‘Having on tablet writ’ can mean nothing else. Pliny[794] accepts this writing given to Bellerophon on codicilli or tablets.[795] Horace, who was not only a great poet, but a masterful genius, mentions writing in Homer’s day, and makes the early inscriptions laws cut into wood (_leges incidere ligno_). Herodotus[796] tells us that he himself saw Cadmeian (that is, old Phœnician) characters; and the tradition is that Danaus introduced letters from Egypt, which, I repeat, produced the one alphabet the world knows. Dr. Schliemann (‘Troy,’ Appendix by the Editor) found at seven and a half mètres (twenty-five feet) below the surface of the so-called Homeric Troy, many short inscriptions in ‘ancient Cypriote characters,’ and as many Greek epigraphs were discovered at Mycenæ. Evidently the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey’ might have been cut in rude Phœnician characters upon wooden tablets or scratched on plates of lead. Professor Paley would date the literary Homer from B.C. 400; but that is a different phase of the subject. Herodotus is the outcome of Homer, or, if you please, of the Homerids and of Æschylus. The work of this prose rhapsodist, besides being a history, a logography, a record of travel, and a study of ethnology and antiquity, is at once an Epic and a Drama. It is epic in the heroic and romantic tone; in the unity of action, a mighty invasion-campaign; and in the frequent digressions which aid, if they retard, the one primary object. It is a tragedy in the scenic displays (the review of Xerxes, for instance), in the action of Destiny, the circle of Necessity, the Nemesiac hypothesis, and the jealousy of the gods (_Deus ultor_); while the catastrophe is represented in ‘Calliope’ by the destruction of the Persian host, the home-return of the victors, and the lurid scenes at the close. It ends with an epigram, a kind of _Vos plaudite_: ‘The Persians ... chose rather to dwell in a churlish land and exercise lordship, than to plough the plains and be slaves of other men’—a sentiment which would ‘bring down the house’ in the Highlands. All is written with a distinct purpose, and the sensible chronology is derived from Egypt. There is something poetical, too, in the enormous numbers. The magnificent-impossible host of five millions two hundred and eighty-three thousand two hundred and twenty men,[797] and the one thousand three hundred and twenty-seven triremes to be defeated and destroyed by a handful of nine thousand Greeks and three hundred and seventy-eight ships, is highly imaginative. The philosophic and sceptical modern mind will hardly be satisfied till the details are confirmed by the contemporary evidence of inscriptions, for instance, the Behistun, which is a running commentary upon ‘Thalia.’ Hellas ever was, and is, and will be, by virtue of her mighty intellect and her preponderating imagination, ‘Græcia mendax.’ Eastern history tells us nothing about the marvellous Persian invasion. We may fairly believe