To have classed this man as a mere fabling annalist, or even if it should be said on better thoughts-no, not as a fabling annalist but as a great scenical historian-is so monstrous an oversight, so mere a neglect of the proportions maintained amongst the topics treated by Herodotus, that we do not conceive any apology requisite for revising, in this place or at this time, the general estimate on a subject always interesting. What is every body's business, the proverb instructs us to view as nobody's by duty; but under the same rule it is any body's by right; and what belongs to all hours alike, may for that reason belong without blame to January of the year 1842. Yet, if any man obstinate in demanding for all acts a "sufficient reason to speak Leibniticé] demurs to our revision, as having no special invitation at this immediate moment, then we are happy to tell him that Mr Hermann Bobrik has furnished us with such an invitation by a recent review of Herodotus as a geographer, and thus furnished even a technical plea for calling up the great man before our bar.

*

We have already said something towards reconsidering the thoughtless classification of a writer whose works do actually, in their major proportion, not essentially concern that subject to which, by their translated title, they are exclusively referred; for even that part which is historical, often moves by mere anecdotes or personal sketches. And the uniform object of these is not the history, but the political condition, of the particular state or province. But we now feel disposed to press this rectification a little more keenly by asking-what was the reason for this apparently wilful error? The reason is palpable: it was the ignorance of irreflectiveness.

I. For with respect to the first oversight on the claim of Herodotus, as an earliest archetype of composition, so much is evident-that, if prose were simply the negation of verse, were it the fact that prose had no separate laws of its own, but that to be a composer in prose meant only his privilege of being inartificial his dispensation from the restraints of

metre-then indeed it would be a slight nominal honour to have been the Father of Prose. But this is ignorance, though a pretty common ignorance. To walk well, it is not enough that a man abstains from dancing. Walking has rules of its own, the more difficult to perceive or to practise as they are less broadly prononcés. To forbear singing is not therefore to speak well or to read well: each of which offices rests upon a separate art of its own. Numerous laws of transition, connexion, preparation, are different for a writer in verse and a writer in prose. Each mode of composition is a great art; well executed, is the highest and most difficult of arts. And we are satisfied that, one century before the age of Herodotus, the effort must have been greater to wean the feelings from a key of poetic composition to which all minds had long been attuned and prepared, than at present it would be for any paragraphist in the newspapers to make the inverse revolution by suddenly renouncing the modesty of prose for the impassioned forms of lyrical poetry. It was a great thing to be the leader of prose composition; great even, as we all can see at other times, to be absolutely first in any one subdivision of composition: how much more in one whole bisection of literature! And, if it is objected that Herodotus was not the eldest of prose writers, doubtless in an absolute sense no man was. There must always have been short public inscriptions not admitting of metre, as where numbers- quantities - dimensions were concerned. It is enough that all feeble tentative explorers of the art had been too meagre in matter, too rude in manner, like Fabius Pictor amongst the Romans, to captivate the. ears of men, and thus to ensure their own propagation. Without annoying the reader by the cheap erudition of parading defunct names before him, it is certain that Scylax, an author still surviving, was nearly contemporary with Herodotus; and not very wide of him by his subject. In his case it is probable that the mere practical benefits of his book to the navigators of the Mediterranean in that early period, had multiplied his book

These rectifications ought to have some effect in elevating-first, the rank of Herodotus; secondly, his present attractions. Most certain we are that few readers are aware of the various amusement conveyed from all sources then existing, by this most splendid of travellers. Dr Johnson has expressed in print, (and not merely in the strife of conversation,) the following extravagant idea-that to Homer, as its original author, may be traced back, at least in outline, every tale or complication of incidents now moving in modern poems, romances, or novels. Now, it is not necessary to denounce such an assertion as false, because, upon two separate reasons, it shows itself to be impossible. In the first place, the motive to such an assertion was-to emblazon the inventive faculty of Homer; but it happens that Homer could not invent any thing, small or great, under the very principles of Grecian art. To be a fiction, as to matters of action, (for in embellishments the rule might be otherwise,) was to be ridiculous and unmeaning in Grecian eyes. We may illustrate the Grecian feeling on this point (however little known to eritics) by our own dolorous disappointment when we opened the Alhambra of Mr Washington Irving. We had supposed it to be some real Spanish or Moorish legend connected with that romantic edifice; and, behold! it was a mere Sadler's Wells travesty, (we speak of its plan, not of its execution,) applied to some slender fragments from past days. Such, but far stronger, would have been the disappointment to Grecian feelings, in finding any poetic (à fortiori, any prose) legend to be a fiction of the writer's-words cannot measure the reaction of disgust. And thence it was that no tragic poet of Athens ever took for his theme any tale or fable not already pre-existing in some version, though now and then it might be the least popular version. It was capital as an offence of the intellect, it was lunatic to do otherwise. This is a most important characteristic of ancient taste; and most interesting in its philosophic value for any comparative estimate of modern art, as against ancient. In particular, no just commentary can ever be written on the poetics of Aristotle, which leaves it out of sight. Secondly, it

