The faults of Herodotus are the faults of a simple and imaginative mind. Children and servants are remarkably Herodotean in their style of narration. They tell every thing dramatically. Their says hes and says shes are proverbial. Every person who has had to settle their disputes knows that, even when they have no intention to deceive, their reports of conversation always require to be carefully sifted. If an educated man were giving an account of the late change of administration, he would say, "Lord Goderich resigned; and the king in consequence sent for the Duke of Wellington." A porter tells the story as if he had been hid behind the curtains of the royal bed at Windsor. "So Lord Goderich says, 'I cannot manage this business; I must go out.' So the king says, says he, 'Well, then, I must send for the Duke of Wellington, that's all." This is the very manner of the father of history.

Grecian confederacy, or the expressions which thority, but in itself not improbate, it was passed between Aristides and Themistocles at composed not to be read, but to be heard. It their famous interview, have been correctly, was not to the slow circulation of a few copies, transmitted to us. The great events are, no which the rich only could possess, that the asdoubt, faithfully related. So, probably, are piring author looked for his reward. The many of the slighter circumstances; but which great Olympian festival--the solemnity which of them it is impossible to ascertain. The fic- collected multitudes, proud of the Grecian tions are so much like the facts, and the facts name, from the wildest mountains of Doris so much like the fictions, that, with respect to and the remotest colonies of Italy and Lybia-many most interesting particulars, our belief was to witness his triumph. The interest of is neither given nor withheld, but remains in the narrative and the beauty of the style were an uneasy and interminable state of abeyance. aided by the imposing effect of recitation—by We know that there is truth, but we cannot the splendour of the spectacle-by the powerful exactly decide where it lies. influence of sympathy. A critic who could have asked for authorities in the midst of such a scene must have been of a cold and sceptical nature, and few such critics were there. As was the historian, such were the auditors-inquisitive, credulous, easily moved by religious awe or patriotic enthusiasm. They were the very men to hear with delight of strange beasts, and birds, and trees; of dwarfs, and giants, and cannibals; of gods.whose very names it was impiety to utter; of ancient dynasties which had left behind them monuments surpassing all the works of later times; of towns like provinces; of rivers like seas; of stupendous walls, and temples, and pyramids; of the rites which the Magi performed at daybreak on the tops of the mountains; of the secrets inscribed on the eternal obelisks of Memphis. With equal delight they would have listened to the graceful romances of their own country. They now heard of the exact accomplishment of obscure predictions; of the punishment of crimes over which the justice of Heaven had seemed to slumber; of dreams, o'nens, warnings from the dead; of princesses for whom noble suit ors contended in every generous exercise of strength and skill; of infants strangely pre served from the dagger of the assassin to fulfil high destinies.

Herodotus wrote as it was natural that he should write. He wrote for a nation susceptible, curious, lively, insatiably desirous of novelty and excitement; for a nation in which the fine arts had attained their highest excellence, but in which philosophy was still in its infancy. His countrymen had but recently begun to cultivate prose composition. Public transactions had generally been recorded in verse. The first historians might therefore indulge, without fear of censure, in the license allowed to their predecessors the bards. Books were few. The events of former times were learned from tradition and from popular ballads; the manners of foreign countries from the reports of travellers. It is well known that the mystery which overhangs what is distant, either in space or time, frequently prevents us from censuring as unnatural what we perceive to be impossible. We stare at a dragoon who has killed three French cuirassiers as a prodigy; yet we read, without the least disgust, how Godfrey slew his thousands, and Rinaldo his ten thousands. Within the last hundred years stories about China and Bantam, which ough. not to have imposed on an old nurse, were gravely laid down as foundations of political theories by eminent philosophers. What the time of the Crusades is to us, the generation of Croesus and Solon was to the Greeks of the time of Herodotus. Babylon was to hem what Pekin was to the French academicians of the last century.

