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to have composed his history and the close of the Peloponnesian war about forty years elapsed-forty years crowded with great military and political events. The circumstances of that period produced a great effect on the Grecian character; and nowhere was this effect so remarkable as in the illustrious democracy of Athens. An Athenian, indeed, even in the time of Herodotus, would scarcely have written a book so romantic and garrulous as that of Herodotus. As civilization advanced, the citizens of that famous republic became still less visionary and still less simple-hearted. They aspired to know where their ancestors had been content to doubt; they began to doubt where their ancestors had thought it their duty to believe. Aristophanes is fond of alluding to this change in the temper of his countrymen. The father and son, in the Clouds, are evidently representatives of the generations to which they respectively belonged. Nothing more clearly illustrates the nature of this moral revolution than the change which passed upon tragedy. The wild sublimity of Eschylus became the scoff of every young Phidippides. Lectures on abstruse points of philosophy, the fine distinctions of casuistry, and the dazzling fence of rhetoric, were substituted for poetry. The language lost something of that infantine sweetness which had characterized it. It became less like the ancient Tuscan, and more like the modern French.

The fashionable logic of the Greeks was, indeed, far from strict. Logic never can be strict where books are scarce, and where information is conveyed orally. We are all aware how frequently fallacies which, when set down on paper, are at once detected, pass for unanswerable arguments when dexterously and volubly urged in parliament, at the bar, or in private conversation. The reason is evident. We cannot inspect them closely enough to perceive their inaccuracy. We cannot readily compare them with each other. We lose sight of one part of the subject before another, which ought to be received in connection with it, comes before us; and as there is no immutable record of what has been admitted and of what has been denied, direct contradictions pass muster with little difficulty. Almost all the education of a Greek consisted in talking and listening. His opinions on governments were picked up in the debates of the assembly. If he wished to study metaphysics, instead of shutting himself up with a book, he walked down to the market-place to look for a sophist. So completely were men formed to these habits, that even writing acquired a conversational air. The philosophers adopted the form of dialogue as the most natural mode of communicating knowledge. Their reasonings have the merits and the defects which belong to that species of composition; and are characterized rather by quickness and subtilty than by depth and precision. Truth is exhibited in parts and by glimpses. Innumerable clever hints are given; but no sound and durable system is erected. The argumentum ad hominem, a kind of argument most efficacious in debate, but atterly useless for the investigation of general principles, is among their favourite resources.

Hence, though nothing can be more admirable than the skill which Socrates displays in the conversations which Plato has reported or invented, his victories for the most part seem to us unprofitable. A trophy is set up, but no new province is added to the dominions of the human mind.

Still, where thousands of keen and ready intellects were constantly employed in speculating on the qualities of actions and on the principles of government, it was impossible that history should retain its old character. It became less gossipping and less picturesque; but much more accurate, and somewhat more scientific.

The history of Thucydides differs from that of Herodotus as a portrait differs from the representation of an imaginary scene; as the Burke or Fox of Reynolds differs from his Ugolino or his Beaufort. In the former case, the archetype is given: in the latter it is created. The faculties which are required for the latter purpose are of a higher and rarer order than those which suffice for the former, and indeed necessarily comprise them. He who is able to paint what he sees with the eye of the mind, will surely be able to paint what he sees with the eye of the body. He who can invent a story and tell it well, will also be able to tell, in an interesting manner, a story which he has not invented. If, in practice, some of the best writers of fiction have been among the worst writers of history, it has been be cause one of their talents had merged in another so completely, that it could not be severed; because, having iong been habituated to invent and narrate at the same time, they found it impossible to narrate without inventing.

Some capricious and discontented artists have affected to consider portrait-painting as unworthy of a man of genius. Some critics have spoken in the same contemptuous manner of history. Johnson puts the case thus: The historian tells either what is false or what is true. In the former case he is no historian. In the latter, he has no opportunity for displaying his abilities. For truth is one: and all who tell the truth must tell it alike.

It is not difficult to elude both the horns of this dilemma. We will recur to the analogous art of portrait-painting. Any man with eyes and hands may be taught to take a like ness. The process, up to a certain point, is merely mechanical. If this were all, a man of talents might justly despise the occupation. But we could mention portraits which are resemblances, but not mere resemblances; faithful, but much more than faithful; portraits which condense into one point of time, and exhibit, at a single glance, the whole history of turbid and eventful lives in which the eye seems to scrutinize us, and the mouth to command us-in which the brow menaces, and the lip almost quivers with scorn-in which every wrinkle is a comment on some important transaction. The account which Thucydides has given of the retreat from Syracuse is, among narratives, what Vandyck's Lord Strafford is among paintings.

