part
of the world we please,--take him in ancient Egypt or Assyria, in
Greece or in Rome, or in modern Europe,--he is but a step in advance
of his predecessor. He is excellent company. He never moralizes, never
bores you with philosophy of history or political economy. He never
speculates about causes. But on the other hand, he is uncritical. He
takes unsuspectingly the materials which he finds ready to his
hand,--the national ballads, the romances, and the biographies. He
transfers to his pages whatever catches his fancy. The more
picturesque an anecdote, the more unhesitatingly he writes it down,
though in the same proportion it is the less likely to be authentic.
Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf; Curtius jumping into the gulf;
our English Alfred spoiling the cakes; or Bruce watching the leap of
the spider,--stories of this kind he relates with the same simplicity
with which he records the birth in his own day, in some outlandish
village, of a child with two heads, or the appearance of the
sea-serpent or the flying dragon. Thus the chronicle, however
charming, is often nothing but poetry taken literally and translated
into prose. It grows, however, and improves insensibly with the growth
of the nation. Like the drama, it develops from poor beginnings into
the loftiest art, and becomes at last perhaps the very best kind of
historical writing which has yet been produced. Herodotus and Livy,
Froissart and Hall and Holinshed, are as great in their own
departments as Sophocles or Terence or Shakespeare. We are not yet
entirely clear of portents and prodigies. Superstition clings to us as
our shadow, and is to be found in the wisest as well as the weakest.
The Romans, the most practical people that ever lived,--a people so
pre-eminently effective that they have printed their character
indelibly into the constitution of Europe,--these Romans, at the very
time they were making themselves the world's masters, allowed
themselves to be influenced in the most important affairs of State by
a want of appetite in the sacred chickens, or the color of the
entrails of a calf. Take him at his best, man is a great fool. It is
likely enough that we ourselves habitually say and practice things
which a thousand years hence will seem not a jot less absurd. Cato
tells us that the Roman augurs could not look one another in the face
without laughing; and I have heard that bishops in some parts of the
world betray sometimes analogous misgiv