not
mean merely that, from subjective differences in the minds reviewing
them, such facts assume endless varieties of interpretation and
estimate, but that objectively, from lights still increasing in the
science of government and of social philosophy, all the primary facts of
history become liable continually to new theories, to new combinations,
and to new valuations of their moral relations. We have seen some kinds
of marble, where the veinings happened to be unusually multiplied, in
which human faces, figures, processions, or fragments of natural scenery
seemed absolutely illimitable, under the endless variations or
inversions of the order, according to which they might be combined and
grouped. Something analogous takes effect in reviewing the remote parts
of history. Rome, for instance, has been the object of historic pens for
twenty centuries (dating from Polybius); and yet hardly so much as
twenty years have elapsed since Niebuhr opened upon us almost a new
revelation, by recombining the same eternal facts, according to a
different set of principles. The same thing may be said, though not with
the same degree of emphasis, upon the Grecian researches of the late
Ottfried Mueller. Egyptian history again, even at this moment, is seen
stealing upon us through the dusky twilight in its first distinct
lineaments. Before Young, Champollion, and the others who have followed
on their traces in this field of history, all was outer darkness; and
whatsoever we _do_ know or _shall_ know of Egyptian Thebes will now be
recovered as if from the unswathing of a mummy. Not until a flight of
three thousand years has left Thebes the Hekatompylos a dusky speck
in the far distance, have we even _begun_ to read her annals, or to
understand her revolutions.

Another instance we have now before us of this new historic faculty for
resuscitating the buried, and for calling back the breath to the frozen
features of death, in Mr Finlay's work upon the Greeks as related to the
Roman empire. He presents us with old facts, but under the purpose of
clothing them with a new life. He rehearses ancient stories, not with
the humble ambition of better adorning them, of more perspicuously
narrating, or even of more forcibly pointing their moral, but of
extracting from them some new meaning, and thus forcing them to arrange
themselves, under some latent connexion, with other phenomena now first
detected, as illustrations of some great principle or agen