Volume 6 — HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE

(1821-1862)

enry Thomas Buckle was born at Lee, in Kent, on November 24th, 1821, the son of a wealthy London merchant. A delicate child, he participated in none of the ordinary sports of children, but sat instead for hours listening to his mother's reading of the Bible and the 'Arabian Nights.' She had a great influence on his early development. She was a Calvinist, deeply religious, and Buckle himself in after years acknowledged that to her he owed his faith in human progress through the dissemination and triumph of truth, as well as his taste for philosophic speculations and his love for poetry. His devotion to her was lifelong. Owing to his feeble health he passed but a few years at school, and did not enter college. Nor did he know much, in the scholar's sense, of books. Till he was nearly eighteen the 'Arabian Nights,' the 'Pilgrim's Progress' and Shakespeare constituted his chief reading.

But he was fond of games of mental skill, and curiously enough, first gained distinction, not in letters but at the chessboard, and in the course of his subsequent travels he challenged and defeated the champions of Europe. He was concerned for a short time in business; but being left with an independent income at the death of his father, he resolved to devote himself to study. He traveled for a year on the Continent, learning on the spot the languages of the countries he passed through. In time he became an accomplished linguist, reading nineteen languages and conversing fluently in seven.

By the time he was nineteen he had resolved to write a great historic work, of a nature not yet attempted by any one. To prepare himself for this monumental labor, and to make up for past deficiencies, he settled in London; and, apparently single-handed and without the advice or help of tutors or professional men, entered upon that course of voluminous reading on which his erudition rests.

He is a singular instance of a self-taught man, without scientific or academic training, producing a work that marks an epoch in historical literature. With a wonderful memory, he had, like Macaulay, the gift of getting the meaning and value of a book by simply glancing over the pages. On an average he could read with intelligent comprehension three books in a working day of eight hours, and in time mastered his library of twenty-two thousand volumes, indexing every book on the back, and transcribing many pages into his commonplace-books. In this way he spent fifteen years of study in collecting his materials.

The first volume of his introduction to the 'History of Civilization in England' appeared in 1857, and aroused an extraordinary interest because of the novelty and audacity of its statements. It was both bitterly attacked and enthusiastically praised, as it antagonized or attracted its readers. Buckle became the intellectual hero of the hour. The second volume appeared in May, 1861. And now, worn out by overwork, his delicate nerves completely unstrung by the death of his mother, who had remained his first and only love, he left England for the East, in company with the two young sons of a friend. In Palestine he was stricken with typhoid fever, and died at Damascus on May 29th, 1862. His grave is marked by a marble tomb with the inscription from the Arabic:--

"The written word remains long after the writer; The writer is resting under the earth, but his works endure."

Three volumes of 'Miscellanies and Posthumous Works,' edited by Helen Taylor, were published in 1872. Among these are a lecture on 'Woman,' delivered before the Royal Institution,--Buckle's single and very successful attempt at public speaking,--and a Review of Mill's 'Liberty,' one of the finest contemporary appreciations of that thinker. But he wrote little outside his 'History,' devoting himself with entire singleness of purpose to his life-work.

The introduction to the 'History of Civilization in England' has been aptly called the "fragment of a fragment." When as a mere youth he outlined his work, he overestimated the extremest accomplishment of a single mind, and did not clearly comprehend the vastness of the undertaking. He had planned a general history of civilization; but as the material increased on his hands he was forced to limit his project, and finally decided to confine his work to a consideration of England from the middle of the sixteenth century. In February, 1853, he wrote to a friend:--

"I have been long convinced that the progress of every people is regulated by principles--or as they are called, laws--as regular and as certain as those which govern the physical world. To discover these laws is the object of my work.... I propose to take a general survey of the moral, intellectual, and legislative peculiarities of the great countries of Europe; and I hope to point out the circumstances under which these peculiarities have arisen. This will lead to a perception of certain relations between the various stages through which each people have progressively passed. Of these general relations I intend to make a particular application; and by a careful analysis of the history of England, show how they have regulated our civilization, and how the successive and apparently the arbitrary forms of our opinions, our literature, our laws, and our manners, have naturally grown out of their antecedents."

