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AN ADDRESS, ETC.

THAT history is a liberal and useful study, and that the history of our country is best deserving our attention, are propositions too clear for argument, and too simple for illustration. Nature has implanted in our breasts a lively impulse to extend the narrow span of our existence, by the knowledge of the events that have happened on the soil which we inhabit, of the characters and actions of those men from whom our descent, as individuals or as a people, is probably derived. The same laudable emulation will prompt us to review, and to enrich our common treasure of national glory: and those who are best entitled to the esteem of posterity, are the most inclined to celebrate the merits of their ancestors. The origin and changes of our religion and government, of our arts and manners, afford an entertaining, and often an instructive subject of speculation; and the scene is repeated and varied by the entrance of the victorious strangers, the Roman and the Saxon, the Dane and the Norman, who have successively reigned in our stormy isle. We contemplate the gradual progress of society, from the lowest ebb of primitive barbarism, to the full tide of modern civilisation. We contrast the naked Briton who might have mistaken the sphere of Archimedes for a rational creature, and the contemporary of Newton, in whose school Archimedes himself would have been an humble disciple; and we compare the boats of osier and hides that floated along our coasts, with the formidable navies which visit and command the remotest shores of the ocean, Without indulging the fond prejudices of patriotic vanity, we may assume a conspicuous place among the inhabitants of the earth. The English will be ranked among the few nations who have cultivated with equal success the arts of war, of learning, and of commerce; and Britain, perhaps, is the only powerful and wealthy state which has ever possessed the inestimable secret of uniting the benefits of order with the blessings of freedom. It is a maxim of our law, and the constant practice of our courts of justice, never to accept any evidence, unless it is the very best which, under the circumstances of the case, can possibly be obtained. If this wise principle be transferred from jurisprudence to criticism, the inquisitive reader of English history will soon ascend to the first witnesses of every period, from whose testimonies the moderns, however sagacious and eloquent, must derive their whole confidence and credit. In the prosecution of his inquiries, he will lament that the transactions of the middle ages have been imperfectly recorded, and that these records have been more imperfectly preserved: that the successive conquerors of Britain have despised or destroyed the monuments of their predecessors;

* I allude to a passage in Cicero (de Naturâ Deorum, lib. ii. cap. 34). Quòd si in Britanniam, sphæram aliquis tulerit hanc, quam nuper familiaris noster effecit Posidonius, cujus singulæ conversiones idem efficiunt in sole, et in lunâ, et in quinque stellis errantibus, quod efficitur in cœlo singulis diebus et noctibus: quis in illa barbarie dubitet, quin ea sphæra sit perfecta ratione?

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and that by their violence or neglect, so much of our national antiquities has irretrievably perished. For the losses of history are indeed irretrievable: when the productions of fancy or science have been swept away, new poets may invent, and new philosophers may reason; but if the inscription of a single fact be once obliterated, it can never be restored by the united efforts of genius and industry. The consideration of our past losses should incite the present age cherish and perpetuate the valuable relics which have escaped; instead of condemning the monkish historians (as they are contemptuously styled) silently to moulder in the dust of our libraries, our candour, and even our justice, should learn to estimate their value, and to excuse their imperfections. Their minds were infected with the passions and errors of their times, but those times would have been involved in darkness, had not the art of writing, and the memory of events, been perserved in the peace and solitude of the cloister. Their Latin style is far removed from the eloquence and purity of Sallust and Livy; but the use of a permanent and general idiom has opened the study, and connected the series of our ancient chronicles, from the age of Bede to that of Walsingham. In the eyes of a philosophic observer, these monkish historians are even endowed with a singular, though accidental merit; the unconscious simplicity with which they represent the manners and opinions of their contemporaries: a natural picture, which the most exquisite art is unable to imitate.

