws of libel so essential for the citizen's protection, what with advertisements, business news, the discussion of current topics, the description of passing events and the transient impression made by them, our newspaper holds the mirror up to modern society; while at its best, journalism sits in her chariot, pencil in hand, like that marble muse herself in our national capitol, over the timepiece of the age. The newspaper's truest revelation is that unconscious one of the passions and prejudice of the times, and of that cast of popular thought under which events were born; it preserves imperishable the fashion prevailing, for posterity to look upon with reverence or a smile. But in the present age the journalist should beware how he presents his columns to bear the double weight of universal advertiser and universal purveyor of knowledge, lest he make a chaos of the whole. As in the former centuries records were scanty, so in the century to come they will be found superabundant, unless fire or deluge diminish them. Pregnant facts, such as in the past we search for in vain, lie buried under prevalent methods, in bushel-heaps of worthless assertion. To know the old era, you must search with a lantern; to know the new era, you must winnow.

Research is a fitting word to apply in historical studies; for by this word we import that one is not content to skim the surface of past events, but prefers to probe, to investigate, to turn the soil for himself. It is original exploration which makes such studies attractive and stimulating. We walk the