All history is more or less deserving of Sir Robert Walpole’s designation. Hume, in one of his letters to Robertson, alluding to the publication of Murdin’s State Papers, which threw unexpected light upon the annals, exclaims, “We are all in the wrong!” And, indeed, Hume himself is among those to whom we are mostly indebted for the imaginative character of history. He had little of the industry of Gibbon, and trusted very much to his own sagacity for his views. He was also a tory, and became, in his scorn of whiggery, the apologist of the Stuarts. His history is charming as a composition, but errs in its colorings of facts and its conclusions from them. Imagination, as we have said, seems the complement of the world of facts and things, in all mental exercises, except the logical and mathematical. If we contemplate nature it enhances what we behold. The mountains, rivers, forests, and the elements that gird them round about, would be only blank conditions of matter, if the mind did not fling its own divinity around them. Nature was thus endowed from the beginning—when men heard voices in the winds, and the supernatural inhabitants of terra firma, “Met on the hill, the dale, forest or mead, By paved fountain, or by rushy brook, Or on the beached margent of the sea;” or, in the train of powerful Poseidon, “Took in by lot, ’twixt high and nether Jove, Imperial rule of all the sea-girt isles.” And the modern lovers of nature, though they no longer recognize the mythologic people of the ancient beliefs in her picturesque wildernesses, clothe them with the attributes of the mysterious abstract power which is over all things. And, in the towering of her peaks, the murmur of her forests and seas, the roar of her storms, the singing of her nightly stars, they find revelations and prophecies of higher and farther existences. In this respect, the modern poetry of nature has a nobler scope and purer inspiration than the ancient. Wordsworth and Byron speculate more sublimely than Lucretius. In another sense, the imagination materially imposes upon facts. In contemplating cities, works of art, ruins, or scenes of nature, we almost always appreciate them for the associations that belong to them—the imaginations they excite. Look at a gray bleak sort of plateau between mountains and the sea, and you see little to admire. But let somebody say, “that is Marathon!” while the blood thrills at the name, a flood of glory flashes over the immortal ground; the air is thick with phantoms— To the hearer’s eye appear, The camp, the host, the fight, the conqueror’s career— The dying Mede, his shaftless, broken bow; The fiery Greek, his red pursuing spear; Mountains above, earth’s, ocean’s plain below; Death in the front, destruction in the rear!