celled all men of all ages, that irresistible eloquence,
which at the distance of more than two thousand years stirs our blood,
and brings tears into our eyes, he passes by with a few phrases of
commonplace commendation. The origin of the drama, the doctrines of the
sophists, the course of Athenian education, the state of the arts
and sciences, the whole domestic system of the Greeks, he has almost
completely neglected. Yet these things will appear, to a reflecting man,
scarcely less worthy of attention than the taking of Sphacteria or the
discipline of the targeteers of Iphicrates.

This, indeed, is a deficiency by no means peculiar to Mr Mitford.
Most people seem to imagine that a detail of public occurrences--the
operations of sieges---the changes of administrations--the treaties--the
conspiracies--the rebellions--is a complete history. Differences of
definition are logically unimportant; but practically they sometimes
produce the most momentous effects. Thus it has been in the present
case. Historians have, almost without exception, confined themselves
to the public transactions of states, and have left to the negligent
administration of writers of fiction a province at least equally
extensive and valuable.

All wise statesmen have agreed to consider the prosperity or adversity
of nations as made up of the happiness or misery of individuals, and to
reject as chimerical all notions of a public interest of the community,
distinct from the interest of the component parts. It is therefore
strange that those whose office it is to supply statesmen with examples
and warnings should omit, as too mean for the dignity of history,
circumstances which exert the most extensive influence on the state of
society. In general, the under current of human life flows steadily on,
unruffled by the storms which agitate the surface. The happiness of the
many commonly depends on causes independent of victories or defeats, of
revolutions or restorations,--causes which can be regulated by no laws,
and which are recorded in no archives. These causes are the things
which it is of main importance to us to know, not how the Lacedaemonian
phalanx was broken at Leuctra,--not whether Alexander died of poison
or by disease. History, without these, is a shell without a kernel;
and such is almost all the history which is extant in the world. Paltry
skirmishes and plots are reported with absurd and useless minuteness;
but improvements the most essenti