Thucydides, a few years only younger than Herodotus, found himself placed in the midst of events the most extraordinary, produced by a system of civilisation prematurely decaying. Greece had not been suffered to grow wise and great according to the laws which usually regulate the ripening of states. She had been scorched into fruit-bearing by the fiery conflicts of the Median war; and her strength thus brought into play, and found to be great beyond calculation, was immediately by ambitious statesmen seized upon, parcelled out into lots which were directed against each other, and thus exhausted in petty struggles. In Greece we have an example of a state whose energies, turned inwards, corroded themselves by concentration; affording a contrast with Rome whose energies, worked outward and were gradually weakened and lost by expansion. The genius of the people begot corresponding historians. Rome, had its perspicuous ornate, diffuse, haughty and sublime Livy; Athens her Thucydides full of poetry indeed, and haughtier and more sublime, but condensed as an oracle, and as an oracle obscure. Few have measured the greatness of this man. Ordinary critics missing the ostentatious display of what is termed philosophy, appear to imagine that Thucydides is not a philosophical historian, reserving this praise for Gibbon, Hume, or Voltaire. But each of these great writers would have contemned the praise of such persons. Thucydides in historical writing stands above rivalry or comparison. The political atmosphere in which he lived, dusky with thunderclouds and continual storms, his eye could penetrate through, and discover all the very extraordinary figures that moved beneath it. Calmly, from heights of speculation never trodden before, he contemplated the various groups of generals and statesmen dispersed over his horizon, pierced through every disguise into their characters, detected their motives, unravelled their plots, gave their secret maxims a tongue, weighed and described their actions with an impartial sagacity which among historians belongs to him alone. In this consists his philosophy. The society, whose developement he studied, was torn by two antagonist principles—aristocracy and democracy, whose struggles, undying in free states, were then more fierce than at any other period in the history of the world. To enable his countrymen and posterity to comprehend the whole chain of events, he opened up a long vista into the past, to the point at which those adversaries appeared upon the scene, and threw a broad light upon all their movements down to the time when Providence removed him from his post. His conception of an historian’s duty, somewhat different from that now entertained, was adopted by all antiquity, in which every succeeding writer bore testimony to his superiority by imitating him. He thought it not enough to narrate and describe, but, throwing open the council chamber and stilling the