And yet the Norman was our countryman; was nearer to us by many an age than the Roman; and possessed the “accumulated knowledge” (had such a thing really existed before the invention of printing), of many an intervening generation. But these were in truth generations of decline, not of advance; a decline often hardly sensible, or arrested for a time, but on the whole prodigious. And if the enthusiastic disciple of progress chooses to count these ebbs as insignificant exceptions to his general theory of flow, let us remember that a space of a thousand years, however unimportant to a geologist, is a considerable fraction of the historical existence of man. And this, as many have said, though not many truly feel it, is one of the most real advantages of classical study, and one of the charms which make us turn back to it with recurring affection, after resultless wanderings in company with the “Positivists.” He who has imbibed its lessons deeply can hardly find his judgment much affected by those metaphors turned into arguments which pass commonly current, likening the youth, manhood, and old age of the world to those of an individual; nor will he readily adopt the formulas of a recent clever writer of the Positive school, that “we may expect to find, in the history of man, each successive age incorporating into itself the substance of the preceding,” and that “this power, whereby the present ever gathers into itself the results of the past, transforms the human race into a colossal man, whose life reaches from the creation to the day of judgment.” Classical study made men pedants, after a fashion, two centuries ago; at present its effect is to preserve them from an equally tasteless and less innocent pedantry. By bringing clearly before our view that magnificent phantasma of great communities entombed, and great conceptions buried with them, it weakens the ordinary temptation to overvalue ourselves and our age. It displays to us the vast ocean of moral and intellectual being such as it really is, subject to æons of rise and fall, and not a steady onward current continually gaining ground; and, by so doing, administers a reasonable check to that “Excelsior” tendency which elevates but often misleads us—an indiscriminating confidence in the destiny and powers of our species. AMERICAN STATE PAPERS.[8]