'Rested the diadem, like the pale moon
Upon the brow of night, a silver crest;'
and the white-robed Madonna, with child-like face upraised, and deep, tender eyes uplifted, yet rests her slender, sandaled foot upon the horned moon, floating below her in misty clouds.
A hiatus for which we crave indulgence; a dream, and yet not all a dream, for each of these old types encloses a living truth, and unfolds into a history, tangled, perhaps, and imperfect, but suggestive and reliable, of races and religions that had else passed away into oblivion. And the earnest student of the present, or the historian of the past, can never disregard these dim old treasures, but must draw from them a fresher faith in his own humanity and in the eternal laws of God, that are unchangeable as he is immortal.
The art of history advances with the art of poetry; both, and indeed all literature, correspond aesthetically with the manners, customs, theology, and politics of the nation of their birth. The severe grandeur of Thucydides, the invariable sweetness of Xenophon, and the cheerful elegance of Herodotus, recall, with their just conceptions of harmony, their noble and sustained flow of thought, and their freedom from the adventitious ornaments of an exaggerated rhetoric or a sentimental morality, the golden age of Greece. We seem to stand within the Parthenon, to gaze upon the Venus of Cnidus, to be jostled by the gay crowd at the Olympic games. It was indeed a golden age, when all that was beautiful in nature was reverently and assiduously nurtured, and all that was noble and natural in art was magnificently encouraged; an age in which refinement and nobility were not accidents, but necessities; when politics had reached the high grade of an art, and oratory attained a beauty and power beyond which no Pitt, Canning, or Brougham has ever yet aspired; an age when the gifted Aspasia held her splendid court, and Alcibiades and Socrates were proud to sit at the Milesian's feet; when Pericles, who 'well deserved the lofty title of Olympian,' lived and ruled: the golden age when Socrates thought and taught, bearing in its bosom the guilty day when Socrates died.
Not less faithful portraitures of the influences that formed them are the histories of Livy, of Sallust, and of Tacitus. They wrote in a language that had been sublimated into electric clouds by the warm and splendid diffuseness of Cicero, and reduced to a granite-like strength by the cold and exquisite simplicity of Terence. The amiable fustian, the Falstaffian bombast of Lucan and Ovid's brilliant imagination, all stamp their indelible seal upon the vivid coloring of Livy, the somewhat affected severity of Sallust, and the elegant morality of Tacitus. The banner of the monarchy flaunts across every page of these writers. They even bear the impress of an architecture whose splendor and strength did not atone for its disregard of the old Hellenic lines and rules. They bear the same relation to Thucydides and Herodotus that a pillar of the Roman Ionic order, with its angularly turned volutes and arbitrary perpendicularity of outline, does to its graceful Greek mother, with her primitive and expressive scrolls, and the slightly convex profile of her shaft. In more modern times, a black-letter, quaint sentence of Froissart or Monstrelet is like a knight in full armor, bristling with quaint, beautiful devices, golden dragons inlaid on Milan cuirasses, golden vines on broad Venetian blades, apes on the hilts of grooved-bladed, firm stilettoes, or the illuminated margins of old metrical romances. The pages of Strada are darkened by the stormy passions of a battling age, crossed with the lurid light of Moorish tragedies; an ay de mi Alhama moans under his pride and bigotry. Torquemadas grind each sentence into dullness and inquisitorial harmlessness, yet now and then sweeps by a trace of Lope de Vega, a word that reminds us of Calderon, while still oftener the euphuism of Gongora pervades the writer's mind and flows in platitudes from his guarded pen.
As we near our own day, history is invested with new dignities; its arms float, sea-weed like, on the raging waves of political life, as if to grasp from some fragment of shipwrecked treaties or some passing argosy of government a precious jewel to light its deep researches. It takes in with nervous grasp the tendencies of literature; its keen gaze drinks in the features of popular belief and searches out the fountains of popular error. Fully equal to the requirements of the exacting age, Motley has produced a work whose lightest merit is its equal conformity to the new rules of his art. He possesses in an eminent degree the first qualification which the old Abbé de Mably, in his Manière d'ecrire l'histoire, insists upon for the historian. He recognizes the natural rights of man, those rights which are the same in every age, and as powerful in their demands in the sixteenth century as in the nineteenth. His well-balanced mind acknowledges and respects the duties of man as citizen and magistrate, and the mutual rights of nations. No splendor, no power, no prejudice, has been able to seduce him from his high principles, neither does a warm and manifest sympathy with his subject delude him even into the passing extravagance of an undue praise. If he comprehends the greatness of the national character he almost flings upon the canvas before us, he appreciates as profoundly its weaknesses too. Strada's history is a poison, which strikes at the very roots of society, and would wither all the fresh young leaves of its vigorous spring. Motley's is its powerful antidote, which restores the juices of life to the brittle fibres, smooths out the shriveled leaves, and clothes them again with the fresh green of hope and promise. Strada is the slave of the victor; Motley is the champion of the vanquished. Strada bends the dignity of Justice before the painted sceptre of Despotism; Motley exalts the honest title of the man above the will of the perjured monarch. Strada gilds with the false gold of sophistry the very chains that gall his soul; Motley sharpens on the clear crystal of his unobtrusive logic, the two-handed sword of power, and cuts his way through an army of protocols and pacts to the fortress of Liberty.
It is, we believe, an exploded theory that the characters of modern times are inferior to those of antiquity. 'Under the toga as under the modern dress,' says Guizot, 'in the senate as in our councils, men were what they still are;' and the old Jesuit takes a narrow view of the progress of mankind, who asserts that the masculine and vigorous treatment that was necessary to Thucydides and Livy is not required by the historians of our puny and degenerate day. Even the Count Gobineau, who so ably and, to his followers, conclusively proves the fallacy of the dearest hope of every learned philanthropist and patriot, does not, in his most earnest antagonism to the doctrine of human progress, insinuate the existence of a principle urging the systematic and inevitable decline of individual power from age to age. So far from exacting less of the historian, the present age demands even a firmer handling. Our era has its Alexanders and Cæsars; its Hannibals and Hectors; and if these men of antiquity rise before us with an unapproachable air of grandeur, it is because the light shining from our distant stand-point surrounds them with deeper shadows, and throws them in bolder relief against the background of their vanished ages. It is a simple triumph of chiaro-scuro, and by no means the proof of the truth of an absurd theory.
It is mournful enough to see the dead nations that were once young and glorious pacing onward through an inferno like so many headless Bertrand de Borns, bearing by the hair
'The severed member, lantern-wise