FEW, even amongst literary people, are aware of the true place occupied by Herodotus in universal literature; secondly, scarce here and there a scholar up and down a century is led to reflect upon the multiplicity of his relations to the whole range of civilization. We endeavour in these words to catch, as in a net, the gross prominent faults of his appreciation; on which account, first, we say pointedly, universal literature, not Grecian since the primary error is, to regard Herodotus merely in relation to the literature of Greece; secondly, on which account we notice the circuit, the numerical amount; of his collisions with science-because the second and greater error is, to regard him exclusively as an historian. But now, under a juster allocation of his rank, as the general father of prose composition, Herodotus is nearly related to all literature whatsoever, modern not less than ancient; and as the father of what may be called ethnographical geography, as a man who speculated most ably on all the humanities of science—that is, on all the scientific questions which naturally interest our human sensibilities in this great temple which we look up to, the pavilion of the sky, the sun, the moon, the atmosphere, with its climates and its winds; or in this home which we inherit, the earth, with its hills and rivers-Herodotus ought least of all to be classed amongst historians: that is but a secondary title for him; he deserves to be rated as the lead

VOL. LI. NO. CCCXV.

er amongst philosophical polyhistors, which is the nearest designation to that of encyclopædist current in the Greek literature. And yet is not this word encyclopædist much lower than his ancient name-father of history? Doubtless it is no great distinction al present to be an encyclopædist, which is often but another name for bookmaker, craftsman, mechanic, journeyman, in his meanest degeneration; yet in those early days, when the timid muse of science had scarcely ventured sandal-deep into waters so unfathomable, it seems to us a great thing indeed, that one young man should have founded an entire encyclopædia for his countrymen, upon those difficult problems which challenged their primary attention, because starting forward from the very roofthe walls-the floor of that beautiful theatre which they tenanted. The habitable world, axous, was now daily becoming better known to the human race; but how? Chiefly through Herodotus. There are amu. sing evidences extant, of the profound ignorance in which nations the most enlightened had hitherto lived, as to all lands beyond their own and its frontier adjacencies. But within the single generation (or the single half century) previous to the birth of Herodotus, vast changes had taken place. The mere revolutions consequent upon the foundation of the Persian empire had approximated the whole world of civilization. First came the conquest of Egypt by the second of the new emperors. This

A

event, had it stood alone, was immeasurable in its effects for meeting curiosity, and in its immediate excitement for prompting it. It brought the whole vast chain of Persian dependencies, from the river Indus eastwards to the Nile westwards, or even through Cyrene to the gates of Carthage, under the unity of a single sceptre. The world was open. Jealous interdicts, inhospitable laws, national hostilities, always in procinctu, no longer fettered the feet of the merchant, or neutralized the exploring instincts of the philosophic traveller. Next came the restoration of the Jewish people. Judea, no longer weeping by the Euphrates, was again sitting for another half millennium of divine probation under her ancient palm-tree. Next after that came the convulsions of Greece, earthquake upon earthquake; the trampling myriads of Darius, but six years before the birth of Herodotus; the riverdraining millions of Xerxes in the fifth year of his wondering infancy. Whilst the swell from this great storm was yet angry, and hardly subsiding, (a metaphor used by Herodotus himself, ετι οιδεοντων πρηγματων,) whilst the scars of Greece were yet raw from the Persian scymitar, her towns and temples to the east of the Corinthian isthmus smouldering ruins yet reeking from the Persian torch, the young Herodotus had wandered forth in a rapture of impassioned curiosity, to see, to touch, to measure, all those great objects, whose names had been recently so rife in men's mouths. The luxurious Sardis, the nation of Babylon, the Nile, the oldest of rivers, Memphis, and Thebes the hundred-gated, that were but amongst his youngest daughters, with the pyramids inscrutable as the heavens all these he had visited. As far up the Nile as Elephantine he had personally pushed his enquiries; and far beyond that, by his obstinate questions from all men presumably equal to the answers. Tyre, even, he made a separate voyage to explore. Palestine he had trodden with Grecian feet; the mysterious Jerusalem he had visited, and had computed her proportions. Finally, as to Greece continental, though not otherwise connected with it himself than by the bond of language, and as the home of his Ionian ancestors, (in which view he often calls it by the great moral

