cters; 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.

Indeed, the vistas opened up by Mr. Finlay are infinite; in _that_ sense
it is that he ascribes inexhaustibility to the trackless savannahs of
history. These vast hunting-grounds for the imaginative understanding
are in fact but charts and surveyors' outlines meagre and arid for the
timid or uninspired student. To a grander intellect these historical
delineations are not maps but pictures: they compose a forest
wilderness, veined and threaded by sylvan lawns, 'dark with horrid
shades,' like Milton's haunted desert in the 'Paradise Regained,' at
many a point looking back to the towers of vanishing Jerusalem, and like
Milton's desert, crossed dimly at uncertain intervals by forms doubtful
and (considering the character of such awful deserts) suspicious.

Perhaps the reader, being r