Oriental fiction,*-the irresistible admixture of humour which tempers the awfulness of Irish Banshee or Phoka,—to contrast the sharp stern outlines of the Fairy Tales of Northern Europe with the misty grandeurs of the East; agile fairy and dusky goblin with the dim aërial form, looming in mid air, of Oriental Genius; but it would lead us too far astray from Books for the Young. The important influence exercised by such "Nursery Tales" cannot be doubted for a moment. It is obvious at a glance, that in mountaineers, for example in the hardy Swiss and our primitive Highlanders, their patriotic ardour of attachment to their birthplace is not more owing to the remarkable features of the scenery amid which they are nurtured, than to the strange unearthly traditions which that scenery has inspired. Such glimpses into the unseen world serve at least to lift the heart from the petty sordid cares of this life to the contemplation and fellowship of those bright angelic beings, who Leave their heavenly bowers, And come to succour us, who succour want, Oh! that high. Heav'n should deign of men to have regard."† Only let there be some selection. The feverish horrors of such supernatural stories as the Castle of Otranto, or the Mysteries of Adolpho, deserve as low a place in legendary art, as in romance the Mysteries of Paris compared with the Waverley Novels. Let it never be forgotten, that a boy's character is formed, not only by the example of school friends, and friends at home, but in at least equal degree by that of the friends whom he meets, and becomes acquainted with, and learns to love in the pages of his favourite books. Among the great faults of the present day in this country are superficial intellectuality, want of originality, and dissipation of power; an imperfect and discursive acquaintance with many studies, instead of intense concentration upon one, according to the bias of the individual,-morally, an excessive anxiety, a harassing ambition to "rise in the world," and a morbid self-consciousness destructive of energetic action. The abatement of these evil tendencies, doubtless, depends much on early culture. Books for the young, we have endeavoured to show, should be entertaining, fitted to nourish the affections and imagination rather than the logical faculty, indirectly instructive and suggestive rather than exhaustive of their Mr. Thackeray has mentioned a good instance of this painlessness in the destruction of the Forty Thieves, in the forty jars, by Ali Baba's scalding oil. † Spenser. subject, presenting images of good to be followed, rather than of evil to be shunned. Above all, children must not be taught too much nor too soon. Knowledge is sometimes a hurtful burden; too much of it in proportion to the natural powers destroys originality, and substitutes an unreal and insipid taste, an unconscious hypocrisy. If the dialectic faculties are later in their development than the emotions, the memory, the imagination, and the apprehension of the senses, it cannot be disputed that the young may best be influenced by personal authority and personal example; nor that the study of languages naturally comes first in order, next the events of history and human life, last of all the abstractions of Philosophy; first words, then things, lastly Ideas. As the sense of hearing is most acute in the dark, as the fancy is most inventive in the glimmering twilight, so the memory is most impressible and most tenacious, the feelings are most susceptible, before they are reduced under the severe control of the mature intellect enlightened by reflexion. With all that is being done for the reform of our modes of training the young, we have still to struggle with the evils of an indiscriminate and a premature education. Goethe, in his Wilhelm Meister, sagaciously protests against an uniform dress for his Utopian schoolboys. To discover the embryo genius, if he had any, of each boy, and to give it especial cultivation, was one secret of the influence of the Jesuits. They knew that our wishes are the prognostication of our powers. With us in Great Britain it is different. Not in large schools only, but in the narrower circle of home, it is too often to be deplored, that those who have care of the young, and who ought to know of each one, what he is, and what he is best able to do, fail to observe their several traits, and to shape their rough-hewn capacities to the proper end. The other evil is even more serious. The anxiety to make clever children defeats itself, it spoils thousands who might be clever men. Not a few, and those the most promising,-children for example like Hartley Coleridge,-require to be positively kept back, not urged onwards. In his pitiable case it was not the predominance of fancy in his childhood that was unhealthy, but the unboyish consciousness of self. Games at play with other boys would have been far better for him than to sit listening with greedy ears to the philosophers of the Lakes. The two greatest among our British poets, Shakespeare and Milton, both speak complainingly of their "late spring." Their regrets were unneeded. Better, far better that it should be so, than that the fruits, nipped and shrunk, should belie the promise of the abundant blossom. Let each period of life wear its own garb, and play its own part. For old age there is rest, -persevering activity for manhood,-and for childhood the grace and beauty and careless happiness which are peculiarly its own. Greece during the Macedonian Period. 425 ART. V.-1. Lectures on Ancient History, from the Earliest Times to the Taking of Alexandria by Octavianus; comprising the History of the Asiatic Nations, the Egyptians, Greeks, Macedonians, and Carthaginians. By B. G. NIEBUHR. Translated from the German edition of Dr. Marcus Niebuhr, by Dr. LEONHARD SCHMITZ, &c. &c. London, 1852. 