common nature in virtue of which all men are entitled to certain legal and moral rights-but as displaying the features of a national character of singular strength and interest. And certainly in that respect the Roman historians have a very special claim to our attention. The Greeks were not patriotic in the same sense and degree as the Romans. And Herodotus and Thucydides are not national historians in the same sense and degree as Livy and Tacitus. Indeed, Livy and Tacitus might, with little exaggeration, be described as the two first national historians on a large and prominent scale, and who, it may be added, had as such no worthy successors for sixteen hundred years.

Livy narrated the events of Rome's career of heroic struggle and achievement with the colouring and in the tone most adapted to inspire the youth of his own generation with reverence and emulation of their ancestors. He was the greatest prose writer of his age. He narrated with unfailing vividness, sensibility, and charm, and could picture or portray with masterly vigour and skill. His ethical feeling was keen and pure. Patriotism was his strongest passion. And if the chief end of history be, as he obviously supposed, to supply examples and stimuli to virtue and patriotism, he certainly cannot be accused of having neglected the historian's main function. His whole work, as has been said, was "a triumphal celebration of the heroic spirit and military glory of Rome." It was natural that he should have been the most popular of the Roman historians. But unfortunately his great qualities were combined with great defects. He was superficial in research; easily satisfied in regard to evidence; prone to take the version of a story which told best; uncritical in the choice and use of authorities. Dazzled by the splendour of the military history of Rome, he neglected the study of its constitutional history. He lacked political insight. He lacked still more philosophical comprehension. Of the general conditions and causes which determined the course of Roman history, and of any law or plan in it, he had no glimpse. He was merely an annalist, although the most attractive and brilliant of annalists. Seneca (Ep. 100) tells us that Livy wrote " dialogos, quos non magis philosophiæ adnumerare possis quam historiæ, et ex professo philosophiam

continentes libros." Whatever the character of the former may have been, we may be certain that the subject of them was not, as Rougemont has supposed, the philosophy of history. If he had had any conception of a philosophy of history he could not have written a history so devoid of philosophy.

Tacitus was very unlike Livy in almost all respects, but as an historian he was like him in so far that his aim too was essentially moral and patriotic. The darkness without was deeper, however, and the hope within less. With the tragic pathos of a despairing patriot and the righteous indignation of an honest man, he delineated the growth of social corruption from the time of Tiberius onwards, in order to deter those in whom any sense of moral obligation was left from what had involved a people so strong and virtuous, so glorious and free as the Roman, in such misery and disgrace, such revolting vice and abject slavery. No historian has given so large a place to the moral element in history, yet without ever becoming a mere moralist or ceasing to be an historian. No one has shown with the same power and vividness what moral law and retribution, virtue and vice and their concomitants and consequences, are in actual historical manifestation and evolution, or traced with so masterly a hand the connections between individual character and the character of public rule. His strong moral feelings may have given rise in certain cases to harsh judgments; but obviously they were, in general, under such firm control, that this must be deemed only a possibility, and in no particular instance assumed as a fact, or even as a probability. From what he knew of the corruption of the governing classes of Rome he may have drawn inferences as to the corruption of the whole social body which are not to be accepted without corroborative evidence, or which can be even proved exaggerated; but it is easy to attribute to Tacitus errors of this kind, which are really only mistakes of the reader's own, consequent on his not keeping in view the precise limits and scope of the two chief works of Tacitus. Notwithstanding his extraordinary intellectual power, Tacitus attained no settled convictions on which any general philosophy of history, or even any general conceptions of history, could be rested. He had obviously no confidence either in any metaphysical or religious theory of

things. His moral sense often breaks down his doubts, and impels him to affirm divine intervention, but his reason was not of the kind which carries the mind above what is visible and concrete or positive. He confessed himself undecided as to whether human affairs are governed by Providence, or fate and inevitable necessity, or the wild rotation of chance. He made no attempt to forecast the future either of humanity or of the empire. Yet he is justly entitled to be regarded as a scientific or philosophical historian, inasmuch as he traced actions back to their motives, events to their causes, and penetrated to the secret springs of social change. In the analysis of character he surpassed all the historians of antiquity. Full of matter as his narrative is, it never contains anything trivial or superfluous. His style fitly exhibits the force, originality, and dignity of his mind. His words are singularly pregnant with meaning, and few of them could either be omitted or replaced by another without loss. He was unquestionably far the most eminent of the Roman historians.

