It is worth observing, that the same class of historians who are given to extract with an unauthorised boldness a prosaic fact from a poetic legend, are also the slowest and most reluctant in understanding the more startling facts which meet them on historic ground, in their simple and full significance. They are bold before the fable, they are timid before the fact. Nor is this surprising. In both cases they are on the search for incidents analogous to those which the ordinary course of life or of history has made familiar to their imagination. They see these with an exuberant faith where they do not exist, and will see nothing _but_ these when something of a far different nature is actually put before them. Mr Grote, who refused to tread at all on the insecure ground of the legend, meets this narrative of the second entry of Pisistratus into Athens upon the level ground of history, and sees it in its simple form, and sees the people in it. Dr Thirlwall, on the contrary, who would read the history of a people's wars and emigrations in the fabulous exploits of fabulous persons, is staggered at the story--converts it all into a holiday pageant! It was some show or procession, and all the world knew as well as Pisistratus that it was the damsel Phye, and not Minerva, who stood in the chariot. "This story would indeed be singular," writes Dr Thirlwall, "if we consider the expedient in the light of a stratagem, on which the confederates relied for overcoming the resistance which they might otherwise have expected from their adversaries. But it seems quite as possible that the pageant was only designed to add extraordinary solemnity to the entrance of Pisistratus, and to suggest the reflection that it was by the special favour of Heaven he had been so unexpectedly restored."--(Vol. ii. p. 67.)