This general scheme was adhered to in the published history, and he supported his views by a vast array of illustrations and proofs. The main ideas advanced in the Introduction--for he did not live to write the body of the work, the future volumes to which he often pathetically refers--these ideas may be thus stated:--First: Nothing had yet been done toward discovering the principles underlying the character and destiny of nations, to establish a basis for a science of history,--a task which Buckle proposed to himself. Second: Experience shows that nations are governed by laws as fixed and regular as the laws of the physical world. Third: Climate, soil, food, and the aspects of nature are the primary causes in forming the character of a nation. Fourth: The civilization within and without Europe is determined by the fact that in Europe man is stronger than nature, and here alone has subdued her to his service; whereas on the other continents nature is the stronger and man has been subdued by her. Fifth: The continually increasing influence of mental laws and the continually diminishing influence of physical laws characterize the advance of European civilization. Sixth: The mental laws regulating the progress of society can only be discovered by such a comprehensive survey of facts as will enable us to eliminate disturbances; namely, by the method of averages. Seventh: Human progress is due to intellectual activity, which continually changes and expands, rather than to moral agencies, which from the beginnings of society have been more or less stationary. Eighth: In human affairs in general, individual efforts are insignificant, and great men work for evil rather than for good, and are moreover merely incidental to their age. Ninth: Religion, literature, art, and government instead of being causes of civilization, are merely its products. Tenth: The progress of civilization varies directly as skepticism--the disposition to doubt, or the "protective spirit"--the disposition to maintain without examination established beliefs and practices, predominates.

The new scientific methods of Darwin and Mill were just then being eagerly discussed in England; and Buckle, an alert student and great admirer of Mill, in touch with the new movements of the day, proposed, "by applying to the history of man those methods of investigation which have been found successful in other branches of knowledge, and rejecting all preconceived notions which could not bear the test of those methods," to remove history from the condemnation of being a mere series of arbitrary facts, or a biography of famous men, or the small-beer chronicle of court gossip and intrigues, and to raise it to the level of an exact science, subject to mental laws as rigid and infallible as the laws of nature:--

"Instead of telling us of those things which alone have any value--instead of giving us information respecting the progress of knowledge and the way in which mankind has been affected by the diffusion of that knowledge ... the vast majority of historians fill their works with the most trifling and miserable details.... In other great branches of knowledge, observation has preceded discovery; first the facts have been registered and then their laws have been found. But in the study of the history of man, the important facts have been neglected and the unimportant ones preserved. The consequence is, that whoever now attempts to generalize historical phenomena must collect the facts as well as conduct the generalization."

Buckle's ideal of the office and acquirements of the historian was of the highest. He must indeed possess a synthesis of the whole range of human knowledge to explain the progress of man. By connecting history with political economy and statistics, he strove to make it exact. And he exemplified his theories by taking up branches of scientific investigation hitherto considered entirely outside the province of the historian. He first wrote history scientifically, pursuing the same methods and using the same kinds of proofs as the scientific worker. The first volume excited as much angry discussion as Darwin's 'Origin of Species' had done in its day. The boldness of its generalizations, its uncompromising and dogmatic tone, irritated more than one class of readers. The chapters on Spain and on Scotland, with their strictures on the religions of those countries, containing some of the most brilliant passages in the book, brought up in arms against him both Catholics and Presbyterians. Trained scientists blamed him for encroaching on their domains with an insufficient knowledge of the phenomena of the natural world, whence resulted a defective logic and vague generalizations.

It is true that Buckle was not trained in the methods of the schools; that he labored under the disadvantage of a self-taught, solitary worker, not receiving the friction of other vigorous minds; and that his reading, if extensive, was not always wisely chosen, and from its very amount often ill-digested. He had knowledge rather than true learning, and taking this knowledge at second hand, often relied on sources that proved either untrustworthy or antiquated, for he lacked the true relator's fine discrimination, that weighs and sifts authorities and rejects the inadequate. Malicious critics declared that all was grist that came to his mill. Yet his popularity with that class of readers whom he did not shock by his disquisitions on religions and morals, or make distrustful by his sweeping generalizations and scientific inaccuracies, is due to the fact that his book appeared at the right moment: for the time was really come to make history something more than a chronicle of detached facts and anecdotes. The scientific spirit was awake, and demanded that human action, like the processes of nature, be made the subject of general law. The mind of Buckle proved fruitful soil for those germs of thought floating in the air, and he gave them visible form in his history. If he was not a leader, he was a brilliant formulator of thought, and he was the first to put before the reading world, then ready to receive them, ideas and speculations till now belonging to the student. For he wrote with the determination to be intelligible to the general reader. It detracts nothing from the permanent value of his work thus to state its genesis, for this is merely to apply to it his own methods.

