"Three-fourths of the two volumes now presented to the public," continues Mr Grote in his preface, "are destined to elucidate this age of historical faith as distinguished from the later age of historical reason: to exhibit its basis in the human mind--an omnipresent religious and personal interpretation of nature; to illustrate it by comparison with the like mental habit in early modern Europe; to show its immense abundance and variety of narrative matter, with little care for consistency between one story and another; lastly, to set forth the causes which overgrew, and partially supplanted the old epical sentiment, and introduced, in the room of literal faith, a variety of compromises and interpretations." This is the just application of the legends of Greece, forming, as they do, the very best description of the people whose exploits and career the author is about to narrate. This is a truer commencement of the history than that which appears at first sight more strictly historical--namely, an investigation into the obscure tribes which inhabited the same country prior to that people who are known to us as Greeks--an investigation that is to be carried on by strained interpretations of these very legends. We congratulate both author and reader on this escape from the fruitless entanglement of the Pelasgian controversy. Mr Grote seems to have taken due warning from the difficulties and embarrassments in which his predecessor has here involved himself. Dr Thirlwall is a judicious, a succinct, and lucid writer, and yet a more tedious, confused, and utterly unsatisfactory piece of history no man can read than the account he gives us, in his opening volume, of the Pelasgians. The subject is clearly hopeless. From the first sentence to the last of that account, a painful confusion attends upon the reader--not the fault, we are ready to believe, of the historian, unless it be a fault to attempt a statement of facts where the materials for such a statement do not exist. "The people"--Dr Thirlwall thus commences--"whom we call Greeks--the Hellenes--were not, _at least under this name_, the first inhabitants of Greece. Many names have been recorded of races that preceded them there, which they in later times considered barbarous, or foreign in language and manners to themselves." Here the very first sentence proclaims a doubt how far the change was one of race or only of name, and this doubt pursues us throughout the whole inquiry. It is never solved by the author, but is sometimes _forgotten_ by him; for he occasionally proceeds with the discussion as if he had left no such doubt behind him undetermined. At one time he states distinctly, "we find that though in early times Thessaly, and the north of Greece in general, was the scene of frequent migrations and revolutions so that its ancient inhabitants may here and there have been completely displaced by new tribes, Attica appears never