n, that
he would have been the rival of Pindar. Even now he is fonder of
talking on poetry than any other subject, and blushed when history was
mentioned. By degrees, however, he warmed, and listened with deep
interest to the discourse of Pericles on the duties of a historian.

'"May our first Athenian historian not be the greatest," said he, "as
the first of our dramatists has been, in the opinion of many. We are
growing too loquacious, both on the stage and off. We make
disquisitions which render us only more and more dim-sighted, and
excursions that only consume our stores. If some among us who have
acquired celebrity by their compositions, calm, candid, contemplative
men, were to undertake the history of Athens from the invasion of
Xerxes, I should expect a fair and full criticism on the orations of
Antiphon, and experience no disappointment at their forgetting the
battle of Salamis. History, when she has lost her Muse, will lose her
dignity, her occupation, her character, her name. She will wander
about the Agora; she will start, she will stop, she will look wild,
she will look stupid, she will take languidly to her bosom doubts,
queries, essays, dissertations, some of which ought to go before her,
some to follow, and all to stand apart. The field of history should
not merely be well tilled, but well peopled. None is delightful to me
or interesting in which I find not as many illustrious names as have a
right to enter it. We might as well in a drama place the actors
behind the scenes, and listen to the dialogue there, as in a history
push valiant men back and protrude ourselves with husky disputations.
Show me rather how great projects were executed, great advantages
gained, and great calamities averted. Show me the generals and the
statesmen who stood foremost, that I may bend to them in reverence;
tell me their names, that I may repeat them to my children. Teach me
whence laws were introduced, upon what foundation laid, by what
custody guarded, in what inner keep preserved. Let the books of the
treasury lie closed as religiously as the Sibyl's; leave weights and
measures in the market-place, Commerce in the harbour, the Arts in the
light they love, Philosophy in the shade; place History on her
rightful throne, and at the sides of her Eloquence and War."'

This is, doubtless, a somewhat full-dress vie