tory whatever,
which have crowned the Jewish History with mysterious glory, and of
these the pupil should be warned in her introductory lesson. The first
is: that the Jewish annals open by one whole millennium before all other
human records. Full a thousand years had the chronicles of the Hebrew
nation been in motion and unfolding that sublime story, fitter for the
lyre and the tumultuous organ, than for unimpassioned recitation, before
the earliest whispers of the historic muse began to stir in any other
land. Amongst Pagan nations, Greece was the very foremost to attempt
that almost impracticable object under an imperfect civilization--the
art of fixing in forms not perishable, and of transmitting to distant
generations, her social revolutions.[22] She wanted paper through her
earlier periods, she wanted typographic art, she wanted, above all,
other resources for such a purpose--the art of reading as a national
accomplishment. How could people record freely and fervently, with
Hebrew rapture, those events which must be painfully chiselled out in
marble, or expensively ploughed and furrowed into brazen tablets? What
freedom to the motions of human passion, where an _extra_ word or two of
description must be purchased by a day's labour? But, above all, what
motive could exist for the accumulation or the adequate diffusion of
records, howsoever inscribed, on slabs of marble or of bronze, on
leather, or plates of wood, whilst as yet no general machinery of
education had popularized the art of reading? Until the age of Pericles
each separate Grecian city could hardly have furnished three citizens on
an average able to read. Amongst a people so illiterate, how could
manuscripts or manu_sculpts_ excite the interest which is necessary to
their conservation? Of what value would a shipload of harps prove to a
people unacquainted with the science or the practical art of music? Too
much or too little interest alike defeat this primary purpose of the
record. Records must be _self_-conservative before they can be applied
to the conservation of events. Amongst ourselves the _black-letter_
records of English heroes by Grafton and Hollinshed, of English voyagers
by Hakluyt, of English martyrs by Fox, perished in a very unusual
proportion by excessive use through successive generations of readers:
but amongst the Greeks they would have perished by neglect. The too much
of the English usage and the too little of the Grecian would have ten