Since 1789 every European people has been busy making a throne, or seat of government and authority, from which its ruler might preside. These thrones have been of many patterns, to correspond to the diversity in tastes of races, parties, and times. Often, the business of destroying seems to have left no leisure for building. In England alone have men learned how to remodel a throne without disturbing its occupant; as we in America raise or move large houses without interrupting the daily life o

One by one the nations of the world come to their own, have free play for their faculties, express themselves, and eventually pass onward into silence. Our age has beheld the elevation of Prussia. Well may we ask, “What has been her message? What the path by which she climbed into preëminence?” That she would reach the summit, the work of Frederick the Great in the last century, and of Stein at the beginning of this, portended. It has been Bismarck’s mission to amplify and complete their task. T

Madame de Staël said of Rienzi and his Romans: “They mistook reminiscences for hopes;” of the second French Empire and the third Napoleon we may say: “They staked their hopes on reminiscences.” In our individual lives we realize the power of memory, suggestion, association. If we have ever yielded to a vice, we have felt, it may be years after, how the sight of the old conditions revives the old temptation. A glance, a sound, a smell, may be enough to conjure up a long series of events, whether

The history of Hungary is in this respect unique: it records the career of an alien tribe which, cutting its way from Eastern Asia to the heart of Europe, founded there a nation, and this nation, after the friction of a thousand years, still preserves its racial characteristics. In 894 Duke Arpád led his horde of Magyars—whose earlier kinsmen were Huns and Avars—up the valley of the Danube. Long were they a terror to Europe; then, gradually, they had to content themselves with Hungary as their h

When men look back, two or three hundred years hence, upon the nineteenth century, it may well be that they will discern its salient characteristic to have been, not scientific, not inventive, as we popularly suppose, but romantic . Science will soon bury our present heaps of facts under larger accumulations, from the summit of which broader theories may be scanned; to-morrow will make to-day’s wonderful invention old-fashioned and insufficient: but the romance with which this later time has bee

Dr. Samuel Johnson , during a long life, cherished an aversion, Platonic rather than militant, for Scotland and the Scotch. Had any one told him that out of the land where oats were fed to men there should issue, soon after his death, a master of romance, an incomparable singer, and a historian without rival, we can well imagine the emphasis with which he would have said, “Tut! tut! sir, that is impossible!” Nevertheless, for the best part of a century Scotland has shed her influence through the

[5] First printed in The Atlantic Monthly , June, 1891. We have no authentic biography of Tintoret. The men of his epoch hungered for fame, but it was by the splendor of their genius, and not by the details of their personal lives, that they hoped to be known to posterity. The days of judicious Boswells and injudicious Froudes had not then come to pass; so that we are now as ignorant of the lives of the painters of the great school which flourished at Venice during the sixteenth century as of th

[27] First printed in The Atlantic Monthly , March, 1890. On Saturday, the 23d of May, 1592, Giovanni Mocenigo, son of the late excellent Marcantonio Mocenigo, addressed to the Father Inquisitor of Venice a letter containing charges of heresy against Giordano Bruno, the Nolan. Among other things, he alleged that Bruno had said “that it is a great blasphemy to say, as Catholics do, that bread is changed to flesh; that he is hostile to the mass; that no religion satisfies him; that Christ was a go

There are many good reasons why we should celebrate the one hundredth birthday of William Cullen Bryant. [34] Not the least of them is this, that in bringing him our tribute we also commemorate the birthday of American poetry. He was our earliest poet, and “Thanatopsis” our earliest poem. Through him, therefore, we make festival to the Muse who has taught many since him to sing. [34] First printed in The Review of Reviews , New York, October, 1894. Older than Bryant were three single-poem men,—F