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.But soonafter 1756, philosophy had reared its demanding head, and the problemv ¹ MW, iv, p.63.v ² MW, iv, p.69.v ³ MW, iv, pp.422 34.YEG, pp.93 5. The Essai sur l étude de la littérature 233of reconciling narrative with deep interpretation had come to the fore.Livy,plus attaché à plaire qu à instruire, vous conduit pas-à-pas à la suite de seshéros, et vous fait éprouver tour-à-tour, l horreur, l admiration, et la pitié.Tacite ne se sert de l empire que l éloquence a sur le cSur, que pour lier à vosyeux la chaine des événemens, et remplir votre âme des plus sages leçons.Jegravis sur les Alpes avec Annibal, mais j assiste au conseil de Tibère.Tite-Liveme peint l abus du pouvoir, une sévérite que la nature approuve en frémissant,la vengeance et l amour qui s unissent à la liberté, la tyrannie qui tombe sousleur coups: mais les loix des décemvirs, leur caractère, leurs défauts, leursrapports enfin avec leurs desseins ambitieux, il les oublie totalement.Je ne voispoint chez lui comment ces loix faites pour une république bornée, pauvre, àdemi-sauvage, la bouleversèrent, lorsque la force de son institution l eut portéeau faite de la grandeur.Je l aurois trouvé dans Tacite.v t[Livy, more concerned to please than to instruct, leads you step by step in thepath of his heroes, and makes you feel by turns horror, admiration and pity.Tacitus makes use of eloquence and its empire over the heart only to forgebefore your eyes the linked chain of events and to fill the soul with the mostsagacious lessons.I climb in the Alps with Hannibal, but I am present in thecouncil of Tiberius.Livy depicts for me the abuse of power, a severity thatnature approves while shuddering, the revenge and the love which join to seekliberty, the tyranny which falls before their blows; but the laws of the decemvirs,their character, their faults, in short what led them to their ambitious designs,he altogether neglects.I do not see with him how the laws made for a republiclimited, poor and half savage, overthrew it when the energy of its foundationhad led it to the pinnacle of greatness.I should have found this in Tacitus.]At this point d Alembert emerges once more; cet écrivain qui unit,comme Fontenelle, le savoir et le goût , but ce juge éclairé, mais sévère ,who has proposed that at the end of each century tous les faits meaning presumably the body of recorded knowledge should be re-viewed, a few preserved and the remainder burned.v uConservons-les tous précieusement.Un Montesquieu démêlera dans les pluschétifs, des rapports inconnus au vulgaire.Imitons les botanistes.Toutes lesplantes ne sont pas utiles dans la médecine, cependant ils ne cessent d endécouvrir de nouvelles.Ils espèrent que le génie et les travaux heureux yverront des propriétés jusqù à présent cachées.v v[Let us carefully preserve them all.A Montesquieu will disentangle from themost insignificant of them relationships unknown to the common eye.Wev t MW, iv, pp.66 7.v u The reference is to d Alembert s Mélanges de philosophie et de littérature, published in 1760.v v MW, iv, pp.67 8. 234 Paris and the defence of erudition, 1758 1763should imitate the botanists.Not all plants are medicinally useful, yet they nevercease to discover new species, hoping that by genius and well-judged researchesthey will discern properties still unknown.]And in fact the penultimate sentence of the passage comparingTacitus and Livy is Montesquieuan rather than Tacitean, and what wefind in the Roman is the arcana imperii, the hidden moves and motives ofstatesmen, rather than the general laws of the growth and decline ofpolities.The shift from Livy to Tacitus is made in a direction Machiavel-lian and still more Guicciardinian; from the heroic eloquence whichdepicts the foundations of civic virtue to the serpentine narrative andgnomic maxims which convey the counsels, or disregard of them, of thetyrant; and not so much to the discovery of general laws as to that ofanachronism.The truism that good laws work ill effects when circum-stances change was a discovery of the Florentine authors.The linkbetween Tacitism and Enlightenment is not clear, but must include thepremise that the function of historiography is to find general causes butto see their effects as infinitely and challengingly diverse.If we searchGibbon s references for the sources of that richness of exploitableinformation which renders the érudit the equal of the philosophe, we findauthors already and prospectively important in his reading: d Herbelotand Sale, Conyers Middleton, Jean Le Clerc, Isaac de Beausobre,Hume, Montesquieu and Warburton.v w We also find a large number ofacknowledgements to authors found in the Mémoires de l Académie, morethan any other to Freret and the Abbé de la Bléterie
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