In that century, in obedience to the
law of human progress, there sprang up in England and on the Continent the
men who first made chronicle material for philosophy, and used philosophy
to teach by example what to imitate and what to shun.
What were the circumstances which led, in the eighteenth century, to the
simultaneous appearance of Hume, Gibbon, and Robertson, as the originators
of a new school of history? Some of them have been already mentioned in
treating of the antiquarian age. We have endeavored to show how the
English literati--novelists, essayists, and poets--have been in part
unconscious historians. It will also appear that the professed historians
themselves have been, in a great measure, the creatures of English
history. The _fifteenth_ century was the period when the revival of
letters took place, and a great spur was given to mental activity; but the
world, like a child, was again learning rudiments, and finding out what it
was, and what it possessed at that present time: it received the new
classical culture presented to it at the fall of the lower empire, and was
content to learn the existing, without endeavoring to create the new, or
even to recompose the scattered fragments of the past.
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