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Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow TO HENRY REEVE, ESQ. - Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 2

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TO HENRY REEVE, ESQ. - Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 2 [1861]

Edition used:

Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated from the French by the translator of Napoleon’s Correspondence with King Joseph. With large Additions. In Two Volumes (London: Macamillan, 1861). 2 vols.

Part of: Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, 2 vols.

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TO HENRY REEVE, ESQ.

I am sorry, my dear friend, to lose the hope of seeing you this spring, but I feel your reasons.

I am employing my leisure profitably by reading again, and with increased attention, Grote’s “History.” It is a much greater work than I at first supposed it to be. Not that it is written with the art which so eminently distinguishes Macaulay: the want of this art may prevent its general popularity, but it is a work which will not perish, and which cannot well be added to. The learning is immense, and sound. Institutions, men, and facts, are shown and appreciated with great political experience, and this is a rare element in the works of learned historians. The modern feelings which inspire the narrator of the events of 3,000 years ago, reanimate the dead. The author, when he defends his friends, and attacks his enemies, of the hundredth Olympiad, illustrates their actions and their thoughts with as much honesty as sagacity. I could not have supposed that so old a history could have excited so vivid an interest.

I expect to find in Paris the first of all conversers, our friend Senior, charged, like a forty-eight pounder, with all the news of the East and of the West, and ready to explode, to the great pleasure of his friends. His travels in the East must have added most instructive matter to his journal. My paper is at an end.