CHAPTER XXVI

HISTORIES

It will take us a little while even to imagine how many important books there are in which famous historians have written of history and politics.

Why should so many books need to be written about history?

Because in this way we are able to trace the long, fascinating story of how mankind--men and women, your fathers and mothers, their fathers and mothers, and so on back for a thousand generations--has been gradually gaining in knowledge and growing, we trust, if even only a very little, more kind and more just.

But let us forget all this for a few minutes. It is a good time to look about our treasure house, and see, or reckon up, as it were, what we have found in it.

If we had to write a fairy tale about books, we could easily imagine that all the famous books in the world were kept in a great, very beautiful palace, and that books of different kinds were arranged in halls, galleries and great rooms which had been assigned to them.

There might very well be a special, beautiful, walled garden, belonging to the palace, for fairy tales, myths, fables and such books.

What a wonderful, great room, or rather series {180} of great rooms, must be kept for stories and novels!

And exquisite galleries, with vaulted roofs, and open courts, where fountains play,--the water falling with a pleasant sound into marble basins,--and with beautiful statues in the courts, we will choose for songs, ballads, and great poetry.

Famous books of history, political speeches, lives of great men, books of travel and discovery, may be arranged in a stately hall, with alcoves, stained glass windows, and marble busts of some of the great men that we read about.

Shall we imagine that we will pay a visit to a few of the alcoves in the great hall of history, and take down from the shelves, here one book, and here another, reading their names, and learning the names of those who wrote the books?

We do not learn very much about a book simply by taking it down from a shelf, and turning over a few of the pages; but we do learn something. Many of you will read a certain number of these books some day. All of us may know something about them. At least we all can remember that famous histories, as well as other books, have helped to make this delightful, thrilling, difficult, very important world in which we live.

Now what books shall we take down from the shelves?

Suppose we begin with a book written by someone you know,--Sir Walter Raleigh.

When Sir Walter Raleigh came back from one of his sea expeditions, on which, after the fashion of the times in which he lived, he had been more or less of a buccaneer, he was put into prison in {181} the Tower of London on account of a political quarrel in which he was involved. Time spent in prison seems very long, especially for a man like Raleigh. So he began to write a _History of the World_. He never finished it, but he got as far on as B.C. 130. You can handle to-day one of the great books in which Raleigh's _History of the World_ is printed; but very few people ever read it.

But at the end of what Raleigh wrote of the _History of the World_, he penned a noble sentence which people have never forgotten. Here it is:

"O eloquent, just, and mightie Death! whom none could advise, thou hast perswaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised. Thou hast drawne together all the farre stretched greatnesse, all the pride, crueltie, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, _Hic jacet_!"

We know that there is, or perhaps we should say that there used to be, a sharp division between ancient and modern history. One of the first writers to connect modern with ancient history was an Englishman whose name was Edward Gibbon. He wrote a book called _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. Do any of you happen to remember that in Dickens' novel, _Our Mutual Friend_, Mr. Boffin paid Silas Wegg to read aloud to him so that he might become a little better educated? Mr. Boffin had chosen Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ for Silas Wegg to read to him. It is a {182} remarkable book, and it made a great impression on the scholarship of the world. Gibbon himself was a clever, but somewhat odd man. He chose to live and write a good part of his time, not in his own country, but in Switzerland. Gibbon is an international author. Not only the people of his own country, but those of other countries as well, read his great work. He lived in the eighteenth century, and he belonged to Dr. Johnson's club. We are going to hear something of Dr. Samuel Johnson in another chapter. Certainly, we should take down Gibbon's history from the shelves, and look at it. Some of you probably will read it later with interest and pleasure.

Lord Macaulay, who wrote _The Lays of Ancient Rome_, was an able historian. He lived from 1800 to 1859. Gibbon had died six years before Macaulay was born. Macaulay was a graduate of Cambridge, a lawyer and a writer. He was a member of Parliament, and lived for several years in India, where he gave splendid governmental service. His _History of England_ is a famous book. When it was first published it was read with as much eagerness as if it had been a thrilling novel. It still charms a multitude of readers. Take down the first volume of his _History of England_ from the shelf, and read in the first chapter two paragraphs that speak of Cromwell and of the gallant bearing of Charles the First at his execution. Perhaps you may remember reading a story by Dumas which tells of the same event. Anyone who cares for history will find delight in Macaulay's famous book.

Here is Napier's _History of the War in the {183} Peninsula_, in which you may read of the campaigns of Wellington. If you will look at his preface you will find noble praise of Wellington's army. Here are John Richard Green's _Short History of the English People_, and Miss Agnes Strickland's _Queens of England_. Here are histories by Carlyle, and by Lecky, who was an Irishman, and many others, and here is John Lothrop Motley's _Rise of the Dutch Republic_. Motley was an American, who, like many other historians, chose a favourite hero of whom to write. His hero was William the Silent. The last sentence of Motley's history reads: "As long as he lived he was the guiding-star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets."