name of Hellas, regions that geographically belong to Asia and even to Africa,) he seems by mere casual notices, now prompted by an historical incident, now for the purpose of an illustrative comparison, to have known so familiarly, that Pausanias in after ages does not describe more minutely the local features to which he had dedicated a life, than this extraordinary traveller, for whom they did but point a period or circumstantiate a parenthesis. As a geographer, often as a hydrographer-witness his soundings thirty miles off the mouths of the Nile-Herodotus was the first great parent of discovery, as between nation and nation he was the author of mutual revelation; whatsoever any one nation knew of its own little ring fence, through daily use and experience, or had received by ancestral tradition, that he published to all other nations. He was the first central interpreter, the common dragoman to the general college of civilization that now belted the Mediterranean, holding up, in a language already laying the foundations of universality, one comprehensive mirror, reflecting to them all the separate chorography, habits, institutions, and religious systems of each. Nor was it in the facts merely, that he retraced the portraits of all leading states; whatsoever in these facts was mysterious, for that he had a self-originated solution; whatsoever was perplexing by equiponderant counter-assumptions, for that he brought a determining impulse to the one side or the other; whatsoever seemed contradictory, for that he brought a reconciling hypothesis. Were it the annual rise of a river, were it the formation of a famous kingdom by alluvial depositions, were it the unexpected event of a battle, or the apparently capricious migration of a people—for all alike Herodotus had such resources of knowledge as took the sting out of the marvellous, or such resources of ability as at least suggested the plausible. Antiquities or mythology, martial institutions or pastoral, the secret motives to a falsehood which he exposes, or the hidden nature of some truth which he deciphers-all alike lay within the searching dissection of this astonishing intellect, the most powerful lens by far that has ever been brought to bear upon the mixed objects of a speculative traveller.

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 inartificialhis 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

so as eventually to preserve it. Yet, as Major Rennell remarks, Geog. Syst. of Herod., p. 610,-" Scylax must be regarded as a seaman or pilot, and the author of a coasting directory;" as a mechanic artizan, ranking with Hamilton, Moore, or Gunter, not as a great liberal artist-an intellectual potentate like Herodotus. Such now upon the scale of intellectual claims as was this geographical rival by comparison with Herodotus, such doubtless were his rivals or predecessors in history, in antiquities, and in the other provinces which he occupied. And generally the fragments of these authors, surviving in Pagan as well as Christian collections, show that they were such. So that, in a high virtual sense, Herodotus was to prose composition what Homer 600 years earlier had been to verse.

II. But whence arose the other mistake about Herodotus-the fancy that his great work was exclusively (or even chiefly) a history? It arose simply from a mistranslation, which subsists every where to this day. We remember that Kant, in one of his miscellaneous essays, finding a necessity for explaining the term Histoire, [why we cannot say, since the Germans have the self-grown word Ge. schichte for that idea,] deduces it of course from the Greek loopia. This brings him to an occasion for defining the term. And how? It is laughable to imagine the anxious reader bending his ear to catch the Kantean whisper, and finally, solemnly hearing that Iroga means-History. Really, Professor Kant, we should almost have guessed as much. But such derivations teach no more than the ample circuit of Bardolph's definition-"accommodated-that whereby a man is, or may be thought to be"-what? "accommodated." Kant was an excellent Latin scholar, but an indifferent Grecian. And spite of the old traditional "Historiarum Libri No. vem," which stands upon all Latin

title-pages of Herodotus, we need scarcely remind a Greek scholar that the verb ίστορεω, or the noun ἱστορία, never bears in this writer the latter sense of recording and memorializing. The substantive is a word frequently employed by Herodotus: often in the plural number; and uniformly it means enquiries or investigations, so that the proper English version of the title-page would be-" Of the researches made by Herodotus, Nine Books." And in reality that is the very meaning, and the secret drift, the conservation running overhead through these nine sections to the nine muses. Had the work been designed as chiefly historical, it would have been placed under the patronage of the one sole muse presiding over History. But because the very opening sentence tells us that it is not chiefly historical, that it is so partially, that it rehearses the acts of men, [Ta yuva,] together with the monumental structures of human labour, [TM« gya-for the true sense of which word in this position sce the first sentence in section thirty-five of Euterpe,] and other things beside, [τα τε άλλα,] because in short not any limited annals, because the mighty revelation of the world to its scattered inhabitants, because

"Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas,

Gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli,therefore it was that a running title or superscription so extensive and so aspiring had at some time been adopted. Every muse, and not one only, is presumed to be interested in the work; and, in simple truth, this legend of dedication is but an expansion or variety more impressively conveyed of what had been already notified in the inaugural sentence; whilst both this sentence and that dedication were designed to meet the very misconception which has since notwithstanding prevailed.*

There is none greater, for inWhence we conclude that inAnd as to the erroneous Latin ver