ded
to the same result. Books and the art of reading must ever be powerful
re-agents--each upon the other: until books were multiplied, there could
be no general accomplishment of reading. Until the accomplishment was
taken up into the system of education, books insculptured by painful
elaboration upon costly substances must be too much regarded as
jewellery to obtain a domestic value for the mass.

The problem, therefore, was a hard one for Greece--to devise any art,
power or machinery for fixing and propagating the great memorials of
things and persons. Each generation as it succeeded would more and more
furnish subjects for the recording pen of History, yet each in turn was
compelled to see them slipping away like pearls from a fractured
necklace. It seems easy, but in practice it must be nearly impossible,
to take aim, as it were, at a remote generation--to send a sealed letter
down to a posterity two centuries removed--or by any human resources,
under the Grecian conditions of the case, to have a chance of clearing
that vast bridgeless gulf which separates the present from the far-off
ages of perfect civilization. Maddening it must have been to know by
their own experience, derived from the far-off past, that no monuments
had much chance of duration, except precisely those small ones of medals
and sculptured gems, which, if durable by metallic substance and
interesting by intrinsic value, were in the same degree more liable to
loss by shipwreck, fire, or other accidents applying to portable things,
but above all furnished no field for more than an intense
abstractiveness. The Iliad arose, as we shall say, a thousand years
before Christ, consequently it bisected precisely the Hebrew history
which arose two thousand years before the same era. Now the Iliad was
the very first historic record of the Greeks, and it was followed at
intervals by many other such sections of history, in the shape of
_Nostoi_, poems on the homeward adventures of the Greek heroes returning
from Troy, or of Cyclical Poems taking a more comprehensive range of
action from the same times, filling up the interspace of 555 years
between this memorable record of the one great Pagan Crusade[23] at the
one limit, and the first Greek prose history--that of Herodotus--at the
lower limit. Even through a space of 555 years _subsequent_ to the
Iliad, which has the triple honour of being the earliest Greek book, the
earliest Greek poem, the earliest Greek h