2. A History of Greece. By the Right Rev. CONNOP THIRLWALL, Lord Bishop of St. David's. Vols. vi. vii. and viii. New Edition. London, 1851. THERE is perhaps no portion of the history of the civilized world which has of late years, in this country at least, received a degree of attention less proportioned to its importance than the later or Macedonian era of Greece, under which we must include the contemporary history of those more distant countries which then became part of the Grecian world. True it is that this period is forced upon our notice from our earliest years; none is more fertile in that anecdotal literature of which the Lives of Plutarch form the great store-house; stories of Alexander and Pyrrhus rush naturally to the mind of the schoolboy to furnish illustrations for his theme on the dangerous consequences of drunkenness or the necessity of bridling a hasty temper. But this precocious and superficial intimacy seldom forms the groundwork of any more solid acquaintance in the course of after studies. Philip and his son are household words in every mouth; but we suspect that they often resemble those standard works in every language of which it is caustically said, that they are quoted by everybody but read by none. Of the "Successors," to give them their old technical name, the vaguest notions are generally entertained; we suspect that not a few fair classical scholars would be sore put to if required to draw any minute distinction between Demetrius Poliorcetes and Demetrius Phalereus. Probably there are plenty of learned persons who know the exact number of courses in the walls of Platææ, and can accurately describe every evolution of Phormion's fleet, who still have nothing but their schoolboy recollections of the Anabasis to remind them that events of no small note occurred both among Greeks and Barbarians, of a later date than a certain sacrifice with which Tissaphernes honoured the Ephesian Artemis. The orators may perhaps carry on a few to behold the death-struggle of Athens; but that death-struggle is too often hastily assumed to have been that of Greece also. At all events, when Thucydides, Xenophon, and Demosthenes have all failed us, none but the professed historian VOL. XXI. NO. XLII. 2 E can be expected to wade through a period where he has to pick his way at every step amid the careless blunders of Plutarch and the impenetrable stupidity of Diodorus, where constant references have to be made to the scandalous gossip of Athenæus and the antiquarian twaddle of Pausanias, and where the very purest and most familiar atmosphere that we are allowed to breathe consists of the disjecta membra of Polybius and of those remote decades of Livy which nobody ever thinks of reading. There is doubtless force in all this; it at least amounts to proof that this period could not be introduced as an essential portion of academical study in the same way as the history of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars. Did we possess the entire work of Polybius, the case would be widely different. Tantalizing indeed it is, when, at some critical point of warfare or negotiation, the too familiar break in the text warns us that we have to fill up the lacunæ of the historian and the statesman with the double-filtered effusions of moralists, topographers, and anecdotemongers. But it is something to have even such fragments as we still possess of one whom, though far inferior to either, we may fairly call at once the Thucydides of his own age and the Arnold of an earlier one. To him, through a happy though melancholy position which befell no other historian, the old local politics of Greece and the wide-spreading diplomacy of the Eternal City were alike living and familiar things. His lot was cast, now among party feuds in Boeotia and Arcadia and border warfare of Messene and Megalopolis; now among those scenes of vast intrigue and conquest, which, to a vulgar mind, might have made the events of his youth seem but combats of the kites and crows. He who had borne the urn of the last of Hellenic heroes-the last who had organized a Grecian commonwealth for war and peace, the last who had fought, Greek against Greek, at no Macedonian or Roman bidding-lived to stand beside the conqueror of mighty Carthage, when he wept over the predestined fate of Rome amid the ashes of her proudest rival. But while our great authority thus remains to us only in a patched and fragmentary state, it is no wonder that the want of a text-book is sufficient to deter those who are used to such guidance as that of Herodotus and Thucydides from venturing themselves among the shoals and quicksands of so dangerous a coast. And, besides this, we must confess that the history itself is, in many respects, far from an attractive one. We are working among the dregs of a nation, the vigour of whose political and literary life has for ever passed away. Conscious speculation on the science of commonwealths and kingdoms has succeeded to the intuitive and experimental wisdom of Themistocles and Pericles; the grammarian and the imitative poet strive, at a still wider distance, to console us for those glorious days of Homer or of Eschylus which are gone never to return. It is a shock to old and high associations when, in the heading or the index, we find the immortal names of Thermopyla and Salamis attached to unfamiliar and comparatively ignoble conflicts. The city of Teucer and Evagoras so closely suggests the memory of its more illustrious parent,* that one is pained to find so glorious a name recalling only the selfish warfare of Macedonian robbers; while the very spot where Leonidas had fallen beholds, indeed, Europe revenge its old wrongs upon the rival continent, but well nigh calls forth our sympathies for the fallen despot, when it is not the patriot fervour of old Greece, but the cold and selfish ambition of the masters of the world to which the pride of eastern tyrants has to bend in homage. In short, there is quite enough to account for, though we cannot bring ourselves to think that there is enough to justify, the neglect into which this portion of history has generally fallen. We have always looked upon the period from the second battle of Mantineia to the reduction of Macedonia and Achaia into Roman provinces, as by no means void either of interest to the reader or of value to the general historian of Greece and of the world. The rise of the Macedonian state under its two great princes, the spread of Hellenism in Asia through the conquests of Alexander, the great political phenomenon of the Achæan League, even the momentary glory of Young Sparta under the last Cleomenes, are surely events of a nature at once highly important and highly interesting; less important and less interesting, we fully grant, than the old days of Marathon and Thermopylæ, of Arginusæ and gospotamos, but still very far from meriting to be entirely passed by in a historical survey either of Greece or of the world at large. It was, therefore, naturally with no slight satisfaction that we found entire sympathy with these views expressed by no less an authority than the great Niebuhr, and the inore so as even Mr. Grote appears to have fallen into the common error of undervaluing this period, and does not contemplate extending his labours to the elucidation of the Achæan League and of the last Macedonian dynasty. Niebuhr, on the other hand, we are informed, had made this period the object of more attentive study than any other portion of ancient history, and in the lectures whose title we have transcribed at the head of this * We may here reverse the words of Eschylus Σαλαμῖνά τε, τᾶς νῦν ματρόπολις τῶνδ' αἰτία ςεναγμῶν. P'ers. 864. |