4 



Second General Meeting. 



trivial in themselves, subsequently become of the greatest importance 

 as furnishing materials for future history. (Cheers). It was an 

 observation of Dugdale's when he was referring to the marginal 

 notes of the ancient editions of those great authors, Suetonius, 

 Livy, and Tacitus — that he was surprised to see into what musty 

 parchments of old Rome these historians must have dived. And I 

 think in our own time — when history is at last beginning to be written 

 — when we have not merely the skeletons, the dry bones of past events 

 — but when the spirit of history is evoked — that we have the most 

 graphic pictures placed before us, of the manners and customs of 

 the times gone by. I believe no one who has read any chapter of 

 Macauley's celebrated book can fail to observe that, from materials 

 mean and meagre in themselves — from the ballads and trash and 

 trifles of the day — the historian has contrived to group together 

 such a picture as was never placed before us by any other writer, 

 of the manners and customs of our forefathers, at a very interesting 

 period of English history. (Applause). It is likewise true that 

 the contemplation of anything tending to divert our minds from 

 the present to something more distant is calculated, as Dr. Johnson 

 remarks, "to advance us in dignity as thinking beings." There is 

 a sort of national pride to be taken in that which has gone before 

 us — it is like the pride which nations take in their descent (for 

 nations have descents and ancestors as well as individuals) — 

 but whether they use that pride for a good or bad purpose must 

 depend upon the spirit in which they feel its advantages. It was 

 an observation, which I have always thought a very wise one, of 

 Sir Thomas Overbury, who, — when speaking of persons who laid 

 all their claims of merit upon their ancestors — said "they very much 

 resembled the potato, because the best part was underground/ ' 

 (Laughter). And so it is with regard to nations. If they merely 

 occupy themselves with thoughts of their past grandeur, of their 

 past successes, and of the eminent men they have produced, as a 

 means of puffing off their own vanity, and not as imposing fresh 

 s duties and fresh calls to exertion, to maintain the name which they 

 have acquired from the efforts of those who preceded them, they 

 come under the same denomination as that valuable esculent to 