For such a people was the book of Herodotus composed; and if we may trust to a report, not sanctioned, indeed, by writers of high au

As the narrative approached their own times the interest became still more absorbing. The chronicler had now to tell the story of that great conflict from which Europe dates its intellectual and political supremacy-a story which, even at this distance of time, is the most marvellous and the most touching in the annals of the human race-a story abounding with all that is wild and wonderful, with all that is pathetic and animating; with the gigan tic caprices of infinite wealth and despotic power; with the mightier miracles of wisdom, of virtue, and of courage. He told them of rivers dried up in a day, of provinces famished for a meal; of a passage for ships hewn through the mountains; of a road for armies spread upon the waves; of monarchies and commonwealths swept away; of anxiety, of terror, of confusion, of despair!-and then of proud and stubborn hearts tried in that extremity of evil and not found wanting; of resistance long maintained against desperate odds; of lives dearly sold when resistance could be maintained no more; of signal deliverance, and of unsparing revenge. Whatever gave a stronger air of reality to a narrative so well calculated to inflame the passions and to flatter national pride was cer tain to be favourably received.

Between the time at which Herodotus is said

that this principle holds good only in abstract | sented on a large scale, others diminished reasonings. When we talk of the truth of the great majority will be lost in the dimness imitation in the fine arts, we mean an imper- of the horizon; and a general icea of their fect and a graduated truth. No picture is ex-joint effect will be given by a few slight actly like the original: nor is a picture good touches.

in proportion as it is like the original. When In this respect no writer has ever equalled Sir Thomas Lawrence paints a handsome Thucydides. He was a perfect master of the peeress, he does not contemplate her through art of gradual diminution. His history is some a powerful microscope, and transfer to the times as concise as a chronological chart; yet canvass the pores of the skin, the blood-vessels it is always perspicuous. It is sometimes as of the eye, and all the other beauties which minute as one of Lovelace's letters; yet it is Gulliver discovered in the Brobdignaggian never prolix. He never fails to contract and maids of honour. If he were to do this, the to expand it in the right place. effect would not merely be unpleasant, but Thucydides borrowed from Herodotus the unless the scale of the picture were propor- practice of putting speeches of his own into tionably enlarged, would be absolutely false. the mouths of his characters. In Herodotus And, after all, a microscope of greater power this usage is scarcely censurable. It is of a than that which he had employed would con- piece with his whole manner. But it is alvict him of innumerable omissions. The same together incongruous in the work of his sucmay be said of history. Perfectly and abso-cessor; and violates, not only the accuracy of lutely true, it cannot be; for, to be perfectly history, but the decencies of fiction. When and absolutely true, it ought to record all the once we enter into the spirit of Herodotus, we slightest particulars of the slightest transac- find no inconsistency. The conventional protions-all the things done, and all the words bability of his drama is preserved from the uttered, during the time of which it treats. beginning to the end. The deliberate orations The omission of any circumstance, how- and the familiar dialogues are in strict keeping ever insignificant, would be a defect. If his- with each other. But the speeches of Thucytory were written thus, the Bodleian library dides are neither preceded nor followed by would not contain the occurrences of a week. any thing with which they harmonize. They What is told in the fullest and most accurate give to the whole book something of the gro annals bears an infinitely small proportion to tesque character of those Chinese pleasure what is suppressed. The difference between grounds, in which perpendicular rocks of the copious work of Clarendon, and the ac-granite start up in the midst of a soft green count of the civil wars in the abridgment of plain. Invention is shocking, where truth is Goldsmith, vanishes, when compared with the in such close juxtaposition with it. immense mass of facts respecting which both are equally silent.

Thucydides honestly tells us that some of these discourses are purely fictitious. He may have reported the substance of others correctly. But it is clear from the internal evidence that he has preserved no more than the substance. His own peculiar habits of thought and expression are everywhere discernible. Individual and national peculiarities are seldom to be traced in the sentiments, and never in the diction. The oratory of the Corinthians and Thebans is not less Attic, either in matter or in manner, than that of the Athenians. The style of Cleon is as pure, as austere, as terse, and as significant, as that of Pericles.

