comes to one's mind
with great force. To the north is Orchomenus and the Minyan treasure
house, seat of those merchant princes of Phoenicia who brought to Greece
the knowledge of letters and the art of working in gold. Thebes is at
our feet with the gloom of the terrible legends of Greek tragedy still
lingering about it, the birthplace of Pindar, the nurse of Epaminondas
and the Sacred Band.

And from out of the plain where 'Mars loved to dance,' rises the Muses'
haunt, Helicon, by whose silver streams Corinna and Hesiod sang. While
far away under the white aegis of those snow-capped mountains lies
Chaeronea and the Lion plain where with vain chivalry the Greeks strove
to check Macedon first and afterwards Rome; Chaeronea, where in the
Martinmas summer of Greek civilisation Plutarch rose from the drear waste
of a dying religion as the aftermath rises when the mowers think they
have left the field bare.

Greek philosophy began and ended in scepticism: the first and the last
word of Greek history was Faith.

Splendid thus in its death, like winter sunsets, the Greek religion
passed away into the horror of night. For the Cimmerian darkness was at
hand, and when the schools of Athens were closed and the statue of Athena
broken, the Greek spirit passed from the gods and the history of its own
land to the subtleties of defining the doctrine of the Trinity and the
mystical attempts to bring Plato into harmony with Christ and to
reconcile Gethsemane and the Sermon on the Mount with the Athenian prison
and the discussion in the woods of Colonus. The Greek spirit slept for
wellnigh a thousand years. When it woke again, like Antaeus it had
gathered strength from the earth where it lay, like Apollo it had lost
none of its divinity through its long servitude.

In the history of Roman thought we nowhere find any of those
characteristics of the Greek Illumination which I have pointed out are
the necessary concomitants of the rise of historical criticism. The
conservative respect for tradition which made the Roman people delight in
the ritual and formulas of law, and is as apparent in their politics as
in their religion, was fatal to any rise of that spirit of revolt against
authority the importance of which, as a factor in intellectual progress,
we have already seen.

The whitened tables of the Pontifices preserved carefully the records of
the eclipses and other atmospherical phenomena, and what we call the art
of verify