Hence also the propriety of discrimination among the various kinds of fact which are at the historian’s disposal, and in this order Voltaire’s whole soul revolted against the reigning practice and prescription. ‘I would rather have details,’ he wrote to one of his intimates so early in his career as 1735, ‘about Racine and Despréaux, Molière, Bossuet, Descartes, than I would about the battle of Steinkirk. There is nothing left but the names of men who led battalions and squadrons. There is no return to the human race from a hundred engagements; but the great men I have spoken of prepared pure and everlasting pleasures for mortals still unborn. A canal-sluice, a picture by Poussin, a fine tragedy, a truth established, are all of them things a thousand times more precious than the whole mass of annals of the court, and than all the narratives of campaigns.’[245] From this and from a multitude of other passages, as well as from his actual compositions, we perceive that the activity of a court and the manœuvres of an army were no longer in Voltaire’s eyes the fit substance of history. One reason for this might be his lively sense of the impossibility of knowing the character and motives of people with whom one has not lived, or the real cause of even the most momentous intrigues and negotiations in which one has not taken a personal share. A still deeper reason would be his most rational conviction that these matters are only of moment to us for their larger results and unmistakable outcome, and from the profoundly true and important principle that the progress of intellectual enlightenment, material prosperity, and moral elevation is not only a feature in the history of a nation, but does itself constitute that history, while all records of other transactions in the course of its annals, achievements in diplomacy, feats of arms, revolutions in policy, have no true historic value, except for the light they shed upon this economic, intellectual, and moral progress, and are not worth studying except in that light. We may see the immediate effects of Voltaire’s influence most markedly of all in Gibbon, but in a less important shape in the general account of the middle ages which Robertson contributed to his History of Charles V. (1769), and which remained for many years the most instructive piece that our literature possessed upon the character and spirit of the feudal system and other features of the middle ages. Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) bears traces of the same influence. In both of these cases much also must be added for the kindred authority of Montesquieu. One has some hesitation in adding Hume to the list in the present connection, because his history, the composition of which extended from 1752 to 1763, ought perhaps to be counted rather the direct and independent outcome of the French philosophic spirit, than of the French historic spirit which itself