This race had dwelt for some ages in Greece, and from thence occupied by emigration the shores of Asia Minor, Sicily, and Southern Italy, with a part of Africa. Pythagoras, the father of Italian philosophy, had migrated from Samos to Crotona, having visited Egypt, examined and gathered from all the stores of its knowledge. A century later Herodotus, the father of Greek history, migrated likewise from his country Halicarnassus, and after spending many years in extensive travels through Egypt and Western Asia settled at Thurii. In the succeeding century Plato travelled in like manner with similar purposes. He was familiar with Sicily as with his own Attica, not to speak of Egypt or Phœnicia. These three great men, Pythagoras, Herodotus, and Plato, are specimens herein of the cultured Greek, the gentleman, as we should call him. Thus though Greece proper was a very small country, the whole region from middle Italy, including Sicily, and the rich coast-land of Northern Africa from Carthage to Egypt, with again Phœnicia and Syria, and the continent to the depth of perhaps a hundred miles round the three sides of Asia Minor watered by the sea, were in a larger sense the Greek’s country, a field of Grecian thought, and enterprise, and observation, a sphere in which his mind was enlarged, and his judgment of men and things matured.(323) Generally speaking these regions were singularly favoured as to richness of soil and convenience of situation. Herodotus himself has marked the climate of Ionia as the most beautiful and best-tempered of the earth; and with a far wider knowledge of its regions we should not venture to dispute the justness of his remark. Some modern writers are wont to dwell on the effect which climate exercises upon man’s mind. However this may be, it is certain that the race whose energies were diffused over this region was most highly gifted with natural endowments. When out of the world which Christianity has mainly formed, and from the bosom of nations which have grown through the struggle of a thousand years, and with perpetual competition among each other, into a rich civilisation, we look back on that ancient and simpler world, we find in Hellenism the most perfect expression of the natural man, as a plastic, artistic, poetical, philosophical, and generally intellectual race, wherein matter was most completely permeated by mind. The language which they used even yet presents a very perfect image of such a race, as not being formed from the corruption of other idioms, but a mother tongue, the most brilliant of the Aryan sisters. In its union of strength with beauty, of pleasing sound with accurate sense, in its power to convey the most subtle distinctions of philosophic thought, or the most radiant images of sensuous loveliness, the gravest enunciations of law, or the tenderest dreams of romance, it was well calculated to be the organ of a people wherein bodily form and immaterial intellect alike culminated.