The Press.
London, England, 1858-01-30 00:00:00

THE PRESS, JANUARY 80, 1858.

It [i.e., his style, though we should rather have called
it his method] is too omniscient. Every thing is too
plain. All is clear; nothing is doubtful. Instead of pro-
bability being, as the great thinker expressed it, " the very
guide of life," it has become a rare exception—an uncom-
mon phenomenon. You rarely come across any thing
which is not decided ; and when you do come across it,
you seem to wonder that the positiveness, which has
accomplished so much, should have been unwilling to
decide any thing. This is hardly the style for history.
The data of historical narratives, especially of modern
histories, are a heap of confusion. No one can tell where
they lie, or where they do not lie; what is in them, or
what is not in them. Literature is called the " fragment
of fragments ;" little has been written, and but little of
that little has been preserved. So history is a vestige of
vestiges ; few facts leave any trace of themselves, any
witness of their occurrence ; of fewer still is that witness
preserved; a slight track is all any thing leaves, and the
confusion of life, the tumult of change sweep even that
away in a moment. It is not possible that these data can
be very fertile in certainties. Few people would make any
thing of them : a memoir here, a M.S. there—two letters
in a magazine—an assertion by a person whose veracity is
denied,—these are the sort of evidence out of which a
flowing narrative is to be educed—of course it ought not to
be too flowing. "If you please, sir, to tell me what you do
nol know," was the inquiry of a humble pupil addressed
to a great man of science. It would have been a relief to
the readers of Macaulay if he had shown a little the out-
side of uncertainties, which there must be—the gradations
of doubt, which there ought to be—the singular accumu-
lation of difficulties, which must beset tho extraction of a
very easy narrative from very confused materials.
This defect in style is, indeed, indicative of a defect in
understanding. Mr. Macaulay's mind is eminently gifted,
but there is a want of graduation in it. He has a fine eye
for probabilities, a clear perception of evidence, a shrewd
guess at missing links of fact ; but each probability seems
to him a certainty, each piece of evidence conclusive, each
analogy exact. The heavy Scotch intellect is a little prone
to this : one figures it as a heap of formulae, and if fact b
is reducible to formulae s, that is all which it regards ; the
mathematical mill grinds with equal energy at flour perfect
and imperfect—at matter which is quite certain, and at
matter which is only a little probable.

This is capital. Yet even Macaulay is made
fun of for what is in our opinion one of his
leading merits. Atter quoting that well-known
passage on our friendships with the dead, Mr.
Bagehot proceeds:—

Bat Bonnet is dead ; and Cicero was a Roman ; and
Plato wrote in Greek. Years and manners separate ns
from the great. After dinner, Demosthenes may come
unseasonably ; Dante might stay too long. We are
alienated fr..)rr. ;he politician, and have a horror of the
theologian. Dreadful idea, having Demosthenes for an
intimate friend! He had pebbles in his month; he was
always urging action ; he spoke such good Greek; we
cannot dwell on it,—it is too much. Only a mind impas-
sive to our daily life, unalive to bores and evils, to joys and
sorrows, incapable of the deepest sympathies, a prey to
print, could imagine it. The mass of men have stronger
ties and warmer hopes. The exclusive devotion to books
tires. We require to love and hate, to act and live.

This language is unworthy of Mr. Bagehot's
understanding. It is indescribably trivial.
But we do not wish to part from him in wrath.
Such blots on his excellence are few and far
between. He has pleased us much. It is only
natural we should point out to him how for the
future he may annoy us less.
And now, in conclusion, we would recom-
mend everybody to read the two essays we
have not criticised—on Shakespeare and
on Shelley. Taken all in all, they are the two
best. The first especially is redolent of that
peculiar quality which wo call alternately
common sense and humour according to the
form it takes. And we are sure our readers
will be both the wiser and the merrier for a
knowledge of it.

