northwestern States, so unlike, as to belong to two different species. If, now, in the one, half a dozen illustrious names in each of the sciences, in letters and in arts, who may be imported, and not true representatives of the national mind, reflect honor on their age; and the highest class of society roll through the land in luxurious coaches, on well-made roads, while nearly all the rest of the inhabitants are chained to the soil; is its civilization, of course, superior to that of the other, where every one can read God's word, is free to go where he will, is ready to defend his rights, and fulfills his obligations, and yet where no great genius, artist, or scholar has hitherto appeared, and everything, in manners and style, is plain and homespun? We think that no one will affirm this. There may, then, be a civilization which is deficient in extent, as there may be one which is deficient in intensity, or which is one-sided. Viewing France now in and about the age of Louis XIV, which attracts the eye of the historian, and excites the pride of the Frenchman by its splendor, we must say that it wanted extent of civilization, because a great mass of the nation was wholly uneducated, and but little affected by the polish of the Parisian court; and thoroughness of civilization, because a large portion of those who stood at the head of socie ty were utterly frivolous, voluptuous, destitute of truly honorable and religious sentiments, and without manly freedom. There can be no great reach of civilization where knowledge and freedom are checked, where religion is a form, and men live in luxurious egotism for the present. The influence of such an age on the next, if nothing else, shows the emptiness and hollowness of its splendor.

We pass on to Mr. Guizot's method. He must have felt that the field was so broad, that a course of fourteen lectures could not give a survey of the whole. Hence he throws out of consideration those influences which tend directly to improve the individual, and confines himself to the social progress of Europe. Indeed, not even all of this department itself is fully considered. Thus nothing is said of those effects of art, or of united effort upon the external world, by which human intercourse or comfort is advanced. The scope of the work, then,

is political; it looks simply at political forces, including religion, in its external form of an organized church. It is these in their conflict and modifications, and the changes wrought by them in the outward form of society, with which the author deals almost exclusively. It is true, indeed, that in treating of the Reformation, and of the English Revolution, a new power from the other department of civilization, the human mind, demanding its own freedom, a deus ex machina, is brought in; but the method forbids the tracking of this formidable power with any degree of accuracy, and we hardly get a glimpse of it, until it is mature enough to work great revolutions in the world.

No doubt Mr. Guizot has selected for himself a most important part of the great subject of European progress, and has spoken of it wisely and well. No doubt, also, he could have treated the other chapters of civilization with equal ability, as he has shown that he could elsewhere. But the partial view acts unfortunately, sometimes, both upon the reader and the author. To the reader it conveys the impression, sometimes, as if the whole story was told, as if civilization were merely external, or principally the fruit of social causes, as if the great religious and intellectual influences which have been at work in European Christendom, have been of minor consideration; whereas, in reality, the social and political forces have as much retarded as favored the improvement of man and of society. And the author himself, having by his method placed these latter considerations out of sight, seems sometimes to undervalue them; he seems to put too great faith in outward powers, and too little in inward. Had both fallen within his range together, he could have set forth, in his admirable way, their interaction and mutual dependence; nor would he have fallen under the suspicion which one is tempted now and then to harbor, that he is unable to give due weight to the highest of the moral powers,-the Christian religion.

The second lecture, one of the most valuable in the course, begins with a contrast of ancient and modern society. Ancient, in each country or city-state, fell under the sway of one predominant, somewhat exclusive, or even tyrannical idea: in

modern society, elements the most various and conflicting have jostled together, and the result is that no one principle or force has taken possession of society, that civilization has grown up, slowly, indeed, amid the wars of social elements, but without exclusiveness, in all variety and freedom.

