Some time or other, I, that have leisure to read, may
introduce _you_, that have not, to two or three dozen of these
writers; of whom I can assure you beforehand that they are often
profound, and at intervals are even as impassioned as if they were come
of our best English blood. But now, confining our attention to M.
Michelet, we in England--who know him best by his worst book, the book
against priests, etc.--know him disadvantageously. That book is a
rhapsody of incoherence. But his "History of France" is quite another
thing. A man, in whatsoever craft he sails, cannot stretch away out of
sight when he is linked to the windings of the shore by towing-ropes of
History. Facts, and the consequences of facts, draw the writer back to
the falconer's lure from the giddiest heights of speculation. Here,
therefore--in his "France"--if not always free from flightiness, if now
and then off like a rocket for an airy wheel in the clouds, M.
Michelet, with natural politeness, never forgets that he has left a
large audience waiting for him on earth, and gazing upward in anxiety
for his return; return, therefore, he does. But History, though clear
of certain temptations in one direction, has separate dangers of its
own. It is impossible so to write a history of France, or of England--
works becoming every hour more indispensable to the inevitably
political man of this day--without perilous openings for error.
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