Mere antiquarianism, Dr Arnold justly observes, is calculated to contract and enfeeble the understanding. It is a pedantic love of detail, with an indifference to the result, for which alone it can be considered valuable. It is the mistake, into which men are perpetually falling, of the means for the end. There are people to whom the tragedies of Sophocles are less precious than the Scholiast on Lycophron, and who prize the speeches of Demosthenes chiefly because they may fling light on the dress of an Athenian citizen. The same tendency discovers itself in other pursuits. Oxen are fattened into plethoras to encourage agriculture, and men of station dress like grooms, and bet like blacklegs, to keep up the breed of horses. It is true that such evils will happen when agriculture is encouraged, and a valuable breed of horses cherished; but they are the consequences, not the cause of such a state of things. So the disciples of the old philosophers drank hemlock to acquire pallid countenances--but they are as far from obtaining the wisdom of their masters by this adventitious resemblance, as the antiquarian is from the historian. To write well about the past, we must have a vigorous and lively perception of the present. This, says Dr Arnold, is the merit of Mitford. It is certainly the only one he possesses; a person more totally unqualified for writing history at all--to say nothing of the history of Greece--it is difficult for us, aided as our imagination may be by the works of our modern writers, to conceive. But Raleigh, whom he quotes afterwards, is indeed a striking instance of that combination of actual experience with speculative knowledge which all should aim at, but which it seldom happens that one man in a generation is fortunate enough to obtain.