Moreover, a perpetual charm lies in his clear, limpid English, a medium perfectly adapted to calm exposition or to impassioned rhetoric. Whatever the defects of Buckle's system: whatever the inaccuracies that the advance of thirty years of patient scientific labors can easily point out; however sweeping his generalization; or however dogmatic his assertions, the book must be allowed high rank among the works that set men thinking, and must thus be conceded to possess enduring value.

MORAL VERSUS INTELLECTUAL PRINCIPLES IN HUMAN PROGRESS

From the 'History of Civilization in England'

There is unquestionably nothing to be found in the world which has undergone so little change as those great dogmas of which moral systems are composed. To do good to others; to sacrifice for their benefit your own wishes; to love your neighbor as yourself; to forgive your enemies; to restrain your passions; to honor your parents; to respect those who are set over you,--these and a few others are the sole essentials of morals: but they have been known for thousands of years, and not one jot or tittle has been added to them by all the sermons, homilies, and text-books which moralists and theologians have been able to produce. But if we contrast this stationary aspect of moral truths with the progressive aspect of intellectual truths, the difference is indeed startling. All the great moral systems which have exercised much influence have been fundamentally the same; all the great intellectual systems have been fundamentally different. In reference to our moral conduct, there is not a single principle now known to the most cultivated Europeans which was not likewise known to the ancients. In reference to the conduct of our intellect, the moderns have not only made the most important additions to every department of knowledge that the ancients ever attempted to study, but besides this they have upset and revolutionized the old methods of inquiry; they have consolidated into one great scheme all those resources of induction which Aristotle alone dimly perceived; and they have created sciences, the faintest idea of which never entered the mind of the boldest thinker antiquity produced.

These are, to every educated man, recognized and notorious facts; and the inference to be drawn from them is immediately obvious. Since civilization is the product of moral and intellectual agencies, and since that product is constantly changing, it evidently cannot be regulated by the stationary agent; because, when surrounding circumstances are unchanged, a stationary agent can only produce a stationary effect. The only other agent is the intellectual one; and that this is the real mover may be proved in two distinct ways: first because, being as we have already seen either moral or intellectual, and being as we have also seen not moral, it must be intellectual; and secondly, because the intellectual principle has an activity and a capacity for adaptation which, as I undertake to show, is quite sufficient to account for the extraordinary progress that during several centuries Europe has continued to make.

Such are the main arguments by which my view is supported; but there are also other and collateral circumstances which are well worthy of consideration. The first is, that the intellectual principle is not only far more progressive than the moral principle, but is also far more permanent in its results. The acquisitions made by the intellect are, in every civilized country, carefully preserved, registered in certain well-understood formulas, and protected by the use of technical and scientific language; they are easily handed down from one generation to another, and thus assuming an accessible, or as it were a tangible form, they often influence the most distant posterity, they become the heirlooms of mankind, the immortal bequest of the genius to which they owe their birth. But the good deeds effected by our moral faculties are less capable of transmission; they are of a more private and retiring character: while as the motives to which they owe their origin are generally the result of self-discipline and of self-sacrifice, they have to be worked out by every man for himself; and thus, begun by each anew, they derive little benefit from the maxims of preceding experience, nor can they well be stored up for the use of future moralists. The consequence is that although moral excellence is more amiable, and to most persons more attractive, than intellectual excellence, still it must be confessed that looking at ulterior results, it is far less active, less permanent, and as I shall presently prove, less productive of real good. Indeed, if we examine the effects of the most active philanthropy and of the largest and most disinterested kindness, we shall find that those effects are, comparatively speaking, short-lived; that there is only a small number of individuals they come in contact with and benefit; that they rarely survive the generation which witnessed their commencement; and that when they take the more durable form of founding great public charities, such institutions invariably fall, first into abuse, then into decay, and after a time are either destroyed or perverted from their original intention, mocking the effort by which it is vainly attempted to perpetuate the memory even of the purest and most energetic benevolence.

