one, however, would have been more prompt than the philosophic writer here cited, to deny the right of persons, ignorant or learned, to point out with the finger, and say, Lo here, a Divine judgment; or, Lo there, the avenging finger of God. No kind of sympathy could he have felt with those who "deal damnation round the land," whether it be, say, the ultraroyalists and Romish party in France descrying in the death of the Duke of Orleans (1842) "the just punishment of Heaven for the sins of his father in usurping the throne," while they further called attention to the "singular coincidence" that the heir apparent thus met his death on the Chemin de la Révolte; or an Irish M.P. assuring the House of Commons that the "finger of God" was visible in the death of Count Cavour; or the priestly party in South Italy, asserting with vehemence that the very dry weather of 1862 was a judgment upon the land for ousting the Bourbons; or again, what a Kirk minister himself calls "an ignorant and presumptuous minister in the north" declaring authoritatively that the long drought of a later autumn, when the pastures were burnt up, and the cattle were suffering, was a Divine judgment or act of vengeance, sent because of organ music being sanctioned in kirk worship here and there. STU BLANK ANNALS OF WELL-BEING. JUDGES V. 31; viii. 28. TIRRING times were those of Sisera and Jael, of Deborah and Barak. The inhabitants of the villages ceased in Israel, the highways were unoccupied, and travellers trod byeways, until Deborah arose, a mother in Israel. Then was war in the gates, and Deborah had dominion over the mighty, and Barak led captivity captive, even the son of Abinoam; and the stars in their courses fought against Sisera; and as for his host, the river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, the river Kishon; while, for himself, at the feet of the wife of Heber the Kenite he bowed, he fell, he lay down; where he bowed, there he fell down dead. Chapter after And then comes a chapter, at this crisis, teems with incident. pause, and the repose from war involves a blank in the history. "And the land had rest forty years." Blessed are the barren years, in this respect. Blank annals betoken well-being,-are a token of peace. The country was in quietness forty years in the days of Gideon, and there was little to chronicle. But Gideon once dead, in a good old age, the children of Israel turned again, and remembered not the Lord their God, who had delivered them out of the hands of all their enemies on every side; and then at once there was again work for the warrior, and work for the chronicler. Eventless tranquillity is followed by eventful strife; and with thickening events the page of history ceases to be blank. Dean Milman's account, in his History of the Jews, of Samuel surrendering his judicial authority, and proceeding to the formal "inauguration" of the king elect,—with which act ended the period of the judges, a period of about 460 years as commonly reckoned,—is followed by some remarks tending to controvert the notion of these years being mainly darkened by foreign oppression. Not one fourth of the period in question, he is careful to show, was passed under servitude to the stranger; and he adds, "Above 300 years of peaceful and uneventful happiness remain, to which History, only faithful in recording the crimes and sufferings of man, bears the favourable testimony of her silence." 1 1 Several books later, the historian puts this heading to his page, "Blank in the History." For after the death of Nehemiah (about B.C. 415), a curtain falls on the history of the Jews: and this curtain remains, permitting only rare and doubtful glimpses behind its thick and impenetrable folds, till the accession of Antiochus Epiphanes (B.C. 175), a period of 210 years. "During the great age of Grecian splendour in arms, enterprise, and letters, the Jews, in this quiet and perhaps enviable obscurity, lay hid within their native valleys. The tide of war rolled at a distance," etc. From the time when the Persian governor, Bagoses, laid a heavy mulct on the whole people, (fifty drachms for every lamb offered in sacrifice,) it would seem that " Judæa has the happy distinction of being hardly if ever mentioned in the succeeding years, when war raged on all sides around her peaceful valleys.”