e walls of Troy, both armies looking on the while. Such
sight the earth never beheld. But the ear of the warrior and the harness
of his steeds resembled such as had been seen or heard of. The poet
invents a centaur, but not the bow and arrow he puts into his hands. His
hero scales the sky, but carries with him the sandal on his foot which
was made in the village below.

"Three-fourths of the two volumes now presented to the public,"
continues Mr Grote in his preface, "are destined to elucidate this age
of historical faith as distinguished from the later age of historical
reason: to exhibit its basis in the human mind--an omnipresent religious
and personal interpretation of nature; to illustrate it by comparison
with the like mental habit in early modern Europe; to show its immense
abundance and variety of narrative matter, with little care for
consistency between one story and another; lastly, to set forth the
causes which overgrew, and partially supplanted the old epical
sentiment, and introduced, in the room of literal faith, a variety of
compromises and interpretations." This is the just application of the
legends of Greece, forming, as they do, the very best description of the
people whose exploits and career the author is about to narrate. This is
a truer commencement of the history than that which appears at first
sight more strictly historical--namely, an investigation into the
obscure tribes which inhabited the same country prior to that people who
are known to us as Greeks--an investigation that is to be carried on by
strained interpretations of these very legends. We congratulate both
author and reader on this escape from the fruitless entanglement of the
Pelasgian controversy. Mr Grote seems to have taken due warning from the
difficulties and embarrassments in which his predecessor has here
involved himself. Dr Thirlwall is a judicious, a succinct, and lucid
writer, and yet a more tedious, confused, and utterly unsatisfactory
piece of history no man can read than the account he gives us, in his
opening volume, of the Pelasgians. The subject is clearly hopeless. From
the first sentence to the last of that account, a painful confusion
attends upon the reader--not the fault, we are ready to believe, of the
historian, unless it be a fault to attempt a statement of facts where
the materials for such a statement do not exist. "The people"--Dr
Thirlwall thus commences--"whom we call Greeks--the Hellenes--were not,
_