The Historians' History of the World 01

It will appear that Raleigh did not carry his history beyond the early Roman period, yet, even so, it is a very bulky book, comprising more than eight hundred enormous quarto pages, an actual bulk far exceeding the extant portions of Diodorus. Raleigh very generally names his authorities in the margin, but even had he failed to do so, it would be easy to understand the sources on which he must have drawn. Obviously he depended largely upon the Bible for the early history of mankind, and for the rest he had access, no doubt, to the dozen or so of classical authors whose names we have had occasion to mention again and again. Naturally enough, the pages of Raleigh seem archaic to the modern reader, yet passages are not wanting which show the shrewd practical insight of the courtier and statesman. As a whole, the work had sufficient interest to be reprinted in 1687, a century after the author’s death. Indeed, until this time there was practically no world history in the field in competition with Raleigh’s that had been written since classical times. It is a curious commentary on the life of the post-classical times and of the middle ages that between the work of Diodorus, written just before the beginning of the Christian era, and the work altogether similar in scope of Sir Walter Raleigh, written sixteen hundred years later, there was no world history produced that is strictly comparable to either. Nor did the seventeenth century produce any marked change in the situation as regards the literature of world history.

The true renaissance of history writing came with the eighteenth century. About 1730 an English publisher was led to notice the paucity of recent literature in this field, and to project a universal history of the widest scope. Such men as Archibald Bower, John Campbell, William Guthrie, George Sale, George Psalmanazar, and John Swinton were associated in the undertaking, and in the course of the following twenty years a long series of volumes dealing with all phases of universal history, except, curiously enough, the history of Great Britain, was brought to a close. A subsequent edition, modified and improved as regards the earlier volumes, and supplemented with an account of English history, was published toward the close of the eighteenth century, the editor being the famous Dr. Tobias Smollett. This work, the first important history of the world produced in modern times, excited great interest. It is odd to reflect in the light of more recent events that the work was translated into various European languages, including German. The production of this work was a notable achievement, but the various parts of the work had widely different degrees of merit. A competent German critic, writing about the middle of the nineteenth century, conceded that the parts of the universal history referring to antiquity were fairly well done, but noted that the treatment of the middle ages was superficial, and the treatment of modern history even worse.

Inasmuch as the history of antiquity has been very largely reconstructed within the past fifty years, it will be obvious that the universal history in question cannot now be regarded with other than an antiquarian interest. Nevertheless, it contains numberless descriptive passages, which are as historically accurate and as interesting to-day as they were when written.