No picture, then, and no history, can present us with the whole truth: but those are the best pictures and the best histories which exhibit such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole. He who is deficient in the art of selection may, by showing nothing but the truth, produce all the effect of the grossest falsehood. It perpetually happens that one writer tells less truth than another, merely because he tells more truths. In the imitative arts we constantly see this. There are lines in the human face, and objects in landscape, which stand in such relations to each other, that they ought either to be all introduced into a painting together, or all omitted together. A sketch into which none of them enters may be excellent; but if some are given and others left out, though there are more points of likeness, there is less likeness. An outline scrawled with a pen, which seizes the marked features of a countenance, will give a much stronger idea of it than a bad painting in oils. Yet the worst painting in oils that ever hung in Somerset House resembles the original in many more particulars. A bust of white marble may give an excellent idea of a blooming face. Colour the lips and cheeks of the bust, leaving the hair and eyes unaltered, and the similarity, instead of being more striking, will be less so.

History has its foreground and its background. and it is principally in the management of its perspective, that one artist differs from another. Some events must be repre

In spite of this great fault, it must be allowed that Thucydides has surpassed all his rivals in the art of historical narration, in the art of producing an effect on the imagination, by skilful selection and disposition, without indulging in the license of invention. But narration, though an important part of the business of an historian, is not the whole. To append a moral to a work of fiction, is either useless or superfluous. A fiction may give a more impressive effect to what is already known, but it can teach nothing new. If it presents to us characters and trains of events to which our experience furnishes us with nothing similar, instead of deriving instruction from it, we pronounce it unnatural. We do not form our opinions from it; but we try it by our preconceived opinions. Fiction, therefore, is essentially imitative. Its merit con sists in its resemblance to a model with which we are already familiar, or to which at least

we can instantly refer. Hence it is that the anecdotes, which interest us most strongly in authentic narrative, are offensive when introduced into novels; that what is called the romantic part of history is in fact the least romantic. It is delightful as history, because it contradicts our previous notions of human nature, and of the connection of causes and effects. It is, on that very account, shocking and incongruous in fiction. In fiction, the principles are given to find the facts; in history, the facts are given to find the principles; and the writer who does not explain the phenomena as well as state them, performs only one-half of his office. Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them, like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value; and the precious particles are generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation is a task of the utmost difficulty.

sagacity, their insight into motives, their skill in devising means for the attainment of their ends. A state of society in which the rich were constantly planning the oppression of the poor, and the poor the spoliation of the rich, in which the ties of party had superseded those of country, in which revolutions and counter-revolutions were events of daily oc currence, was naturally prolific in desperate and crafty political adventurers. This was the very school in which men were likely to acquire the dissimulation of Mazarine, the judicious temerity of Richelieu, the penetration, the exquisite tact, the almost instinctive presentiment of approaching events, which gave so much authority to the counsel of Shaftes bury, that "it was as if a man had inquired of the oracle of God." In this school Thucydides studied; and his wisdom is that which such a school would naturally afford. He judges better of circumstances than of principles. The more a question is narrowed, the better he reasons upon it. His work suggests many most important considerations respecting the first principles of government and morals, the growth of factions, the organization of armies, and the mutual relations of communities. Yet all his general observations on these subjects are very superficial. His most judicious remarks differ from the remarks of a really philosophical historian, as a sum correctly cast up by a book-keeper, from a general expression discovered by an algebraist. The former is useful only in a single transaction; the latter may be applied to an infinite number of

cases.

