have made an Index for these huge books! Even your genius, had you been faithful, was adequate to that. Those thirty thousand or fifty thousand old Newspapers and Pamphlets of the King’s Library, it is you, my voluminous friend, that should have sifted them, many long years ago. Instead of droning out these melancholy scepticisms, constitutional philosophies, torpedo narratives, you should have sifted those old stacks of pamphlet-matter for us, and have had the metal grains lying here accessible, and the dross-heaps lying there avoidable; you had done the human memory a service thereby; some human remembrance of this matter had been more possible!’
Certainly this description does not want for emphasis: but all ingenuous inquirers into the Past will say there is too much truth in it. Nay, in addition to the sad state of our Historical Books, and what indeed is fundamentally the cause and origin of that, our common spiritual notions, if any notion of ours may still deserve to be called spiritual, are fatal to a right understanding of that Seventeenth Century. The Christian Doctrines which then dwelt alive in every heart, have now in a manner died out of all hearts,—very mournful to behold; and are not the guidance of this world any more. Nay worse still, the Cant of them does yet dwell alive with us, little doubting that it is Cant;—in which fatal intermediate state the Eternal Sacredness of this Universe itself, of this Human Life itself, has fallen dark to the most of us, and we think that too a Cant and a Creed. Thus the old names suggest new things to us,—not august and divine, but hypocritical, pitiable, detestable. The old names and similitudes of belief still circulate from tongue to tongue, though now in such a ghastly condition: not as commandments of the Living God, which we must do, or perish eternally; alas, no, as something very different from that! Here properly lies the grand unintelligibility of the Seventeenth Century for us. From this source has proceeded our maltreatment of it, our miseditings, miswritings, and all the other ‘avalanche of
