The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 / Devoted to Literature and National Policy.

The death of Henry Thomas Buckle, at this period of his career, is no ordinary calamity to the literary and philosophical world. Others have been cut short in the midst of a great work, but their books being narrative merely, may close at almost any period, and be complete; or others after them may take up the pen and conclude that which was so abruptly terminated. So it was with Macaulay; he was fascinating, and his productions were literally devoured by readers of elevated taste, though they disagreed almost entirely with his conclusions. His volumes were read—as one reads Dickens, or Holmes, or De Quincey—to amuse in leisure hours.
But such are not the motives with which we take up the ponderous tomes of the historian of Civilization in England. He had no heroes to immortalize by extravagant eulogy, no prejudices seeking vent to cover the name of any man with infamy. He knew no William to convert into a demi-god; no Marlborough who was the embodiment of all human vices. His mind, discarding the ordinary prejudices of the historian, took a wider range, and his researches were not into the transactions of a particular monarch or minister, as such, but into the laws of human action, and their results upon the civilization of the race. Hence, while he wrote history, he plunged into all the depths of philosophy; and thus it is, that his work, left unfinished by himself, can never be completed by another. It is a work which will admit no broken link from its commencement to its conclusion.
Mr. Buckle was born in London, in the early part of the year 1824, and was consequently about thirty-eight years of age at the time of his death. His father was a wealthy gentleman of the metropolis, and thoroughly educated, and the historian was an only son. Devoted to literature himself, it is not surprising that the parent spared neither money nor labor to educate his child. He did not, however, follow the usual course; did not hamper the youthful mind by the narrow routine of the English academy, nor did he make him a Master of Arts at Oxford or Cambridge.