The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches-2 [26]
mountains of Doris, and the remotest colonies of Italy and Libya,--was to witness his triumph. The interest of the narrative, and the beauty of the style, were aided by the imposing effect of recitation,--by the splendour of the spectacle,--by the powerful 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, omens, warnings from the dead,--of princesses, for whom noble suitors contended in every generous exercise of strength and skill,--of infants, strangely preserved from the dagger of the assassin, to fulfil high destinies. 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 gigantic 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 certain to be favourably received. Between the time at which Herodotus is said 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 civilisation 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 Aeschylus became the scoff of every young Phidippides. Lectures on abstruse points of philosophy, the fine distinctions of casuistry,