puppets of a few fools and knaves who held the reins of power? Have
they not held that, on the whole, the problems of human nature and
human history have been sufficiently solved by Gibbon and Voltaire,
Gil Blas and Figaro; that our forefathers were silly barbarians; that
this glorious nineteenth century is the one region of light, and that
all before was outer darkness, peopled by 'foreign devils,'
Englishmen, no doubt, according to the flesh, but in spirit, in
knowledge, in creed, in customs, so utterly different from ourselves
that we shall merely show our sentimentalism by doing aught but
laughing at them?

On what other principle have our English histories as yet been
constructed, even down to the children's books, which taught us in
childhood that the history of this country was nothing but a string
of foolish wars, carried on by wicked kings, for reasons hitherto
unexplained, save on that great historic law of Goldsmith's by which
Sir Archibald Alison would still explain the French Revolution -


'The dog, to serve his private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man?'


It will be answered by some, and perhaps rather angrily, that these
strictures are too sweeping; that there is arising, in a certain
quarter, a school of history books for young people of a far more
reverent tone, which tries to do full honour to the Church and her
work in the world. Those books of this school which we have seen, we
must reply, seem just as much wanting in real reverence for the past
as the school of Gibbon and Voltaire. It is not the past which they