These conclusions are no doubt very unpalatable; and what makes them peculiarly offensive is, that it is impossible to refute them. For the deeper we penetrate into this question, the more clearly shall we see the superiority of intellectual acquisitions over moral feeling. There is no instance on record of an ignorant man who, having good intentions and supreme power to enforce them, has not done far more evil than good. And whenever the intentions have been very eager, and the power very extensive, the evil has been enormous. But if you can diminish the sincerity of that man, if you can mix some alloy with his motives, you will likewise diminish the evil which he works. If he is selfish as well as ignorant, it will often happen [that] you may play off his vice against his ignorance, and by exciting his fears restrain his mischief. If, however, he has no fear, if he is entirely unselfish, if his sole object is the good of others, if he pursues that object with enthusiasm, upon a large scale, and with disinterested zeal, then it is that you have no check upon him, you have no means of preventing the calamities which in an ignorant age an ignorant man will be sure to inflict. How entirely this is verified by experience, we may see in studying the history of religious persecution. To punish even a single man for his religious tenets is assuredly a crime of the deepest dye; but to punish a large body of men, to persecute an entire sect, to attempt to extirpate opinions which, growing out of the state of society in which they arise, are themselves a manifestation of the marvelous and luxuriant fertility of the human mind,--to do this is not only one of the most pernicious, but one of the most foolish acts that can possibly be conceived. Nevertheless it is an undoubted fact that an overwhelming majority of religious persecutors have been men of the purest intentions, of the most admirable and unsullied morals. It is impossible that this should be otherwise. For they are not bad-intentioned men who seek to enforce opinions which they believe to be good. Still less are they bad men who are so regardless of temporal considerations as to employ all the resources of their power, not for their own benefit, but for the purpose of propagating a religion which they think necessary to the future happiness of mankind. Such men as these are not bad, they are only ignorant; ignorant of the nature of truth, ignorant of the consequences of their own acts. But in a moral point of view their motives are unimpeachable. Indeed, it is the very ardor of their sincerity which warms them into persecution. It is the holy zeal by which they are fired that quickens their fanaticism into a deadly activity. If you can impress any man with an absorbing conviction of the supreme importance of some moral or religious doctrine; if you can make him believe that those who reject that doctrine are doomed to eternal perdition; if you then give that man power, and by means of his ignorance blind him to the ulterior consequences of his own act,--he will infallibly persecute those who deny his doctrine; and the extent of his persecution will be regulated by the extent of his sincerity. Diminish the sincerity, and you will diminish the persecution; in other words, by weakening the virtue you may check the evil. This is a truth of which history furnishes such innumerable examples, that to deny it would be not only to reject the plainest and most conclusive arguments, but to refuse the concurrent testimony of every age. I will merely select two cases, which, from the entire difference in their circumstances, are very apposite as illustrations: the first being from the history of Paganism, the other from the history of Christianity; and both proving the inability of moral feelings to control religious persecution.

I. The Roman emperors, as is well known, subjected the early Christians to persecutions which, though they have been exaggerated, were frequent and very grievous. But what to some persons must appear extremely strange, is, that among the active authors of these cruelties we find the names of the best men who ever sat on the throne; while the worst and most infamous princes were precisely those who spared the Christians, and took no heed of their increase. The two most thoroughly depraved of all the emperors were certainly Commodus and Elagabalus; neither of whom persecuted the new religion, or indeed adopted any measures against it. They were too reckless of the future, too selfish, too absorbed in their own infamous pleasures, to mind whether truth or error prevailed; and being thus indifferent to the welfare of their subjects, they cared nothing about the progress of a creed which they, as Pagan emperors, were bound to regard as a fatal and impious delusion. They therefore allowed Christianity to run its course, unchecked by those penal laws which more honest but more mistaken rulers would assuredly have enacted. We find, accordingly, that the great enemy of Christianity was Marcus Aurelius; a man of kindly temper, and of fearless, unflinching honesty, but whose reign was characterized by a persecution from which he would have refrained had he been less in earnest about the religion of his fathers. And to complete the argument, it may be added that the last and one of the most strenuous opponents of Christianity who occupied the throne of the Cæsars was Julian; a prince of eminent probity, whose opinions are often attacked, but against whose moral conduct even calumny itself has hardly breathed a suspicion.

