Our present business is with M. Guizot as a historian and philosopher; a character in which he will be remembered, long after his services to humanity as a statesman and a minister have ceased to attract the attention of men. In those respects, we place him in the very highest rank among the writers of modern Europe. It must be understood, however, in what his greatness consists, lest the readers, expecting what they will not find, experience disappointment, when they begin the study of his works. He is neither imaginative nor pictorial; he seldom aims at the pathetic, and has little eloquence. He is not a Livy nor a Gibbon. Nature has not given him either dramatic or descriptive powers. He is a man of the highest genius; but it consists not in narrating particular events, or describing individual achievement. It is in the discovery of general causes; in tracing the operation of changes in society, which escape ordinary observation: in seeing whence man has come, and whether he is going, that his greatness consists: and in that loftiest of the regions of history, he is unrivaled. We know of no author who has traced the changes of society, and the general causes which determine the fate of nations, with such just views and so much sagacious discrimination. He is not properly speaking, an historian; his vocation and object were different. He is a great discourser on history. If ever the philosophy of history was embodied in a human being, it is in M. Guizot. The style of this great author is, in every respect, suited to his subject. He does not aim at the highest flights of fancy; makes no attempt to warm the soul or melt the feelings; is seldom imaginative, and never descriptive. But he is uniformly lucid, sagacious, and discriminating; deduces his conclusions with admirable clearness from his premises, and occasionally warms from the innate grandeur of his subject into a glow of fervent eloquence. He seems to treat of human affairs, as if he viewed them from a loftier sphere than other men; as if he were elevated above the usual struggles and contests of humanity; and a superior power had withdrawn the veil which shrouds their secret causes and course from the gaze of sublunary beings. He cares not to dive into the secrets of cabinets; attaches little, perhaps too little, importance to individual character; but fixes his steady gaze on the great and lasting causes which, in a durable manner, influence human affairs. He views them not from year to year but from century to century; and, when considered in that view, it is astonishing how much the importance of individual agency disappears. Important in their generation--sometimes almost omnipotent for good or for evil while they live--particular men, how great soever, rarely leave any very important consequences behind them; or at least rarely do what other men might not have done as effectually as them, and which was not already determined by the tendency of the human mind,