not the proper offering of a biographer? May not all that is more than this be left to the individual reader with his own peculiar tastes and needs? By his temperateness, Mr. Schuy ler has humanized what was before by turns Ogre and DemiGod. The reader will supply the "critical summing up and final sentence, as to the issue and crown of the narrative" for himself and right gratefully.

I am tempted to refer in conclusion to the condescension of our author, who feeds the literary sense with bits of small fact, or particulars and details. Mr. Freeman complains that Ælfred is to the vulgar the king who let the cakes burn. Of course and if the truth were told, would we not all rank with the vulgar in this taste for simple, characteristic facts about historical personages? Our interest is aroused, and legitimately aroused, by those acts of theirs which are of a nature apparently assorted with our own lives. Everybody wants to know even about their faces that William II. had a red beard, whereas the Normans at Senlac were clean shaven; and Cromwell a wart above his nose. Comparatively few really care to remember that Haroun the Just sent an elephant to the great Karl. Either we or some of our friends have facial adornments or otherwise: none of our friends has an Empire. But further, the object of historical writing is confessedly the exposition of the past for the sake of the present. We of the present, readers of history, owe to-day to the development of political institutions, and to-morrow we shall owe to their continuance. But we owe our to-days and to-morrows to them very much as the Hollander owes his plate of cheese to the dikes: they enable us to live as we wish without interference. We have practically little to do with them. We ask them to let us alone and make other fellows stand out of our sunshine. Such is the ideal of political institutions according to the latest theory. They and the great or small men and women who have made them or have been made by them, belong not to our sphere. Our interest extends only at rare intervals beyond the private lives of ourselves and of the great or mean men and women about us. Certainly then, to make events long past and the dead of former generations vividly present and real, actions and actors alike may properly be summoned to appear by the spell of homely incidents.

ARTICLE V. -THE HISTORICAL METHOD AND
PURPOSE IN PHILOLOGY.*

IN an eloquent discourse entitled "The Mediatorial Office of Philology" (Das Mittleramt der Philologie), Ernst Curtius points out the fact that every science has a historical basis and method, in the following words: "Thus, however many groups of facts there may be that form a distinct series and that demand a separate line of investigation; however manifold the articulations of the great body of science; whether the facts to be investigated are those of the development of the human mind, or those of the movements of planets; whether they lie in the relations of space and number, in the life of an organism or in inorganic matter, or in the hidden forces of nature that present no visible object to the perceptions of sense,-one effort inspires and informs every investigation, to wit to recognize the ground of existence for that which is, the motive force in that which moves, in phenomena to find the producing cause, in the accidental the indwelling purpose, and in the isolated the connection with the whole. In this broad sense all scientific research is resolved into the history of nature and of man.”

Philology has to do with the history of man; and a true conception of it, as we shall try to show, can be gained only by contemplating it as the historical study of man as revealed in language, literature, and art. This compass and aim of philology are clearly marked in the successive stages of its development as a science.

The epochs of this growth are not difficult to determine; they are marked by the names of Scaliger, Bentley, Heyne, Wolf, Bopp, Hermann, Boeckh, and Ritschl. Each of these names stands for a tendency and a development.

* An Address delivered at Hanover, N. H., July 8, 1884, before the American Philological Association by Martin L. D'Ooge, Professor in the University of Michigan.

The Address was prefaced by a survey of the progress of philology during the current year.

The Italian renaissance in art and letters delivered the humanities from the barrenness and bigotry, the pedantry and prudishness of medieval scholasticism. With open-eyed wonder the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries read the long-buried treasures of classical literature, and philology, if we may use the term here by way of anticipation, which before had been simply a knack, a hair-splitting of words, a dead routine, now became the art of imitating the great models of Greece and Rome. The disclosure of the old classical world to the gaze of the newly awakened age aroused an unquenchable desire to gain complete possession of the entire store of the material that had so long been locked up. This was the epoch of the external reconstruction, so to say, of antiquity. No nook or crypt of research that was supposed would yield even the slightest result in the study of the ancient civilization was left unexplored. Scaliger, the chief name of this period, was not only the polyhistor "of infinite reading," but he is the first to deserve the name philologist in any sense, inasmuch as he sought to grasp and to combine-superficially though it was—the various parts and different sides of philological study, such as grammar and antiquities, text criticism and chronology.

