It is, we believe, an exploded theory that the characters of modern times are inferior to those of antiquity. 'Under the toga as under the modern dress,' says Guizot, 'in the senate as in our councils, men were what they still are;' and the old Jesuit takes a narrow view of the progress of mankind, who asserts that the masculine and vigorous treatment that was necessary to Thucydides and Livy is not required by the historians of our puny and degenerate day. Even the Count Gobineau, who so ably and, to his followers, conclusively proves the fallacy of the dearest hope of every learned philanthropist and patriot, does not, in his most earnest antagonism to the doctrine of human progress, insinuate the existence of a principle urging the systematic and inevitable decline of individual power from age to age. So far from exacting less of the historian, the present age demands even a firmer handling. Our era has its Alexanders and Cæsars; its Hannibals and Hectors; and if these men of antiquity rise before us with an unapproachable air of grandeur, it is because the light shining from our distant stand-point surrounds them with deeper shadows, and throws them in bolder relief against the background of their vanished ages. It is a simple triumph of _chiaro-scuro_, and by no means the proof of the truth of an absurd theory. It is mournful enough to see the dead nations that were once young and glorious pacing onward through an inferno like so many headless Bertrand de Borns, bearing by the hair 'The severed member, lantern-wise Pendent in hand.'