Books, before the invention of printing, were separately and slowly copied by the pen; and the transcripts of our old historians must have been rare; since the number would be proportioned to the number of readers capable of understanding a Latin work, and curious of the history and antiquities of England. The gross mass of the laity, from the baron to the mechanic, were more addicted to the exercises of the body than to those of the mind: the middle ranks of society were illiterate and poor, and the nobles and gentlemen, as often as they breathed from war, maintained their strength and activity in the chase or the tournament. Few among them could read; still fewer could write; none were acquainted with the Latin tongue; and if they sometimes listened to a tale of past times, their puerile love of the marvellous would prefer the romance of Sir Launcelot or Sir Tristram, to the authentic narratives most honourable to their country and their ancestors. Till the period of the reformation, the ignorance and sensuality of the clergy were continually increasing: the ambitious prelate aspired to pomp and power; the jolly monk was satisfied with idleness and pleasure; and the few students of the ecclesiastical order, perplexed rather than enlightened their understandings with occult science and scholastic divinity. In the monastery in which a chronicle had been composed, the original was deposited and perhaps a copy; and some neighbouring churches might be induced, by a local or professional interest, to seek the communication of these historical memorials. Such manuscripts were not liable to suffer from the injury of use; but the casualty of fire, or the slow progress of damp and worms, would often endanger

their limited and precarious existence. The sanctuaries of religion were sometimes profaned by aristocratic oppression, popular tumult, or military license; and although the cellar was more exposed than the library, the envy of ignorance will riot in the spoil of those treasures which it cannot enjoy.

After the discovery of printing, which has bestowed immortality on the works of man, it might be presumed that the new art would be applied without delay, to save and to multiply the remains of our national chronicles. It might be expected that the English, now waking from a long slumber, should blush at finding themselves strangers in their native country; and that our princes, after the example of Charlemagne and Maximilian I., would esteem it their duty and glory to illustrate the history of the people over whom they reigned. But these rational hopes have not been justified by the event. It was in the year 1474 that our first press was established in Westminister Abbey, by William Caxton: but in the choice of his authors, that liberal and industrious artist was reduced to comply with the vicious taste of his readers; to gratify the nobles with treatises on heraldry, hawking, and the game of chess, and to amuse the popular credulity with romances of fabulous knights, and legends of more fabulous saints. The father of printing expresses a laudable desire to elucidate the history of his country; but instead of publishing the Latin chronicle of Radulphus Higden, he could only venture on the English version by John de Trevisa; and his complaint of the difficulty of finding materials for his own continuation of that work, sufficiently attests that even the writers, which we now possess, of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had not yet emerged from the darkness of the cloister. His successors, with less skill and ability, were content to tread in the footsteps of Caxton; almost a century elapsed without producing one original edition of any old English historian; and the only exception which I recollect is the publication of Gildas (London, 1526) by Polydore Virgil, an ingenious foreigner. The presses of Italy, Germany, and even France, might plead in their defence, that the minds of their scholars, and the hands of their workmen, were abundantly exercised in unlocking the treasures of Greek and Roman antiquity; but the world is not indebted to England for one first edition of a classic author. This delay of a century is the more to be lamented, as it is too probable that many authentie and valuable monuments of our history were lost in the dissolution of religious houses by Henry the Eighth. The protestant and the patriot must applaud our deliverance; but the critic may deplore the rude havoc that was made in the libraries of churches and monasteries, by the zeal, the avarice, and the neglect, of unworthy reformers.

Far different from such reformers was the learned and pious Matthew Parker, the first protestant archbishop of Canterbury, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. His apostolical virtues were not incompatible with the love of learning, and while he exercised the arduous office, not of governing, but of founding the Church of England, he strenuously applied himself to revive the study of the Saxon

