Now that we enter upon that period when all the great political events have been sufficiently described, and partly, at least, set forth with incomparable talent, by the great classical historians of antiquity; by a multitude of writers that have borrowed from that source, or have worked upon those lofty models; it would be idle to repeat what is universally known, and to recount, in long historical detail, how, after contests and struggles of less importance, the glory of Greece burst forth in all its lustre in her resistance to Persian might; how, soon after, she exhausted her best strength in the great Peloponnesian civil war betwixt Sparta and Athens, and how both those states ruined themselves in the idle ambition of maintaining the ηγεμονια as they called it, or the superiority and preponderance in the political system of Greece;--how, after the short dominion of the Thebans under their single great man, Epaminondas, the Macedonians became lords of the ascendant, and ruled for a longer time with despotic sway;--and finally how Greece obtained an apparent freedom under the generous protection of Rome, and was soon after reduced to a state of permanent vassalage under her prefects and her legions. This instructive and, we may well say, eternal history may be read, studied, and meditated on in all its ample details and living clearness in the pages of the great classical historians of antiquity. The knowledge of all these historical facts must be here pre-supposed, and I must confine myself to a rapid and lively sketch of the intellectual character and moral life of the Greeks, in their relation to the rest of mankind, and according to the place which they occupy in universal history.