The Eighteen Christian Centuries. By the

Rev. James White. London : Blackwoods.
PHYSIOLOGISTS tell us that the constitution of
our digestive apparatus is such as to require
in the food submitted to it not only the pre-
sence of specifically nutritive properties, but
over and above these a certain amount of bulk,
to enable the organs to take effective cogni-
sance of that which is brought before them.
The savages who are occasionally reduced to
live upon substances, such us train oil, or
honey, which would appear to possess the
constituents chemically necessary for support-
ing life, are nevertheless obliged to mix with
them it quantity of earth or sawdust, in order
to prevent their reception in too concentrated
a form, and obviate the too rapid action of the
separative and assimilative processes. ',lke
many of the truths relative to our bodily
structure, this doctrine finds a parallel in the
laws of our mental organisation. There is an
inevitable though not always a very definite
limit to the quantity of ideas or facts which

can in a given time be seized by the apprehen-
sion or stored up by the memory ; and we
are compelled by experience to acknowledge
that truths must sometimes he held in solu-
tion instead of being precipitated, and that the
book which contains the fewest words is not
always the one which it takes the shortest
time to master. The mind must have time to
dwell upon its information in order to grasp it
in its full extent. This is perhaps even more
true of history than of science or metaphysics.
The principles of mechanics or geometry, the
formulae of mathematics, or the few great laws
of psychology, may, when once rightly appre-
hended, be retained in the mind to wait the
arrival of the constantly recurring facts which
exemplify them. That two straight lines can-
not inclose a space, and that it is much more
difficult to retrace the links of our ideas in
their reverse order than in the order in which
they arose, are truths which we see or feel
illustrated every day of our lives. But the
order and connection of long past events have
no such hold upon us. The sequences and.
interdependences of historical phenomena,
stript of their local colours and illustrative
circumstances, overwhelm the mind by their
individual importance while they confuse it
with their aggregate number, and an epitome
which pretends to embrace them all can leave
nothing but the most vague impression. To use
the language of Gibbon in speaking of the By-
zantine empire," in a composition of some days,
" in a perusal of some hours, six hundred years
" have rolled away, and the duration of a life
"or reign is contracted to a fleeting mo-
" ment : and our immortal reason survives
" and disdains the phantoms of kings who have
" passed before our eyes, and faintly dwell on
" our remembrance. '

If the work at the head of this article had
been like the common historical abridgments to
whose faults we have alluded, and which, after
having tormented schoolboys, subside into
mere books of occasional refereace, we should
not have troubled ourselves to review it at all.
But Mr. %Vhite's epitome is of an excep-
tional character. He has his faults,
which we shall not scruple to mention ;
but there is nothing about him of the
literary hack who painfully photographs
an enormous landscape into the diameter of
a half-crown, and wearies you with the micro-
scopic examination of its almost undiscerniblo
features. Mr. White is a literary artist, whose
sketch, however incomplete in minute detail,
gives a faithful idea of the great outlines, the
light and shade, and the general colour of the
locality it professes to represent. To revert
to our former illustration, ho gives bulk to the
more important events by taking them alone,
and treating them at sufficient length to insure
their retention in the memory. Conceiving that
every century has had its own characteristics,
whichas we knoware already in several instances
universally acknowledged, his plan is to place
under a similar light the whole eighteen.
This task he has accomplished in the
manner which might have been expected
from the author of that spirited little
book, " Landmarks of History of Eng-
land "—with much lucidity of arrangement,
much felicity of language, and a just degree of
historical perspective. He has evidently
studied with great care the best and
most recent writers, and his eclecticism from
Gibbon, Hallam, Guizot, Michelet, and others
is for the most part sound and trustworthy.
His style is neither uugracefully stiff nor gau-
dily magniloquent, but is generally spirited
and pleasing, and carries the reader on with-
out any sense of weariness or effort. We are
bound to say, however, that, though good as a
whole, it is disfigured by a few blemishes
which the author will do well to remove when
he prepares his second edition. He is usually
quiet and gentlemanly enough, but occasion-
ally he seems to be seized with a fancy for
undignified witticisms, which have always a
strong flavour of the provincial lecture-room,
and occasionally descend to positive vulgarity.
Thus, at page 214, he drags in by head and
shoulders a joke about the recent attempt to
introduce horseflesh at table, and alludes at
page 239, apropos of the pretensions of the
Church of Rome, to an equally disagreeable
article of diet!—

When it sinks into the powerlessness of a simple
bishopric, it will still imitate the lofty style of the African
potentate, who is graciously pleased, atter he has gorged
himself on baked hippopotamus, to announce by a herald at
the door of his tent, that the other monarchs of the earth
may dine.

In speaking of the bribe offered by the Vene-
tians to Maximilian the Penniless after the
league of Cambray, ho says " they had made
" no similar proposition to the French King,
" nor to Ferdinand, nor even of a ten pound
" note (!) to the Mantuan Marquis or the Mag.
" nifico of Ferrara." Froissart (p. 336) is
called "the Paul Pry of the period." And Mr.
White is very fond of employing the word
" peoples" in a sense neither necessary in it-
self nor adopted by any good writer.

