any principle that could have given
steadiness and gravity--which constituted the original sin of the Greek
character. By _levitas_ was meant the passive obedience to casual,
random, or contradictory impulses, the absence of all determining
principle. Now this _levitas_ was the precise anti-pole of the Roman
character; which was as massy, self-supported, and filled with
resistance to chance impulses, as the Greek character was windy, vain,
and servile to such impulses. Both nations, it is true, were
superstitious, because all nations, in those ages were intensely
superstitious; and each, after a fashion of its own, intensely
credulous. But the Roman superstition was coloured by something of a
noble pride; the Grecian by vanity. The Greek superstition was fickle
and self-contradicting, and liable to sudden changes; the Roman,
together with the gloom, had the unity and the perseverance of bigotry.
No Christian, even, purified and enlightened by his sublime faith, could
more utterly despise the base crawling adorations of Egypt, than did the
Roman polytheist, out of mere dignity of mind, while to the frivolous
Athenian they were simply objects of curiosity. In the Greek it was a
vulgar sentiment of clannish vanity.[28] Even the national
self-consequence of a Roman and a Greek were sentiments of different
origin, and almost opposite quality; in the Roman it was a sublime and
imaginative idea of Rome, of her self-desired grandeur, and, above all,
of her divine _destiny_, over which last idea brooded a cloud of
indefinite expectation, not so entirely unlike the exalting expectations
of the Jews, looking for ever to some unknown 'Elias' that should come.

Thus perplexed by the very different claims upon his respect in these
two exclusive authorities of the ancient world--carried to the Roman by
his _moral_ feelings, to the Grecian by his intellectual--the student is
suddenly delivered from his doubts by the discovery that these two
principal streams of history flow absolutely apart through the elder
centuries of historical light.

IV. _777 and its Three Great Landmarks._--In this perplexity, we say,
the youthful pupil is suddenly delighted to hear that there is no call
upon her to choose between Grecian and Roman guides. Fortunately, and as
if expressly to save her from any of those fierce disputes which have
risen up between the true Scriptural chronology and the chronology of
the mendacious Septuagint, it is laid down th