against the "abomination of desolation, standing where it should not "-i.e. the Roman banners, expressing the triumph of an idolatrous nation, insolently hoisted aloft in the Temple of Jehovah was transfigured, through this one man's presence, into a capricious, possibly an ungrateful, rebellion. Did this carrion find a peaceful grave?

GREECE UNDER THE ROMANS 1

WHAT is called Philosophical History I believe to be yet in its infancy. It is the profound remark of Mr. Finlay-profound as I myself understand it, i.e. in relation to this philosophical treatment--" that History will ever remain inexhaustible." How inexhaustible? Are the facts of History inexhaustible? In regard to the ancient division of History with which he is there dealing, this would be in no sense true; and in any case it would be a lifeless truth. So entirely have the mere facts of Pagan History been disinterred, ransacked, sifted, that, except by means of some chance medal that may be unearthed in the illiterate East (as of late towards Bokhara), or by means of some mysterious inscription, such as those which still mock the learned traveller in Persia, northwards near Hamadan (Ecbatana), and southwards at Persepolis, or those which distract him amongst the shadowy ruins of Yucatan (Uxmal, suppose, and Palenque)—once for all, barring these pure godsends, it is hardly "in the dice that any downright novelty of fact should remain in reversion for this nineteenth century. The merest possibility exists that in Armenia, or in a Græco-Russian monastery on Mount Athos, or in Pompeii, &c., some authors hitherto aveкdoтоι may yet be concealed; and, by a channel in that

1 From Blackwood's Magazine for October 1844, where it appeared as a review of "Greece under the Romans. By George Finlay, K.R. G. Edinburgh and London, 1844." Reprinted by De Quincey in 1858 in the Eighth Volume of his Collected Writings, with only slight verbal changes, such as the substitution of "I" for "We," but with the addition of one or two footnotes.-M.

degree improbable, it is possible that certain new facts of history may still reach us. But else, and failing these cryptical or subterraneous currents of communication, for us the record is closed. History in that sense has come to an end, and is sealed up as by the Angel in the Apocalypse. What then? The facts so understood are but the dry bones of the mighty past. And the question arises here also, not less than in that sublimest of prophetic visions, "Can these dry bones live?" Not only can they live, but by an infinite variety of life. The same historic facts, viewed in different lights, or brought into connexion with other facts, according to endless diversities of permutation and combination, furnish grounds for such eternal successions of new speculations as make the facts themselves virtually new, and virtually endless. The same Hebrew words are read by different sets of vowel points, and the same hieroglyphics are deciphered by keys everlastingly varied.

To me I repeat that oftentimes it seems as though the science of History were yet scarcely founded. There will be such a science, if at present there is not; and in one feature of its capacities it will resemble Chemistry. What is so familiar to the perceptions of man as the common chemical agents of water, air, and the soil on which we tread? Yet each one of these elements is a mystery to this day; handled, used, tried, searched experimentally, combined in ten thousand ways—it is still unknown; fathomed by recent science down to a certain depth, it is still probably by its destiny unfathomable. Even to the end of days, it is pretty certain that the minutest particle of earth, that a dewdrop scarcely distinguishable as a separate object, that the slenderest filament of a plant, will include within itself secrets inaccessible to man. And yet, compared with the mystery of man himself, these physical worlds of mystery are but as a radix of infinity. Chemistry is in this view mysterious and Spinosistically sublime—that it is the science of the latent in all things, of all things as lurking in all. Within the lifeless flint, within the silent pyrites, slumbers an agony of potential combustion. Iron is imprisoned in blood. With cold water (as every child is now-a-days aware) you may lash a fluid into angry ebullitions of heat; with hot water, as with the

rod of Amram's son, you may freeze a fluid down to the temperature of the Sarsar wind, provided only that you regulate the pressure of the air. The sultry and dissolving fluid shall bake into a solid, the petrific fluid shall melt into a liquid. Heat shall freeze, frost shall thaw; and wherefore? Simply because old things are brought together in new modes of combination. And, in endless instances beside, we see in all elements the same Panlike latency of forms and powers, which gives to the external world a capacity of self-transformation, and of polymorphosis absolutely inexhaustible.

But the same capacity belongs to the facts of History. And I do not mean merely that, from subjective differences in the minds reviewing them, such facts assume endless varieties of interpretation and estimate, but that objectively, from lights still increasing in the science of government and of social philosophy, all the primary facts of History become liable continually to new presentations, to new combinations, and to new valuations of their moral relations. I have seen some kinds of marble, where the veinings happened to be unusually multiplied, in which human faces, figures, processions, or fragments of natural scenery, seemed absolutely illimitable, under the endless variations or inversions of the order according to which they might be combined and grouped. Something analogous takes effect in reviewing the remote parts of History. Rome, for instance, has been the object of historic pens for twenty centuries (dating from Polybius); and yet hardly so much as twenty years have elapsed since Niebuhr opened upon us almost a new revelation, by re-combining the same eternal facts according to a different set of principles. The same thing may be said, though not with the same degree of emphasis, upon the Grecian researches of the late Ottfried Mueller. Egyptian History again, even at this moment, is seen stealing upon us through the dusky twilight in its first distinct lineaments. Before Young, Champollion, Lepsius, and the others who have followed on their traces in this field of History, all was outer darkness; and whatsoever we do know or shall know of Egyptian Thebes will now be recovered as if from the unswathing of a mummy. Not until a flight of three thousand years has left Thebes the Hekatompylos a dusty speck

in the far distance, have we even begun to read her annals, or to understand her revolutions.

Another instance I have now before me of this new historic faculty for resuscitating the buried, and for calling back the breath to the frozen features of death, in Mr. Finlay's work upon the Greeks as related to the Roman Empire. He presents us with old facts, but under the purpose of clothing them with a new life. He rehearses ancient stories, not with the humble ambition of better adorning them, of more perspicuously narrating, or even of more forcibly pointing their moral, but of extracting from them some new meaning, and thus forcing them to arrange themselves, under some latent connexion with other phenomena now first detected, as illustrations of some great principle or agency now first revealing its importance. Mr. Finlay's style of intellect is appropriate to such a task; for it is subtle and Machiavelian. But there is this difficulty in doing justice to the novelty, and at times I may say with truth to the profundity, of his views, that they are by necessity thrown out in continued successions of details, are insulated, and, in one word, sporadic. This follows from the very nature of his work; for it is a perpetual commentary on the incidents of Grecian History, from the era of the Roman Conquest to the commencement of what Mr. Finlay, in a peculiar sense, calls the Byzantine Empire. These incidents have nowhere been systematically or continuously recorded: they come forward by casual flashes in the annals, perhaps, of some church historian, as they happen to connect themselves with his momentary theme; or they betray themselves in the embarrassments of the central government, whether at Rome or at Constantinople, when arguing at one time a pestilence, at another an insurrection, or at a third an inroad of barbarians. It is not the fault of Mr. Finlay, but his great disadvantage, that the affairs of Greece have been thus discontinuously exhibited, and that its internal changes of condition have been never treated except indirectly, and by men aliud agentibus. The Grecian race had a primary importance on our planet; but the Grecian name, represented by Greece considered as a territory, or as the political seat of the Hellenic people, ceased to have much importance, in the eyes of historians, from the time