We challenge all modern history and biography for the production of three parallels to our chosen {229} models, whose works can contribute so much to the attainment of this particular end. Davila, the favorite of Hampden,--and Guicciardini, whom St. John preferred to all modern historians,--have some of the excellences of which we have been speaking, but will any one compare them to the first? In the English language, Clarendon is the only history worthy of the attention of the student in search of an author who illustrates the science of human nature by a reference to the recorded experience of past generations. The works of Gibbon, Hume and Robertson, are admirable for their style and general interest, but they take no true views of man (_epistola non erubescit_) as the instrument of legislation; they do not present us with that impersonation of the common qualities and motives of our nature, which alone can be the subject of laws, and whose character only can be moulded by the general institutions of society,--in short, with that man who is the true subject of the politician's study. Indeed we doubt if the historical works of these gentlemen ever were or ever will be the favorites of any great and practical statesman,--a test which we ask shall be applied to the models which we have chosen. We are perfectly aware of what we hazard by such assertions, but safe behind our mask, we feel secure from danger. In the view of the course of study which we have just been surveying, we paused at the point where the inquirer having learnt the strength and the temper of the various great springs which chiefly influence human action, had turned aside to ascertain the best modes of handling them by a reference to the experience of those who had successfully regulated the machinery of society and effected in its movements the particular objects which they had in view. From this point, the transition is easy from the history and biography of antiquity to its oratory. For where shall we find the springs of human action so dexterously handled? It must be remembered that the orators of antiquity approached their subjects under circumstances very different from those which attend our modern debates. They practised upon the societies in which they lived, under the same penalties which attend the eastern physician who undertakes the Sultan's cure. The gift of this splendid but fatal talisman of the heart was always attended with the most unhappy consequences to its possessor. Exile and death were the penalties, in case of failure, in the measures which they recommended, or even in case of the loss of popular affection. And so deep were the distresses of those gifted but unhappy children of genius, that one of their most sincere admirers was forced to exclaim "Ridenda poemata malo Quam te conspicuæ divina Philippica famæ, Volveris a prima quæ proxima."