ONCE A WEEK

NEW SERIES

No, 164. February 18, 1871. Price 2d.

THE GRAND STYLE.—AND THE OTHER.

HISTORY, to ordi- nary readers

those   who   get   it
from   authors   who
have studied what
they call the "dig-
nity  of  history,
and    wnte   in   the
"grand    style"-is
a  splendid   specta-
cular drama, in in-

numerable ta-

bleaux,     and    with
no   plot,    or   none
discoverable.   The
tableaux are all ex-

actly alike, only

the actors change their clothes, and perform
to different music. But the incidents are
the same, and the grouping.  A Drury Lane
playbill, advertising  some great  spectacle,
pretty well represents the course of history
in every one of its acts. Here we have, in
big letters-"The Assembling of the Tribes
-Martial Preparations-Terrific Battle-
Siege of the City-Heroism  of  Besieged
-Great Triumphal Procession."  Glory, of
course, crowns the victors; and their deeds
are narrated a few years after, and before
the next act begins-the last book of He-
rodotus, for instance, gives us the  Battle of
Plataea-by the historian,who sheds undying
lustre on the actors. The lustre somehow
dies out ;  new great victories dim the glories
of the old ; and what was once a perfect
lime-light ofsplendour, on deeds engraven in
gold, becomes a feeble glimmer over a tar-
nished gilding.  Pray, who remembers great
heroes?  They survive to be read by the
schoolboy ; or their names, where school-
boys do not read of them, remain only to

point a moraI and adorn a Ieading article. Take, for example, the great, the illustri ous Belisarius-who conquered the Vandals and the Goths-the master of Sicily and of Rome. What Civil Service candidate can now detail his achievements? And who re- members of him aught but the lying fable that he begged his bread, blind and desti- tute? Glory nieans honourable mention by the historians. But what if no one reads theirhistories? Lucky, however, in turbulent times, are the men who get through without leaving behind them names destined to de- scend to posterity laden with the reproach of crimes never committed, and atrocities never imagined. And while the great villains ofhistory-such as Nero, Richard the Third, or Robespierre-find no dificulty in getting rehabities, the lesser scoundrels-who, per- haps, were tolerably honest and upright men, as honesty then went ; who but a poor half-page in the scroll of Clio, and that an ignoble one-find none to plead their cause. My own sympathy has always been with these helpless victims of a spasmodic public virtue, doomed to live on, their fair names straggled in the dust by a disgraceful agnomen -such as Caius the Traitor, Balbus the Con- spirator, Manlius the Murdercr, and so on. It is all useless pity, because nothing can be done for them. They went in for public affairs, and tossed up, so to speak-heads or tails, glory or reprobation. It came down tails-reprobation. Only one cannot help fancying that Messrs. Gibbon, Hume, and Rollin must be having a bad time of it aniong the indignant shades of those whom they have immortalized with what the news- papers call an unenviable notoriety.

Happily, in these days,we have a new kind of writers, who give us other, if not juster, notions of glory. They do not, it is true, write history-because we know that, without the grand style, history is a thing of nought ;

but   they  wnte  memoirs,   Chroniqes Scan-

daleuses, anecdotes, and gossip. They peep