One of the first writers who made plain to the world the entrancing history of New France, which, as you know, is an earlier name for Canada, was the historian Francis Parkman. Parkman was born in Boston near the end of the eighteenth century. He devoted himself to historical research, and wrote a long series of books, many of the names of which are familiar to you.

Some of the titles of these volumes written by Parkman are _Pioneers of France in the New World_, _The Jesuits in North America_, _The Discovery of the Great West_, _The Old Régime in Canada_, _Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV_, and _The Conspiracy of Pontiac_.

Parkman begins _The Conspiracy of Pontiac_, which he completed in 1851, with the paragraph quoted below. It is interesting to note the great changes which have come about on this continent {184} since Parkman wrote this history, nearly eighty years ago.

"The Indian is a true child of the forest and the desert. The wastes and solitudes of nature are his congenial home. His haughty mind is imbued with the spirit of the wilderness, and the light of civilization falls on him with a blighting power. His unruly pride and untamed freedom are in harmony with the lonely mountains, cataracts and rivers among which he dwells; and primitive America, with her savage scenery and savage men, opens to the imagination a boundless world, unmatched in wild sublimity."

Biography sometimes is closely related to history. When the life of a famous public man is written in such a way as to tell the story of how his actions have changed the history of his country, biography and history seem practically identical. The story of Queen Elizabeth is, one may say, the story, or history, of England during her reign. The same statement is partly true of the biography of Queen Victoria. It is true also of the life of any great public man in any country. Books of biography are widely read in this twentieth century. Most of the people you know read biographies.

If we find the alcove in which are kept the newest books in the hall of history, we will discover on the shelves such volumes as Sir Sidney Lee's _Life of King Edward VII_, Mr. Lytton Strachey's _Queen Victoria_, his _Elisabeth and Essex_, and Mr. Philip Guedalla's _Life of Palmerston_. These are all clearly written, easy to read, condensed rather than long drawn out, based on sound historical {185} research and so fascinating that thousands of people begin to read them as soon as they are published.

Here is a little book of history called _Gallipoli_, which was published in 1916. It was written by a poet, John Masefield, and it tells the story of the Australians when they fought on the Gallipoli Peninsula in the Great War. There are many notable histories of different campaigns in the War, but none surely will last longer than this small, noble book.

Now we know the names of a few histories by historians of English-speaking countries. There are many other histories written by Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, and others.

Before we leave books of history, shall we look at a history of English literature, so that we may mark down for ourselves the names of the periods, or times, when some of the great writers lived?

There was an Anglo-Saxon period before William the Conqueror came to England. Poets and writers lived then, but only learned scholars read now the works they composed. You are likely to read at some time of Beowulf, who is supposed to have written about 520, and of Cædmon, who is said to have been a servant at the monastery of Whitby under the Abbess Hilda.

The first great English poet, who was the master of a period of English poetry, was Chaucer. His work brings us to the fourteenth century. He had a number of less famous contemporaries.

Many of the old ballads were made probably in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

{186} Sir Thomas Malory wrote his book _Morte d'Arthur_ in the fifteenth century.

The first book was printed in England by Caxton in 1477.

The Elizabethan Age, as you know, is one of the most famous periods in English literature. It is generally divided into an earlier and a later period. Spenser belonged to the earlier time; and Shakespeare marked the later period, along with other notable writers. The Elizabethan age is reckoned to have lasted longer than Elizabeth's reign, because writers still wrote in the same fashion and spirit. The authorized translation of the Bible into English was written at this time.

In the time of the Commonwealth and later, when England was largely puritan, the great poet Milton lived, and John Bunyan, who wrote _The Pilgrim's Progress_.

Dryden, a poet, belongs to the second part of the seventeenth century. Pope, another poet, lived most of his life in the eighteenth century. A number of novelists, Defoe, who wrote _Robinson Crusoe_, of an earlier date than the others, and Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, all great novelists, come in the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries.

A group of distinguished men, some of whom we will learn a little about in the next chapter, lived in the eighteenth century. Their names are Johnson; Goldsmith; Burke, the statesman; Gibbon, the historian; Garrick, an actor; and Reynolds, the painter. Swift, Addison, Steele, and other essayists, wrote earlier in the same century.

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You do not need to remember specially the various ages in which writers lived. But we understand now that people often speak of periods in English literature; it is interesting to fit into their proper places great writers whose names we know.

Scott and Jane Austen belong to the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Dickens, Thackeray, and many others, lived and wrote in the nineteenth century, and are great Victorians. Hardy is partly Victorian and partly Georgian. Kipling and Barrie belong to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. We live now in the first half of the twentieth century.

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