at least under this name_, the first inhabitants of Greece. Many names
have been recorded of races that preceded them there, which they in
later times considered barbarous, or foreign in language and manners to
themselves." Here the very first sentence proclaims a doubt how far the
change was one of race or only of name, and this doubt pursues us
throughout the whole inquiry. It is never solved by the author, but is
sometimes _forgotten_ by him; for he occasionally proceeds with the
discussion as if he had left no such doubt behind him undetermined. At
one time he states distinctly, "we find that though in early times
Thessaly, and the north of Greece in general, was the scene of frequent
migrations and revolutions so that its ancient inhabitants may here and
there have been completely displaced by new tribes, Attica appears never
to have undergone such a change; and Peloponnesus lost no considerable
part of its original population till long after the whole had become
Hellenic." (P. 54.) Herodotus had said that certain Pelasgians living in
his time spoke a language different from the Greeks. Dr Thirlwall puts
the passage of Herodotus upon the rack to extract from it a confession
that the difference was not greater than between one dialect of Greek
from another. Yet, as the narrative proceeds--if narrative it can be
called--we have the Pelasgians and the Greeks represented as essentially
distinct people; and we hear of the difficulty of determining "the
precise point of civilisation to which the Pelasgians had advanced,
before the Greeks overtook and outstripped them." The whole treatise,
notwithstanding the air of decision now and then assumed, is but an
amplification of the doubt implied in the very first sentence of it.

The legends which fill up the dark space with _eponymous_ heroes, as
they have been called--heroes who take the name of a tribe in order to
bestow it back upon the tribe; for it was the Greek mode of thinking at
these early periods to presume that every tribe, or _gens_, had a common
progenitor from whom it took its title and origin,--these legends are at
one time treated with the due suspicion which should attend upon them;
yet, at another, if a fortunate congruity, some lucky "dovetailing," can
be observed amongst them, they are raised into the rank of historical
evidence. The mode of interpretation which we have described as
characterising the first and undisciplined age of critical inquiry, is
not