roots of that raven hair; that, in Wordsworth's fine way of expressing the very same fact as to Mary Queen of Scots: 'Kill'd the bloom before its time, And blanch'd, without the owner's crime, The most resplendent hair.' Ah, wrecks of once blooming nurseries, that from generation to generation, from John Coleridge the apostolic to S. T. C. the sunbright, and from S. T. C. the sunbright to Hartley the starry, lie scattered upon every shore! _II. MR. FINLAY'S HISTORY OF GREECE._ In attempting to appraise Mr. Finlay's work comprehensively, there is this difficulty. It comes before us in two characters; first, as a philosophic speculation upon history, to be valued against others speculating on other histories; secondly, as a guide, practical altogether and not speculative, to students who are navigating that great trackless ocean the _Eastern_ Roman history. Now under either shape, this work traverses so much ground, that by mere multiplicity of details it denies to us the opportunity of reporting on its merits with that simplicity of judgment which would have been available in a case of severer unity. So many separate situations of history, so many critical continuations of political circumstances, sweep across the field of Mr. Finlay's telescope whilst sweeping the heavens of four centuries, that it is naturally impossible to effect any comprehensive abstractions, as to principles, from cases individual by their nature and separated by their period not less than by their relations in respect to things and persons. The mere necessity of the plan in such a work ensures a certain amount of dissent on the part of every reader; he that most frequently goes along with the author in his commentary, will repeatedly find himself diverging from it in one point or demurring to its inferences in another. Such, in fact, is the eternal disadvantage for an author upon a subject which recalls the remark of Juvenal: 'Vester porro labor fecundior, historiarum Scriptores: petit hic plus temporis, atque olei plus: Sic _ingens rerum numerus_ jubet, atque operum lex.' It is this _ingens rerum numerus_ that constitutes at once the attraction of these volumes, and the difficulty of dealing with them in any adequate or satisfactory manner.