Revolutions in English History
By Vol. I. Revolutions of Race. New York : D. Appleton & Co. 1860. pp. xvi., 563.
WE do not think that Dr. Vaughan has been happy in his choice of a title for his book. It is more properly an introduction to the study of English history, than the limitation of the title would seem to import. The Saxon occupation of England is, perhaps, the only event which may fitly be called a revolution of race. The volume, however, is a solid and sensible one. Dr. Vaughan is not a brilliant writer; but brilliancy is not always the best quality in an historian, for it as often leaves readers dazzled as taught. A decidedly matter-of-fact turn of mind prevents his being a theorist, so that he does not formulate characters and events in accordance with some fixed preconception. His learning seems sometimes limited by what was accessible to him at the least expense of study,—as, for example, in his account of the religion of the Teutonic races, where he depends almost altogether on Mallet. His style is generally clear and unpretending, never remarkable for any rhetorical merit, sometimes disfigured by inaccuracies, which, had they occurred in an American book, would have been attributed by English critics to the low grade of our culture and civilization. In one instance he is guilty of the barbarous cockney ism of using the word party as an equivalent for person. He speaks of the Roman Wall as having been kept perpetually guarded when he means constantly, of border land as “ separating between” two races, and of ornaments made “from jet.”
Though we do not find in Dr. Vaughan the fascinating qualities which we have been spoiled into expecting by some recent English and French examples of historical composition, we can give him the praise of being fair-minded, sensible, and clear. If he anywhere shows prejudice, it is in his somewhat depreciatory estimate of the Normans, whom he rather gratuitously supposes to have acquired civilization and the love of art from the Saxons, — a supposition at war with probability as well as fact. If anything distinguished the Norman from the Saxon, it was his aptitude for appreciating beauty as distinguished from use,—an aptitude on which French influence could not have been lost before the Conquest of England. The Normans in Sicily certainly had not had the advantage of Saxon training in æsthetics, and the poetry and architecture of the Normans in England were no reproduction of Saxon models.
But whatever deductions are to be made on the score of want of picturesqueness in style, of generalizing power, and of that imagination which sets before us dramatically the mutual interaction of men and events, Dr. Vaughan’s history will be found a useful and enlightened compendium of the facts with which it deals.