How many pages
of Clarendon's, Hume's, or even Robertson's history would be cancelled
if we had access to all the recollections of each event, and the
evidence of the unlettered vulgar who had witnessed the fact brought to
our notice, even through the mouthpiece of tradition!
There is more truth than comes to the surface in that speech put into
the lips of the father of lies by a late poet, where he says--
"The Bible's your book--history mine."
Savigny makes the same charge against one class of historians in his own
country:--"However discordant," says he, "their other doctrines may
appear, they agree in the practice of adopting each a particular system,
and in viewing all historical evidence as so many proofs of its truth."
Were it not for that contempt we have already noticed as the offspring
of pride and dogmatism, and which, in the administration of the republic
of letters, has been entertained and openly proclaimed for every kind of
history except that which its own acts may have originated, we should
have been in possession of thousands of facts and notions now overlaid
and lost irrecoverably to the philosopher and the historian.
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