To the wide, comprehensive vision of Motley, history appears in its true light as a science, demanding the assistance of other sciences to the due and harmonious development of all its parts. It relies not more upon the correctness of the recorder's authorities and the profoundness of his researches in the mere region of the events and mutual relation of nations, than upon his universal acquaintance with general literature and the sister arts of politics and philosophy. It was for the treacherous and elegant Bolingbroke to reduce the noble art of Thucydides from the height of sublimity and grandeur to the parlor level of the conversations of the Hotel de Rambouillet, to introduce into the most serious political disquisitions, concerning perhaps the welfare of society, an imperceptible yet carefully elaborated and most effective tone of levity that speedily proved disastrous to their object. It was be who forced the vapid but imposing ceremonial of the _bon ton_ into the records of church and state; who clothed his empty but pompous periods with the ermine of royalty, to ensure them the reverence of a deluded multitude; who stripped Virtue of her ancient prerogatives, and fed her with the crumbs from his table. His polished diction, undeniable talent and fine acquisitions served most unhappily to disguise his real poverty of sentiment, and for a time, at least, diverted the current of popular feeling from the true, beautiful, and reliable in early literature and art, no less than in history. With what success his faulty and imperfect theories were engrafted upon the literature of his nation, the learned and sagacious Schlosser conclusively proves in his _History of the Eighteenth Century_. Says this ripe scholar and deep thinker, 'All that Bolingbroke ridicules as tedious and without talent, all that he laughs at as useless and without taste, all that which, urged by his labors and those of his like-minded associates, had for eighty years disappeared from ancient history, is again brought back in our day. So short is the triumph of falsehood.' Well may we pervert the verses of Horace,-- 'Nullæ placere diu, nec vivere _historiæ_ possunt Quæ scribuntur aquæ potoribus.' That was an ungenerous fountain whence Bolingbroke drank even his chilling draughts of inspiration. Splendid, in sooth, as the great _Brunnen_ of the luckless Abderites of Wieland, with its sea-god of marble surrounded by a stately train of nymphs, tritons, and dolphins, from whose jets the water only dripped like tears, because, says the writer, with grave naïveté, 'there was scarcely enough to moisten the lips of a single nymph.' Truly the purple wine of inspiration is as necessary to the historian as to the poet; and if the laughing Bacchus that holds the beaker to the student's eager lips be not clothed in the classic robes of the senate-chamber or the flowing garments of the professor, he wears at least the fawn's dappled hide, and in his hand