Apart from Swift's other views, there are to be found scattered through his writings not a few distinct propositions of an innovative character respecting our social arrangements. We have seen his doctrine as to the education of women; and we may mention, as another instance of the same kind, his denunciation of the system of standing armies as incompatible with freedom. Curiously enough, also, it was Swift's belief that, Yahoos though we are, the world is always in the right. HOW LITERATURE MAY ILLUSTRATE HISTORY.1 SOME of the ways in which Literature may illustrate History are obvious enough. In the poems, the songs, the dramas, the novels, the satires, the speeches, even the speculative treatises, of any time or nation, there is imbedded a wealth of direct particulars respecting persons and events, additional to the information that has been transmitted in the formal records of that time or nation, or in its express histories of itself. "It has often come to my ears that it is a saying too frequently in your mouth that you have lived long enough for yourself:" so did Cicero, if the speech in which the passage occurs is really his, address Cæsar face to face, in the height of his power, and not long before his assassination, remonstrating with him on his melancholy, and his carelessness of a life so precious to Rome and to the world. If the words are any way authentic, what a flash they are into the mind of the great Roman 1 Macmillan's Magazine, July 1871. in his last years, when, blasé with wars and victories, and all the sensations that the largest life on earth could afford, he walked about the streets of Rome, consenting to live on so long as there might be need, but, so far as he himself was concerned, heedless when the end might come, the conspirators in a ring round him, the short scuffle, the first sharp stab of the murderous knife! Let this pass as one instance of a valuable illustration of Biography and History derived from casual reading. Literature teems with such no one can tell what particles of direct historical and biographical information lie yet undiscovered and unappropriated in miscellaneous books. But there is an extension of the use for the historian of the general literature of the time with which he may be concerned. Not only does Literature teem with yet unappropriated anecdotes respecting the persons and events of most prominent interest in the consecutive history of the world; but quite apart from this, the books, and especially the popular books, of any time, are the richest possible storehouses of the kind of information the historian wants. Whatever may be the main thread of his narrative, he has to re-imagine more or less vividly what is called the general life of the time, its manners, customs, humours, ways of thinking, the working of its institutions, all the peculiarities of that patch of the never |