Lectures on Modern History, from the Irruption of the Northern Nations to the Close of the American Revolution (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Lectures on Modern History, From the Irruption of the Northern Nations to the Close of the American Revolution

Nothing so much embarrasses a student, who is beginning the study of history, as the difficulty he finds in selecting the best authors, ascertaining their intrinsic and relative merits, and in marking out for himself the most profitable course of reading. He is bewildered, amidst a multitude of books, and perpetually at a loss, as he proceeds, to determine the comparative importance of periods, events, and characters. If he seeks a guide, he is either met by a dry catalogue of authors, arranged with little discrimina tion, or referred to abridgments and abstracts, as destitute of the soul and substance of history, properly so called, as a skeleton is of the Spirit and proportions of a living man. His time is thus lost and his patience exhausted, while he makes scarcely any progress in those acquisitions which it is the design of history to communi cate, and by which the mind should be expanded and strengthened at the same time that it is enriched with facts.

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