II. The second illustration is supplied by Spain; a country of which it must be confessed, that in no other have religiuos feelings exercised such sway over the affairs of men. No other European nation has produced so many ardent and disinterested missionaries, zealous self-denying martyrs, who have cheerfully sacrificed their lives in order to propagate truths which they thought necessary to be known. Nowhere else have the spiritual classes been so long in the ascendant; nowhere else are the people so devout, the churches so crowded, the clergy so numerous. But the sincerity and honesty of purpose by which the Spanish people, taken as a whole, have always been marked, have not only been unable to prevent religious persecution, but have proved the means of encouraging it. If the nation had been more lukewarm, it would have been more tolerant. As it was, the preservation of the faith became the first consideration; and everything being sacrificed to this one object, it naturally happened that zeal begat cruelty, and the soil was prepared in which the Inquisition took root and flourished. The supporters of that barbarous institution were not hypocrites, but enthusiasts. Hypocrites are for the most part too supple to be cruel. For cruelty is a stern and unbending passion; while hypocrisy is a fawning and flexible art, which accommodates itself to human feelings, and flatters the weakness of men in order that it may gain its own ends. In Spain, the earnestness of the nation, being concentrated on a single topic, carried everything before it; and hatred of heresy becoming a habit, persecution of heresy was thought a duty. The conscientious energy with which that duty was fulfilled is seen in the history of the Spanish Church. Indeed, that the inquisitors were remarkable for an undeviating and uncorruptible integrity may be proved in a variety of ways, and from different and independent sources of evidence. This is a question to which I shall hereafter return; but there are two testimonies which I cannot omit, because, from the circumstances attending them, they are peculiarly unimpeachable. Llorente, the great historian of the Inquisition, and its bitter enemy, had access to its private papers: and yet, with the fullest means of information, he does not even insinuate a charge against the moral character of the inquisitors; but while execrating the cruelty of their conduct, he cannot deny the purity of their intentions. Thirty years earlier, Townsend, a clergyman of the Church of England, published his valuable work on Spain: and though, as a Protestant and an Englishman, he had every reason to be prejudiced against the infamous system which he describes, he also can bring no charge against those who upheld it; but having occasion to mention its establishment at Barcelona, one of its most important branches, he makes the remarkable admission that all its members are men of worth, and that most of them are of distinguished humanity.

These facts, startling as they are, form a very small part of that vast mass of evidence which history contains, and which decisively proves the utter inability of moral feelings to diminish religious persecution. The way in which the diminution has been really effected by the mere progress of intellectual acquirements will be pointed out in another part of this volume; when we shall see that the great antagonist of intolerance is not humanity, but knowledge. It is to the diffusion of knowledge, and to that alone, that we owe the comparative cessation of what is unquestionably the greatest evil men have ever inflicted on their own species. For that religious persecution is a greater evil than any other, is apparent, not so much from the enormous and almost incredible number of its known victims, as from the fact that the unknown must be far more numerous, and that history gives no account of those who have been spared in the body in order that they might suffer in the mind. We hear much of martyrs and confessors--of those who were slain by the sword, or consumed in the fire: but we know little of that still larger number who by the mere threat of persecution have been driven into an outward abandonment of their real opinions; and who, thus forced into an apostasy the heart abhors, have passed the remainder of their lives in the practice of a constant and humiliating hypocrisy. It is this which is the real curse of religious persecution. For in this way, men being constrained to mask their thoughts, there arises a habit of securing safety by falsehood, and of purchasing impunity with deceit. In this way fraud becomes a necessary of life; insincerity is made a daily custom; the whole tone of public feeling is vitiated, and the gross amount of vice and of error fearfully increased. Surely, then, we have reason to say that, compared to this, all other crimes are of small account; and we may well be grateful for that increase of intellectual pursuits which has destroyed an evil that some among us would even now willingly restore.

THE MYTHICAL ORIGIN OF HISTORY

From the 'History of Civilization in England'

At a very early period in the progress of a people, and long before they are acquainted with the use of letters, they feel the want of some resource which in peace may amuse their leisure, and in war may stimulate their courage. This is supplied to them by the invention of ballads; which form the groundwork of all historical knowledge, and which, in one shape or another, are found among some of the rudest tribes of the earth. They are for the most part sung by a class of men whose particular business it is thus to preserve the stock of traditions. Indeed, so natural is this curiosity as to past events that there are few nations to whom these bards or minstrels are unknown. Thus, to select a few instances, it is they who have preserved the popular traditions, not only of Europe, but also of China, Tibet, and Tartary; likewise of India, of Scinde, of Beloochistan, of Western Asia, of the islands of the Black Sea, of Egypt, of Western Africa, of North America, of South America, and of the islands in the Pacific.

