practicable and juft. Neither difficulties nor dangers could check them; and their fages had not yet difcovered, that virtues in excefs degenerate into vices. Notwithstanding the beautiful rant which HORACE puts into his mouth, I make no doubt that REGULUS learned at Carthage those leffons of moderation which he had not learned at Rome: but he learned them by experience, and the fruits of this experience came too late, and coft too dear; for they coft the total defeat of the Roman army, the prolongation of a calamitous war which might have been finished by a glorious peace, the lofs of liberty to thousands of Roman citizens, and to REGULUS himself the lofs of life in the midst of torments, if we are entirely to credit what is perhaps exaggeration in the Roman authors.

THERE is another advantage worthy our obfervation that belongs to the study of hiftory; and that I fhall mention here,

not

not only because of the importance of it, but because it leads me immediately to fpeak of the nature of the improvement we ought to have in our view, and of the method in which it feems to me that this improvement ought to be purfued: two particulars from which your lordship may think perhaps that I digress too long. The advantage I mean confifts in this, that the examples which history presents to us, both of men and of events, are generally complete: the whole example is before us, and confequently the whole leffon, or fometimes the various leffons which philofophy proposes to teach us by this example. For firft, as to men; we fee them at their whole length in history, and we fee them generally there through a medium lefs partial at least than that of experience for I imagine, that a whig or a tory, whilft those parties fubfifted, would have condemned in SATURNINUS the fpirit of faction which he applauded in his own tribunes,

D 3

tribunes, and would have applauded in DRUSUS the spirit of moderation which he despised in thofe of the contrary party, and which he fufpected and hated in thofe of his own party. The villain who has imposed on mankind by his power or cunning, and whom experience could not unmask for a time, is unmasked at length: and the honeft man, who has been misunderstood or defamed, is juftified before his story ends. Or if this does not happen, if the villain dies with his mask on, in the midst of applaufe and honor and wealth and power, and if the honeft man dies under the fame load of calumny and difgrace under which he lived, driven perhaps into exile and exposed to want; yet we fee historical justice executed, the name of one branded with infamy, and that of the other celebrated with panygeric to fucceeding Praecipuum munus annalium

ages.

reor, ne virtutes fileantur; utque pravis dictis factifque ex pofteritate et in

"famiâ

"famiâ metus fit." Thus according to TACITUS, and according to truth, from which his judgments feldom deviate, the principal duty of history is to erect a tribunal, like that among the Egyptians, mentioned by DIODORUS SICULUS, where men and princes themselves were tried, and condemned or acquitted, after their deaths: where those who had not been punished for their crimes, and those who had not been honored for their virtues, received a juft retribution. The fentence is pronounced in one cafe, as it was in the other, too late to correct or recompence; but it is pronounced in time to render these examples of general inftruction to mankind. Thus CICERO, that I may quote one inftance out of thousands, and that I may do justice to the general character of that great man whose particular failing I have cenfured fo freely; CICERO, I fay, was abandoned by OCTAVIUS, and massacred by ANTHONY. But let any man read this fragment of ARELLIUS FUSCUS, and D 4 chufe

chufe which he would wish to have been, Quoad the orator, or the triumvir? " "humanum genus incolume manferit, "quamdiu ufus litteris, honor fummae

eloquentiae pretium erit, quamdiu rerum "natura aut fortuna fteterit, aut memoria " duraverit, admirabile pofteris vigebis in"genium, et uno proferiptus feculo, pro"fcribes Antonium omnibus."

THUS again as to events that stand recorded in hiftory: we fee them all, we fee them as they followed one another, or as they produced one another, caufes or effects, immediate or remote. We are caft back, as it were, into former ages; we live with the men who lived before us, and we inhabit countries that we never faw. Place is enlarged, and time prolonged, in this manner; fo that the man who applies himself early to the study of hiftory, may acquire in a few years, and before he fets his foot abroad in the world, not only a more extended knowledge of mankind,