cal characters are at least as real as those of romance, which they are very far from being to us, and he enters into their impressions and motives with a facile sympathy which we rarely feel. Not only does he firmly believe that Marcus Curtius leaped into the gulf, but he has not yet learned to question the expediency of the act; and, having never been enlightened by Mr. Grote, the black broth of Lykurgus is as much a matter of fact to him as the bread and butter upon his own breakfast table. Sir Walter Scott tells us that even the dinner-bell—most welcome sound to boyish ears—failed to win him from his rapt perusal of Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry; but Gibbon, as a lad, found the passage of the Goths over the Danube just as engrossing, and, stifling the pangs of hunger, preferred to linger fasting in their company. The great historian's early love for history has furnished Mr. Bagehot with one more proof of the fascination of such records for the youthful mind, and he bids us at the same time consider from what a firm and tangible standpoint it regards them. "Youth," he writes, "has a principle of consolidation. In history, the whole comes