is evident that the whole character, the very principle of movement, in many modern stories, depends upon sentiments derived remotely from Christianity; and others upon usages or manners peculiar to modern civilization; so as in either case to involve a moral anachronism if viewed as Pagan. Not the colouring only of the fable, but the very incidents, one and all, and the situations, and the perplexities, are constantly the product of something characteristically modern in the circumstances, sometimes for instance in the climate; for the ancients had no experimental knowledge of severe climates. With these double impossibilities before us, of any absolute fictions in a Pagan author that could be generally fitted to anticipate modern tales, we shall not transfer to Herodotus the impracticable compliment paid by Dr Johnson to Homer. But it is certain that the very best co.lection of stories furnished by Pagan funds, lies dispersed through his great work. One of the best of the Arabian Nights, the very best as regards the structure of the plot-viz. the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves-is evidently derived from an incident in that remarkable Egyptian legend, connected with the treasure house of Rhampsinitus. This, except two of his Persian legends, (Cyrus and Darius,) is the longest tale in Herodotus; and by much the best in an artist's sense; indeed, its own remarkable merit, as a fable in which the incidents successively generate each other, caused it to be transplanted by the Greeks to their own country. Vossius, in his work on the Greek historians, and a hundred years later, Valckenaer, with many other scholars, had pointed out the singular conformity of this memorable Egyptian story with several that afterwards circulated in Greece. The eldest of these transfers was undoubtedly the Boeotian tale (but in days before the name Boeotia existed) of Agamedes and Trophonius, architects, and sons to the King of Orchomenos, who built a treasure-house at Hyria, (noticed by Homer in his ship catalogue,) followed by tragical circumstances, the very same as those recorded by Herodotus. It is true that the latter incidents, according to the Egyptian version-the monstrous device of Rhampsinitus for discovering

the robber at the price of his daughter's honour, and the final reward of the robber for his petty ingenuity, (which, after all, belonged chiefly to the deceased architect,) ruin the tale as a whole. But these latter incidents are obviously forgeries of another age; "angeschlossen" fastened on by fraud, 66 an den ersten aelteren theil," to the first and elder part, as Mueller rightly observes, p. 97, of his Orchomenos. And even here it is pleasing to notice the incredulity of Herodotus, who was not, like so many of his Christian commentators, sceptical upon previous system and by whole. sale, but equally prone to believe wherever his heart (naturally reve rential) suggested an interference of superior natures, and to doubt wherever his excellent judgment detected marks of incoherency. He records the entire series of incidents 28 τα λεγόμενα axon, reports of events which had reached him by hearsay, Eμoi de ou Tiota—" but to me," he says pointedly, "not credible."

In this view, as a thesaurus fabularum, a great repository of anecdotes and legends, tragic or romantic, Herodotus is so far beyond all Pagan competition, that we are thrown upon Christian literatures for any corresponding form of merit. The case has often been imagined playfully, that a man were restricted to one book; and, supposing all books so solemn as those of a religious interest to be laid out of the question, many are the answers which have been pronounced, according to the difference of men's minds. Rousseau, as is well known, on such an assumption made his election for Plutarch. But shall we tell the reader why? It was not altogether his taste, or his judicious choice, which decided him; for choice there can be none amongst elements unexamined-it was his limited reading. Except a few papers in the French Encyclopédie during his maturer years, and some dozen of works presented to him by their authors, his own friends, Rousseau had read little or nothing beyond Plutarch's Lives in a bad French translation, and Montaigne. Though not a Frenchman, having had an education (if such one can call it) thoroughly French, he had the usual puerile French craze about Roman virtue, and republican simplicity, and Cato, and "all that." So

