May the day be far off when Homer and AEschylus shall cease to be read in the original! The great writers of Hellas and Italy were poets or orators, great teachers or great thinkers; but they were something more. They were perfect instrumentalities too. Their thoughts, their lessons, their aspirations, their regrets, you may interpret and transfer into the speech and the idioms of the moderns; but the music of their language, the subtleties of melody and rhythm, and harmony and tone, can no more be translated than a symphony for the strings can be adequately represented upon the organ. You may persuade yourself that you have got the substance; you have missed the perfection of the form. Yet who but a narrow pedant will insist that the study of any literature, ancient or modern, is valuable chiefly for familiarizing us with the language, not for enriching our minds with the subject matter? Do we desire to understand the past and so to be better able to estimate the importance of great movements that are going on in the present or, by the help of the experience of bygone ages, to forecast the future? Then it behoves us to see that our induction shall be made from as wide a view as may be, and to avail ourselves of any light that may be gained. But it is mere waste of time to be for ever staring at the lamp which may be pretty to look at in itself, but is then most precious when it serves as a means to an end. If we are ever to construct a Science of History, the old methods must give place to something which may approximate to philosophic enquiry. When we come to think of it, how very small an area of time or space is covered by the historians of Greece and Rome: how small an area and how superficially dealt with! Even Thucydides hardly ventures to lift the veil which separates the civilization of his own age from that of an earlier period; he lifts it for a moment, then drops the curtain and passes on. It is true indeed that Herodotus introduces us to a world that is not Hellenic, and brings us into some sort of relation with men whose habits and art and religion had a character of their own; but then these nations were not as we, and not as men even of our race could ever become. We never seem to be _in touch_ with Egypt or Assyria, and when he prattles on about these nations it is less as a historian than as an observant traveller that Herodotus delights and allures. Xenophon's passing notices of the manners and education, of the _feudalism_ and the social life of the Medes, are too brief to be anything but tantalizing; but the neglect of Xenophon by professed students is not creditable, however significant. Perhaps of all the Greek writers Polybius was the man who had the truest conception of the historian's vocation; perhaps, too, it was just because he was so much before his age that his voluminous and ambitious work has come down to us little more than a fragment. Because he was something better than a