e
must know more than mere facts. Human nature, viewed under an induction of
extended experience, is the best help to the criticism of human history.
Historical characters can only be estimated by the standard which human
experience, whether actual or traditionary, has furnished. To form correct
views of individuals we must regard them as forming parts of a great
whole--we must measure them by their relation to the mass of beings by whom
they are surrounded, and, in contemplating the incidents in their lives or
condition which tradition has handed down to us, we must rather consider
the general bearing of the whole narrative, than the respective
probability of its details.

It is unfortunate for us, that, of some of the greatest men, we know
least, and talk most. Homer, Socrates, and Shakespere(1) have, perhaps,
contributed more to the intellectual enlightenment of mankind than any
other three writers who could be named, and yet the history of all three
has given rise to a boundless ocean of discussion, which has left us
little save the option of choosing which theory or theories we will
follow. The personality of Shakespere is, perhaps, the only thing in which
critics will allow us to believe without controversy; but upon everything
else, even down to the authorship of plays, there is more or less of doubt
and uncertainty. Of Socrates we know as little as the contradictions of
Plato and Xenophon will allow us to know. He was one of the _dramatis
personae_ in two dramas as unlike in principles as in style. He appears as
the enunciator of opinions as different in their tone as those of the
writers who have handed them down. When we have read Plato _or_ Xenophon,
we think we know something of Socrates; when we have fairly read and
examined both, we feel convinced that we are something worse than
ignorant.

It has been an easy, and a popular expedient, of late years, to deny the
personal or real existence of men and things whose life and condition were
too much for our belief. This system--which has often comforted the
religious sceptic, and substituted the consolations of Strauss for those
of the New Testament--has been of incalculable value to the historical
theorists of the last and present centuries. To question the existence of
Alexander the Great, would be a more excusable act, than to believe in
that of Romulus. To deny a fact related in Herodotus, because it is
inconsistent with a theory developed from an Assyrian