In all these countries, letters were long unknown, and as a people in that state have no means of perpetuating their history except by oral tradition, they select the form best calculated to assist their memory; and it will, I believe, be found that the first rudiments of knowledge consist always of poetry, and often of rhyme. The jingle pleases the ear of the barbarian, and affords a security that he will hand it down to his children in the unimpaired state in which he received it. This guarantee against error increases still further the value of these ballads; and instead of being considered as a mere amusement, they rise to the dignity of judicial authorities. The allusions contained in them are satisfactory proofs to decide the merits of rival families, or even to fix the limits of those rude estates which such a society can possess. We therefore find that the professed reciters and composers of these songs are the recognized judges in all disputed matters; and as they are often priests, and believed to be inspired, it is probably in this way that the notion of the divine origin of poetry first arose. These ballads will of course vary according to the customs and temperaments of the different nations, and according to the climate to which they are accustomed. In the south they assume a passionate and voluptuous form; in the north they are rather remarkable for their tragic and warlike character. But notwithstanding these diversities, all such productions have one feature in common: they are not only founded on truth, but making allowance for the colorings of poetry, they are all strictly true. Men who are constantly repeating songs which they constantly hear, and who appeal to the authorized singers of them as final umpires in disputed questions, are not likely to be mistaken on matters in the accuracy of which they have so lively an interest.

This is the earliest and most simple of the various stages through which history is obliged to pass. But in the course of time, unless unfavorable circumstances intervene, society advances; and among other changes, there is one in particular of the greatest importance. I mean the introduction of the art of writing, which, before many generations are passed, must effect a complete alteration in the character of the national traditions. The manner in which, this occurs has, so far as I am aware, never been pointed out; and it will therefore be interesting to attempt to trace some of its details.

The first and perhaps the most obvious consideration is, that the introduction of the art of writing gives permanence to the national knowledge, and thus lessens the utility of that oral information in which all the acquirements of an unlettered people must be contained. Hence it is that as a country advances the influence of tradition diminishes, and traditions themselves become less trustworthy. Besides this, the preservers of these traditions lose in this stage of society much of their former reputation. Among a perfectly unlettered people, the singers of ballads are, as we have already seen, the sole depositaries of those historical facts on which the fame, and often the property, of their chieftains principally depend. But when this same nation becomes acquainted with the art of writing, it grows unwilling to intrust these matters to the memory of itinerant singers, and avails itself of its new art to preserve them in a fixed and material form. As soon as this is effected, the importance of those who repeat the national traditions is sensibly diminished. They gradually sink into an inferior class, which, having lost its old reputation, no longer consists of those superior men to whose abilities it owed its former fame. Thus we see that although without letters there can be no knowledge of much importance, it is nevertheless true that their introduction is injurious to historical traditions in two distinct ways: first by weakening the traditions, and secondly by weakening the class of men whose occupation it is to preserve them.

But this is not all. Not only does the art of writing lessen the number of traditionary truths, but it directly encourages the propagation of falsehoods. This is effected by what may be termed a principle of accumulation, to which all systems of belief have been deeply indebted. In ancient times, for example, the name of Hercules was given to several of those great public robbers who scourged mankind, and who, if their crimes were successful as well as enormous, were sure after their death to be worshiped as heroes. How this appellation originated is uncertain; but it was probably bestowed at first on a single man, and afterwards on those who resembled him in the character of their achievements. This mode of extending the use of a single name is natural to a barbarous people, and would cause little or no confusion, as long as the tradition of the country remained local and unconnected. But as soon as these traditions became fixed by a written language, the collectors of them, deceived by the similarity of name, assembled the scattered facts, and ascribing to a single man these accumulated exploits, degraded history to the level of a miraculous mythology. In the same way, soon after the use of letters was known in the North of Europe, there was drawn up by Saxo Grammaticus the life of the celebrated Ragnar Lodbrok. Either from accident or design, this great warrior of Scandinavia, who had taught England to tremble, had received the same name as another Ragnar, who was prince of Jutland about a hundred years earlier. This coincidence would have caused no confusion as long as each district preserved a distinct and independent account of its own Ragnar. But by possessing the resource of writing, men became able to consolidate the separate trains of events, and as it were, fuse two truths into one error. And this was what actually happened. The credulous Saxo put together the different exploits of both Ragnars, and ascribing the whole of them to his favorite hero, has involved in obscurity one of the most interesting parts of the early history of Europe.

