The tradition that Pythagoras borrowed all his learning and philosophy from the East is rejected by modern scholars: could not so great a man, they ask, dispense with foreign teachers? And the answer is, that assuredly he could and did; but his countrymen, it is to be observed, by a very natural process of thought, looked upon his greatness as the result of his Eastern education. “No man is a prophet in his own country, and the imaginative Greeks were peculiarly prone to invest the distant and the foreign with striking attributes;” unable to believe in wisdom springing up from among themselves, they turned to the East as to a vast and unknown region, whence all novelty, even of thought, must come. “Πᾶσι τοῖς φιλοσόφοις,” says a Greek philosopher, “ἔδοξε χαλεπὸς ἐν τῇ πατρίδι ὁ βίος.” As the first, so the most arduous conquests of Mohammed were, says Gibbon, those of his wife, his servant, his pupil, and his friend; since he presented himself as a prophet to those who were most conversant with his infirmities as a man. “Thus was Mohammed,” writes Dean Milman, after recording the conversion of the child Ali, “the prophet of his household. Slowly however did he win proselytes, even among his own kindred. Three years elapsed before the faith received the accession of Abubeker and of Othman, the future caliphs. Mohammed at length is accepted as the prophet of his family, of the noble and priestly house of Hashem. Abu Talib, his uncle, remains almost alone an unbeliever. And now Mohammed aspires to be the prophet of his _tribe_.” But in effect the “false” prophet is an exception to the rule of no prophet accepted in his own house and country. An American commentator on Shakspeare incidentally expounds that rule, in remarking on the degree to which our sense of truth is impeded or impaired by the pressure on our minds of what is actual and visible and present. A faithful painter may, he observes, portray a human face with all its characteristic expression, and in all its true individuality; and yet the nearest relatives are not only the hardest to satisfy, but, by the very nature of their familiarity with the subject, will often be the worst judges of the likeness. We are all of us, he adds, “very apt to fail in appreciating the best and noblest parts in the characters of those whom we know familiarly, for the thousand familiarities of common life interpose; and it is sad to think that often it is not until death has hallowed and idealized the character, that we can do it justice.” Envy and jealousy, remarks David Hume in treating of the recognition of real genius, have too much place in a narrow circle, and even familiar acquaintance with the person of one thus gifted may diminish the applause due to his performance—that is, among those of his own age and country. Pindar and Æschylus, we are told, left their country because those who were born their equals could not endure to see them rise their superiors. “What a war against the gods is this!”