Here Thucydides is deficient. The deficiency, indeed, is not discreditable to him. It was the inevitable effect of circumstances. It was in the nature of things necessary that, in some part of its progress through political science, the human mind should reach that point which it attained in his time. Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps. The axioms of an English debating club would have been startling and mysterious paradoxes to the most enlightened statesman of Athens. But it would be as absurb to speak contemptuously of the Athenian on this account, as to ridicule Strabo for not having given us an account of Chili, or to talk of Ptolemy as we talk of Sir Richard Phillips. Still, when we wish for solid geographical information, we must prefer the solemn coxcombry of Pinker-a ton to the noble work of Strabo. If we wanted instruction respecting the solar system, we should consult the silliest girl from a boarding-school rather than Ptolemy.

This opinion will, we fear, be considered as heterodox. For, not to speak of the illusion which the sight of a Greek type, or the sound

Greek diphthong, often produces, there are some peculiarities in the manner of Thuycidides, which in no small degree have tended to secure to him the reputation of profundity. His book is evidently the book of a man and a Thucydides was undoubtedly a sagacious statesman; and in this respect presents a reand reflecting man. This clearly appears markable contrast to the delightful childishfrom the ability with which he discusses prac-ness of Herodotus. Throughout it there is an tical questions. But the talent of deciding on air of matured power, of grave and melanthe circumstances of a particular case is often choly reflection, of impartiality and habitual possessed in the highest perfection by persons self-command. His feelings are rarely indestitute of the power of generalization. Men, dulged, and speedily repressed. Vulgar preskilled in the military tactics of civilized na- judices of every kind, and particularly vulgar tions, have been amazed at the far-sightedness superstitions, he treats with a cold and sober and penetration which a Mohawk displays in disdain peculiar to himself. His style is concerting his stratagems, or in discerning weighty, condensed, antithetical, and not unthose of his enemies. In England, no class frequently obscure. But when we look at his possesses so much of that peculiar ability political philosophy. Without regard to these which is required for constructing ingenious circumstances, we find him to have been, what schemes, and for obviating remote difficulties, indeed it would have been a miracle if he had as the thieves and the thief-takers. Women not been, simply an Athenian of the fifth cen have more of this dexterity than men. Law-:ury before Christ. yers have more of it than statesmen statesmen have more of it than philosophers. Monk had more of it than Harrington and all his club. Walpole had more of it than Adam Smith or Beccaria. Indeed, the species of discipline by which this dexterity is acquired tends to contract the mind, and to render it incapable of abstract reasoning.

Xenophon is commonly placed, out we think without much reason, in the same rank with Herodotus and Thucydides. He resembles them, indeed, in the purity and sweetness of his style; but in spirit, he rather resembles that later school of historians, whose works seem to be fables, composed for a moral, and who, in their eagerness to give us warnings and example, forget to give us men and wo men. The life of Cyrus, whether we look upon

The Grecian statesmen of the age of Thucydides were distinguished by their practical

