say fictions, but
undefined, unmeasured, immeasurable realities; far gone down into the
mighty gulf of shadows, and for us irrecoverable. All that is known
about the Assyrian empire is its termination under Sardanapalus. It was
then coming within Grecian twilight; and it will be best to say that,
generally speaking, Sardanapalus coincided with Romulus and the Greek
Olympiad. To affect any nearer accuracy than this would be the grossest
reliance on the mere jingle of syllables. History would be made to rest
on something less than a pun; for such as _Palus_ and _Pul_, which is
all that learned archbishops can plead as their vouchers in the matter
of Assyria, there is not so much as the argument of a child or the wit
of a punster.

Upon the whole, the teacher will make the following remarks to her
pupils, after having read what precedes; remarks partly upon the new
mode of delivering chronology, and partly upon the things delivered:

I. She will notice it--as some improvement--that the three great
leading events, which compose the opening of history not fabulous, are
here, for the first time, placed under the eye in their true relations
of time, viz., as about contemporary. For without again touching on the
question--do they, or do they not, vary from each other in point of time
by twenty-three and by thirty years--it will be admitted by everybody
that, at any rate, the three events stand equally upon the frontier line
of authentic history. A frontier or debateable land is always of some
breadth. They form its inauguration. And they would do so even if
divided by a much wider interval. Now, it is very possible to know of A,
B, and C, separately, that each happened in such a year, say 1800; and
yet never to have noticed them consciously _as_ contemporary. We read of
many a man (L, M, N, suppose), that he was born in 1564, or that he died
in 1616. And we may happen separately to know that these were the years
in which Shakespeare was born and died. Yet, for all that, we may never
happen consciously to notice with respect to any one of the men, L, M,
N, that he was a contemporary of Shakespeare's. Now, this was the case
with regard to the three great events, Greek, Roman, and Assyrian. No
chronologer failed to observe of each in its separate place that it
occurred somewhere about 750 years B.C. But every chronologer had failed
to notice this coincident time of each _as_ coincident. And,
accordingly, all failed to converge t