—Milman, Hist. of Jews, books vi. and ix. It is Dean Swift's remark that, generally speaking, the times which afford most plentiful matter for story are those wherein a man would least choose to live; such as, the various events and revolutions of war, the intrigues of a ruined faction, the violence of a prevailing one, and the arbitrary and unlawful acts of oppressing governors. Gibbon significantly characterises the reign of that second Numa, Antoninus Pius, as "marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." In a subsequent volume of his great work, when he comes to relate the conquest of Palestine, the historian who takes so gloomy a view of history makes this pregnant reference to the pleasant vale of Damascus, which had been adorned in every age with a royal city: "her obscure felicity has hitherto escaped the historian of the Roman empire." Again, he says of the death of Justinian, that it in some degree restored the peace of the church, the reigns of his four next successors being "distinguished by a rare, though fortunate, vacancy in the ecclesiastical history of the East." And in a later chapter Gibbon extends to a whole people the observation applied to a man, that the energy of the sword is communicated to the pen; it being found by experience that history will rise or fall with the spirit of the age. When, in the words of Shakspeare's Canidius, "With news the time's in labour, and throes forth, Each minute, some," then it is that Captain Sword puts upon his mettle Captain Pen. Steel pens run swiftly, thus tempered and pointed. Dryden has his courtly scoff at blank annals of national weal(the first couplet by the way, affording a specimen of that female rhyme which Dryden himself condemned): "Some lazy ages, lost in sleep and ease, No action leave to busy chronicles : Such whose supine felicity but makes But in his Absalom and Achitophel he writes to other purpose: "The sober part of Israel, free from stain, They cursed the memory of civil wars." Joseph de Maistre begins one of his politico-philosophical treatises with the benediction, in fact, not merely intent :"Heureux les peuples dont on ne parle pas ! Le bonheur politique, comme le bonheur domestique, n'est pas dans le bruit." And in one of his letters he exclaims: "Malheur aux générations qui assistent aux époques du monde ! Heureux mille fois les hommes qui ne sont appelés à contempler que dans l'histoire les grandes révolutions, les guerres générales,les chocs des empires et les funérailles des nations! Heureux les hommes qui passent sur la terre dans un de ces moments de repos qui servent d'intervalle aux convulsions d'une nature condamnée et souffrante!" M. Sismondi, at one stage of his great work, checks himself with a "Let us not hurry on "; for, when the narrator hurries' forward, he may give a false idea of history. "The reader never feels this flight of time, unless he sees how the time has been filled up; its duration is ever proportioned to the number of facts presented to him, and, in some sort, to the number of pages he has to peruse. You may warn him that whole years are silently passed over, but he is unconscious of them." Very short work indeed would it make of some of the most momentous times in our history, were Prior's charitable suggestion to be taken literally, "Finding some of Stuart's race Unhappy, pass their annals by." Readers of sensibility, Mr. de Quincey has said, acknowledge the effect from any large influence of deep halcyon repose, when relieving the agitations of history. The events which leave the deepest impression on the minds of the common people are said by Sir Walter Scott to be such as resemble, not the gradual progress of a fertilising river, but the headlong and precipitous fury of some portentous flood. "The eras by which the vulgar compute time have always reference to some period of fear and tribulation, and they date by a tempest, an earthquake, or burst of civil commotion." Some one else has registered the complaint that history, like one or two of the other muses, is always too much taken up with noise and tumult. It is part of The Complaint of Young, that— "Fame's trumpet seldom sounds but, like the knell, It brings bad tidings; how it hourly blows Man's misadventures round the listening world! [Who] fills his chronicle with human woes." A passage that may recal Cowper's dreamy retrospect of man as he was created, when "... History, not wanted yet, Leaned on her elbow, watching Time, whose course, Many histories, as a Guesser at Truth observed, give you little else than a narrative of military affairs, marches and countermarches, skirmishes and battles; which, except during some great crisis of a truly national war, afford about as complete a picture of a nation's life as an account of the doses of physic a man may have taken, and the surgical operations he may have undergone, would of the life of an individual. M. Demogeot expatiates on the fact that the cloister chronicles he is analysing take small account of the storms without; the battle of Poitiers, for instance, in 732, by which Charles Martel arrested the advance of Islamism, is passed over without a line, while the pettiest monastic details get equal space with such extra-mural catastrophes and surprises as the scribe reckoned worthy of mention at all. This is the kind of small beer chronicle-keeping to warrant Thomson's outburst "Life tedious grows, an idly bustling round, A dull gazette! The impatient reader scorns |