THE

NORTH BRITISH REVIEW.

NO. CI.

OCTOBER, 1869.

ART. I.-JUVENTUS MUNDI.*

much more serious sense than Gibbon was a man of affairs. He carries into literature the whole of his purely intellectual faculties. All the intellectual graces of his greatest speeches are reproduced in his Studies on Homer; there is the same power of making details interesting, of making subtlety clear, of making paradoxes all but self-evident. And all this splendid activity is entirely disinterested, in a way in which the works of professed scholars often are not. Mr. Gladstone loves Homer for his own sake: Mr. Grote loves Athens because she was a witness against the policy of the Holy Alliance. It is unfortunate, but perhaps it is inevitable, that intellectual sympathies so keen and so delicate should be somewhat exclusive, and, it must be added, capricious, in their object. A man who cared less for one department of scholarship, and who had done less for his favourite department, would have found it easier to accept at second

GIBBON thought it worth while to record his belief that his experience in the Hampshire militia was a qualification for narrating the campaigns of Roman armies, and to suggest that his political life as a silent member of Lord North's party qualified him to appreciate the spirit of Roman administration, and to unfold the intrigues of the city and the palace which determined the fate of the Empire. Compared with Tillemont, Gibbon was a man of action: compared with Tacitus, he was a man of letters. Tacitus had lived at the centre of public life: Gibbon had only set one foot within the circle. Tacitus has faults which Gibbon escapes, and merits which he does not reach; and both are due to his training as a great official. He despised the Jews as an administrator too much to read the Septuagint; and accordingly he disfigured the fifth book of his Histories with the malevolent and in-hand the results to which the general movecoherent fables of their neighbours. But only a statesman could have written his account of the fall of Galba, or of the collapse of the imposing power of Vitellius. Even writers so far inferior to Gibbon as Mr. Helps and Mr. Finlay show us that they have seen events close: their narrative is less impressive and less masterly, but it is easier to realize. Gibbon's generalizations are always firm and clear and accurate; but it is impossible to penetrate behind them to the facts. For the author had generalized from books, and not from life.

Mr. Gladstone is a man of letters in a

ment of scholarship tends; and the results which he himself reached would have been more readily admitted, and would have advanced knowledge more, when they were offered, not as a substitute, but as a supplement, to the investigations of other scholars.

There were at one time people who imagined that, in politics, Mr. Gladstone was destined to be the ornament of a lost cause: in literature, he is the ornament of a decaying school. He carries us back to the days when Keble discussed, in his delightful Prælectiones Academica, what Homer would have thought of the Whigs. In Juventus Mundi we do not find the same anxiety to condemn the author's enemies by the sentence of his favourite. Instead of bringing English statesmen to the bar of Homer, he