The “ancients,” are to us Greeks and Romans. Very different men were those traders, whose acute and vivid genius, flexible to all things, could cover up, and conceal, what the brain had devised, or the hand acquired. Those traders had no Penny Magazine, and published no Price Current. Undenying at home, they were selfish abroad; they kept to themselves what they knew, and did not overreach one another for the profit or pleasure of strangers. Even in our own times, secrets are kept by large bodies of men, about nothing, and for no end. The needle would have been a talisman to the state exclusively possessing it; to a few entrusted, not as an instrument, but as an oracle or a god.[128] Of all factitious props, secretive habits are the most powerful. The art of the Thaumaturgist, calculated in all other countries merely to strike the vulgar with awe, became to them an element of political greatness and commercial profit. They were ready to shed blood for indiscretion or mischance. Patriotism, the mysteries, and natural science formed, by their interlacing fibres, that strong yet flexible tissue which enveloped and concealed the Phœnician polity, and remained unchanged from the time when it served as swaddling-bands to an infant community, to the hour when it wrapped as cerecloth the clay from which fate, and not malady, had driven life. Reveal the polarity of the needle! Tyrians suffer the secret of the compass to be extorted! He who could conceive such a thing, may be learned in books, or perhaps learned in history, but not in men. Yet this is the sole _argument_ of the sceptics. “It could not have been concealed.” Who was to find it out? Was curiosity of Greek or Roman to beat Punic astuteness? Were stripes, or chains, or death, to conquer Punic endurance? and who had the thought of exerting the one, or employing the other?