"The effect," he says, "of any particular arrangement of the judicial power, is seen directly in the greater or less purity with which justice is administered; but there is a further effect, and one of the highest importance, in its furnishing to a greater or less portion of the nation one of the best means of moral and intellectual culture—the opportunity, namely, of exercising the functions of a judge. I mean, that to accustom a number of persons to the intellectual exercise of attending to, and weighing, and comparing evidence, and to the moral exercise of being placed in a high and responsible situation, invested with one of God's own attributes, that of judgment, and having to determine with authority between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, is to furnish them with very high means of moral and intellectual culture—in other words, it is providing them with one of the highest kinds of education. And thus a judicial constitution may secure a pure administration of justice, and yet fail as an engine of national cultivation, where it is vested in the hands of a small body of professional men, like the old French parliament. While, on the other hand, it may communicate the judicial office very widely, as by our system of juries, and thus may educate, if I may so speak, a very large portion of the nation, but yet may not succeed in obtaining the greatest certainty of just legal decisions. I do not mean that our jury system does not succeed, but it is conceivable that it should not. So, in the same way, different arrangements of the executive and legislative powers should be always regarded in this twofold aspect—as effecting their direct objects, good government and good legislation; and as educating the nation more or less extensively, by affording to a greater or less number of persons practical lessons in governing and legislating."
History is an account of the common purpose pursued by some one of the great families of the human race. It is the biography of a nation; as the history of a particular sect, or a particular body of men, describes the particular end which the sect or body was instituted to pursue, so history, in its more comprehensive sense, describes the paramount object which the first and sovereign society—the society to which all others are necessarily subordinate—endeavours to attain. According to Dr Arnold, a nation's life is twofold, external and internal. Its external life consists principally in wars. "Here history has been sufficiently busy. The wars of the human race have been recorded when every thing else has perished."
Mere antiquarianism, Dr Arnold justly observes, is calculated to contract and enfeeble the understanding. It is a pedantic love of detail, with an indifference to the result, for which alone it can be considered valuable. It is the mistake, into which men are perpetually falling, of the means for the end. There are people to whom the tragedies of Sophocles are less precious than the Scholiast on Lycophron, and who prize the speeches of Demosthenes chiefly because they may fling light on the dress of an Athenian citizen. The same tendency discovers itself in other pursuits. Oxen are fattened into plethoras to encourage agriculture, and men of station dress like grooms, and bet like blacklegs, to keep up the breed of horses. It is true that such evils will happen when agriculture is encouraged, and a valuable breed of horses cherished; but they are the consequences, not the cause of such a state of things. So the disciples of the old philosophers drank hemlock to acquire pallid countenances—but they are as far from obtaining the wisdom of their masters by this adventitious resemblance, as the antiquarian is from the historian. To write well about the past, we must have a vigorous and lively perception of the present. This, says Dr Arnold, is the merit of Mitford. It is certainly the only one he possesses; a person more totally unqualified for writing history at all—to say nothing of the history of Greece—it is difficult for us, aided as our imagination may be by the works of our modern writers, to conceive. But Raleigh, whom he quotes afterwards, is indeed a striking instance of that combination of actual experience with speculative knowledge which all should aim at, but which it seldom happens that one man in a generation is fortunate enough to obtain.
From the sixteenth century, the writers of history begin to assume a different character from that of their predecessors. During the middle ages, the elements of society were fewer and less diversified. Before that time the people were nothing. Popes, emperors, kings, nobles, bishops, knights, are the only materials about which the writer of history cared to know or enquire. Perhaps some exception to this rule might be found in the historians of the free towns of Italy; but they are few and insignificant. After that period, not only did the classes of society increase, but every class was modified by more varieties of individual life. Even within the last century, the science of political economy has given a new colouring to the thoughts and actions of large communities, as the different opinions held by its votaries have multiplied them into distinct and various classes. Modern historians, therefore, may be divided into two classes; the one describing a state of society in which the elements are few; the other the times in which they were more numerous. As a specimen of the first order, he selects Bede. Bede was born in 674, fifty years after the flight of Mahomet from Mecca. He died in 755, two or three years after the victory of Charles Martel over the Saracens. His ecclesiastical history, in five books, describes the period from Augustine's arrival in Kent, 597.
