The ostensible subject of the great work of Herodotus is the Persian invasion of Greece, and round the main subject he groups the varied knowledge accumulated during a lifetime of multiform experience. We have a brilliant, but not very valuable stone, a species of mock diamond, set in most rare filigree and purest gold. We have the entertaining works of a curious and observant traveller, rendered unnecessarily complete and uniform by the introduction of a great historical event, picturesquely and dramatically represented. We pick up ever and anon scraps of wisdom from quaint and subtle observations of the old gossip, or from sententious epigrams assigned to king, or priest, or courtier. We smile at the credulity of this guest and questioner of Egyptian savants; but very possibly this historical dramatist would smile at the credulity of his annotators, and the pains needlessly expended in defending or attacking the details of that impossible host of five million men, with women, and horses, and camels, that drank the rivers dry as they marched across the world, or rather across the parchment of the writer, for the conquest of a not very productive earth-corner, about twice the size of Yorkshire. The attention of heaven and earth is riveted to the singular and uneven game of military chess. Prophets prophesy, and monarchs dream dreams. Omens are misunderstood by wise men, though a child might run and read destruction in their significance. Mares give birth to leverets in vain. The stars in their courses fight, obviously to after-wit, against a judicially blinded Sisera. The might of old historic Asia bursts upon the shores of Greece, and

breaks into harmless foam. We remarked that it would be impossible to define how much of history was contained in the poem of Homer; it were almost as difficult, and perhaps as useless a task, to eliminate imagination from fact in the treatment by Herodotus of the great Persian invasion of Greece.

Thucydides occupied years of banishment in detailing the incidents of the Peloponnesian war,-the first writer of history, first in point of time; and, to this very day, the first in point of quality. We have now and then a prophecy, referred to in a spirit of ill-concealed derision. Perhaps the fashion of hot-meat suppers was going out of vogue; for neither Pericles, nor Brasidas, nor Alcibiades, nor Cleon dream a single dream. Degenerate days! How they used to eat and drink at any hour of the night, those old heroes round Ilium! They would come in from a night-surprise, and wake up Nestor, and a few other choice and everhungry spirits, and fall-to like men. What wonder if a monarch, with half a chine within him, awoke before the dim dawn with the dream-god Oneirus at his side? The history of Thucydides, so far as it goes, is perhaps the most perfect and reliable of all historical works, ancient and modern. The dry record of facts is relieved from time to time by brief but philosophical speculation, and the chief actors in the scene are made dramatically to express the motives and aspirations of their respective states. But the speeches, put into the mouths of envoys, Athenian, Lacedæmonian, Corinthian, or Corcyræan, are never given as the ipsissima verba of the speakers. We are expressly warned that

they are but compendious records of memory or hearsay. The political leanings of the writer are manifest; but his aristocratic tastes never lead him to put nonsense into the mouth of a democratic leader. Indeed, after perusing a speech of Cleon or Diodotus, we find a difficulty in refuting his arguments. The great game for Hellenic supremacy is carried on with the ordinary weapons of valour, skill, common-sense, presumption, ignorance, and folly; and we are not surprised to find, that, when valour is evenly divided, resolution and common-sense eventually determine the issue. The ability of Thucydides as a historian is signally, though unconsciously, attested by Xenophon, who, although successful in almost every other field of literary exertion, in military story, in educational romance, in philosophical biography, in practical and every-day philosophy, yet falls both in style and matter as far behind his predecessor, as does our Smollet behind our Hume.

Livy treats the history of Rome as an inexhaustible subject for grand scene-paintings; and, despite the magnificent efforts of Lord Macaulay, is still the monarch of panoramic history.

Tacitus was miserably circumstanced for a historian. By natural tastes he would seem more fitted for philosophy than for history. In modern times, in the treatment of the latter, he would undoubtedly have chosen the field of philosophic history or political economy, and would have risen from petty and personal details to high and comprehensive generalizations. As it was, he was condemned, to a very great extent, to exhaust

his wit and sarcasm, and his marvellous power of Rembrandt-colouring upon the unimproving ana of the imperial court. Rome was to him what Paris would be to a French historian of the last century. Tiberius was the nucleus of the Roman world; as Louis Quatorze of the French. They, in their respective days, and to their respective subjects, were the centres of the political universe; of centrifugal and centripetal force. When Tiberius was gloomy—and that was not seldom

there was an eclipse of the moon. When Louis changed his mistress-and that was not seldom-there was commotion in far distant planets. The annals of Tacitus form, perhaps, the most melancholy of all historic records. Their details are dismal and sad enough of themselves. But their reader is most saddened by the reflection that a writer of consummate genius should have wasted so much of descriptive power and philosophic thoughtfulness in portraying individual vices, meannesses, and tyrannies. It is as though we had left us cartoons by Michael Angelo, drawn with a charcoal pencil on a large white wall.

It were a pity that the History of Hume should ever lose its place upon our shelves, so long as a value shall be put upon pure and simple and vigorous and unadulterated English. It would be a pity that it should be ever again regarded in the light of genuine history, so long as accuracy of detail and the absence of political bias are held as requisites in a historian. It is a melancholy fact that impartiality was found wanting in a philosopher, so dispassionate, so even-tempered, as the great Scotsman. When cold and phlegmatic wis

dom warms into political unfairness, who can be trusted? Let us have almanacks again, skeleton Fasti, and genealogical trees; and be left to draw our own inferences.

Perhaps, since the days of the Eneid, no work of fiction has been ever written to compare with what we have of Lord Macaulay's History of England. The quasi-historical-poem and the quasi-fictional-history may be perused by an ordinary and unbiassed reader without his becoming in the slightest degree interested in, or attached to, the hero of either. In the latter work all the resources of scholarship and rhetoric, and a something very akin to genius, are brought to bear upon the life and adventures of a resolute, obstinate, sagacious, cold-blooded, hard-headed, uninteresting Dutchman. The painter has set in a large frame of solid gold--or of gilding, very thickly laid on-the portrait of a hero, in whose lineaments are clearly discerned the qualities of bull-dog tenacity and uninspired common-sense. Of all the warriors that fought around Troy, Agamemnon is certainly the most uninteresting. This was to be expected from his position as generalissimo. But still he makes a fool of himself, and is a human being, and a weak one, for all his sceptre and his upper-royalty. His character is as fraught with interest when compared with that of William, as is the great Knight-Templar when compared with his rival Ivanhoe. We can sympathize with a historico-philosopher, even though we yawn over the perusal of his latter volumes, when he waxes enthusiastically prolix in detailing the unimportant eccentricities of the Great

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