and the tide, either of flow or ebb, by which human affairs were at the time wafted to and fro. The desperate struggles of war or of ambition in which they were engaged, and in which so much genius and capacity were exerted, are swept over by the flood of time, and seldom leave any lasting trace behind. It is the men who determine the direction of this tide, who imprint their character on general thought, who are the real directors of human affairs; it is the giants of thought who, in the end, govern the world--kings and ministers, princes and generals, warriors and legislators, are but the ministers of their blessings or their curses to mankind. But their dominion seldom begins till themselves are mouldering in their graves. Guizot's largest work, in point of size, is his translation of _Gibbon's Rome_; and the just and philosophic spirit in which he viewed he course of human affairs, was admirably calculated to provide an antidote to the sceptical sneers which, in a writer of such genius and strength of understanding, are at once the marvel and the disgrace of that immortal work. He has begun also a history of the English Revolution, to which he was led by having been the editor of a valuable collection of Memoirs relating to the great Rebellion, translated into French, in twenty-five volumes. But this work only got the length of two volumes, and came no further down than the death of Charles I., an epoch no further on in the English than the execution of Louis in the French revolution. This history is clear, lucid, and valuable; but it is written with little eloquence, and has met with no great success: the author's powers were not of the dramatic or pictorial kind necessary to paint that dreadful story. These were editorial or industrial labours unworthy of Guizot's mind; it was when he delivered lectures from the chair of history in Paris, that his genius shone forth in its proper sphere and its true lustre.