Doubtless this tendency, unless restrained by other demands, is not exempt from danger. We may be carried away by the attraction peculiar to these noble studies, withdraw into antiquity and fall into a species of historical mysticism which ends in the affirmation, that whatever has been is true, absolutely, and which, instead of confining itself to the explanation of transitory phenomena, invests them with all the dignity of principles. We shall endeavor to avoid the peril pointed out by Mallebranche. “Learned men study rather to acquire a chimerical greatness in the imagination of other men, than to acquire greater breadth and strength of mind themselves. They make their heads a kind of store-room, into which they gather, without order or discrimination, everything which has a look of erudition,—I mean to say everything which may seem rare or extraordinary and excite the wonder of other people. They glory in getting together, in this archæological museum, antiques with nothing that is rich or solid about them, and the price of which depends on nothing but fancy, chance or passion.” A display of erudition may obscure the truth, and bury it under its weight, instead of bringing it out into relief. By concentrating the mind on the material vestiges of the past, it may withdraw it from the intellectual movement of the present, and give us a race of scholars, of great merit, doubtless, but who move about like strangers among their contemporaries. Without a sense for the practical, and without ideas of an elevated nature, a person may, indeed, be a man of erudition—he cannot be a historian. As the proverb says, the forest cannot be seen, for the trees. That this noble study may bear its best and most useful fruit; that is, that it should preserve us against ambitious _formulas_ and destructive chimeras, we must pursue another way. “The world,” says Montaigne, “is incapable of curing itself. It is so impatient of what burthens it, that it thinks only of how it shall rid itself of it, without inquiring at what price. A thousand examples show us that it cures itself ordinarily at its own cost. The getting rid of the present evil is not cure, unless there be a general amendment of condition. Good does not immediately succeed evil. One evil, and a worse, may follow another, like Cæsar’s assassins, who brought the republic to such a pass, that they had reason to repent the meddling with it.” Such, too frequently, is the lot of those who, abandoning themselves to their imagination, and without consulting the past, mix together promises of liberty and the despotism of Utopias which they would impose on nations under pretext of enfranchising them. Despising the work of the ages, they think they can build upon a soil shaken by destruction and crumbled, until it may be likened to moving sand.