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Gibbon says twenty years: Sharon Turner gives 1074. Bollandist. Mai. 5. Ranke's Hist. of the Popes. "The battle of Lepanto arrested for ever the danger of Mahometan invasion in the south of Europe." Alison's Europe, vol. ix. p. 95.
Ranke's indefatigable zeal, his anxiety "in history always to see the thing as in very deed it enacted itself," never carried him nearer his object than the impression of an impression. No State papers, no documents, the most authentic, can take us further.
It is the third paragraph of his well-known review of Von Ranke's History of the Popes. The passage is familiar to all readers, and some of its phrases are household words.
In Froude's Elizabeth one gets the impression that the Simancas manuscripts furnish a disproportionate basis of the narrative; in Ranke's England, that the story is made up too much from the Venetian archives.
Thus, we have Ranke's "Popes" and D'Aubigne's "Reformation," Hallam's "Middle Ages" and "English Constitution"; De Quincey treats of "The Caesars"; Vico demonstrates that History is a science with positive laws; Gervinus illustrates it as a development of certain inevitably progressive ideas; Niebuhr interprets it by fresh tests and ordeals; Dr.
Gardiner also we owe the publication, through the Camden Society, of reports of some of the earlier Stuart Parliaments. Ranke's "History of England during the Seventeenth Century" has the same documentary value as embodying the substance of state-papers in both English and foreign archives, which throw great light on the foreign politics of the Stuart kings.
Niebuhr's Roman History, Wilken's History of the Crusades, Leo's History of Italy, Ranke's History of the Popes, etc., have attained well-merited fame.
Cf. L. Ranke's excellent considerations upon the essence of Roman Law in his Weltgeschichte, Bd. iv. Abth. 2, pp. 20-31. Also Sismondi's remarks upon the part played by the legistes in the constitution of royal authority, Histoire des Francais, Paris, 1826, viii. 85-99.
Herr Ranke has got access, in the Archives, to a series of private utterances by Friedrich, Letters from him, of a franker nature than usual, and letting us far deeper into his mind; which must have been well worth reading in the original, in their fully dated and developed condition. From Herr Ranke's Fragmentary Excerpts, let us, thankful for what we have got, select one or two.
Here we close this hasty sketch of one of the most important portions of the history of mankind. Our readers will have great reason to feel obliged to us if we have interested them sufficiently to induce them to peruse Professor Ranke's book.
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