It has been said by a very high authority that the study of history is destined to assume a new aspect, from the application to it of a higher order of minds and a more philosophical method of treatment. We are passing out of the age of speciality into the age of generalization. Innumerable observers have collected facts, and innumerable speculators have multiplied theories; and we now seem to have arrived at that period when it becomes the proper function of the thinker to co-ordinate the stores of knowledge which have been set apart for him by others; evolve laws from the multitude of instances; separate the truth from the falsehood of conflicting theories; conjoin effects with their causes, and trace the half-revealed and far-reaching relations between distant and apparently unconnected phenomena. The influence of such a spirit--long felt in the less complicated sciences--is now, even in England, beginning to act on those which are more intricate. For history the time is rapidly passing away during which a great but much erring thinker could say that it was the unfortunate peculiarity of the history of man that, although its separate parts had each been handled with considerable ability, hardly anyone had hitherto attempted to combine them into a whole, or to ascertain the way in which they are connected with each other. On the contrary, he said, a strange idea prevailed among historians that their business was merely to narrate events; so that, according to the notion of history in his day prevalent, any writer who, from indolence of thought or from natural incapacity, was unfit to deal with the highest branches of knowledge, had only to pass some years in reading a certain number of books, and then he was, _ipso facto_, qualified to be a historian. The time is fast coming when those dreary and monotonous narratives of court intrigues and party cabals will exist only to memorialize an age when the history of kings was substituted for the history of nations, and the consideration of the actions of a few individuals for the exposition of the life of the whole social organization. {78} History is growing to be less of a chronicle and more of a science; her office is no longer thought to be confined to the registration of a few superficially prominent facts; but the discovery, by a scientific induction, of historical laws, and the investigation of causes, is chiefly aimed at; and, as the circumstances which have to be taken into account in such a method of writing history are often dismissed by the older school of writers as almost unworthy of notice, and are, moreover, exceedingly numerous and of almost infinite complication, a far wider and more diversified range of learning and a far greater power of analysis than were formerly either required or expected are supposed in the historian.