Dr Arnold's dissertation on Bede involves him in the discussion of a question on which much skill and ability have been exercised. We allude to the question of miracles. "The question," says he, "in Bede takes this form—What credit is to be attached to the frequent stories of miracles or wonders which occur in his narrative?" He seizes at once upon the difficulty, without compromise or evasion. He makes a distinction between a wonder and a miracle: "to say that all recorded wonders are false, from those recorded by Herodotus to the latest reports of animal magnetism, would be a boldness of assertion wholly unjustifiable." At the same time he thinks the character of Bede, added to the religious difficulty, may incline us to limit miracles to the earliest times of Christianity, and refuse our belief to all which are reported by the historians of subsequent centuries. He then proceeds to consider the questions which suggest themselves when we read Matthew Paris, or still more, any of the French, German, or Italian historians of the same period:—
"The thirteenth century contains in it, at its beginning, the most splendid period of the Papacy, the time of Innocent the Third; its end coincides with that great struggle between Boniface the Eighth and Philip the Fair, which marks the first stage of its decline. It contains the reign of Frederick the Second, and his long contest with the popes in Italy; the foundation of the orders of friars, Dominican and Franciscan; the last period of the crusades, and the age of the greatest glory of the schoolmen. Thus, full of matters of interest as it is, it will yet be found that all its interest is more or less connected with two great questions concerning the church; namely, the power of the priesthood in matters of government and in matters of faith; the merits of the contest between the Papacy and the kings of Europe; the nature and character of that influence over men's minds which affected the whole philosophy of the period, the whole intellectual condition of the Christian world."—P. 138.
The pretensions and corruptions of the Church are undoubtedly the chief object to which, at this period, the attention of the reader must be attracted. "Is the church system of Innocent III. in faith or government the system of the New Testament?" Is the difference between them inconsiderable, such as may be accounted for by the natural progress of society, or does the rent extend to the foundation? "The first century," says Dr Arnold, "is to determine our judgment of the second and of all subsequent centuries. It will not do to assume that the judgment must be interpreted by the very practices and opinions, the merits of which it has to try." As a specimen of the chroniclers, he selects Philip de Comines, almost the last great writer of his class. In him is exemplified one of the peculiar distinctions of attaching to modern history the importance of attending to genealogies.
"For instance, Comines records the marriage of Mary, duchess of Burgundy, daughter and sole heiress of Charles the Bold, with Maximilian, archduke of Austria. This marriage, conveying all the dominions of Burgundy to Maximilian and his heirs, established a great independent sovereign on the frontiers of France, giving to him on the north, not only the present kingdoms of Holland and Belgium, but large portions of what is now French territory, the old provinces of Artois and French Flanders, French Hainault and French Luxemburg; while on the east it gave him Franche Comté, thus yielding him a footing within the Jura, on the very banks of the Saône. Thence ensued in after ages, when the Spanish branch of the house of Austria had inherited this part of its dominions—the long contests which deluged the Netherlands with blood, the campaigns of King William and Luxembourg, the nine years of efforts, no less skilful than valiant, in which Marlborough broke his way through the fortresses of the iron frontier. Again, when Spain became in a manner French by the accession of the House of Bourbon, the Netherlands reverted once more to Austria itself; and from thence the powers of Europe advanced, almost in our own days, to assail France as a republic; and on this ground, on the plains of Fleurus, was won the first of those great victories which, for nearly twenty years, carried the French standards triumphantly over Europe. Thus the marriage recorded by Comines has been working busily down to our very own times: it is only since the settlement of 1814, and that more recent one of 1830, that the Netherlands have ceased to be effected by the union of Charles the Bold's daughter with Maximilian of Austria"—P. 148.
Again, in order to understand the contest which Philip de Comines records between a Frenchman and a Spaniard for the crown of Naples, we must go back to the dark and bloody page in the annals of the thirteenth century, which relates the extinction of the last heir of the great Swabian race of Hohenstauffen by Charles of Anjou, the fit and unrelenting instrument of Papal hatred—the dreadful expiation of that great crime by the Sicilian Vespers, the establishment of the House of Anjou in Sicily, the crimes and misfortunes of Queen Joanna, the new contest occasioned by her adoption—all these events must be known to him who would understand the expedition of Charles VIII. The following passage is an admirable description of the reasons which lend to the pages of Philip de Comines a deep and melancholy interest:—
"The Memoirs of Philip de Comines terminate about twenty years before the Reformation, six years after the first voyage of Columbus. They relate, then, to a tranquil period immediately preceding a period of extraordinary movement; to the last stage of an old state of things, now on the point of passing away. Such periods, the lull before the burst of the hurricane, the almost oppressive stillness which announces the eruption, or, to use Campbell's beautiful image—