He therefore who would understand--or would write--the history of Greece must really in his studies begin at both ends--both at the Greece of to-day, and at the Greece of Solon, or what earlier period may be taken as the start of Greek history. With perhaps the least qualified dogmatism, one may assert that he will begin with the Greece of to-day; or if he deals solely with Ancient Greece he will begin with the full blaze of Hellenic civilisation which still has a pale reflection in the modern world, and gradually work back to the beginnings. It is no doubt customary to begin Greek history, say, with the Homeric Age, and work downwards, as it is customary to begin a formal treatise on geography with the general features of the earth's shape and surface. But that beginning represents really the temporarily accredited and accepted result of a process which, starting from the other end, has worked backwards to commencements or origins. And the teacher, in particular, will do well not to imitate too slavishly the method of the formal treatise. A day may come--or may have come--for example, for Greek history to start from periods long anterior to the supposed or traditional date of the wars around the wall of Troy. But when it does so, it will have done so by more thoroughly ransacking the Greece of to-day: and so disclosing the secrets of what is termed pre-historic Greece. Then, conversely, when modern diggings on Greek soil reveal the features of an earlier than what was erewhile to older historians its earliest past, the reconstruction of that early people's life reflects a new light on the directions and the limitations of its subsequent civilisation. We see better into the reality of Homer, and even of Demosthenes--into their ideal glory and their historical limitations, when we explore the cradle in which their race's life was erst fostered, and the rock out of which they and nature hewed them. And this is no peculiarity of Greece. The deepest research into the social institutions which control the England of to-day is the best propaedeutic for the study of Anglo-Saxon times; and the same is true _vice versa_.