revolting. A writer is bound--he
has created it into a duty, having once assumed the office of a national
historiographer--to select from the rolls of a nation such events as are
the most striking. And a selection conducted on this principle through
several centuries, or pursuing the fortunes of a dynasty reigning over
vast populations, _must_ end in accumulating a harvest of results such
as would startle the sobriety of ordinary historic faith. If a medical
writer should elect for himself, of his own free choice, to record such
cases only in his hospital experience as terminated fatally, it would be
absurd to object the gloomy tenor of his reports as an argument for
suspecting their accuracy, since he himself, by introducing this as a
condition into the very terms of his original undertaking with the
public, has created against himself the painful necessity of continually
distressing the sensibilities of his reader. To complain of Herodotus,
or any public historian, as drawing too continually upon his reader's
profounder sensibilities, is, in reality, to forget that this belongs as
an original element to the very task which he has undertaken. To
undertake the exhibition of human life under those aspects which
confessedly bring it into unusual conflict with chance and change, is,
by a mere self-created necessity, to prepare beforehand the summons to a
continued series of agitations: it is to seek the tragic and the
wondrous wilfully, and then to complain of it as violating the laws of
probability founded on life within the ordinary conditions of
experience.

That most memorable of Panhellenic festivals it was, which first made
known to each other the two houses of Grecian blood that typified its
ultimate and polar capacities, the most and the least of exorbitations,
the utmost that were possible from its equatorial centre; viz., on the
one side, the Asiatic Ionian, who spoke the sweet musical dialect of
Homer, and, on the other side, the austere Dorian, whom ten centuries
could not teach that human life brought with it any pleasure, or any
business, or any holiness of duty, other or loftier than that of war. If
it were possible that, under the amenities of a Grecian sky, too fierce
a memento could whisper itself of torrid zones, under the stern
discipline of the Doric Spartan it was that you looked for it; or, on
the other hand, if the lute might, at intervals, be heard or fancied
warbling too effeminately for the mart