ead the continuation of his history at the festival of the
Panathenaea (B. C. 446). It was received with the most rapturous
applause; and we are told that the people solemnly conferred upon the
man who had immortalized their achievements against the Mede the gift
of ten talents. The disposition of this remarkable man, like that of
all travellers, inclined to enterprise and adventure. His early
wanderings, his later vicissitudes, seem to have confirmed a
temperament originally restless and inquisitive. Accordingly, in his
forty-first year, he joined the Athenian emigrators that in the south
of Italy established a colony at Thurium (B. C. 443).

VIII. At Thurium Herodotus apparently passed the remainder of his
life, though whether his tomb was built there or in Athens is a matter
of dispute. These particulars of his life, not uninteresting in
themselves, tend greatly to illustrate the character of his writings.
Their charm consists in the earnestness of a man who describes
countries as an eyewitness, and events as one accustomed to
participate in them. The life, the raciness, the vigour of an
adventurer and a wanderer glow in every page. He has none of the
refining disquisitions that are born of the closet. He paints history
rather than descants on it; he throws the colourings of a mind,
unconsciously poetic, over all he describes. Now a soldier--now a
priest--now a patriot--he is always a poet, if rarely a philosopher.
He narrates like a witness, unlike Thucydides, who sums up like a
judge. No writer ever made so beautiful an application of
superstitions to truths. His very credulities have a philosophy of
their own; and modern historians have acted unwisely in disdaining the
occasional repetition even of his fables. For if his truths record
the events, his fables paint the manners and the opinions of the time;
and the last fill up the history, of which events are only the
skeleton.

To account for his frequent use of dialogue and his dramatic effects
of narrative, we must remember the tribunal to which the work of
Herodotus was subjected. Every author, unconsciously to himself,
consults the tastes of those he addresses. No small coterie of
scholars, no scrupulous and critical inquirers, made the ordeal
Herodotus underwent. His chronicles were not dissertations to be
coldly pondered over and skeptically conned: they were read aloud at
solemn festivals to listening thousands; they were to arrest the
cur