Passing from the brilliant spectacle of the
Augustan age, with its poets, wits, and cour-
tiers, Mr. White places before us in rapid
succession the long line of emperors under
whom the great Roman power slowly but
sorely verged to its inevitable fall—the long
gallery of portraits exhibiting every phase of
despotism, as if to warn mankind against that
form of government for ever. In the second
century the centralised power of bad heredi-
tary rulers is succeeded by the beneficence
and wisdom of such men as Trojan and the
Antonines ; cruelty gives place to protection,
and civil progress hardly gains more when
citizens are treated as children than it did
when they were treated like brutes and slaves.
At the period of Rome's greatest apparent
power and grandeur the author pauses to
compare her resources with those of modern
nations, and the following statement appears
to us both new and interesting
Viewed in comparison with some of the monarchies of
the present day, neither its extent of territory, nor amount
of population, nor number of soldiers is very surprising-
The Queen of England reigns over more subjects, and
commands far mightier fleets and armies, than any of the
Roman emperors. The Empire of Russia is more exten-
sive, and yet the historians of a few generations ago are
lost in admiration of the power of Rome. The whole
military force of the empire amounted to four hundred and
fifty thousand men. The total number of vessels did not
exceed a thousand. But see what were the advantages
Rome possessed in the compactness of its territory and the
unity of its government. The great Mediterranean Sea,
peopled and crltivated on both its shorts, was but a peace-
ful lake, on which the Roman galley had no enemy to fear,
and the merchant ship dreaded nothing but the winds and
waves. There were no fortresses to be garrisoned on what
are now the boundaries of jealous or hostile kingdoms.
If the great circuit of the Roman State could be protected
from barbarous inroads, the internal defence of all that vast
incloaure could be left to the cif it power. If the Black
Sea and the Sea of Azoff could be kept clear of piratical
adventurers, the broad highway of the Mediterranean was
safe. A squadron near Gibraltar, a squadron at the Dar-
danelles, and the tribes which might possibly venture in
from the ocean—the tribes which, slipping down from the
Don or the Dnieper, might thread their way through the
Hellespont and emerge into the Egean—were caught at
their first appearance ; and when the wisdom of the
Romans had guarded the mouths of the Danube from the
descent, in canoe or coracle, of the wild settlers on its
upper banks, the peace and commerce of the whole empire
were secured. With modern Europe the case is very dif-
ferent. There are boundaries to be guarded which occupy
more soldiers than the territories are worth. Lines are
arbitrarily fixed across the centre of a plain, or along the
summit of a mountain, which it is a case of war to pass.
Belgium defends her flats with a hundred thousand men,
and the marshes of Holland are secured by sixty thousand
Dutch. The State of Dessau, in Germany, threatens its
neighbours with fifteen hundred soldiers, while Reuss
guards its dignity and independence with three hundred
tntantry and fifty horse. But the great powers, as they
are called, take away from the peaceable and remunerative
employments of trade or agriculture an amount of labour
which would be an incalculable increase to the riches and
happiness of the world. The aggregate soldiery of Europe
is upwards of four millions of men—just nine times the
largest calculation of the Roman Legions. The ships of
Europe—to the smaller of which the greatest galleys of the
ancient world would scarcely serve as tenders—amount to
2,113. The number of guns they carry, against which
there is nothing we can take as a measure of value in
ancient warfare, but which are now the greatest and surest
criterions of military power, amounts to 45,387. But this
does not give so clear a view of the alteration in relative
power as is yielded by an inspection of some of the sepa-
rate items. Gaul, included within the Rhine, was kept in
order by six or seven legions. The French Empire has
on foot an army of six hundred and fifty thousand men,
and a fleet of four hundred sail. Britain, which was
garrisoned by thirty thousand men, had, in 1855, an army
at home and abroad of six hundred and sixty thousand
men, and a fleet of five hundred and ninety-one ships of
war, with an armament of seventeen thousand guns.
The disjointed States which now constitute the Empire
of Austria, and which occupied eight legions in their
defence, are now in possession of an army of six hundred
thousand men ; and Prussia, whose army exceeds half a
million of soldiers, was unheard of except in the dieous-
-1110111 of geographers,

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