Of all the benefits that modern times owe to antiquity, the most important but at the same time the least often acknowledged, is the boon of philosophy. The poets, orators, and historians of Greece and Rome are in the hands of every school-boy, and are the pleasure and study of all who pretend to education, while the works of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and the other lights of antiquity (the heralds, they have been called, of the true cross) languish here and there on the shelves of some old library, or in the shop of some antiquarian Bibliopole. There is this remarkable difference between philosophy and the lighter literature of antiquity. Homer and Herodotus, Demosthenes and his fellow orators, flashed out, as it were, from the bosom of the people with no warning—no precursor, and first established that order or sequence of literary cultivation which the experience of subsequent ages has proved infallible; I mean first, poetry and eloquence—next, history, and last of all, philosophy. Philosophy itself was no child of the moment. As the sea-beach gains something as each wave rolls over it, so was it with philosophy. Each age made its deposit at the bank of truth, and slowly and imperceptibly, but with not less security, was that mountain raised, which, however wildly raged the storms of the middle ages—how much so ever its fair face was obscured—still never ceased to exist, but served as a place of rest to the weary bird of literature, a rest whence the yet callow philosophy and unfledged history might wing their infantine flight. We may give an era to history—for there is great difference between it and tradition—we may positively ascertain the first poet, but we cannot approximate to the first philosopher. Socrates is not the only sage who never gave his lucubrations to posterity, and we learn from its very name, (love of wisdom,) that it is coeval with mind, nay, almost one of its principles. Were we to treat as philosophy only what has been written, we should be forced again to bound our researches by what has descended to us, and short indeed would be our course; but it is not so. We know with as much certainty the opinions of those who never wrote, as we do those of Plato and his followers, and are thus able to trace philosophy _ab ovo usque ad mala_, from the alpha not to the omega, for that has not been reached, but to the point at which we find it now. Philosophy first presents itself to the historian about the commencement of the sixth century. The country where we first behold it, is Asia Minor; beneath its warm climate the Grecian colonists, who from time to time had settled there, grew day by day more and more cultivated, till at length they were the tutors of their father-land. Thales of Miletus, Pittacus of Mytelene in Lesbos, Bias of Priene flourished in a quick succession, while as yet Hellas had produced but Solon, who was more lawgiver than sage, and who would better be associated with Lycurgus than with Thales.