numerable shadows, of some vast wilderness or Bilidulgerid
of trackless time, over which are strewed the wrecks of events without
order, and persons without limit. _Omne ignotum_, says Tacitus, _pro
magnifico_; that is, everything which lies amongst the shades and
darkness of the indefinite, and everything which is in the last degree
confused, seems infinite. But the gloom of uncertainty seems far greater
than it really is.

One short distribution and circumscription of historical ages will soon
place matters in a more hopeful aspect. Fabulous history ceases, and
authentic history commences, just three-quarters of a millennium before
Jesus Christ; that is, just 750 years. Let us call this space of time,
viz., the whole interval from the year 750 B.C. up to the Incarnation of
Christ, the first chamber of history. I do not mean that precisely 750
years before our Saviour's birth, fabulous and mythological history
started like some guilty thing at the sound of a cock-crowing, and
vanished as with the sound of harpies' wings. It vanished as the natural
darkness of night vanishes. A stealthy twilight first began to divide
and give shape to the formless shadows: what previously had been one
blank mass of darkness began to break into separate forms: outlines
became perceptible, groups of figures started forward into relief; chaos
began to shape and organize its gloomy masses. Next, and by degrees,
came on the earliest dawn. This ripened imperceptibly into a rosy aurora
that gave notice of some mightier power approaching. And at length, but
not until the age of Cyrus, five centuries and a half before Christ,
precisely one century later, the golden daylight of authentic history
sprang above the horizon and was finally established. Since that time,
whatever want of light we may have to lament is due to the _loss_ of
records, not to their original _absence_; due to the victorious
destructions of time, not[20] to the error of the human mind confounding
the provinces of Fable and of History.

Let the first chamber of history therefore be that which stretches from
the year 750 B.C. to the era of His Incarnation. I say 750 for the
present, because it would be quite idle, in dealing with intervals of
time so vast, to take notice of any little excess or defect by which the
actual period differed from the ideal; strictly speaking, the period of
authentic history commences sixteen or seventeen years earlier. But for
the present let us sa