efallen, verfolge die Weise,
Der Weg ist begonnen, vollende die Reise.
GOETHE, _West-oestlicher Divan, Buch der Sprueche_.

[3] Recent investigation has made it clear that the history of Islamic
Arabia is not severed by any violent convulsion from pre-Mohammedan
Arabia. "The times of ignorance" were not the desolate waste which
Tabari, "the Livy of the Arabs," paints, and down to the close of the
eighteenth century the comparison between England, Rome, and Islam
offers a fair field for speculative politics.

[4] Yet the scientific conception of the _destruction_ or _decay_ of
this whole star-system by fire or ice does of itself turn progress into
a mockery. (See Prof. C. A. Young, _Manual of Astronomy_, p. 571, and
Prof. F. R. Moulton, _Introduction to Astronomy_, p. 486.)

[5] Condorcet's biography (1786) of his master is one of the noblest
works of its class in French literature. Turgot's was one of those
minds that like Chamfort's or Villiers de L'Isle Adam's scatter
bounteously the ideas which others use or misuse. The fogs and mists
of Comte's portentous tomes are all derived, it has often been pointed
out, from a few paragraphs of Turgot. And a fragment written by Turgot
in his youth inspired something of the substance and even of the title
of Condorcet's great _Esquisse_.

[6] References to the power over his mind of the French Revolutionary
principles abound in Goethe's writings. The violence of the first
impression, which began with the affair of the necklace, had reached a
climax in '90 and '91, and this, along with the ineffaceable memories
of the _Werther_ and _Goetz_ period, which his heart remembered when in
his intellectual development he had left it far behind, accounts in a
large measure for his yielding temporarily at least to the spell of
Napoleon's genius, and for the studied but unaffected indifference to
German politics and to the War of Liberation. Even of 1809, the year
of Eckmuehl, Essling, and Wagram, and the darkest hour of German
freedom, Goethe can write: "This year, considering the beautiful
returns it brought me, shall ever remain dear and precious to memory,"
and when the final uprising against the French was imminent, he sought
quietude in oriental poetry--Firdusi, Hafiz, and Nisami.

[7] Of his _Contes_ Taine said: "Depuis les Grecs aucun artiste n'a
taille un camee litteraire avec autant de relief, avec une aussi
rigoureuse perfection de forme."

[8] It is r