vast amount of positive information quite as authentic and valuable and curious as that which makes up the matter of professed history, but which the mere historian does not and cannot furnish. They would thus be not substitutes for history, but supplements to it. Let us dwell upon this consideration for a moment. It is wonderful, when you think closely on it, how little of all which we should love to know and ought to know about a former period and generation a really standard history tells us. From the very nature of that kind of composition it must be so. Its appropriate and exclusive topics are a few prominent, engrossing, and showy incidents, wars, conquests, revolutions, changes of dynasties, battles, and sieges,― the exterior and palpable manifestations of the workings of the stormy and occasional passions of men moving in large masses on the high places of the world. These topics it treats instructively and eloquently. But what an inadequate conception does such a book give you of the time, the country, and the people to which it relates! What a meagre, cold, and unengaging outline does it trace, and how utterly deficient in minute, precise, and circumstantial and satisfactory information! How little does it tell you of the condition and character of the great body of the people,their occupations, their arts and customs, their joys and sorrows! how little of the origin, state, and progress of opinions and of the spirit of the age! How misty, indistinct, and tantalizing are the glimpses you gain of that old, fair, wonderful creation which you long to explore! It is like a vast landscape painting in which nothing is represented but the cloven summit and grand sweep of the mountain, a portion of the sounding shore of the illimitable sea, the dim, distant course of a valley, traversed by the father of rivers two thousand miles in length, and which has no place for the enclosed corn-field, the flocks upon a thousand hills, the cheerful country-seat, the village spires, the churchyard, the vintage, the harvest-home, the dances of peasants, and the "cotter's Saturday night."

Now the use, one use, of such romances as Scott's is to supply these deficiencies of history. Their leading object, perhaps, may be to tell an interesting story with some embellishments of poetry and eloquence and fine writing and mighty dialogue. But the plan on which they are composed requires that they should interweave into their main design a

near, distinct, and accurate, but magnified and ornamental view of the times, people, and country to which that story goes back. They are, as it were, telescope, microscope and kaleidoscope all in one, if the laws of optics permit such an illustration. They give you the natural scenery of that country in a succession of landscapes fresh and splendid as any in the whole compass of literature, yet as topographically accurate as you will find in any geography or book of travels. They cause a crowded but exact and express image of the age and society of which they treat to pass before you as you see Moscow or Jerusalem or Mexico in a showman's box. They introduce genuine specimens,- real living men and women of every class and calling in society, as it was then constituted, and make them talk and act in character. You see their dress, their armor, and their weapons of war. You sit at their tables, you sleep under their roof-tree, you fish, hunt, and fowl with them. You follow them to their employments in field, forest, and workshop, you travel their roads, cross their rivers, worship with them at church, pledge them at the feast, and hear their war-cry in battle, and the coronach which announces and laments their fall. Time and space are thus annihilated by the power of genius. Instead of reading about a past age, you live in it. Instead of looking through

a glass darkly at vast bodies in the distance,— at the separate, solitary glories of a sky beyond your reach,— wings as of the morning are given you: you ascend to that sky, and gaze on their unveiled present glories. It is as if you were placed in the streets of a city buried eighteen hundred years ago by the lava of a volcano, and saw it suddenly and completely disinterred, and its whole, various population raised in a moment to life in the same attitudes, clothed upon with the same bodies, wearing the same dresses, engaged in the same occupations, and warmed by the same passions, in which they perished! If would carry me too far to illustrate these thoughts by minute references to all Scott's poetry and romances, or to attempt to assort the particulars and sum up the aggregate of the real historical information for which we are indebted to that poetry and those romances. Go back, however, at random, to the age of Richard of the Lion Heart, the close of the twelfth century, the era of chivalry, the Crusades, and almost of Magna Charta. Read of it first in the acute and elegant Hume and the laborious Lingard; and then

open the splendid romance of "Ivanhoe," and see not which most interests you, but which relates most vividly, most minutely, and most completely, the authentic history of the England of that troubled yet glorious day. The character and peculiarities of the chivalrous Richard; his physical strength; his old English good-nature and companionable and convivial qualities and practices; his romantic love of adventure and peril and of the rapture of battle (certaminis gaudia), relieved and softened by his taste for troubadour music and song; the cold, jealous, timid temper of his brother John, at once an ambitious usurper and an unprincipled voluptuary; the intriguing politics of his court; his agency in procuring Richard's long imprisonment in Germany, and his sudden start of terror on hearing of his escape and return to England to claim his throne; the separation of the English people of that era into two great distinct and strongly marked races, the Saxon and the Norman; the characteristic traits and employments of each ; the relations they sustained to each other; their mutual fear, hatred, and suspicion; the merry lives of Robin Hood and his archers in the forest; the pride and licentiousness of the bold Norman barons, and the barbaric magnificence of their castles, equipage, and personal decoration; the contrasted poverty and dignified sorrow of the fallen Saxon chiefs; the institutions and rites of a still gorgeous but waning chivalry; the skilful organization, subtle policy, and imposing exterior of the order of the Templars; the pride, pomp, and circumstance of the gilded and sounding era of the Crusades, these topics, this information, not the well-feigned fortunes of Isaac, Rebecca, Athelstane, Wilfred, give to the surpassing poetry and painting of this unequalled romance a permanent and recognized historical value, and entitle it to a place upon the same shelf with the more exclusive and pretending teachers of English history.

