I.The Great Use of History,Properly So Called,As Distinguished from the Writings of Mere Annalists and Antiquaries.II.Greek and Roman Historians.III.Some Idea of a Complete History.IV.Further Cautions to be Observed in This Study,and the Regulation of it According to the Different Possessions,and Situations of Men;Above all,the Use to Made of it (1)By Divine,and (2)By Those who are Called to the Service of their Countries.
I remember my last letter ended abruptly,and a long interval has since passed:so that the thread I had then spun has slipt from me.I will try to recover it,and to pursue the task your lordship has obliged me to continue.
Besides the pleasure of obeying your orders,it is likewise of some advantage to myself,to recollect my thoughts,and resume a study in which I was conversant formerly.For nothing can be more true than that saying of Solon reported by Plato,though censured by him,impertinently enough in one of his wild books of laws;"Assidue addiscens,ad senium venio."The truth is,the most knowing man,in the course of the longest life,will have always much to learn,and the wisest and best much to improve.This rule will hold in the knowledge and improvement to be acquired by the study of history.
and therefore even he who has gone to this school in his youth,should not neglect it in his age."I read in Livy,"says Montagne,"what another man does not:and Plutarch read there what I do not."Just so the same man may read at fifty what he did not read in the same book at five and twenty:at least I have found it so,by my own experience,on many occasions.
By comparing,in this study,the experience of other men and other ages with our own,we improve both:we analyse,as it were,philosophy.We reduce all the abstract speculations of ethics,and all the general rules of human policy,to their first principles.With these advantages every man may,though few men do,advance daily towards those ideas,those increated essences a Platonist would say,which no human creature can reach in practice,but in the nearest approaches to which the perfection of our nature consists;because every approach of this kind renders a man better,and wiser,for himself,for his family,for the little community of his own country,and for the great community of the world.Be not surprised,my lord,at the order in which I place these objects.Whatever order divines and moralists,who contemplate the duties belonging to these objects,may place them in,this is the order they hold in nature:and I have always thought that we might lead ourselves and others to private virtue,more effectually by a due observation of this order,than by any of those sublime refinements that pervert it.
Self-love but serves the virtuous wind to wake;As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake.
The centre mov'd,a circle straight succeeds;Another still,and still another spreads;
Friend,parent,neighbor,first it will embrace,His country next,and next all human race.
So sings our friend Pope,my lord,and so I believe.So I shall prove too,if I mistake not,in an epistle I am about to write to him,in order to complete a set that were written some years ago.
A man of my age,who returns to the study of history,has no time to lose,because he has little to live:a man of your lordship's age has no time to lose,because he has much to do.For different reasons therefore the same rules will suit us.Neither of us must grope in the dark,neither of us must wander in the light.I have done the first formerly a good deal;"ne verba mihi darentur;ne aliquid esse,in hac recondita antiquitatis scientia,magni ac secreti boni judicaremus."If you take my word,you will throw none of your time away in the same manner:and I shall have the less regret for that which I have misspent,if I persuade you to hasten Sown from the broken traditions of antiquity,to the more entire as well as more authentic histories of ages more modern.In the study of these we shall find wany a complete series of events,preceded by a deduction of their immediate and remote causes,related in their full extent,and accompanied with such a detail of circumstances,and characters,as may transport the attentive reader back to the very time,make him a party to the councils,and an actor in the whole scene of affairs.Such draughts as these,either found in history or extracted by our own application from it,and such alone,are truly useful.
Thus history becomes what she ought to be,and what she has been sometimes called,"magistra vita,"the mistress,like philosophy,of human life.If she is not this,she is at best "nuntia vetustatis,"the gazette of antiquity,or a dry register of useless anecdotes.Suetonius says that Tiberius used to inquire of the grammarians,"qua mater Hecuba?
quod Achilles nomen inter virgines fuisset?quid Syrenes cantare sint solita?"Seneca mentions certain Greek authors,who examined very accurately whether Anacreon loved wine or women best,whether Sappho was a common whore,with other points of equal importance;and I make no doubt but that a man,better acquainted than I have the honor to be with the learned persons of our own country,might find some who have discovered several anecdotes,concerning the giant Albion,concerning Samothes the son,or Brito the grandson of Japhet,and concerning Brutus who led a colony into our island after the siege of Troy,as the others repeopled it after the deluge.But ten millions of such anecdotes as these,though they were true;and complete authentic volumes of Egyptian or Chaldean,of Greek or Latin,of Gallic or British,of French or Saxon records,would be of no value in my sense because of no use towards our improvement in wisdom and virtue;if they contained nothing more than dynasties and genealogies,and a bare mention of remarkable events in the order of time,like journals,chronological tables,or dry and meagre annals.
