and manners has so effectually barred all coalition
between Europe and Asia, from the oldest times, that of necessity their
histories have flowed apart with little more reciprocal reference or
relationship, than exists between the Rhine and the Danube--rivers,
which almost meeting in their sources, ever after are continually
widening their distance until they fall into different seas two thousand
miles apart. Asia never, at any time, much acted upon Europe; and when
later ages had forced them into artificial connections, it was always
Europe that acted upon Asia; never Asia, upon any commensurate scale,
that acted upon Europe.[26]

Not, therefore, in Asia can the first footsteps of chronology be sought;
not in Africa, because, _first_, the records of Egypt, so far as any
have survived, are intensely Asiatic; liable to the same charge of
hieroglyphic ambiguity combined with the exaggerations of outrageous
nationality; because, _secondly_, the separate records of the adjacent
State of Cyrene have perished; because, _thirdly_, the separate records
of the next State, Carthage, have perished; because, _fourthly_, the
learned labours of Mauritania[27] have also perished.

Thus the pupil is satisfied that of mere necessity the chronologer must
resort to Europe for his earliest monuments and his earliest
authentications--for the facts to be attested, and for the evidences
which are to attest them. But if to Europe, next, to what part of
Europe? Two great nations--great in a different sense, the one by
dazzling brilliancy of intellect, the other by weight and dignity of
moral grandeur--divide between them the honours of history through the
centuries immediately preceding the birth of Christ. To which of these,
the pupil asks, am I to address myself? On the one hand, the greater
refinement and earlier civilization of Greece would naturally converge
all eyes upon her; but then, on the other hand, we cannot forget the
'_levitas levissimae gentis_'--the want of stability, the want of all
that we call moral dignity, and by direct consequence, the puerile
credulity of that clever, sparkling, but very foolish people, the
Greeks. That quality which, beyond all others, the Romans imputed to the
Grecian character; that quality which, in the very blaze of admiration,
challenged by the Grecian intellect, still overhung with deep shadows
their rational pretensions and degraded them to a Roman eye, was the
essential _levitas_--the defect of