Diversity, it is said, implies error; truth one, and admits of no degree. We answer,

In this respect no writer has ever equalled Thucydides. He was a perfect master of the art of gradual diminution. His history is sometimes as concise as a chronological chart; yet it is always perspicuous. It is sometimes as minute as one of Lovelace's letters; yet it is never prolix. He never fails to contract and to expand it in the right place.

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 idea 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 Sir Thomas Lawrence paints a handsome peeress, he does not contemplate her through a powerful microscope, and transfer to the eanvass the pores of the skin, the blood-vessels of the eye, and all the other beauties which Gulliver discovered in the Brobdignaggian maids of honour. If he were to do this, the 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 al vict him of innumerable omissions. The same together incongruous in the work of his suc may be said of history. Perfectly and abso-cessor; and violates, not only the accuracy of Jutely 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 attered, 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 pleasurewhat 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.

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.

Thucydides honestly tells us that some of these discourses are purely fictitious. He No picture, then, and no history, can present may have reported the substance of others us with the whole truth: but those are the best correctly. But it is clear from the internal pictures and the best histories which exhibit evidence that he has preserved no more than such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the substance. His own peculiar habits of the effect of the whole. He who is deficient thought and expression are everywhere dis in the art of selection may, by showing no-cernible. Individual and national peculiarities thing 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 back ground: 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 allow. ed 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 consists 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 | sagacity, their insight into motives, their skill anecdotes, which interest us most strongly in in devising means for the attainment of their authentic narrative, are offensive when intro- ends. A state of society in which the rich duced into novels; that what is called the ro- were constantly planning the oppression of mantic part of history is in fact the least the poor, and the poor the spoliation of the romantic. It is delightful as history, because rich, in which the ties of party had superseded it contradicts our previous notions of human those of country, in which revolutions and nature, and of the connection of causes and counter-revolutions were events of daily oceffects. It is, on that very account, shocking currence, was naturally prolific in desperate and incongruous in fiction. In fiction, the and crafty political adventurers. This was principles are given to find the facts; in his- the very school in which men were likely to tory, the facts are given to find the principles; acquire the dissimulation of Mazarine, the judiand the writer who does not explain the phe- cious temerity of Richelieu, the penetration, nomena as well as state them, performs only the exquisite tact, the almost instinctive preone-half of his office. Facts are the mere dross sentiment of approaching events, which gave of history. It is from the abstract truth which so much authority to the counsel of Shaftes interpenetrates them, and lies latent among bury, that "it was as if a man had inquired of them, like gold in the ore, that the mass de- the oracle of God." In this school Thucydides rives its whole value; and the precious parti- studied; and his wisdom is that which such a eles are generally combined with the baser in school would naturally afford. He judges bet such a manner that the separation is a task of ter of circumstances than of principles. The the utmost difficulty, 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 Pinkerton 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 a 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 in destitute 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 cenhave more of this dexterity than men. Law-tury before Christ.

yers have more of it than statesmen: states- Xenophon is commonly placed, but we think men have more of it than philosophers. Monk without much reason, in the same rank with 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.

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

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

head.

it as a history or as a romance, seems to us a 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 Euphracame 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, omens, 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, an 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 desirous to find restraints which might curb the passions of the multitude; and he absurdly fancied that he had found them in a religion without evidences or sanction, precepts or example, in a frigid system of Theophilanthropy, supported by nursery tales.

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 a particular society, though a natural, and, under certain restrictions, a most useful sentiment, implies no extraordinary attainments in wisdom or virtue; that where it has existed in an intense degree, it has turned states into gangs of robbers, whom their mutual fidelity has rendered more dangerous, has given a character

peculiar atrocity to war, and has generated that worst of all political evils, the tyranny of nations over nations.

