It is a deeply interesting study to investigate all the evils
that were the result. Nations, like individuals, cannot become
desperate gamblers with impunity. Punishment is sure to overtake them
sooner or later. A celebrated writer [Smollett.] is quite wrong, when
he says, "that such an era as this is the most unfavourable for a
historian; that no reader of sentiment and imagination can be
entertained or interested by a detail of transactions such as these,
which admit of no warmth, no colouring, no embellishment; a detail of
which only serves to exhibit an inanimate picture of tasteless vice
and mean degeneracy." On the contrary, and Smollett might have
discovered it, if he had been in the humour--the subject is capable of
inspiring as much interest as even a novelist can desire. Is there no
warmth in the despair of a plundered people?--no life and animation
in the picture which might be drawn of the woes of hundreds of
impoverished and ruined families? of the wealthy of yesterday become
the beggars of to-day? of the powerful and influential changed into
exiles and outcasts, and the voice of self-reproach and imprecation
resounding from every corner of the land? Is it a dull or
uninstructive picture to see a whole people shaking suddenly off the
trammels of reason, and running wild after a golden vision, refusing
obstinately to believe that it is not real, till, like a deluded hind
running after an ignis fatuus, they are plunged into a quagmire? But
in this false spirit has history too often been written. The intrigues
of unworthy courtiers to gain the favour of still more unworthy kings;
or the records of murderous battles and sieges have been dilated on,
and told over and over again, with all the eloquence of style and all
the charms of fancy; while the circumstances which have most deeply
affected the morals and welfare of the people, have been passed over
with but slight notice as dry and dull, and capable of neither warmth
nor colouring.