Dissertations and Discussions political, philosophical, and historical, reprinted chiefly from the Edinburgh and Westminster Reviews Volume 2

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1867 Excerpt: ...in its results, broke the yoke of another enthralling system of popular religion, sixteen hundred years after they had ceased to exist as a people. These things were effected in two centuries of national existence: twenty and upwards have since elapsed, and it is sad to think how little comparatively has been accomplished. To give a faithful and living portraiture of such a people; to show what they were and did, and as much as possible of the means by which they did it--by what causes so meteor-like a manifestation of human nature was produced or aided, and by what faults or necessities it was arrested; to deduce from the qualities which the Greeks displayed collectively or individually, and from the modes in which those qualities were unconsciously generated or intentionally cultivated, the appropriate lessons for the guidance of our own world--is an enterprise never yet attempted systematically, nor attempted successfully at all. Such is the declared object of the work of which the first two volumes lie before us. ' First, to embody in his own mind, and next to lay out before his readers, the general picture of the Grecian world,' is Mr. Grote's description of his task. ' The histo-rian,' he says, ' will especially study to exhibit the spontaneous movement of Grecian intellect, sometimes aided but never borrowed from without, and lighting up a small portion of a world otherwise clouded and stationary; and to set forth the action of that social system, which, while ensuring to the mass of freemen a degree of protection elsewhere unknown, acted as a stimulus to the creative impulses of genius, and left the inferior minds sufliciently unshackled to soar above religious and political routine, to overshoot their own age, an...