Valuable, therefore, as is the assistance of those authors who have devoted their talents and learning to epitomizing and rendering accessible the story of past ages, it is far from desirable that we should content ourselves with a blind trust in them, without checking their assertions, and filling up their sketches by a more detailed knowledge than it is possible for them to communicate. To apply these observations to the present work, the History of Greece contained in the Library of Useful Knowledge necessarily gives a very short account of many things which deserve to be known in detail, both on account of their historical notoriety and for the intrinsic value which they possess as striking examples of human power, passion, and suffering. Much of the excessive commendation which has been bestowed upon ancient virtue and patriotism ought probably to be attributed to the eager interest naturally excited by the revival of learning and the peculiar circumstances under which it took place. The discovery of the works of the most celebrated writers of antiquity, whose names at least had not been forgotten, must at any time have produced much curiosity and excitement: and peculiarly so when modern literature did not yet possess many names to divide the palm of genius with them. Besides this the political circumstances of the Italian states, in which the new discoveries were at first most successfully and generally prosecuted, would give an additional interest and a peculiar bias to the study of ancient literature; for their inhabitants would naturally be disposed, as Italians, to exult in the glories of ancient Italy, and as republicans to look for patterns both of polity and of conduct among the famous republics of Greece and Rome. A contrary cause, in a later age, and in countries subject to arbitrary power, would probably conduce to the continuance of the same feeling, when the prevalent subjection of public opinion made it safer to enforce sentiments of freedom and patriotism under the mask of an overstrained admiration for actions, frequently of very questionable character, done in times long past, than openly to profess the love of republican simplicity and liberty, which was willingly left to be inferred. The usual course of education long tended, and in an inferior degree perhaps still tends, to cherish the same indiscriminate enthusiasm. The first histories put into the hands of children are usually those of Greece and Rome, taken not from the sober and comparatively unprejudiced relations of the earliest authorities, but from Plutarch, and other compilers of a later age, who, living themselves under despotic power, and compelled to veil their philosophical aspirations after a better state of polity and morals under extravagant praises of a by–gone period of imaginary virtue and disinterestedness, were for the most part ready to warp truth into correspondence with their own views. In such works actions