, and it anticipates
later histories of civilisation by dwelling but slightly on political
events and bringing into prominence human achievements in science,
philosophy, and the arts. Beginning with the advance of man from
primitive rudeness to ordered society--a sketch based on the conjectures
of Plato in the Protagoras--Le Roy reviews the history, and estimates
the merits, of the Egyptians, Assyrians and Persians, the Greeks, Romans
and Saracens, and finally of the modern age. The facts, he thinks,
establish the proposition that the art of warfare, eloquence,
philosophy, mathematics, and the fine arts, generally flourish and
decline together.

But they do decline. Human things are not perpetual; all pass through
the same cycle--beginning, progress, perfection, corruption, end. This,
however, does not explain the succession of empires in the world, the
changes of the scene of prosperity from one people or set of peoples
to another. Le Roy finds the cause in providential design. God, he
believes, cares for all parts of the universe and has distributed
excellence in arms and letters now to Asia, now to Europe, again to
Africa, letting virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance travel from
country to country, that all in their turn may share in good and bad
fortune, and none become too proud through prolonged prosperity.

But what of the modern age in Western Europe? It is fully the equal, he
assevers, of the most illustrious ages of the past, and in some respects
it is superior. Almost all the liberal and mechanical arts of antiquity,
which had been lost for about 1200 years, have been restored, and
there have been new inventions, especially printing, and the mariner's
compass, and "I would give the third place to gunnery but that it seems
invented rather for the ruin than for the utility of the human race." In
our knowledge of astronomy and cosmography we surpass the ancients. "We
can affirm that the whole world is now known, and all the races of men;
they can interchange all their commodities and mutually supply their
needs, as inhabitants of the same city or world-state." And hence there
has been a notable increase of wealth.

Vice and suffering, indeed, are as grave as ever, and we are afflicted
by the trouble of heresies; but this does not prove a general
deterioration of morals. If that inveterate complaint, the refrain
chanted by old men in every age, were true, the world would already
have reached the extreme li