lence in nearly every
department. The subject is therefore unique both in the value of its
materials and in the definiteness of its limits. What is demanded for
the adequate treatment of it is not universal knowledge, but minute and
thorough scholarship; not a wide and diversified experience, an
unlimited range of sympathies, the power of detecting subtle motives and
disentangling complicated threads of action, but a comprehension of the
simple and eternal elements of character and conduct, the faculty of
tracing a specific development from its origin to its decline, while
indicating its connection with other indigenous growths of the same
soil, and a vivid sense of the marvellous rapidity and exquisite beauty
of the simultaneous or successive unfoldings. Given these powers,
unhampered by any defect of mere technical skill, and it is hard to see
how any mind susceptible of being interested in their application to
such a topic could resist their sway.

We do not know what ideal Mr. Mahaffy may have formed of the task he has
undertaken or of the qualities demanded for it. His preface gives no
intimation on this point, and his "introduction" affords only negative
evidence in his refusal to follow "the usual practice with historians of
Greek literature" and "begin with a survey of the character and genius
of the race, the peculiar features of the language, and the action which
physical circumstances have produced upon the development of all these
things." Instead of any discussions of this nature, which "in many
German books are," it appears, "so long and so vague that the student is
wearied before he arrives at a single fact," the natural division of
literature into poetry and prose is made the starting-point. The former,
in accordance with "a well-known law of human progress," precedes the
latter, but is gradually supplanted by it. "This may be seen among us in
the education of children, who pass in a few years through successive
stages not unlike those of humanity at large in its progress from mental
infancy to mature thought. We know that little children can be taught to
repeat and remember rhymes long before they will listen to the simplest
story in prose." On the other hand, "when the majority of people begin
to read, poetry loses its hold upon the public, and the prose-writer,
who composes with greater simplicity and less labor, at last obtains an
advantage over his rival the poet, who is put into competition with all