But philology was not yet a science. It was hardly a true discipline; it was reserved for England to produce the man who should make it that-Richard Bentley. Bentley's greatness lies in his wonderful grasp of all related facts and his unerring induction. He was able to array and to set in order all single and separate parts, and to concentrate, as it were, all rays of light into one focus. In his "Letters of Phalaris" we have the first brilliant example of objective literary and historical criticism. Nothing but a complete acquaintance with the monuments of ancient literature, informed by a sharp discernment of the conditions of ancient life, could so clarify his vision that he was enabled to separate the genuine from the false and to disclose to view the secrets of authorship. If we may not say with Bunsen that Bentley is the founder of historical philology, we can at least subscribe to the opinion of another German scholar, that he inaugurated a new era in literary criticism. Under his influence, perpetuated by the school of Hemsterhuis, the vague conjectures and fanciful specula

tions of the earlier criticism gave way to rigid inductions and methodical divinations that were well-nigh reduced to a certainty.

In tracing the development of a science it is interesting to observe its unconscious endeavor to combine and to organize its varied parts,-to construct a consistent unit out of many fractions. The two men to whom above all others is due the praise of making philology a separate science are Heyne and Wolf. Heyne, recognizing the fundamental principle of all science to be the procedure from the special to the general, from the separate to the combined whole, to contemplate all sides, the outer and the inner life, directed attention especially to the value of the historical and archæological side of classical studies. To him belongs the credit of being the first to introduce into the academic curriculum the study of the archaology of art, in which he laid special stress upon the study of mythology as illustrated in ancient art. The value of this discipline in philology has ever since been fully recognized in the German and French schools. In England and with us the place that archæology should hold in a complete course of classical study has not yet been determined. The recent establishment of a course of lecturers on archæology and of a museum of classical art at the University of Cambridge promises well for that branch of philological study in England. Signs of a new interest in the study of classical archæology are appearing among us also, and American scholars are beginning to recognize its value as the means of a better appreciation of all philological research.

But Heyne, with all his breadth of view and insight into the life of classical antiquity, did not bring it to pass that philology was recognized as an independent and true science. At most it was still a discipline, in the service of theology. And so long as it remained in this menial position, the handmaid of a despotic master, it must needs be greatly circumscribed and trammeled in its life. When, therefore, Wolf, a stripling of eighteen years, persisted, against the wishes of the Rector of the University of Göttingen, in matriculating as studiosus philologiae, he struck a blow for the independence of philology better than he knew. As teacher and critic it

was his constant aim to show the organic relation of the various parts of philological study, and to build a systematic structure in which each discipline should find its proper place. Whatever fault may be found now with Wolf's analysis of philology into twenty-four different disciplines, his efforts to make philology an independent science and to correlate its parts must always be regarded as marking an epoch. Wolf seems to have assigned to the historical-archæological side of philology a disproportionate place, or at least to have underrated the function of grammatical study and the value of textual criticism. This predilection may be inferred from his definition of philology as "the science of classical antiquity, the final goal of which is the acquaintance with the ancient Greek and Roman man himself, an acquaintance which is to be gained from the study of the monuments of classical antiquity pursued with the purpose to trace the development of an organic and real national life and culture." The utterances of Wolf against a certain class of grammarians were doubtless deserved at the time, and may still have some pertinence. So, e. g., in his edition of the "Phaedo" he allows himself an outburst of passion against grammatical collectors and statisticians, who, "without mastering the principle of analogy or any other fundamental truth, are forever occupied with collecting separate items which never produce an idea; and who, wandering about in the chase after words and phrases and allowing the catch of yesterday to be canceled by that of to-day, never come to any insight or decision why and under what conditions a usage must be grammatically correct."

But if the grammatical-critical side of philology was disesteemed to any degree by Wolf, it received speedy and complete vindication by Hermann, and if Hermann undervalued the archæological-historical side, there stood August Boeckh ready to strike telling blows for "the reconstruction of classical antiquity."

It is a well-known paradox that in the growth of a science there must always be present at one and the same time a conscious aim at organic unity and the energy of diverse tendencies working towards different and yet harmonious ends. The historical development of a science depends accordingly