ners of the time. Facts, if too nakedly told, may be very
different from truths, in the impression they convey; and the spirit
of Grecian history is lost if we do not feel the Greeks themselves
constantly before us. Thus when, as in Herodotus, the agents of
events converse, every word reported may not have been spoken; but
what we lose in accuracy of details we more than gain by the fidelity
of the whole. We acquire a lively and accurate impression of the
general character--of the thoughts, and the manners, and the men of
the age and the land. It is so also with legends, sparingly used, and
of which the nature is discernible from fact by the most superficial
gaze; we more sensibly feel that it was the Greeks who were engaged at
Marathon when we read of the dream of Hippias or the apparition of
Theseus. Finally, an historian of Greece will, almost without an
effort, convey to the reader a sense of the mighty change, from an age
of poetical heroes to an age of practical statesmen, if we suffer
Herodotus to be his model in the narrative of the Persian war, and
allow the more profound and less imaginative Thucydides to colour the
pictures of the Peloponnesian.

XIV. The period now entered upon is also remarkable for the fertile
and rapid development of one branch of intellectual cultivation in
which the Greeks were pre-eminently illustrious. In history, Rome was
the rival of Greece; in philosophy, Rome was never more than her
credulous and reverend scholar.

We have seen the dawn of philosophy with Thales; Miletus, his
birthplace, bore his immediate successors. Anaximander, his younger
contemporary [234], is said, with Pherecydes, to have been the first
philosopher who availed himself of the invention of writing. His
services have not been sufficiently appreciated--like those of most
men who form the first steps in the progress between the originator
and the perfector. He seems boldly to have differed from his master,
Thales, in the very root of his system. He rejected the original
element of water or humidity, and supposed the great primary essence
and origin of creation to be in that EVERYTHING or NOTHING which he
called THE INFINITE, and which we might perhaps render as "The Chaos;"
[235] that of this vast element, the parts are changed--the whole
immutable, and all things arise from and return unto that universal
source [236]. He pursued his researches into physics, and attempted
to account for the thunder