Let me remind you that Scott is not the only writer of romance who has made his fiction the vehicle of authentic and useful information concerning the past, and thus earned the praise of a great historian. Let me remind you of another instance, the most splendid in literature. The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, what are they but great Waverley Novels? And yet what were our knowledge of the first four hundred years of Grecian history without them? Herodotus, the father of history, devotes about twenty-five duodecimo

lines to the subject of the Trojan Wanderer; and, without meaning any disrespect to so revered a name, so truly valuable a writer, I must say that this part of his narrative is just about as interesting and instructive as an account in a Castine newspaper that in a late, dark night a schooner from Eastport got upon Mt. Desert Rock, partly bilged, but that no lives were lost, and there was no insurance. Unroll, now, by the side of this the magnificent cartoons on which Homer has painted the heroic age of the bright clime of battle and of song! Abstracting your attention for a moment from the beauty and grandeur and consummate art of these compositions, just study them for the information they embody. We all know that critics have deduced the rules of epic poetry from these inspired models, and Horace tells us that they are better teachers of morality than the Stoic doctors, Chrysippus and Crates. But what else may you learn from them? The ancient geography of Greece; the number, names, localities, and real or legendary history of its tribes; the condition of its arts, trades, agriculture, navigation, and civil policy; its military and maritime resources; its manners and customs; its religious opinions and observances and mythology and festivals, this is the information for which we are indebted to an old, wandering, blind harper, just such another as he who sang the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" to the ladies of Newark Castle....

It is time now to turn to our early history, and consider more directly in what way and to what extent our Iliad and Odyssey, and "Ivanhoe" and “ Kenilworth," when they come to be written, will help to illustrate and to complete and to give attraction to that history. Select, then, for this purpose, almost at random, any memorable event or strongly marked period in our annals. King Philip's War is as good an illustration as at this moment occurs to me. What do our historians tell us of that war? and of New England during that war? You will answer substantially this: It was a war excited by Philipa bold, crafty, and perfidious Indian chief dwelling at Bristol in Rhode Island-for the purpose of extirpating or expelling the English colonists of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven. It began in 1675 by an attack on the people of Swanzey, as they were returning on Sunday from meeting. It ended in August, 1676, at Mount Hope, by the death of Philip and the annihilation of his tribe. In the course of these two years he had succeeded in drawing into

his designs perhaps fifteen or twenty communities of Indians, and had at one time and another perhaps eight or ten thousand men in arms.

The scenes of the war shifted successively from Narragansett Bay to the northern line of Massachusetts in the valley of the Connecticut River. But there was safety nowhere. There was scarcely a family of which a husband, a son, a brother, had not fallen. The land was filled with mourning. Six hundred dwelling-houses were burned with fire. Six hundred armed young men and middle-aged fell in battle, as many others, including women and children, were carried away into that captivity so full of horrors to a New England imagination. The culture of the earth was interrupted. The prayers, labors, and sufferings of half a century were nearly forever frustrated.

Such is about the whole of what history records, or, rather, of what the great body of our well-educated readers know of the New England of 1675, and of the severest and most interesting crisis through which, in any epoch, the colony was called to pass. Now, I say, commit this. subject, King Philip's War, to Walter Scott, the poet, or the novelist, and you would see it wrought up and expanded into a series of pictures of the New England of that era, so full, so vivid, so true, so instructive, so moving, that they would grave themselves upon the memory and dwell in the hearts of our whole people forever. How he would do this, precisely what kinds of novels and poems he would write, . . . it would be presumptuous in me to venture fully to explain. Some imperfect and modest conjectures upon this point, however, I hope you will excuse.

In the first place, he would collect and display a great many particulars of positive information concerning these old times, either not contained at all in our popular histories or not in a form to fix the attention of the general reader. He would spread out before you the external aspects and scenery of that New England, and contrast them with those which our eyes are permitted to see, but which our fathers died without beholding. And what a contrast! The grand natural outline and features of the country were indeed the same then as now, and are so yesterday, to-day, and always. The same waves dashed high upon the same "stern and rock-bound coast"; the same rivers poured their sweet and cheerful tides into the same broad bay; the same ascending succession of geological formations the narrow sandy belt of seashore and marsh and