that his decision goes for little. And even he, had he read Herodotus, would have thought twice before he made up his mind. The truth is, that in such a case, suppose, for example, Robinson Crusoe empowered to import one book and no more into his insular hermitage, the most powerful of human books must be unavoidably excluded, and for the following reason: that in the direct ratio of its profundity will be the unity of any fictitious interest; a Paradise Lost, or a King Lear, could not agitate or possess the mind as they do, if they were at leisure to "amuse" us. So far from relying on its unity, the work which should aim at the maximum of amusement, ought to rely on the maximum of variety. And in that view it is that we urge the paramount pretensions of Herodotus; since not only are his topics separately of primary interest, each for itself, but they are collectively the most varied in the quality of that interest, and they are touched with the most flying and least lingering pen; for, of all writers, Herodotus is the most cautious not to trespass on his reader's patience : his transitions are the most fluent whilst they are the most endless, justifying themselves to the understanding as much as they recommend themselves to the spirit of hurrying curiosity; and his narrations or descriptions are the most animated by the generality of their abstractions, whilst they are the most faithfully individual by the felicity of their minute circumstances.

Once, and in a public situation, we ourselves denominated Herodotus the Froissart of antiquity. But we were then speaking of him exclusively as an historian; and even so, we did him injustice. Thus far it is true the two men agree, that both are less political, or reflecting, or moralizing, as historians, than they are scenical and splendidly picturesque. But Froissart is little else than an historian. Whereas Herodotus is the counterpart of some ideal Pandora, by the universality of his accomplishments. He is a traveller of discovery, like Captain Cooke or Park. He is a naturalist, the earliest that existed. He is a mythologist, and a speculator on the origin, as well as value, of religious rites. He is a political economist by instinct of genius, before the science

of economy had a name or a conscious function; and by two great records, he has put us up to the level of all that can excite our curiosity at that great era of moving civilization :first, as respects Persia, by the elaborate review of the various satrapies or great lieutenancies of the empire that vast empire which had absorbed the Assyrian, Median, Babylonian, Little Syrian, and Egyptian kingdoms, registering against each separate viceroyalty, from Algiers to Lahore beyond the Indus, what was the amount of its annual, tribute to the gorgeous exchequer of Susa; and secondly, as respects Greece, by his review of the numerous little Grecian states, and their several contingents in ships, or in soldiers, or in both, (according as their position happened to be inland or maritime,) towards the universal armament against the second and greatest of the Persian invasions. Two such documents, such archives of political economy, do not exist elsewhere in history. Egypt had now ceased, and we may say that (according to the Scriptural prophecy) it had ceased for ever to be an independent realm. Persia had now for seventy years had her foot upon the neck of this unhappy land; and, in one century beyond the death of Herodotus, the two-horned hegoat of Macedon was destined to butt it down into hopeless prostration. But so far as Egypt, from her vast antiquity, or from her great resources, was entitled to a more circumstantial notice than any other satrapy of the great empire, such a notice it has; and we do not scruple to say, though it may seem a bold word, that, from the many scattered features of Egyptian habits or usages incidentally indicated by Herodotus, a better portrait of Egyptian life, and a better abstract of Egyptian political economy, might even yet be gathered, than from all the writers of Greece for the cities of their native land.

But take him as an exploratory traveller and as a naturalist, who had to break ground for the earliest entrenchments in these new functions of knowledge; we do not scruple to say that, mutatis mutandis, and conces sis concedendis, Herodotus has the separate qualifications of the two men whom we would select by preference as the most distinguished amongst Christian traveller-naturalists; he has the universality of the Prussian Humboldt; and he has the picturesque fidelity to nature of the English Dam pier-of whom the last was a simple self-educated seaman, but strongminded by nature, austerely accurate through his moral reverence for truth, and zealous in pursuit of knowledge, to an excess which raises him to a level with the noble Greek. Dampier, when in the last stage of exhaustion from a malignant dysentery, unable to stand upright, and surrounded by perils in a land of infidel fanatics, crawled on his hands and feet to verify some fact of natural history, under the blazing forenoon of the tropics; and Herodotus, having no motive but his own inexhaustible thirst of knowledge, embarked on a separate voyage, fraught with hardships, towards a chance of clearing up what seemed a difficulty of some importance in deducing the religious mytho logy of his country.

But it is in those characters by which he is best known to the world-viz. as an historian and a geographer-that Herodotus levies the heaviest tribute on our reverence; and precisely in those characters it is that he now claims the amplest atonement, having formerly sustained the grossest outrages of insult and slander on the peculiar merits attached to each of those characters. Credulous he was supposed to be, in a degree transcending the privilege of old garrulous nurses; hyperbolically extravagant beyond Sir John Mandeville; and lastly, as if he had been a Mendez Pinto or a Mun