The invention of printing, which virtually exempts books from the operation of the law that subjects all things mundane to the decays of time, has greatly promoted also the process of their renovation; for, by giving to the issue of an edition of a standard work a degree of importance, several hundred times greater than what belonged to the transcription of a single copy, it has called for the employment of a proportionably larger amount of learning, diligence, and caution in the work of revision; and then, by enabling each successive editor to avail himself of the labours of his predecessors, the advantages belonging to the concentration of many minds upon the same subject have been secured.
It is a fact therefore, the significance of which should be clearly understood, that, since the fifteenth century, the lapse of time, instead of gradually impairing and corrupting the literary remains of antiquity, has incessantly contributed to their renovation and purification. Indeed it may be affirmed that, in relation to the amount, the exactitude, and the certainty of our knowledge, we are not receding from remote ages, but are constantly approaching towards them. In a thousand instances what was unknown, or was doubtful, or imperfect, or corrupted, at the commencement of the fifteenth century, has been ascertained, restored, and completed in the nineteenth. The history and the literature of Greece and Rome—long inhumed in monasteries, were, at the period of their re-appearance, liable to uncertainties and to suspicions which not all the learning and industry of that vigorous age were able to dispel. But the learning and the industry of the four centuries that have since elapsed, constantly directed towards the same objects, and constantly accumulating a various mass of evidence, have left exceedingly few questions of literary antiquity open to controversy.
Thus then, by the mention of some leading facts, we have traced the remains of ancient literature up to the time when they passed to the press, and when their history can no longer be regarded as obscure or questionable. Nor can it be thought that this body of literature is now liable to the hazards of extinction from political changes, or from the decline of learning in this or that country; for unless a universal devastation should take its course, at once, over every region of the civilized world, the literature now extant in books can neither perish, nor suffer corruption. A temple, a statue, a picture, or a gem is but one; and however durable may be the material of which it consists, it continually decays, and it is always destructible. The touch of the sculptor moulders from the chiselled surface; and the time will come when every monument of his genius shall have crumbled into dust, and when his fame—lost from the marble, shall live only in the works of the poets and historians who were his contemporaries.
Thus it is that the written records of distant ages, with the knowledge of which the intellectual, moral, and political well-being of mankind is inseparably connected, are secured from extinction by a mode of conservation that is less liable to extensive hazards than any other that can be imagined. If Man be cut off from the knowledge of the past, he becomes indifferent to the future, and thenceforward sinks into the rudeness and ferocity of the sensual life. The redundant amplitude, therefore, of the means by which this knowledge is preserved, only bears a due proportion to the importance of the consequences that depend upon its perpetuation.
CHAPTER X.
SEVERAL METHODS AVAILABLE FOR ASCERTAINING THE CREDIBILITY OF ANCIENT HISTORICAL WORKS.
The facts referred to in the preceding chapters belong in common to ancient books of all classes, and they tend to prove that the works of the Greek and Roman writers—poets, dramatists, philosophers, critics, and historians—which issued from the press in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, may, by means of various and independent evidence, be infallibly traced up to the age in which they are commonly supposed to have been written.
The reader’s attention is now to be directed to one class of those ancient works, namely, those which are professedly historical; and our object will be to ascertain on what grounds, and with what limitations, such works deserve our confidence as truthful narratives of facts.
The very same mode of inquiry which common sense suggests, on the most ordinary occasions, when we are called upon to estimate the value of testimony, is applicable to all cases of the like nature. Nor can the importance of the consequences that may be involved in the issue of the investigation, in a peculiar instance, render it invalid, or warrant our rejection of it as unsatisfactory.
In some lesser particulars the modes of estimating oral and written testimony must differ; but in substance the heads of inquiry will be the same. In the case with which we have now to do—namely, the credibility of the testimony of ancient historians, it is natural to consider the following points:—
1. The moral and intellectual character of the writer,—if this can be known;