unseemly gabble in Hamlet. Perhaps our judgment of history is made
sounder, and our view of it more lifelike, when we are so constantly
reminded how the little things of life assert their place alongside the
great ones, and how healthy the constitution of the race is, how sound
its digestion, how gay its humor, that can take the world so easily
while our continent is racked with fever and struggling for life
against the doctors.

"Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, the dog must have his day."

It is always pleasant to meet Dame Clio over the tea-table, as it were,
where she is often more entertaining, if not more instructive, than
when she puts on the loftier port and more ceremonious habit of a Muse.
These inadvertences of history are pleasing. We are no longer
foreigners, in any age of the world, but feel that in a few days we
could have accommodated ourselves there, and that, wherever men are, we
are not far from home. The more we can individualize and personify, the
more lively our sympathy. Man interests us scientifically, but men
claim us through all that we have made a part of our nature by
education and custom. We would give more to know what Xenophon's
soldiers gossiped about round their camp-fires, than for all the
particulars of their retreat. Sparta becomes human to us when we think
of Agesilaus on his hobby-horse. Finding that those heroic figures
romped with their children, we begin for the first time to suspect that
they ever really existed as much as Robinson Crusoe. Without these
personal traits, antiquity seems as unreal to us as Sir Thomas More's
Utopia. It is, indeed, surprising how little of real life what is
reckoned solid literature has preserved to us, voluminous as it is.
Where does chivalry at last become something more than a mere
procession of plumes and armor, to be lamented by Burke, except in some
of the less ambitious verses of the Trouveres, where we hear the
canakin clink too emphatically, perhaps, but which at least paint
living men and possible manners? Tennyson's knights are cloudy,
gigantic, of no age or country, like the heroes of Ossian. They are
creatures without stomachs. Homer is more condescending, and though we
might not be able to draw the bow of Ulysses, we feel quite at home
with him and Eumaeus over their roast pork.

We cannot deny that the poetical view of any period is higher, and in
the deepest sense truer, than all others; but we are t