I must not, however, step over the threshold of the investigation without giving warning, that we have to meet at the outset an opinion broadly pronounced, and proceeding from a person of such high authority as Mr. Grote, our most recent historian of Greece, to the effect that these inquiries are futile. This intimation is so important that it shall stand in his own words. “In going through historical Greece,” says Mr. Grote, “we are compelled to accept the Hellenic aggregate with its constituent elements as a primary fact to start from, because the state of our information does not enable us to ascend any higher. By what circumstances, or out of what pre-existing elements, this aggregate was brought together and modified, we find no evidence entitled to credit[123].” And then, in condemnation particularly of Pelasgic inquiries, he resumes: “if any man is inclined to call the unknown ante-Hellenic period of Greece by the name of Pelasgic, it is open to him to do so: but this is a name carrying with it no assured predicates, no way enlarging our insight into real history, nor enabling us to explain--what would be the real historical problem--how or from whom the Hellens acquired that stock of dispositions, aptitudes, arts, &c. with which they began their career.... No attested facts are now present to us--none were present to Herodotus and Thucydides even in their age, on which to build trustworthy affirmations respecting the ante-Hellenic Pelasgians.” In answer to these passages, which raise the question no less broadly than fairly, it may first be observed, that at least Herodotus and Thucydides did not think what we are thus invited to think for them, and that of the judgment of the latter, as an inquirer into matters of fact, Mr. Grote has himself justly expressed the highest opinion[124]. Mr. Grote, placing in one category all that relates to the legendary age, finds it as a whole intractable and unhistorical, with a predominance of sentimental attributes quite unlike the practical turn and powers of the Greek mind in later times[125]. But has not this disturbance of equilibrium happened chiefly because the genuine though slender historic materials of the heroic age, supplied by the poems of Homer, have been overborne and flooded by the accumulations made by imagination, vanity, resentment, or patriotism, during a thousand years? Even of the unsifted mass of legend, to which the distinguished historian refers, it may be doubted, whether it is not, when viewed as a whole, bewildering, formless, and inconsistent, rather than sentimental. It has been everywhere darkened by cross purposes, and by the unauthorized meddling of generations, which had ceased to sympathize with the heroic age. At any rate, I crave permission to try what we can make of that age in the matter of history, by dealing first and foremost with him who handled it for the purposes of history, apart from those, I mean the after poets, tragedians, and logographers, to