authorities. The Dissertation on the Prophecies (1754) of Bishop Thomas Newton (1704-1782) enjoys a reputation in excess perhaps of its merits. It was a last feeble echo of remonstrance against the insinuations of the Deist Collins that the prophecies were best left out of an argument for supernatural religion. Johnson's comment upon the book is memorable: 'It is Tom's great work, but how far it is great or how much of it is Tom's are other questions.' Bishop George Horne (1730-1792) was likewise following an old groove in his Defence of the Thirty-nine Articles (1772): subsequently, in his Letters on Infidelity (1784), he specially assailed Hume, in answer to whose great argument George Campbell (17191796) issued his enormously popular Dissertation on Miracles in 1762. In 1778 appeared the free-spoken Opinions of Christian Writers of the first Three Centuries concerning the Person of Christ, by the Unitarian Gilbert Wakefield (1756-1801), and in 1773 the last instalments of the able Remarks on Ecclesiastical History of John Jortin (1698-1770). The famous Concordance of Alexander Cruden (1701-1770) had appeared in 1731, but his Scripture Dictionary was not issued until 1770. The Lives of the Saints, by Alban Butler (1710-1773), appeared in 1745; while the famous Bible Commentary of the saintly Thomas Scott (1747-1821) was published near the close of the century (1788-92).

We have drawn a charitable veil over the sermons that Dr. Johnson read and listened to with such assiduity. How many of them will be read, except by professional persons, in the twentieth century? Perhaps those who possess the handy one-volume Sterne issued by Henry Bohn in 1865 will read the sermons at the end. The first series of Sermons by Mr. Yorick (1760) are not exceptionally lively, consisting merely of the early sermons which Sterne published, by the shrewd advice of a bookseller, to satisfy the curi osity of the public as to what manner of man the author of Tristram might be. But with the second batch of Sermons (1766) the case is altered. These were deliberately written to sustain the repute of the author of 'Shandy,' and are well worth examination: notably the discourse on the prodigal son, in which the preacher dwells on the need of sending young men on the grand tour, not with 'a broken Swiss valet,' but with a carefully selected tutor and proper introductions, or the sermon on Judges, xix. 1, or the still more extraordinary one preached at Paris before a congregation of sceptics in 1763. Here, as Gray said, you see the preacher' tottering on the verge of laughter and ready to throw his periwig in the face of the audience.'

CHAPTER VI.

THE HISTORIANS.

THE old English historians, a prolific and in many respects a notable group of writers, had been rather Eutropian than Tacitean in their methods; such men as Hall and Holinshed, Camden, Speed and Stow and Strype, and the industrious Huguenot compilers, Boyer and Rapin, had restricted themselves largely to voluminous annalizing. Men of affairs with a faculty for writing, such as Clarendon and Burnet, had produced graphic and humorous political memoirs, to which they had given the name of Histories, and these had provoked similar labours on the part of their political adversaries. The value of general judgments, of comparative studies in history, the influence of economic conditions, of ideas in relation to events -such considerations as these were almost entirely neg. lected. Bolingbroke may be said to have had some glimpses of later historical method, but his conceptions of history are still in a very crude and disorganized state. He condemns the labours of erudite research as so much learned lumber, and so begins by depriving himself of the necessary materials for any sound process of historical deduction. He adopts indeed the old saw that history is philosophy teaching by examples, but he manages with curious infelicity to repudiate the true historical method before it had come into being, and thus condemns himself

to a merely empirical system of guesswork. The attempt to treat history inductively upon a broad philosophical basis was reserved, in fact, for the gr

