Time will make the present age as obsolete as the last, for our sons will cast a new light over the ambiguous scenes which distract their fathers; they will know how some things happened for which we cannot account; they will bear witness to how many characters we have mistaken; they will be told many of those secrets which our contemporaries hide from us; they will pause at the ends of our beginnings; they will read the perfect story of man, which can never be told while it is proceeding. All this is the possession of posterity, because they will judge without our passions; and all this we ourselves have been enabled to possess by the secret history of the last two ages![255]
[252] The large mass of important documents in the National State-paper Office has recently been made available to the use of the historic student, with the best results, and cannot fail to have important influence on the future historic literature of the country.
[253] See what I have said of “Suppressors and Dilapidators of Manuscripts,” vol. ii. p. 443.
[254] The “Conway Papers” remain unpublished. From what I have already been favoured with the sight of, I may venture to predict that our history may receive from them some important accession. The reader may find a lively summary of the contents of these Papers in Horace Walpole’s account of his visit to Ragley, in his letter to George Montague, 20th August, 1758. The Right Hon. John Wilson Croker, with whom the Marquis of Hertford had placed the disposal of the Conway Papers, is also in possession of the Throckmorton Papers, of which the reader may likewise observe a particular notice in Sir Henry Wotton’s will, in Izaak Walton’s Lives. Unsunned treasures lie in the State-paper office.
[255] Since this article has been sent to press I rise from reading one in the Edinburgh Review on Lord Orford’s and Lord Waldegrave’s Memoirs. This is one of the very rare articles which could only come from the hand of a master long exercised in the studies he criticises. The critic, or rather the historian, observes, that “of a period remarkable for the establishment of our present system of government, no authentic materials had yet appeared. Events of public notoriety are to be found, though often inaccurately told, in our common histories; but the secret springs of action, the private views and motives of individuals, &c., are as little known to us as if the events to which they relate had taken place in China or Japan.” The clear, connected, dispassionate, and circumstantial narrative, with which he has enriched the stores of English history, is drawn from the sources of secret history; from published memoirs and contemporary correspondence.
LITERARY RESIDENCES.
Men of genius have usually been condemned to compose their finest works, which are usually their earliest ones, under the roof of a garret; and few literary characters have lived, like Pliny and Voltaire, in a villa or château of their own. It has not therefore often happened that a man of genius could raise local emotions by his own intellectual suggestions. Ariosto, who built a palace in his verse, lodged himself in a small house, and found that stanzas and stones were not put together at the same rate: old Montaigne has left a description of his library; “over the entrance of my house, where I view my court-yards, and garden, and at once survey all the operations of my family!”