tory, is a vivid imagination—a faculty which, consequently, a skilful narrator must himself possess, and to which he must be able to furnish excitement in others. Some may perhaps be startled at this remark, who have been accustomed to consider Imagination as having no other office than to feign and falsify. Every faculty is liable to abuse and misdirection, and Imagination among the rest; but it is a mistake, to suppose that it necessarily tends to pervert the truth of history, and to mislead the judgment. On the contrary, our view of any transaction, especially one that is remote in time or place, will necessarily be imperfect, generally incorrect, unless it embrace something more than a bare outline of the occurrences—unless we have before the mind a lively idea of the scenes in which the events took place, the habits of thought and of feeling of the actors, and all the circumstances connected with the transaction-unless, in short, we can, in a considerable degree, transport ourselves out of our own age, and country, and persons, and imagine ourselves the agents or spectators. It is from a consideration of all these circumstances, that we are enabled to form a right judgment as to the facts which history records, and to derive instruction from it. What we imagine, may, indeed, be wholly imaginary, i.e. unreal; but it may be what actually does or did exist. To say that Imagination, if not regulated by sound judgment and sufficient knowledge, may chance to convey to us false impressions of past events, is only to say that man is fallible. But such false impressions are even much the more likely to take possession of those whose imagination is feeble or uncultivated. They are apt to imagine the things, persons, times, countries, &c., which

they read of, as much less different from what they see around them than is really the case.

This may serve to correct a common misapprehension respecting the functions of the Imagination, and to show that, when disciplined and cultivated, it serves the cause of truth. This, too, is to be thought of, that the neglect of its culture does not extinguish it; for existing, as it does, though in very different degrees, in all minds, it will act in some way, perhaps feebly, and fitfully, and irregularly; and if it is not trained in the service of wisdom and truth, it certainly will be found in alliance with folly and falsehood.

I pass to another authority, immeasurably higher, when I quote a single sentence from Lord Bacon, who has said, that "Dramatic poetry is like history made visible, and is an image of actions past, as if they were present." Now I stand upon this sentence as the text of my lectures, and on the authority of Bacon as sustaining the view I am anxious to present of the imaginative study of history. In truth, I need attempt no more than to evolve the wisdom that is wrapped in these few words of a great philosopher-one of the greatest the world has known.

When Lord Bacon speaks of dramatic poetry being history made visible, he could not have been thinking of mere scenic representations. Theatric art, in his day, was too rude and contracted for him to see in it aught but what was too mean to show the images of actions

*Whateley's Elements of Rhetoric, p. 176.

"Dramatica est veluti Historia spectabilis: nam constituit imaginem rerum tanquam presentium: Historia, autem, tanquam præteritarum." De Augin. Sc. lib. ii. ch. xiii.

past, as if they were present; and, indeed, he speaks elsewhere of its low estate. He thought of no scenic representation—no mere bodily vision-no spectacle for the outward eye-but of that vision of the mind, that inward sight, which Imagination gives. The aspiring and far-reaching genius of Bacon felt that, while our sensuous nature is limited to the visible, the audible, the present, and the palpable, the spirituality of our being can comprehend the remote and the unseen. The heroes of antiquity rise up again in lifelike reality, and distant regions of the earth are made apparent; and, indeed, it may happen that the actual vision of the eyes may be most fitly told in words that speak only of the visions of the mind. When Milton visited the south of Europe, it was in his thoughts, after wandering in Valdarno, and by the leafy brooks of Vallambrosa, and amid the ruins of Rome, to cross from Italy over into Greece. But this cherished purpose was thwarted by tidings that came from his own afflicted country; and, deeming it the duty of England's sons to stand upon England's soil in her season of adversity, he speeded homeward. Greece was never seen by Milton-I mean by those bodily eyes, which afterward were quenched in blindness. But the spiritual power of his imagination, enriched as it was with classic lore, had borne him to the glorious promontory of Attica. He had seen the olive groves of Academe; he had heard the whispers of the waters of Ilissus—the industrious murmur of the bees; he had felt the pure air that was wafted from the waves of the bright Ægean Sea to mingle with the breath of the flowery Hymettus. The poet's splendid vision has been recorded; and when, a few years ago, a learned traveller visited

Greece, he lingered upon Hymettus; and, gazing over the country around Athens, he said: "I cannot leave the spot the scene now present to my eyes-without repeating the description given by one who was no eyewitness of it. To omit it would be injustice to Athens as well as to Milton;"-and that fine description in the fourth book of Paradise Regained, was aptly rehearsed amid the music of those natural sounds, which are yet heard upon the hills of Attica.*

Another and higher exercise of the Imagination is when it is employed to give us a sense of reality in the knowledge of the actions and the sufferings that history records. The mind may learn the facts of history, and the memory may, at need, recall them; and yet there may be, withal, a most inadequate conception of their truth and reality. How little sense, at best, is there of what the annals of the world tell of suffering humanity! We read or hear, for instance, of a battle, and the numbers of those who have fallen in it; and, after a cold calculation, we think it a large or small proportion; and it makes about as much impression on us as any other statistics might. No sympathy is touched by these aggregates. The intellect calmly comprehends the facts, but the imagination is not astir to give them reality in our minds. It is comparatively a recent event in history-the dreadful famine in which thousands of the Genoese perished-when, in 1799, the French army

* Quoted in substance from "Greece, Pictorial, Descriptive, and Historical, by Christopher Wordsworth, DD., p. 31." Milton's words as he turned from this glorious promise were-" Turpe enim existimabam, dum mei cives de libertate dimicarent, me, animi causa, otiose peregrinari." W. B. R.

under Massena was besieged in their city, and a British fleet kept such unrelenting guard in that magnificent bay, that naught reached the sufferers, save the waves that

"Dash their white foam against the palace walls

Of Genoa-the superb."*

The inhabitants of that wealthy and luxurious city were reduced to all desperate extremities, and twenty thousand innocent persons-women, too, and children— perished by the slow misery of famine. History tells us. of these things in its didactic form: it gives us the information, but it gives us no more. In the fourteenth century, the like calamity, with pestilence superadded to famine, desolated one of the opulent and populous Flemish towns, and it is thus described in the Chronicles of Froissart:

"This whole winter of 1382, the Earl of Flanders had so much constrained Ghent, that nothing could enter the place by land or water: he had persuaded the Duke of Brabant and Duke Albert to shut up their countries so effectually, that no provisions could be exported thence, but secretly, and with a great risk to those who attempted it. It was thought by the most intelligent, that it could not be long before they perished through famine,—for all the storehouses of corn were empty, and the people could not obtain bread for money. When the bakers had baked any, it was necessary to guard their shops; for the populace, who were starving, would have broken them open. It was melancholy to hear these poor people (for men, women, and children of good substance were in this

* Wordsworth's Musings near Aquapendente. Works, p. 319.