it as a history or as a romance, seems to us a head. For the historians of this class we must very wretched performance. The Expedition confess that we entertain a peculiar aversion. of the Ten Thousand, and the History of Gre- They seem to have been pedants, who, though cian Affairs, are certainly pleasant reading; destitute of those valuable qualities which are but they indicate no great power of mind. In frequently found in conjunction with pedantry, truth, Xenophon, though his taste was elegant, thought themselves great philosophers and great his dispositions amiable, and his intercourse politicians. They not only mislead their readwith the world extensive, had, we suspect, ra- ers in every page, as to particular facts, but ther a weak head. Such was evidently the they appear to have altogether misconceived opinion of that extraordinary man to whom he the whole character of the times of which they early attached himself, and for whose memory write. They were inhabitants of an empire he entertained an idolatrous veneration. He bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Euphra came in only for the milk with which Socrates tes, by the ice of Scythia and the sands of Maunourished his babes in philosophy. A few ritania; composed of nations whose manners, saws of morality, and a few of the simplest whose languages, whose religion, whose coundoctrines of natural religion, were enough for tenances and complexions, were widely differthe good young man. The strong meat, the ent, governed by one mighty despotism, which bold speculations on physical and metaphysi- had risen on the ruins of a thousand commoncal science, were reserved for auditors of a wealths and kingdoms. Of liberty, such as it different description. Even the lawless habits is in small democracies, of patriotism, such as of a captain of mercenary troops, could not it is in small independent communities of any change the tendency which the character of kind, they had, and they could have, no experiXenophon early acquired. To the last, he mental knowledge. But they had read of men seems to have retained a sort of heathen Pu- who exerted themselves in the cause of their ritanism. The sentiments of piety and virtue, country, with an energy unknown in later which abound in his works, are those of a times, who had violated the dearest of domestic well-meaning man, somewhat timid and nar- charities, or voluntarily devoted themselves to row-minded, devout from constitution rather death for the public good; and they wondered than from rational conviction. He was as at the degeneracy of their contemporaries. It superstitious as Herodotus, but in a way far never occurred to them, that the feelings which more offensive. The very peculiarities which they so greatly admired sprung from local and charm us in an infant, the toothless mumbling, occasional causes; that they will always grow the stammering, the tottering, the helplessness, up spontaneously in small societies; and that, the causeless tears and laughter, are disgust-in large empires, though they may be forced ing in old age. In the same manner, the ab- into existence for a short time by peculiar cirsurdity which precedes a period of general cumstances, they cannot be general or perma intelligence, is often pleasing; that which fol-nent. It is impossible that any man should feel lows it is contemptible. The nonsense of for a fortress on a remote frontier, as he feels Herodotus is that of a baby. The nonsense for his own house; that he should grieve for a of Xenophon is that of a dotard. His stories defeat in which ten thousand people whom he about dreams, omers, and prophecies, present never saw have fallen, as he grieves for a dea strange contrast to the passages in which feat which has half unpeopled the street in the shrewd and incredulous Thucydides men- which he lives; that he should leave his home tions the popular superstitions. It is not quite for a military expedition, in order to preserve clear that Xenophon was honest in his credu- the balance of power, as cheerfully as he would lity; his fanaticism was in some degree politic. leave it to repel invaders who had begun to He would have made an excellent member of burn ail the cornfields in his neighbourhood. the Apostolic Comarilla. An alarmist by nature, ar aristocrat by party, he carried to an unreasonable excess his horror of popular turbulence. The quiet atrocity of Sparta did not shock him in the same manner; for he hated tumult more than crimes. He was de-a particular society, though a natural, and, under sirous to find restraints which might curb the certain restrictions, a most useful sentiment, passions of the multitude; and he absurdly implies no extraordinary attainments in wisfancied that he had found them in a religion dom or virtue; that where it has existed in an without evidences or sanction, precepts or intense degree, it has turned states into gangs example, in a frigid system of Theophilan- of robbers, whom their mutual fidelity has renthropy, supported by nursery tales. dered more dangerous, has given a character of peculiar atrocity to war, and has generated that worst of all political evils, the tyranny of nations over nations.

The writers of whom we speak should have considered this. They should have considered that, in patriotism, such as it existed amongst the Greeks, there was nothing essentially and eternally good; that an exclusive attachment to

Polybius and Arrian have given us authentic accounts of facts, and here their merit ends. They were not men of comprehensive minds; they had not the art of telling a story in an interesting manner. They have in consequence been thrown into the shade by writers, who, though less studious of truth than themselves, understood far better the art of producing effect, by Livy and Quintus Curtius.

Yet Polybius and Arrian deserve high praise, when compared with the writers of that school of which Plutarch may be considered as the

Enthusiastically attached to the name of liberty, these historians troubled themselves lit tle about its definition. The Spartans, tormented by ten thousand absurd restraints, unable to please themselves in the choice of their wives, their suppers, or their company, compelled to assume a peculiar manner, and to talk in a peculiar style, gloried in their liberty The aristocracy of Rome repeatedly made li