quieu, as the first attempt to appea widely to modern comprehension by an attractive grouping of historical facts was reserved to Montesquieu's even greater contemporary, Voltaire. While thus in France the finest intellects of the age were engaged upon historical interpretation, it seemed in our country as if men of the dullest intellects and meanest acquirements were busying themselves with the subject. The histories of such men as Robert Brady, John Oldmixon, James Ralph, Laurence Eachard, and Nicholas Tindal (1687-1774), the continuator of Rapin, might well have been written by authors who had failed at every other kind of literature. When the Duchess of Marlborough wished for an historical memoir of her husband, embodying the details of his immortal victories, she had to apply to David Mallet, a man whom, as Buckle says, the French would have hardly thought worthy of dusting the manuscripts of one of their great historians. Men of this calibre despised the Middle Ages with a wild and ignorant presumption, and little or nothing was done in England by the generation succeeding that of Dugdale, of Rymer, of Hearne, and of Madox, corresponding to the great labours of Muratori, Maffei, Ducange, Bouquet, and the Benedictines of France. The contracted views that disfigured much of our old historical work were manifested in Thomas Carte, an historical writer of great patience and industry. The son of a Jacobite antiquary, Carte shared his father's tastes and prejudices. Having gained some reputation as an historical investigator, he obtained a good subscription for a History of England on a large scale, the first volume of which ap

Thomas Carte (1686-1754).

THOMAS CARTE-GEORGE LYTTELTON.

129

peared in 1747. The way in which new and original materials were employed showed a great advance upon previou mark it out as the best history

of England in p of research previous to that of Dr. Lingard. Yet so absurdly narrow and superstitious was Carte's mind, that he thought it necessary to enter into a long examination of the question of touching for the King's Evil, a prerogative which he presumed to be peculiar to the Lord's anointed. After gravely and at - great length considering this difficult question, the historian came to the conclusion that God had not granted to our Hanoverian kings the power of miraculously curing the scrofula, but that he had allowed that power to remain in the hands of the Pretender. Between the political wrath which this assertion provoked, and the ridicule which, in full eighteenth century, it could hardly fail to elicit, Carte's History fell into a largely undeserved contempt, followed by an oblivion from which it has never emerged. Carte having been thus discredited, the writer who in the early fifties was most respected as an George Lyttelton historian was 'the good' Lord Lyttelton, (1709-1773). whose History of Henry II. eventually appeared in 1767. To this work, which was the labour of wellnigh thirty years, it would be unfair to deny the merit of protracted research. But this is about all that can possibly be said in its favour. It shows, said Walpole, how dull one may be if one but take pains for seven and twenty years. The materials are so ill-arranged and the style so insufferably prolix, that it has come to be regarded as the English parallel of the Italian History of Guicciardini, to which (rather than read it) the man preferred the galleys. David Hume,' whose career as a whole belongs rather to

1 See Chapter IV.

K

David Hume (1711-1776).

philosophy than to history, gives us, with his own pen, a brief account of the inception of his famous History. In 1752 the Faculty of Advocates chose me their librarian, an office from which I received little or no emolument, but which gave me the command of a large library. I then formed the plan of writing the history of England.' The opening portion of his History, extending from 1603 to 1649, was thus written in two years a period of time which can hardly be deemed adequate for the examination of the materials then accessible. But Hume had in his great Treatise of Human Nature come to the conclusion that, if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, it is certain it must lie very deep and abstruse,' and he, perhaps, thought that to protract the research after such a chimera was mere waste of time. The result is that his History of England, the first volume of which appeared in 1754, consists rather of a series of brilliant illustrations of an à priori theory than of a serious inquiry into the facts, upon which alone any inductive process can properly be based. From an intense disgust at the party manoeuvres, misnamed politics, of his own time, as exemplified by the narrow chicanery of the dominant Whig party, Hume was disposed to exalt the government of the Stuart kings, from whose tyranny the Whigs were never tired of priding themselves that they had emancipated the country. He went so far as to assert that in all history it would be difficult to find a reign more unspotted and unblemished than that of James I. The paradox that the revolution of 1688, so much belauded by Whig writers, was in reality a retrograde step, pleased Hume more as he proceeded, and, in his last revision of his work, he assiduously softened or expunged many villanous, seditious, Whig strokes which had crept into it,' being convinced that he had not done enough to canonize Laud or