All this seems to be admirably well put. And yet we cannot forbear suggesting whether the author is not drawing a comparison between a finished state of society among the ancients, and one still in the process of becoming among the moderns. The Roman State, according to an opinion which has had many advocates, was by no means homogeneous at first, being composed of Latin, Sabine, and Etruscan elements; and afterwards it took its shape amid the long and violent conflicts, first of the patricians with the plebeians, and then of the optimates with the people, so that its history is filled with the strife of opposing principles down to the time of the Emperors. If a philosopher, before the end of the Republic, had sketched its character, would he not have insisted on the quarrel of political elements? Who knows but that a social philosopher, two or five hundred years hence, if the present state of things should last so long, may see uniformity stamped on all Christian societies, the same principles relating to government in State and Church, the same arts and sciences equally diffused? We hope, indeed, that it may not be so, but that the parts of the world will develop everything good, in individual, unchecked freedom, having "differences of administrations but the same Lord." We should be sorry even to have all nations equally democratic, and all Congregationalists. But the tendency to simplicity and to equality; to the paring off of one mediaeval excrescence after another; the reduction, as Mr. Guizot himself says, of all the social forces to the government and the people; the equable and quick diffusion of all improvements everywhere;—the whole movement, in short, of modern society in this one direction of a uniform civilization, makes us ask when all these lines will stop converging, and whether the French proverb, "tout le monde est un pays," will not be fulfilled in a

new sense.

The sources of modern society are traced back by Mr. Guizot

to Rome, the Christian Church and the Germans. From Rome, described as a municipality, which, in the progress of its enlargement, had outgrown its form and spirit, are derived the system of municipal corporations, the principle of liberty, and a common civil legislation, together with the idea of absolute power, the principle of order and servitude.*

Here, it would seem, three influences, rather than two, are represented as emanating from Rome, its municipal system, the civil law, and the imperial despotism. For, although the Roman law was matured under the empire, and some of its tendencies are despotical, it deserves a place by itself, as being separate from the empire at its origin, and unlike it in its kind. We think it would have been well if Mr. Guizot had pointed out more distinctly the immensely important part which Roman law has had in molding modern civilization. Driven into the background at first, it appears in canon law, in the compends prepared for their Roman subjects by the earlier. Germanic sovereigns, in the codes of Ostrogothic Italy and of Visigothic Spain, and under the meagre forms of voluntary jurisdiction; but when the time for its revival came, when the Lombard towns felt the need of some kind of law better adapted than the feudal for the intercourse of society, it created for itself the earliest of the modern universities; it spread its principles from that center over most of Europe; in the hands of suzerains and of their judges, it restricted, and finally broke down feudal law, and has been the source of most modern law, the aid of centralization, perhaps the prop of absolutism.

As for the idea of absolute power, "of sacred majesty, of the power of the emperor," we wish that our author had ex

* Here there is a gross mistranslation in Hazlitt's version, (p. 48, Amer. ed.) "The two elements," Mr. Guizot is made to say, were first the system of municipal corporations a general civil legislation, common to all;

secondly the idea of absolute power," etc. But it should be, “secondly, a general civil legislation common to all, the idea of absolute power," etc. As if the municipia and not the empire were the source of the common legislation.

The two last clauses are omitted by Hazlitt, although defining what the author means.

plained himself more fully. We conceive him to have united together several distinct things; the sway over the imagination of the sublime immensity of the empire; the historical traditions, kept alive, especially by the church and by Roman literature, of a common government under one head and source of law, the perfect contrast to the states of barbarism and of feudality which came after it; and the long practice of absolute power, destroying even the recollections of liberty. The sway which this grand unit exercised over the mind is seen in words and facts. Even Persia called Alexander the Great the king of Roum, thus displacing the tradition of its Greek conquerors by the tradition of a mightier power; and so also the conquered nations of Europe called themselves Romans, their broken down languages the Roman, or Romanic, and their books of stories written in them "Romanceros," or romances. The same cause led such a fantastic enthusiast as Rienzi to his absurd attempt to make the institutions of the Papal city over again after the ancient type. The influence of the historical traditions of Rome is manifest in all the attempts to imitate or to revive the empire. The first line of Frank kings must borrow its institutions and offices. Charlemagne, in concert with the Pope, must revive the empire itself; and the attempt at such a union of Europe is seen through the history of Germany and Italy from Otho the Great to Charles V. Even Napoleon had the same idea floating in his mind. If the idea was never realized after Charlemagne, so as to include more than one or two countries, and if the absolute power strained after by these modern emperors received constant checks from the existing disintegration of society, still the day dream was a universal absolute empire, bringing Rome back in the fulness of its strength, only not interfering with the Papacy. There were two great lights-so Catholic Rome constantly taught-the sun, which is the Pope, and the moon, which is the Emperor.

The other element of Roman civilization, and that to which Mr. Guizot evidently attaches the most importance, is "the municipal regime, its customs, its rules, its examples, as a principle of liberty." Here the inquiry will naturally be started,