The annals of the North afford another curious instance of this source of error. A tribe of Finns called Quæns occupied a considerable part of the eastern coast of the Gulf of Bothnia. Their country was known as Quænland; and this name gave rise to a belief that to the north of the Baltic there was a nation of Amazons. This would easily have been corrected by local knowledge: but by the use of writing, the flying rumor was at once fixed; and the existence of such a people is positively affirmed in some of the earliest European histories. Thus too Åbo, the ancient capital of Finland, was called Turku, which in the Swedish language means a market-place. Adam of Bremen, having occasion to treat of the countries adjoining the Baltic, was so misled by the word Turku that this celebrated historian assures his readers that there were Turks in Finland.

To these illustrations many others might be added, showing how mere names deceived the early historians, and gave rise to relations which were entirely false, and might have been rectified on the spot; but which, owing to the art of writing, were carried into distant countries and thus placed beyond the reach of contradiction. Of such cases, one more may be mentioned, as it concerns the history of England. Richard I., the most barbarous of our princes, was known to his contemporaries as the Lion; an appellation conferred upon him on account of his fearlessness and the ferocity of his temper. Hence it was said that he had the heart of a lion; and the title Coeur de Lion not only became indissolubly connected with his name, but actually gave rise to a story, repeated by innumerable writers, according to which he slew a lion in a single combat. The name gave rise to the story; the story confirmed the name: and another fiction was added to that long series of falsehoods of which history mainly consisted during the Middle Ages.

The corruptions of history, thus naturally brought about by the mere introduction of letters, were in Europe aided by an additional cause. With the art of writing, there was in most cases also communicated a knowledge of Christianity; and the new religion not only destroyed many of the Pagan traditions, but falsified the remainder by amalgamating them with monastic legends. The extent to which this was carried would form a curious subject for inquiry; but one or two instances of it will perhaps be sufficient to satisfy the generality of readers.

Of the earliest state of the great Northern nations we have little positive evidence; but several of the lays in which the Scandinavian poets related the feats of their ancestors or of their contemporaries are still preserved; and notwithstanding their subsequent corruption, it is admitted by the most competent judges that they embody real and historical events. But in the ninth and tenth centuries, Christian missionaries found their way across the Baltic, and introduced a knowledge of their religion among the inhabitants of Northern Europe. Scarcely was this effected when the sources of history began to be poisoned. At the end of the eleventh century Saemund Sigfusson, a Christian priest, gathered the popular and hitherto unwritten histories of the North into what is called the "Elder Edda"; and he was satisfied with adding to his compilation the corrective of a Christian hymn. A hundred years later there was made another collection of the native histories; but the principle which I have mentioned, having had a longer time to operate, now displayed its effects still more clearly. In this second collection, which is known by the name of the 'Younger Edda,' there is an agreeable mixture of Greek, Jewish, and Christian fables; and for the first time in the Scandinavian annals, we meet with the widely diffused fiction of a Trojan descent.

If by way of further illustration we turn to other parts of the world, we shall find a series of facts confirming this view. We shall find that in those countries where there has been no change of religion, history is more trustworthy and connected than in those countries where such a change has taken place. In India, Brahmanism, which is still supreme, was established at so early a period that its origin is lost in the remotest antiquity. The consequence is that the native annals have never been corrupted by any new superstition, and the Hindus are possessed of historic traditions more ancient than can be found among any other Asiatic people. In the same way, the Chinese have for upwards of two thousand years preserved the religion of Fo, which is a form of Buddhism. In China, therefore, though the civilization has never been equal to that of India, there is a history, not indeed as old as the natives would wish us to believe, but still stretching back to several centuries before the Christian era, from whence it has been brought down to our own times in an uninterrupted succession. On the other hand, the Persians, whose intellectual development was certainly superior to that of the Chinese, are nevertheless without any authentic information respecting the early transactions of their ancient monarchy. For this I can see no possible reason except the fact that Persia, soon after the promulgation of the Koran, was conquered by the Mohammedans, who completely subverted the Parsee religion and thus interrupted the stream of the national traditions. Hence it is that, putting aside the myths of the Zendavesta, we have no native authorities for Persian history of any value, until the appearance in the eleventh century of the Shah Nameh; in which, however, Firdusi has mingled the miraculous relations of those two religions by which his country had been successively subjected. The result is, that if it were not for the various discoveries which have been made, of monuments, inscriptions, and coins, we should be compelled to rely on the scanty and inaccurate details in the Greek writers for our knowledge of the history of one of the most important of the Asiatic monarchies.