A DISCOURSE

DELIVERED BEFORE THE OHIO HISTORICAL SOCIETY-BY JAMES H. PERKINS,

PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY:— I meet you this evening with very great pleasure, for, although not yet a member of your body, I take a deep interest in the subjects which it is your purpose to pursue, and rejoice in your success. That success, perhaps, has not thus far equaled your hopes, but let not that fact dishearten you, gentlemen: that some interest is felt in your pursuits, the audience before me testifies, and though many may join your society, who do nothing, and care nothing for it,—though your numbers may be but few, and your results unseen for a while, there is no cause for despair in all this. It is one of the great sins of our day, that immediate and striking effects are demanded whenever an exertion is made; we have too little faith; we need to realise the parable of the mustard-seed; we need to feel that few and feeble as we may be, when entering upon a good work, we have no reason to fear if the work be indeed good, for there is One working with us. whose ends will be brought about.

I would, also, gentlemen, thank you in the name of those who, though fellow-laborers with you, are not of your number, for the patience, perseverance and energy which you have thus far shown. May your industry continue unabated; may you long labor, and with success, to collect materials for the writer, and to awake in all an interest in the study of history.

An interest, I say, in all. of being interested in history?

For who, in truth, is not capable

History is but the tale of the

world's doings, and refers no less to those of the hamlet, the workshop and the meadow, than to those of the capitol, the senate-chamber, and the field of battle. The Genius of history, is that spirit to whom power has been given to summon the old dead from their graves, and bid them walk before us, as they walked before our fathers; and it is not the scholar alone that is privileged to call this spirit, the old man in the chimney-corner may call her, and she will come, and at his bidding the battle of Bunker Hill, or the bold march of Clarke through the western wilderness, or the quiet and sunny scenes of his own young days,—his village frolics, his village quarrels, his mother's death, his wedding, his emigration, any, or all of these will rise as readily and truly as if a scholar spoke. The whole past is history, and not the man lives but daily plays the historian. The mother of the backwoods, fifty years since, as she drew her children closer to her when the winter-storm shrieked about her cabin, and cheered their little hearts by telling them how Boone, and Harrod, and Logan had fought when hope seemed over, and how even feeble women had foiled the savage more than once, she was an historian. Indeed, what is it that we do daily? We live history, and relate history. the legislature, the coming together of this cation convention which will soon open, all these will be soon matter of history. We draw not a breath, we utter not a word, we do not an act, but goes into that past which, becoming present again, is history. And of what does most of our conversation consist, but a continual summoning of this past to live once more? A relating or bringing back of what is gone?

The meeting of society, the edu

Everywhere we find this interest in the past; in daily talk, in monuments, in writings. That race to whose labors we owe the mounds and walls of this and other lands, were interested in history. They would, had they been able, have written out their battles, and laws, and social customs for our reading; they could not thus write them, but they made their

mark, and we, wrapped in the past also, are still seeking to deepyher it.

All then, I believe, are interested in what has been done; in the past: but in our common records of it they are not interested. And why is this? It is because few care for dates, and places, and proper names; man loves to look into the past, because there dwelt man, and he is wrapped in its story more or less as that reveals man more or less. There is something in the struggles, and sufferings, and triumphs of our fellow beings, which takes hold of us with a mysterious power, so that our breath fails, and our knees tremble, and our very finger-ends tingle, as we listen. The child will hear you talk about life by the hour together, but he cares nothing for what is not living. It is a horse, or a dog, or Jack-thegiant-killer, or puss-in-boots, that he loves to hear about; and if you would tell him of the stars, or the sea, you must speak of the planets as journeying, and of the waves as leaping and living. The young and the rude always personify; they endow brute matter with vital and individual force; the boy talks of his foot-ball, and the sailor of his ship, and the mechanic of his machine, as “she.” "She went over the fence," "or she met the waves bravely,” or “she works to a charm;" and from these everyday expressions, up to those of the psalmist, who bids the waves clap their hands, and the hills be joyful together, we find the same tendency. It is life that man loves to watch, and hear of; life, that great mystery of our universe, that perpetual revelation of the Almighty.

Novels are read, days wasted and nights spent over them, because they picture the life of man; they open, as history cannot, the motives and the progress of every act. The love of fictitious writings, I regard as a strong proof of the interest which men take in what has been done. For, be it noted, it is not the fiction which is liked; truth is always preferred to fiction if there be but the same life in it; there is indeed a wonderful interest in the actual, merely as the actual. A boy

reads a tale, and if you tell him, when he is done, that it is true, he reads it over again with new zest; or, if he thought it true before, and you tell him that it is false, he feels that he has been a loser. Here and there in Miss Edgworth's works some anecdote is mentioned as being a fact; and that we long remember. A sketch in a periodical is "founded on fact,”and it goes and goes where mere fiction would never reach. Who has not had new interest given to Scott's novels by his last notes, in which he gives the truths whereon they are based? Or, on the other hand, take a popular work of history, one that is read with interest by thousands, and prove it to be fictitious, and it would be dry as chaff; the life of Marion, full of vitality and incident and variety as it is, would be but a poor story if a false one; its wonderful points would then be improbable, its anecdotes would be unmeaning; but it is true, or supposed to be, and young and old can read it again and again.

There is then, I say, a very general and very deep interest in history; in the record of past life, in the record of what has actually been. But, be it noted, there must be life in the history, or to the mass of men it is nothing-dead events and deader dates are nothing. I may listen with infinite tedium to one man's account of a merry meeting, or a pitched battle, for he will but give me the fact that men and women laughed, and danced, or that two parties fell to and fought; while to another, who shall paint me the very men and women, and how this one was dressed, and that one held her head, and the other stepped off with a partner having a cork leg, or who shall make me see the red-coated soldiers, and hear the swearing sergeants, and watch the cool yeomanry, holding their fire till they can see the white of their enemies' eyes to this man I could listen if I had not slept for fortyeight hours.

You are all acquainted with the biography of Johnson, by Boswell, and know that it is thought the best work of the kind extant. Why is this? How did that weakest of weak

men, that laughing-stock of his generation, succeed where the wise and learned have failed? He did it by painting to the life; not a foible, not a cross word, not a broad insult, not a disgusting habit, not a roll, nor a puff, nor any other living part of his subject is omitted.*

You have all heard of Froissart, whose history, after five hundred years, is at this moment in course of republication, adorned and illustrated in the choicest style of the modern English press. Why is this? Countless other historians have, since he wrote, risen and gone into invisibility again, why does this one loom forth so? Because men walk, and horses rear, and ladies laugh, in his pages; it is all busy life.

And very lately a work has been published which, be its faults what they may, is full of the deepest interest, for it is all alive; I mean Carlyle's French Revolution. He, unlike our modern writers, gives you a picture instead of a statement; the storming of the Bastile in the pages of Thiers, or Alison, or Scott, is a long past and wholly dead event— in Carlyle it is as living, as passing, as full of exciting interest as Sir Walter's own picture of the storming of Front de Bouf's castle in Ivanhoe. Louis Tournay, with his axe hewing at the chain of the draw-bridge, is as real in the history, as the black knight with his battle-axe battering at the barbican is in the novel. There was another scene in that revolution, lightly touched on by most writers, but full of meaning; it was when the constitution was to be sworn to by all France, and the people of France, full of enthusiasm, took from the workmen who were preparing the field of Mars for the ceremony, their spades and barrows, and worked themselves like day-laborers; this scene, so full of character, so pointedly the result of that strange temper which then filled France, is by most slighted; but Carlyle gives it to us with all the freshness of the next day's newspaper; and thereby gives more insight into the spirit of the time, the feeling of