uth of a particular fact stated by the very
reverend historian, that he was notorious in Charles the Second's
court, and that no man believed a word he said. But now Thucydides,
though writing about his own time, and doubtless embellishing by
fictions not less than his more amusing brethren, is as dull as if he
prided himself on veracity. Nay, he tells us no secret anecdotes of
the times--surely there must have been many; and this proves to us,
that he was a low fellow without political connections, and that he
never had been behind the curtain. Now, what business had such a man
to set himself up for a writer of history and a speculator on
politics? Besides, his history is imperfect; and, suppose it were
not, what is its subject? Why simply one single war; a war which
lasted twenty-seven years; but which, after all, through its whole
course was enlivened by only two events worthy to enter into general
history--viz. the plague of Athens, and the miserable licking which
the Athenian invaders received in Sicily. This dire overthrow dished
Athens out and out; for one generation to come, there was an end of
Athenian domination; and that arrogant state, under the yoke of their
still baser enemies of Sparta, learned experimentally what were the
evils of a foreign conquest. There was therefore, in the domination of
the Thirty Tyrants, something to 'point a moral' in the Peloponnesian
war: it was the judicial reaction of martial tyranny and foreign
oppression, such as we of this generation have beheld in the double
conquest of Paris by insulted and outraged Christendom. But nothing of
all this will be found in Thucydides--he is as cool as a cucumber upon
every act of atrocity; whether it be the bloody abuse of power, or the
bloody retribution from the worm that, being trampled on too long,
turns at last to sting and to exterminate--all alike he enters in his
daybook and his ledger, posts them up to the account of brutal Spartan
or polished Athenian, with no more expression of his feelings (if he
had any) than a merchant making out an invoice of puncheons that are
to steal away men's wits, or of frankincense and myrrh that are to
ascend in devotion to the saints. Herodotus is a fine, old, genial
boy, that, like Froissart or some of the crusading historians, kept
himself in health and jovial spirits by travelling about; nor did he
confine himself to Greece or the Grecian islands; but he went to
Egypt, got bousy in the Pyramid of Ch