his pages as precisely as though he accepted them every whit, the oldest of old-world stories about Zeus and the Titans, Ares and Aphrodite, Athene and Poseidon,-the wondrous tale of Prometheus, with links Indissoluble of adamantine chains Fastened against the beetling precipice and that of Deucalion, and of Theseus, and those Argonauts whom an Edinburgh Reviewer is "content to abandon," as a sort of ideal impersonation of the first rude attempts at navigation beyond the more sunny surface of the Ægean, into the dark and perilous remoter seas; and the legend of the primitive Hellens,-Æolian, Dorian, and Ionic; and of Cecrops, who, coming to Attica from Egypt, before the time of Moses himself, occupied that rock which afterwards became the citadel (Acropolis) of Athens, and consecrated it to his native deity, that African Neith whose name should one day be changed into Athene; and of Cadmus, a leader of the immigrants who first brought Greece the letters and the religious rites she was to turn hereafter to such account; and the tale of Danaus, and the tale of Orpheus, and, above all, The tale of Troy divine, from which time downward, as Hermann remarks, the Hellenes always looked upon themselves as one people. Yet that Trojan war is, in the eyes of Mr. Grote and "modern inquiry," essentially a legend and nothing more-though so literally believed, reverentially cherished, and numbered among the gigantic phenomena of the past, by the Grecian public. If he is asked whether it be not a legend embodying portions of historical matter, and raised upon a basis of truth,-whether there may not really have occurred at the foot of the hill of Ilium, a war purely human and political, without gods, without heroes, without Helen, without Amazons, without Ethiopians under the beautiful son of Éos, without the wooden horse, without the characteristic and expressive features of the old epical war,-like the mutilated trunk of Dei phobus in the under-world,-if he is asked whether there was not really some such historical Trojan war as this, his answer is, that as the possibility of it cannot be denied, so neither can the reality of it be affirmed. "We possess nothing but the ancient epic itself, without any independent evidence: had it been an age of records, indeed, the Homeric epic, in its exquisite and unsuspect ing simplicity, would probably never have come into existence. Whoever, therefore, ventures to dissect Homer, Arktinus, and Leschês, and to pick out certain portions as matter-of-fact, while he sets aside the rest as fiction, must do so in full reliance on his own powers of historical divination, without any means either of proving or verifying his conclusions." In other words, a dilemma is proposed between absolute scepticism on the one hand, and a sic volo sic jubeo self-sufficiency, an ipse dixit Sir Oracleship, on the other. Choose your horn. Moving onwards, we arrive at the conquest of the Peloponnesus, and the territorial divisions of the conquest; we witness the institution of the Amphictyonics and the four great national Games of Greece-games of which Bulwer has said, that they effected for the many what chivalry did for the few, "they made a knighthood of a people;" and we are told the grand old legend of Codrus; and we spell our way through blood in the laws of Draco; and we study the legislation of Solon, who built his common-weal And of bold freedom, they unequal'd shone ; and we watch the fortunes of the Peisistratida, of whom it has been said, that so long as one of their race still swayed the destinies of Athens, so long was it still possible that Greece would have been without a head, without a heart, without a voice ;-and anon we come to the "stormy sunshine" of the wars with the Great King -and see fought o'er again, once more, that battle of Marathon which grave judges have pronounced to be, even as an event in English history, more important than the battle of Hastingst-and see the Great King sit on the rocky brow that o'erlooks sea-girt Salamis-and gaze on the procession of mortal-immortals who pass in majestic pomp before us-Leonidas, As at Thermopyla he glorious fell; and the "honest front" of Aristides, "to whom th' unflattering voice of freedom gave the noblest name of Just;" Pericles, the Magnificent; and Cimon, "sweet-soul'd, whose genius, rising strong, shook off the load of young debauch," and on Persian insolence "flamed amazement;" and the great sea-captain Themistocles; and the brilliant, capricious, impulsive Alcibiades; and from Sparta come Lysander and Agesilaus; and from Corinth, Timoleon, "who wept the brother while the tyrant bled;" and from Thebes, the " singular good" dual, Epaminondas and Pelopidas-not Arcades ambo, but Boeotians both-though "sure such a pair" (with a Pindar to boot) might stultify the sneer, Can any good thing come out of Bocotia ? *History of Greece. Part. I. chap. xv. For, says an Edinburgh Reviewer, "if the issue of that day [Marathon] had been different, the Britons and Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods." Forcible, it may be thought, and-far-fetched. And thus we travel on, through fair weather and foul,-now under Athenian ascendancy, now Spartan, now Theban-passing in review the reverses and convulsions of the Peloponnesian War, Corcyra in sedition, Scione in revolt, Amphipolis lost and won, and that awful night-battle of Syracuse, called by Mr. Grote "the most picturesque battle in history," fought as it was within the still waters of the land-locked bay, the glory of ancient harbours-the long, low barriers of Epipole and of the Hyblæan hills enclosing the doomed armament as within arms of stone-the white peak of Ætna brooding over the scene from afar, like the guardian spirit of the island-while the infinite variety of human emotion in the groups along the shore, closing with the close of the battle in one universal shriek of despair, has been described by the historian's eloquent critic in the Quarterly Review, as only equalled by that which went up from the spectators on the hills round about Jerusalem, when the last crash of the burning temple announced that their national existence was at an end. But this reverse only served to elicit the indomitable energy of the suffering peoplecast down but not destroyed; and the History rather swells than declines in interest at this turning-point, and maintains its hold of us to see the end," through subsequent years of comparative dulness, and decadence the most evident, foreshowing and forerunning the death-in-life period of Hellas in extremis, of free-acting Greece in articulo mortis. 66 At Mr. Grote had promised a critical résumé of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, to form part of the closing volume. But as his History at large, so this volume in particular, outgrew his good intentions, and we are now to look forward (and marry we will) to the publication of this philosophical conspectus in a supplementary or complementary volume, the appearance of which, it may be presumed, will not be very long deferred. We tender our best congratulations to him, at parting, on the manner in which he has been enabled to carry through his grand enterprise. Athens itself, within these few months, he has been lauded by a native Professor (Constantine Paparrogopoulos) as τον μεγαν Αγγλον ἱστοριογραφον ΓΕΩΡΓΙΟΝ ΓΡΟΤΕ. His own countrymen have reason, as well as himself, to be proud of a work which, to the erudition and patient investigation supposed to be monopolised by our Ger man cousins, adds the practical shrewdness and sober sagacity of the English publicist. Mr. Grote is, like the best of the Germans, a man of books; unlike a good many of them, he is something more: a man of thought, a man of sense, a man of action,-in fine, and is éros éinew, a man of men. Campaign, Omer Pasha's, 507 Cheshant, The Private Theatricals at, Constantinople, A Week in. By Las- -The Man of the People. IL- Costello, Miss, "Lay of the Stork," 515 Court, Aristocracy, and Diplomacy of D. Damascus and its Neighbourhood, 48 Disjointed Gossip from the other side 2 x Falsehoods and Realities of the War, 19 Lake Ngami, 611 G. Glimpse of Beanfield, A. By John Goethe, Lewes's Life and Works of. H. L. Lamb, Charles. Prosings by Monks- Lewes's Life and Works of Goethe. M. Macaulay's History of England. New- Materfamilias, Miseries of a Wet Day Her Majesty's Theatre, Re-opening of, Meccah, El Medinah and, 366 635 Heroes, How we treat our, 270 History of Greece, Grote's. Mingle- How we went to see the Militia Re- J. Jayne, Charles William, Mother Ford, Joint-Stock Banker, The. A Tale of Medwin, Captain, the New Simonides, "Men and Women," Browning's, 64 Milman's Latin Christianity. New- Death, 71 Monkshood, New-Book Notes by. Grote's History of Greece, 533, 637 |