But two chapters out of seventy-one
constitute a small proportion. In the remainder of his work he is as
free from bias and unfairness as human frailty can well allow. The
annotated editions of Milman and Guizot are guarantees of this. Their
critical animadversions become very few and far between after the
first volume is passed. If he had been animated by a polemical object
in writing; if he had used the past as an arsenal from which to draw
weapons to attack the present, we may depend that a swift blight would
have shrivelled his labours, as it did so many famous works of the
eighteenth century, when the great day of reaction set in. His mild
rebuke of the Abbe Raynal should not be forgotten. He admired the
_History of the Indies_. It is one of the few books that he has
honoured with mention and praise in the text of his own work. But he
points out that the "zeal of the philosophic historian for the rights
of mankind" had led him into a blunder. It was not only Gibbon's
scholarly accuracy which saved him from such blunders. Perhaps he had
less zeal for the rights of mankind than men like Raynal, whose
general views he shared.
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