Michelet’s History of France

Michelet’s History of France down to Francis I., although it is a collection of brilliant pensies, caractHes, and aperqus rather than a continuous history, is a fine and stirring work of special value to the English reader. It is now sixty years old; but a century will not destroy its living inspiration. Hallam, the very antithesis of Michelet, one who was never once betrayed into an epigram or fired into poetry, has acknowledged in fit language the beauty and vigour of his French competitor.

There are magnificent chapters on the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries; and his picture of physical France, his story of Charles the Great, of Louis the Fat, Philip Augustus, St. Louis, Philip the Fair, of the Crusades, the Albigenses, the Communes, his chapters on Gothic architecture, on the English wars, and especially on Jeanne Dare, are unsurpassed in the pages of modern historical literature. Michelet has some of the moral passion and insight into character of Tacitus, no little of the picturesque colour of Carlyle, and more than the patriotic glow of Livy. Alas! had he only something of the patient reserve of Thucydides, the simplicity and precision of Caesar, the learning and harmonious completeness of Gibbon! He is a poet, a moralist, a preacher, rather than a historian in the modern sense of the word. Yet with all his shortcomings (and his later work has but flashes of his old force), Michelet’s picture of mediaeval France will long remain an indispensable book private turkey tours.

Dean Milman’s Latin Christianity

Dean Milman’s Latin Christianity, which appeared forty years ago, just misses, it may be, being one of ‘ the great books of history ’ —but will long hold its own as an almost necessary complement to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. It was avowedly designed as its counterpart, its rival, and in one sense its antidote. And we cannot deny that this aim has been, to a great extent, attained. It covers almost exactly the same epoch; it tells the same story; its chief characters are the same as in the work of Gibbon. But they are all viewed from another point of view and are judged by a different standard.

Although the period is the same, the personages the same, and even the incidents are usually common to both histories, the subject is different, and the plot of the drama is abruptly contrasted. Gibbon recounts the dissolution of a vast system: Milman recounts the development of another vast system: first the victim, then the rival, and ultimately the successor of the first. Gibbon tells us of the decline and fall of the Roman empire: Milman narrates the rise and constitution of the Catholic Church — the religious and ecclesiastical, the moral and intellectual movements which sprang into full maturity as the political empire of Rome passed through its long transformation of a thousand years.

The scheme and ground-plan of Milman are almost perfect. Had he the prodigious learning, the superhuman accuracy of. Gibbon, that infallible good sense, that perennial humour, that sense of artistic proportion, the Dean might have rivalled the portly ex-captain of yeomanry, the erudite recluse in his Swiss retreat. He may not be quite strong enough for his giant’s task. But no one else has even essayed to bend the bow which the Ulysses of Lausanne hung up on one memorable night in June 1787 in his garden study; none has attempted to recount the marvellous tale of the consolidation of the Christianity of Rome over the whole face of Western Europe during a clear period of a thousand years.