INAUGURAL LECTURE.

IT has been often remarked, that when a stranger enters St. Peter's for the first time, the immediate impression is one of disappointment; the building looks smaller than he expected to find it. So it is with the first sight of mountains; their summits never seem so near the clouds as we had hoped to see them. But a closer acquaintance with these, and with other grand or beautiful objects, convinces us that our first impression arose not from the want of greatness in what we saw, but from a want of comprehensiveness in ourselves to grasp it. What we saw was not all that existed; but all that our untaught glance could master. As we know it better, it remains the same, but we rise more nearly to its level: our greater admiration is but the proof that we are become able to appreciate it more truly. (1)

Something of this sort takes place, I think, in our uninstructed impressions of history. We are not inclined to rate very highly the qualifications required either in the student or in the writer of it. It seems to demand little more than memory in the one, and honesty and diligence in the other. It is, we say, only a record of facts; and such a work seems to offer no field for the imagination, or for the judgment, or for our powers of reasoning. History is but time's follower; she does not pretend to discover, but merely to register what time has brought to light already. Eminent men have been known to hold this language; Johnson, whose fondness for biography might have taught him to judge more truly, enter

tained little respect for history. We cannot comprehend what we have never studied, and history must be content to share in the common portion of every thing great and good; it must be undervalued by a hasty observer.

If I were to attempt to institute a comparison between the excellencies of history and those of other studies, I should be falling into the very fault which I have been just noticing; I might be doing injustice to other branches of knowledge, only because I had no sufficient acquaintance with them. But I may be allowed to claim for history, not any particular rank, whether high or low, as compared with other studies, but simply that credit should be given it for containing more than a superficial view of it can appreciate; for having treasures, neither lying on the surface nor immediately below the surface, treasures not to be obtained without much labor, yet rewarding the hardest labor amply.

To these treasures it is my business to endeavor to point out the way. A Professor of history, if I understand his duties rightly, has two principal objects; he must try to acquaint his hearers with the nature and value of the treasure for which they are searching; and, secondly, he must try to show them the best and speediest method of discovering and extracting it. The first of these two things may be done once for all; but the second must be his habitual employment, the business of his professorial life. I am now, therefore, not to attempt to enter upon the second, but to bestow my attention upon the first: I must try to state what is the treasure to be found by a search into the records of history; if we cannot be satisfied that it is abundant and most valuable, we shall care little to be instructed how to gain it.

In speaking of history generally, I may appear to be forgetting that my proper subject is more limited; that it is not history simply, but modern history. I am perfectly aware of this, and hope not to forget it in my practice: but still at

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the outset I must trace the stream from its source; I must ask you to remain with me awhile on the high ground, where the waters, which are hereafter to form the separate streams of ancient and modern history, lie as yet undistinguished in their common parent lake. I must speak of history in general, in order to understand the better the character of any one of its particular species.

The general idea of history seems to be, that it is the biography of a society. It does not appear to me to be history at all, but simply biography, unless it finds in the persons who are its subject something of a common purpose, the accomplishment of which is the object of their common life. History is to this common life of many, what biography is to the life of an individual. Take, for instance, any common family, and its members are soon so scattered from one another, and are engaged in such different pursuits, that although it is possible to write the biography of each individual, yet there can be no such thing, properly speaking, as the history of the family. But suppose all the members to be thrown together in one place, amidst strangers or savages, and there immediately becomes a common life,-a unity of action,-interest, and purpose, distinct from others around them, which renders them at once a fit subject of history. Perhaps I ought not to press the word "purpose;" because purpose implies consciousness in the purposer, and a society may exist without being fully conscious of its own business as a society. But whether consciously or not, every society -so much is implied in the very word-must have in it something of community; and so far as the members of it are members, so far as they are each incomplete parts, but taken together form a whole, so far, it appears to me, their joint life is the proper subject of history.

Accordingly we find the term history often applied to small

and subordinate societies. We speak of the history of lite rary or scientific societies; we have histories of commercial bodies; histories of religious orders; histories of universities. In all these cases, history has to do with that which the several members of each of these societies have in common; it is, as I said, the biography of their common life. And it seems to me that it could not perform its office, if it had no distinct notion in what this common life consisted.

But if the life of every society belongs to history, much more does the life of that highest and sovereign society which we call a state or a nation. And this in fact is considered the proper subject of history; insomuch that if we speak of it simply, without any qualifying epithet, we understand by it, not the biography of any subordinate society, but of some one or more of the great national societies of the human race, whatever political form their bond of connection may assume. And thus we get a somewhat stricter definition of history properly so called; we may describe it not simply as the biography of a society, but as the biography of a political society or commonwealth.

Now in a commonwealth or state, that common, life which I have ventured to call the proper subject of history, finds its natural expression in those who are invested with the state's government. Here we have the varied elements which exist in the body of a nation, reduced as it were to an intelligible unity: the state appears to have a personal existence in its government. And where that government is lodged in the hands of a single individual, then biography and history seem to melt into one another, inasmuch as one and the same person combines in himself his life as an individual, and the common life of his nation.

That common life, then, which we could not find represented by any private members of the state, is brought to a head, as it were, and exhibited intelligibly and visibly in the