tongue, and of English antiquities. By the care of this respectable prelate, four of our ancient historians were successively published: the Flores of Matthew of Westminster (1570); the Historia Major of Matthew Paris (1571); the Vita Elfridi Regis, by Asserius; and the Historia Brevis, and Upodigma Neustriæ, by Thomas Walsingham. After Parker's death, this national duty was for some years abandoned to the diligence of foreigners. The Ecclesiastical History of Bede had been printed and reprinted on the continent, as the common property of the Latin church; and it was again inserted in a collection of British writers (Heidelberg 1587), selected with such critical skill, that the romance of Jeffrey of Monmouth, and a Latin abridgment of Froissard, are placed on the same level of historical evidence. An edition of Florence of Worcester, by Howard, (1592,) may be slightly noticed; but we should gratefully commemorate the labours of Sir Henry Saville, a man distinguished among the scholars of the age by his profound knowledge of the Greek language and mathematical sciences. A just indignation against the base and plebeian authors of our English chronicles, had almost provoked him to undertake the task of a general and legitimate history: but his modest industry, declining the character of an architect, was content to prepare materials for a future edifice. Some of the most valuable writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were rescued by his hands from dirt, and dust, and rottenness (é situ squalore et pulvere), and his collection, under the common title of Scriptores post Bedam, was twice printed; first in London (1596), and afterwards at Frankfort (1601). During the whole of the seventeenth, and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, the same studies were prosecuted with vigour and success; a miscellaneous volume of the Anglica Normanica, &c. (Frankfort 1603), and the Historia Nova of Eadmer (London 1623), were produced by Camden and Selden, to whom literature is indebted for more important services. The names of Wheeler and Gibson, of Watts and Warton, of Dugdale and Wilkins, should not be defrauded of their due praise: but our attention is fixed by the elaborate collection of Twysden and Gale: and their titles of Decem and Quindecim Scriptores announce that their readers possess a series of twenty-five of our old English historians. The last who has dug deep into the mine was Thomas Hearne, a clerk of Oxford, poor in fortune, and indeed poor in understanding. His minute and obscure diligence, his voracious and undistinguishing appetite, and the coarse vulgarity of his taste and style, have exposed him to the ridicule of idle wits. Yet it cannot be denied that Thomas Hearne has gathered many gleanings of the harvest; and if his own prefaces are filled with crude and extraneous matter, his editions will be always recommended by their accuracy and use.

I am not called upon to enquire into the merits of foreign nations in the study of their respective histories, except as far as they may suggest a useful lesson, or a laudable emulation to ourselves. The patient Germans have addicted themselves to every species of literary labour; and the division of their vast empire into many independent

states would multiply the public events of each country, and the pens, however rude, by which they have been saved from oblivion. Besides innumerable editions of particular historians, I have seen (if my memory does not fail me) a list of more than twenty of the voluminous collections of the Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum; some of these are of a vague and miscellaneous nature; others are relative to a certain period of time; and others again are circumscribed by the local limits of a principality or a province. Among the last I shall only distinguish the Scriptores Rerum Brunswicensium, compiled at Hanover in the beginning of this century by the celebrated Leibnitz. We should sympathise with a kind of domestic interest in the fortunes of a people to whom we are united by our obedience to a common sovereign; and we must explore with respect and gratitude the origin of an illustrious family, which has been the guardian, near fourscore years, of our liberty and happiness. The antiquarian, who blushes at his alliance with Thomas Hearne, will feel his profession ennobled by the name of Leibnitz. That extraordinary genius embraced and improved the whole circle of human science; and after wrestling with Newton and Clarke in the sublime regions of geometry and metaphysics, he could descend upon earth to examine the uncouth characters and barbarous Latin of a chronicle or charter. In this, as in almost every other active pursuit, Spain has been outstripped in the industry of her neighbours. The best collection of her national historians was published in Germany: the recent attempts of her royal academy have been languid and irregular, and if some memorials of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are lately printed at Madrid, her five oldest chronicles after the invasion of the Moors still sleep in the obscurity of provincial editions. (Pampelona, 1615, 1634; Barcelona, 1663.) Italy has been productive in every age of revolutions and writers; and a complete series of these original writers, from the year 500 to the year 1500, are most accurately digested in the Scriptores Rerum Italicarum of Muratori. This stupendous work which fills twenty-eight folios, and overflows into the six volumes of the Antiquitates Italia Medii Evi, was achieved in years by one man; and candour must excuse some defects in the plan and execution, which the discernment, and perhaps the envy of criticism has too rigorously exposed. The antiquities of France have been elucidated by a learned and ingenious people: the original historians, which Duchesne had undertaken to publish, were left imperfect by his death, yet had reached the end of the thirteenth century; and his additional volume (the sixth) comes home to ourselves, since it celebrates the exploits of the Norman Conquerors and Kings of England. About years ago the design of publishing Les Historiens des Gaules et de la France, was resumed on a larger scale, and in a more splendid form; and although the name of Dom Bouquet stands foremost, the merit must be shared among the veteran Benedictines of the Abbey of St. Germain des Prés at Paris. This noble collection may be proposed as a model for such national works: the original texts are corrected from the best manuscripts; and the curious