eops, ate a beef-steak in the
hanging-gardens of Babylon, and listened to no sailors' yarns at the
Piraeus, which doubtless, before his time, had been the sole authority
for Grecian legends concerning foreign lands. But, as to Thucydides,
our own belief is, that he lived like a monk shut up in his _museum_
or study; and that, at the very utmost, he may have gone in the
steamboat[15] to Corfu (_i. e._ Corcyra), because _that_ was the
island which occasioned the row of the Peloponnesian war.

[Footnote 15: 'In the steamboat!' Yes, reader, the steamboat. It is
clear that there _was_ one in Homer's time. See the art. _Phaeacian_ in
the _Odyssey_: if it paid then, _a fortiori_ six hundred years after.
The only point unknown about it, is the captain's name and the
state-cabin fares.]

Xenophon now is quite another sort of man; he could use his pen; but
also he could use his sword; and (when need was) his heels, in running
away. His Grecian history of course is a mere fraction of the general
history; and, moreover, our own belief, founded upon the differences
of the style, is, that the work now received for his must be spurious.
But in this place the question is not worth discussing. Two works
remain, professedly historical, which, beyond a doubt, _are_ his; and
one of them the most interesting prose work by much which Athens has
bequeathed us; though, by the way, Xenophon was living in a sort of
elegant exile at a chateau in Thessaly, and not under Athenian
protection, when he wrote it. Both of his great works relate to a
Persian Cyrus, but to a Cyrus of different centuries. The _Cyropaedia_
is a romance, pretty much on the plan of Fenelon's _Telemaque_, only
(Heaven be praised!) not so furiously apoplectic. It pursues the
great Cyrus, the founder of the Persian empire, the Cyrus of the
Jewish prophets, from his infancy to his death-bed; and describes
evidently not any real prince, according to any authentic record of
his life, but, upon some basis of hints and vague traditions, improves
the actual Cyrus into an ideal fiction of a sovereign and a military
conqueror, as he _ought_ to be. One thing only we shall say of this
work, though no admirers ourselves of the twaddle which Xenophon
elsewhere gives us as philosophic memorabilia, that the episode of
Abradates and Panthea (especially the behaviour of Panthea after the
death of her beloved hero, and the incident of the dead man's hand
coming away on Cyrus grasping it) excee