The retributive and avenging Fury proceeds with steady step through the domain of history, but the traces of her silent progress are not always visible to the eye of man. Generations have passed away, and empires sunk in ruin, without its being possible, satisfactorily to point out the remote and proximate causes of their fall. The judgment of the conscientious historian stands, then, in the middle point, between blind scepticism on the one hand, and rash credulity on the other. He avoids the explaining of events as an officious interpreter of Providence, no less than wishing to behold in their progress, nothing but the concatenation of blind necessity. On the other hand, incidents emerge, from time to time, from the ocean of history, under the same circumstances and forms, and in which it is as impossible not to perceive the hand of heaven, as it is to overlook the operation of submarine fire in the formation of a new island. As in the extensive department of acoustics, different nations have appropriated different sounds to one and the same object, and have expressed it by different words,—hence, the variety of languages; so, in the many-toned domain of history, one and the same occurrence has been passed unnoticed by many nations, and, by many others, viewed and represented in different lights. Hence the variety of histories, according to the difference of the characters and genius of countries and nations. The universally opposed _polarity_, if we may so express it, of the east and the west, appears even in the different mode of writing history. Some events are related by European, some by oriental writers, and when they coincide, the same occurrence is viewed in an entirely different light. What escapes the one is seized by the other, and the latter considers attentively what the other passes over. How very different are the judgments of eastern and western historians, concerning the original condition of mankind, the rise of kingdoms, the institution of religions, the developement of civilization, the horrors of despotism, the struggles of liberty, and the continued connexion of causes and effects! Where the one views immutable necessity, the other perceives very often blind chance; and what is deemed by the latter the consequence of a present crime, appears to the former the punishment of one long past. This, however, is not the place to proceed farther with these remarks; yet we have an opportunity of advantageously applying them to the next event which we shall have to consider.