ks which embrace an existence; like the Dictionary of Bayle,
or the History of Gibbon, or the "Fasti Hellenici" of Clinton, it was
a book to which thousands of books had contributed, only to make the
originality of the single mind more bold and clear. Into the furnace all
vessels of gold, of all ages, had been cast; but from the mould came the
new coin, with its single stamp. And, happily, the subject of the work
did not forbid to the writer the indulgence of his naive, peculiar irony
of humor, so quiet, yet so profound. My father's book was the "History
of Human Error." It was, therefore, the moral history of mankind,
told with truth and earnestness, yet with an arch, unmalignant smile.
Sometimes, indeed, the smile drew tears. But in all true humor lies its
germ, pathos. Oh! by the goddess Moria, or Folly, but he was at home in
his theme. He viewed man first in the savage state, preferring in this
the positive accounts of voyagers and travellers to the vague myths
of antiquity and the dreams of speculators on our pristine state. From
Australia and Abyssinia he drew pictures of mortality unadorned, as
lively as if he had lived amongst Bushmen and savages all his life.
Then he crossed over the Atlantic, and brought before you the American
Indian, with his noble nature, struggling into the dawn of civilization,
when Friend Penn cheated him out of his birthright, and the Anglo-Saxon
drove him back into darkness. He showed both analogy and contrast
between this specimen of our kind and others equally apart from the
extremes of the savage state and the cultured,--the Arab in his tent,
the Teuton in his forests, the Greenlander in his boat, the Finn in his
reindeer car. Up sprang the rude gods of the North and the resuscitated
Druidism, passing from its earliest templeless belief into the later
corruptions of crommell and idol. Up sprang, by their side, the Saturn
of the Phoenicians, the mystic Budh of India, the elementary deities of
the Pelasgian, the Naith and Serapis of Egypt, the Ormuzd of Persia, the
Bel of Babylon, the winged genii of the graceful Etruria. How nature and
life shaped the religion; how the religion shaped the manners; how, and
by what influences, some tribes were formed for progress; how others
were destined to remain stationary, or be swallowed up in war and
slavery by their brethren,--was told with a precision clear and strong
as the voice of Fate. Not only an antiquarian and philologist, but an
anatomis