ed some of the more splendid aspects connected with
Mr Finlay's theme; but that theme, in its entire compass, is worthy of a
far more extended investigation than our own limits will allow, or than
the historical curiosity of the world (misdirected here as in so many
other cases) has hitherto demanded. The Greek race, suffering a long
occultation under the blaze of the Roman empire, into which for a time
it had been absorbed, but again emerging from this blaze and reassuming
a distinct Greek agency and influence, offers a subject great by its own
inherent attractions, and separately interesting by the unaccountable
neglect which it has suffered. To have overlooked this subject, is one
amongst the capital oversights of Gibbon. To have rescued it from utter
oblivion, and to have traced an outline for its better illumination, is
the peculiar merit of Mr Finlay. His greatest fault is to have been
careless or slovenly in the niceties of classical and philological
precision. His greatest praise, and a very great one indeed, is--to have
thrown the light of an _original_ philosophic sagacity upon a neglected
province of history, indispensable to the _arrondissement_ of Pagan
archaeology.

FOOTNOTES:

{A} _Greece under the Romans._ BY GEORGE FINLAY, K.R.G. William Blackwood
& Sons. Edinburgh and London. 1844.

{B} "_With scorn._"--This has arisen from two causes: one is the habit of
regarding the whole Roman empire as in its "decline" from so early a
period as that of Commodus; agreeably to which conceit, it would
naturally follow that, during its latter stages, the Eastern empire must
have been absolutely in its dotage. If already declining in the second
century, then, from the tenth to the fifteenth it must have been
paralytic and bed-ridden. The other cause may be found in the accidental
but reasonable hostility of the Byzantine court to the first Crusaders,
as also in the disadvantageous comparison with respect to manly virtues
between the simplicity of these western children, and the refined
dissimulation of the Byzantines.

* * * * *

_Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work._

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56, Number 348, by Various

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