The growth of Roman historiography had been slow; its decay was rapid. After the greatest of Roman historians there appeared not a single great one. Even writers like Suetonius and Florus have no claim to a place in this sketch. We must pass onwards, therefore, into the Christian world.

The political unity of the Roman empire contributed both by its advantages and defects to prepare the mind for belief in the spiritual unity of humanity proclaimed by Christianity. The Gospel of Christ, with its new views of God and of man and of their relationship to each other, proved to be the germ of a new world, vaster and more wonderful than that ruled by the Cæsars. It did not preserve the Roman empire from dissolution, or arrest the decay of Roman literature; it failed to inspire a strong patriotism or to produce a high civic virtue; it added not a single author worthy of mention to the number of Roman historians. But it leavened society, created the Church, and caused religion to be felt as one of the most powerful factors of history. It made men conscious, as they had never been before, that they were spiritual as well as political beings, and even more spiritual than political beings; that spiritual life was the most important form of life. Sustained by this consciousness

the Church grew stronger as the empire grew weaker, and remained, when the political unity of Rome was shattered, to represent and uphold religious unity, to remind separate and hostile nations that they were members of a common humanity and subject to the laws of a divine kingdom,-and, it must be added, strenuously to endeavour to make the kingdoms of the earth submissive to its own will and subservient to its own interests.

Christianity by creating the Church enormously enlarged and enriched history. It thereby opened up a central and exhaustless vein in the mine of human nature,-set in movement a main stream in the flow of human affairs. The rise of ecclesiastical history was more to historiography than was the discovery of America to geography. It added immensely to the contents of history, and radically changed men's conceptions of its nature. It at once caused political history to be seen to be only a part of history, and carried even into the popular mind the conviction-of which hardly a trace is to be found in the classic historians-that all history must move towards some general human end, some divine goal.

Ecclesiastical historiography was first cultivated in the Greek Church. The author of the Acts of the Apostles and Hegesippus led the way. Eusebius (264-340) gained the title of Father of Church History. His Ecclesiastical History' began with the incarnation of Christ, and ended with the triumph of the Church by the help and favour of Constantine. It recounted the successions of the apostles, the calamities of the Jews, the persecutions and martyrdoms of Christians, the services of eminent ecclesiastics, the heresies and controversies, and, in a word, the chief transactions and varying conditions of the Church during the first 324 years of its existence. The work was well conceived, judiciously planned, and laboriously executed. Although largely annalistic and often loosely constructed, it forms on the whole a unity. Its materials are of themselves sufficient to give it a priceless value. They are drawn almost entirely from Greek sources, and so the work conveys little information as to the Latin Churches. Eusebius was not a great writer, and to call him, as has often been done, "the Christian Herodotus," is more apt to suggest his inferiority than likeness

to the heathen one. He was as devoid of the incomparable art of the son of Lyxes, as of his simplicity and richness of nature. He lived in a time when life was artificial and diseased, and although he had many good qualities, intellectual and moral, he belonged too truly to his time. He was a courtier bishop, wanting in strength and reality of character, in singleness of heart, vision, and speech. He was honest, but not impartial. He loved religion better than truth, and conceived of religion in a worldly way. It is easy to explain and even to excuse his faults; it is a duty gratefully to acknowledge his services to the cause of Christian learning; but it is difficult to respect and impossible to admire him. The defects of his character have left deep traces in his historical works. It is unnecessary here to notice his 'Life of Constantine.' But his Chronicle,' based on a chronological labour of Julius Africanus, undoubtedly deserves mention. It consists of an epitome of universal history, followed by chronological tables which exhibit in parallel columns the successions of the rulers of different nations, accompanied with indications of the years of the more remarkable events. It was thus the expression of the conception of history implied in the claim of Christianity to be the end of all past ages of divine revelation, and of human search and desire. The position accorded by the Christian Church to the historical books of the Old Testament of necessity profoundly affected the mode of viewing history. It caused what had been deemed general history by the classical historians to be considered only a kind of partial or particularist history, and the history of the human race as a whole to be the only truly general history. The Christian historian or annalist felt bound to look back to the creation, to trace the special histories of the different nations as divisions of one comprehensive history, and, by the help of a chronology, derived chiefly from Biblical data, to determine how the special histories synchronised. In this there was manifest gain to historiography. The underlying thought was the great one that the history of man was a divinely ordered system, beginning with Adam, centring in Christ, and closing in a day of judgment. The result was an immediate and decisive transcendence of the particularism in the treatment of history characteristic of the classical authors.