Polybius and Arrian have given us authen-of tic 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 ef which Plutarch may be considered as the

Enthusiastically attached to the name of liberty, these historians troubled themselves little 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

berty a plea for cutting off the favourites of the people. In almost all the little commonwealths of antiquity, liberty was used as a pretext for measures directed against every thing which The writings of these men, and of their momakes liberty valuable, for measures which dern imitators, have produced effects which stifled discussion, corrupted the administration deserve some notice. The English have been of justice, and discouraged the accumulation so long accustomed to political speculation, of property. The writers, whose works we and have enjoyed so large a measure of pracare considering, confounded the sound with the tical liberty, that such works have produced substance, and the means with the end. Their little effect on their minds. We have classical imaginations were inflamed by mystery. They associations and great names of our own, conceived of liberty as monks conceive of love, which we can confidently oppose to the most as Cockneys conceive of the happiness and in- splendid of ancient times. Senate has not to nocence of rural life, as novel-reading semp-our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. stresses conceive of Almack's and Grosvenor We respect the Great Charter more than the Square, accomplished Marquesses and hand- laws of Solon. The Capitol and the Forum some Colonels of the Guards. In the relation impress us with less awe than our own Westof events, and the delineation of characters, minster Hall and Westminster Abbey, the they have paid little attention to facts, to the place where the great men of twenty generacostume of the times of which they pretend totions have contended, the place where they treat, or to the general principles of human na- sleep together! The list of warriors and tare. They have been faithful only to their statesmen by whom our constitution was foundown puerile and extravagant doctrines. Gene- ed or preserved, from De Monfort down to Fox, rals and Statesmen are metamorphosed into may well stand a comparison with the Fasti magnanimous coxcombs, from whose fulsome of Rome. The dying thanksgiving of Sidney virtues we turn away with disgust. The fine is as noble as the libation which Thrasea sayings and exploits of their heroes reminds poured to Liberating Jove: and we think with us of the insufferable perfections of Sir Charles far less pleasure of Cato tearing out his entrails, Grandison, and affect us with a nausea similar than of Russel saying, as he turned away from to that which we feel when an actor, in one of his wife, that the bitterness of death was past. Morton's or Kotzebue's plays, lays his hand on-Even those parts of our history, over which, his heart, advances to the ground-lights, and on some accounts, we would gladly throw a months a moral sentence for the edification of veil, may be proudly opposed to those on which the gods. the moralists of antiquity loved most to dwell. These writers, men who knew not what it The enemy of English liberty was not murwas to have a country, men who had never en-dered by men whom he had pardoned and joyed political rights, brought into fashion an offensive cant about patriotism and zeal for freedom. What the English Puritans did for the language of Christianity, what Scuderi did for the language of love, they did for the language of public spirit. By habitual exaggeration they made it mean. By monotonous emphasis they made it feeble. They abused it till it became scarcely possible to use it with

lament that, from the frailty of human nature, a man who could perform so great an exploit could repent of it.

effect.

loaded with benefits. He was not stabbed in
the back by those who smiled and cringed
before his face. He was vanquished on fields
of stricken battle; he was arraigned, sen-
tenced, and executed in the face of heaven
and earth. Our liberty is neither Greek nor
Roman; but essentially English.
It has a
character of its own-a character which has
taken a tinge from the sentiments of the chi-
valrous ages, and which accords with the
peculiarities of our manners and of our insu-
lar situation. It has a language, too, of its
own, and a language singularly idiomatic, full
of meaning to ourselves, scarcely intelligible
to strangers.

Their ordinary rules of morality are deduced from extreme cases. The common regimen which they prescribe for society is made up of those desperate remedies, which only its most desperate distempers require. They look with peculiar complacency on actions, which even Here, therefore, the effect of books, such as those who approve them consider as excep- those which we have been considering, has tions to laws of almost universal application-been harmless. They have, indeed, given curwhich bear so close an affinity to the most atro-rency to many very erroneous opinions with cious crimes, that even where it may be unjust respect to ancient history. They have heated to censure them, it is unsafe to praise them. It the imagination of boys. They have misled is not strange, therefore, that some flagitious the judgment, and corrupted the taste of some instances of perfidy and cruelty should have men of letters, such as Ákenside and Sir Wil been passed unchallenged in such company, liam Jones. But on persons engaged in pubthat grave moralists, with no personal interest lic affairs they have had very little influence. at stake, should have extolled, in the highest The foundations of our constitution were laid terms, deeds of which the atrocity appalled by men who knew nothing of the Greeks, but even the infuriated factions in whose cause that they denied the orthodox procession, and they were perpetrated. The part which Timo- cheated the Crusaders; and nothing of Rome, leon took in the assassination of his brother but that the Pope lived there. Those who fol shocked many of his own partisans. The re-lowed, contented themselves with improving collection of it preyed long on his own mind. on the original plan. They found n.dels at But it was reserved for historians who lived home; and therefore they did not look for them me centuries later to discover that his con- abroad. But when enlightened men on the duct was a glorious display of virtue, and to continent began to think about political re

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