Notwithstanding the well-known and proverbial dulness of history, there are many historical works which do succeed in awakening a durable and sometimes absorbing interest in the mind of the reader. Probably few works professedly addressed to the imagination have awakened in many breasts so deep and lasting an interest as the narrative of Livy, the biography of Tacitus, the pictured page of Gibbon. Such works are almost always complained of as dull at first: but the interest gradually waxes warmer as the narrative proceeds; the feelings become roused on one side, or in favour of one hero or another, in the great drama of the world; and not unfrequently in the end the most attractive works of imagination are laid aside for the annals of real events. But how is it that this interest is awakened? By the study of months, sometimes of years: by an interest produced by the reading of a whole winter by the fireside. Let any man try, in a narrative of _long_ continued historical events, to excite a deep interest in a space which can be read _in three hours_, and the powers of Tacitus or Gibbon would at once fail in the attempt. It is quite possible in that brief period to awaken the deepest interest in a single or closely connected series of events, as a battle, a siege, a revolt, a ship-wreck: but wholly impossible to do so with incidents scattered over a long course of years. The interest so generally felt in epic poetry and romance is excited in the same way, though in a much shorter period. As the colours of these species of composition are more brilliant, the feelings more chastened, the events more select, the characters more prominent, the catastrophe more rapidly brought about, than in real life, so the artist has the means, in a much shorter period, of awakening the interest upon the growth of which the success of his work is chiefly dependent. But nevertheless, even there, it is by comparatively slow degrees, and by reading for a very considerable period, that the interest is created. It is wholly impossible to produce it, or make the story or the characters intelligible, in a few hours. Every scholar recollects the delight with which his mind grew, as it were, under the fire of Homer's conceptions, his taste matured under the charm of Virgil's feelings: but no one will pretend that the intense delight he felt could be awakened, if he had read extracts from their most brilliant passages in a few hours; this pleasure was the feast, this interest the growth, of weeks and months. No reader of Tasso, Milton, or Klopstock, for the first time, would think he could acquire an interest in the _Jerusalem Delivered_, the _Paradise Lost_, or the _Messiah_, between tea and supper. Many of their finest passages might be read in that brief space, and their beauty _as pieces of poetry_ fully appreciated; but it would be wholly impossible in so short a time to awaken an interest in the whole story, or the fate of the principal characters.--Nevertheless it