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[14] See note immediately preceding on previous page.

[15] ‘With impunity.‘–There is no one point in which I have found a more absolute coincidence of opinion amongst all profound thinkers, English, German, and French, when discussing the philosophy of education, than this great maxim–that the memory ought never to be exercised in a state of insulation, that is, in those blank efforts of its strength which are accompanied by no law or logical reason for the thing to be remembered; by no such reason or principle of dependency as could serve to recall it in after years, when the burthen may have dropped out of the memory. The reader will perhaps think that I, the writer of this little work, have a pretty strong and faithful memory, when I tell him that every word of it, with all its details, has been written in a situation which sternly denied me the use of books bearing on my subject. A few volumes of rhetorical criticism and of polemic divinity, that have not, nor, to my knowledge, could have furnished me with a solitary fact or date, are all the companions of my solitude. Other voice than the voice of the wind I have rarely heard. Even my quotations are usually from memory, though not always, as one out of three, perhaps, I had fortunately written down in a pocket-book; but no one date or fact has been drawn from any source but that of my unassisted memory. Now, this useful sanity of the memory I ascribe entirely to the accident of my having escaped in childhood all such mechanic exercises of the memory as I have condemned in the text–to this accident, combined with the constant and severe practice I have given to my memory, in working and sustaining immense loads of facts that had been previously brought under logical laws.

[16] ‘The long careering of an earthquake.‘–It is remarkable, and was much noticed at the time by some German philosophers, that the earthquake which laid Lisbon in ruins about ninety-five years ago, could be as regularly traced through all its stages for some days previous to its grand finale, as any thief by a Bow Street officer. It passed through Ireland and parts of England; in particular it was dogged through a great part of Leicestershire; and its rate of travelling was not so great but that, by a series of telegraphs, timely notice might have been sent southwards that it was coming. [The Lisbon earthquake occurred in 1755; so that this paper must have been written about 1849 or 1850.–ED.]

[17] ‘The exact personality.‘–The historical personality, or complete identification of an individual, lies in the whole body of circumstances that would be sufficient to determine him as a responsible agent in a court of justice. Archbishop Usher and others fancy that Sardanapalus was the son of Pul; guided merely by the sound of a syllable. Tiglath-Pileser, some fancy to be the same person as Sardanapalus; others to be the very rebel who overthrew Sardanapalus. In short, all is confused and murky to the very last degree. And the reader who fancies that some accurate chronological characters are left, by which the era of Sardanapalus can be more nearly determined than it is determined above, viz., as generally coinciding with the era of Romulus and of the Greek Olympiad, is grossly imposed upon.

[18] ‘And Asiatic.‘–Asiatic, let the pupil observe, and not merely Assyrian; for the Assyria of this era represents all that was afterwards Media, Persia, Chaldaea, Babylonia, and Syria. No matter for the exact limits of the Assyrian empire, which are as indistinct in space as in time. Enough that no Asiatic State is known as distinct from this empire.

[19] And this is so exceedingly striking, that I am much surprised at the learned disputants upon the era of Homer having failed to notice this argument; especially when we see how pitiably poor they are in probabilities or presumptions of any kind. The miserable shred of an argument with those who wish to carry up Homer as high as any colourable pretext will warrant, is this, that he must have lived pretty near to the war which he celebrates, inasmuch as he never once alludes to a great revolutionary event in the Peloponnesus. Consequently, it is argued, Homer did not live to witness that revolution. Yet he must have witnessed it, if he had lived at the distance of eighty years from the capture of Troy; for such was the era of that event, viz., the return of the Heraclidae. Now, in answer to this, it is obvious to say that negations prove little. Homer has failed to notice, has omitted to notice, or found no occasion for noticing, scores of great facts contemporary with Troy, or contemporary with himself, which yet must have existed for all that. In particular, he has left us quite in the dark about the great empires, and the great capitals on the Euphrates and the Tigris, and the Nile; and yet it was of some importance to have noticed the relation in which the kingdom of Priam stood to the great potentates on those rivers. The argument, therefore, drawn from the non-notice of the Heraclidae, is but trivial. On the other hand, an argument of some strength for a lower era as the true era of Homer, may be drawn from the much slighter colouring of the marvellous, which in Homer’s treatment of the story attaches to the Iliad, than to the Seven against Thebes. In the Iliad we have the mythologic marvellous sometimes; the marvellous of necessity surrounding the gods and their intercourse with men; but we have no Amphiaraus swallowed up by the earth, no Oedipus descending into a mysterious gulf at the summons of an unseen power. And beyond all doubt the shield of Achilles, supposing it no interpolation of a later age, argues a much more advanced state of the arts of design, etc., than the shields, (described by AEschylus, as we may suppose, from ancient traditions preserved in the several families), of the seven chiefs who invaded Thebes.

[20] ‘Seven-gated,’ both as an expression which recalls the subject of the Romance (the Seven Anti-Theban Chieftains), and as one which distinguishes this Grecian Thebes from the Egyptian Thebes; that being called Hekatompylos, or Hundred-gated. Of course some little correction will always be silently applied to the general expression, so as to meet the difference between the two generations that served at Troy and in the Argonautic expedition, and again between David and his son. If the elder generation be fixed to the year 1000, then 1000 minus 30 will express the era of the younger; if the younger be fixed to the year 1000, then 1000 plus 30 will express the era of the elder. Or, better still, 1000 may be taken as the half-way era in which both generations met; that era in which the father was yet living and active, whilst the son was already entering upon manhood; that era, for instance, at which David was still reigning, though his son Solomon had been crowned. On this plan, no correction at all will be required; 15 years on each side of the 1000 will mark the two terms within which the events and persons range; and the 1000 will be the central point of the period.

[21] Elam is the Scriptural name for Persia.

[22] ‘Alala! Alala!’ the war cry of Eastern armies.

[23] And for the very reason that political economy had but a small share in determining the war of the year A, it became not so much a great force as the sole force for putting an end to the war of the year D.