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everything, men of business. It is the class between these two -between the quite unoccupied and the very busy-which is favorable to literary growth; and this class in India we do not possess. With us every man has his business-and this business is not authorship; nor can it be matter of reproach to a society that its members do not succeed in other walks than those which they profess to follow.

Probably no country contains so many able soldiers and efficient statesmen as India; but our society is too uniform in its character to produce authors except as an accidental exception.

What literary professional talent does exist in India, is concentrated on the newspaper press; on the deficiencies of which we have spoken without reserve, but certainly without hostility.

Lastly, while we believe the literary class in India, as regards writers, to be small and unimportant, we are convinced of its growing consequence as regards readers. The overland mail has done much, the railways in this country will probably do more, to encourage a taste for reading. As this taste increases, it will be found that the bonds which were not felt by infancy are unendurable to a matured society; we shall no longer be content with such books as London publishers and Calcutta agents may be pleased to send us; nor shall we acquiesce any longer in the payment of fancy prices for articles of ascertainable value; and thus the book trade in this country will be forced to assume a position more advantageous to the reading public and more becoming its own dignity.

Above all we must get rid of that petty provincialism which induces us to acquiesce in our own disparagement. "It is as good as you can expect in India," is a phrase too frequently used, fatal as it is to all improvement. Nothing is good enough so long as better may be had. be had. The fact of our being in India is not now accepted as a justification for ill made roads and unbridged rivers ; yet surely an eastern sun and a sandy soil afford a better excuse for these than they can do for an indifferent newspaper or a bad book. We will no longer allow the plea to Government; when shall we learn to deny it to ourselves?

ART. II.-The Life and Travels of Herodotus in the 5th Century before Christ; an imaginary Biography founded on fact. By J. TALBOYS WHEELER, F. R. G. S., Author of the "Geography of Herodotus," &c., 2 vols. London: 1855.

WE feel considerable hesitation in recommending this work to the public without some reserve. The object of the writer is "to give in a popular form a complete survey of the principal nations of the ancient world as they were in the days of Pericles and Nehemiah."

"With this view," he continues, "the author has written an imaginary biography of Herodotus, the Greek historian and geographer, who flourished in the 5th century before Christ; and by describing his supposed travels to the most famous cities and countries of antiquity, he has been enabled to review their several histories, narrate their national traditions, describe the appearance of each people, point out their peculiarities and manners, and develop the various religious views and ideas which belong to their several mythologies."

This plan offers a wide scope for the exercise of the author's pen. The ancient Greek colonies in Italy, the whole of Greece, European and Asiatic, Egypt and Ethiopia, Palestine as it existed in the period between the close of Old Testament history and the commencement of the New, Assyria and Babylonia, Persia and Media, Scythia and India,-all these are passed in review in the work before us, and are described, in reference to their history, geography, customs and national characteristics, in a rapid and interesting manner. We are quite ready to allow that Mr. Wheeler has accomplished his task with great ability, and that he has displayed accurate and varied scholarship in the illustration of his subject. The style, which is flowing and corrrect, is well adapted to his theme, and in many parts of the book there are indications of great skill in the grouping of incidents and the exhibition of striking historical tableaux.

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But we doubt whether the plan itself is a good one. The great difficulty in this species of composition is to get the historical and the imaginative faculties to work harmoniously you must either discard the "imaginary" altogether, or run the risk of being betrayed into exaggeration and bad taste. It is much easier to introduce historical facts in order to give substance and coherence to a fictitious texture, than to lay an imaginative colouring over plain historic truth. In the former case, the addition of real incidents renders the work of imagination more solid and purposelike, while in the latter the reader is almost sure to be bewildered

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or led astray in his search after truth by the alloy of fiction mingled with it. The "Life and travels of Herodotus" is not, it should be remembered, a historical romance. The object which the writer has in view differs widely from that of the authors of "Quentin Durward" and "Agincourt." Sir Walter Scott and Mr. James intend to make the amusement of the reader their first and main concern if some little instruction in the way of history can be combined with the plan, so much the better, but they do not lay themselves out to do more than amuse. The historical romance, therefore, is an end in itself. It does not pretend to be a handmaid to history, or to form an introduction to a deeper and more extended course of study. But Mr. Wheeler's book does. has laboured, he says, "to compile such an introduction to the study of ancient history as should both amuse and instruct the general reader, and lead him to the study of that higher class of historical, geopraphical, and critical works which as yet he may not have had the courage to undertake." If the fictitious parts be omitted we are quite willing to allow that the pretension is not at all ill-founded. On the contrary, we think that his brief, clear, and lively description of the chief nation of the old world in the most interesting period of its history is well adapted to give the general reader a satisfactory conspectus of the subject, and to whet his appetite for more extended study. But we contend that the book in its present form is exceedingly likely to mislead the reader-unless he be very well acquainted with Herodotus' work-as to the extent of our acquaintance with the life of the historian. A remarkable instance of this defect occurs in the forty eighth chapter in which the author describes an imaginary interview between Herodotus and Nehemiah.

"The haughty dignity of the cupbearer," he supposes," had somewhat offended Herodotus at their first interview. Like most Greeks, our traveller had himself a great contempt for Hebrews and Syrians generally; but gradually Nehemiah threw off his coldness, and Herodotus began to take pleasure in the elevated thoughtfulness of his conversation and the peculiar sweetness of his character."

He then represents Nehemiah as giving Herodotus an account of the Jewish nation from the earliest times, detailing their religious ideas and the Divine sanctions on which they reposed, and even hinting at the exalted hopes which they entertained of the coming of a mighty Deliverer. Now will the reader who is unacquainted with Herodotus believe that there is absolutely no foundation for this narrative except the fact that the historian visited Palestine. There is not a word in his History about the Jewish religion, or Jewish history, or Jewish customs. It is impossible to account for this silence on any other supposition than that he

passed so hastily through the country as to have obtained no particulars of interest regarding it. If nothing else had impressed him, the grand, simple, pure ideas of religion which he would have found among the Jews could not have failed to attract his attention, &c.

And after all, this fictitious adjunct is quite unnecessary. The author has greatly underrated his powers if he thinks himself incapable of producing a readable book without calling in the assistance of imaginary incidents. He urges in support of his plan that he adopted it from an anxious desire to render his work as popular as possible. Is this fair to the reading public? We think not. A book intended for general instruction may be highly popular without swerving a hair's breadth from the severity of truth. Let technical terms be excluded, or lucidly explained; let the writer be careful not to assume more extensive knowledge of the ground-work of his subject than the class for whom he writes may fairly be expected to have acquired; let the information be conveyed in plain and lively language; let it be manifest that the writer himself is devotedly attached to the subject on which he writes;-and we venture to affirm that this is a surer, as it is certainly a more honourable way of enlisting the sympathies and promoting the instruction of the public at large.

We should not have thought it necessary to say so much on this point if the author had not promised a succession of works on a similar plan, embracing the history of later periods. We shall be very glad to welcome any historical sketches from Mr. Wheeler's pen, but we protest against the employment of such fictitious machinery as we are now deprecating in the volumes before us. We are greatly obliged to him for his (in the main) solid and entertaining sketch of ancient history, but we do not want to be told that Herodotus was a dunce at arithmetic, or that he was taken in by a Corinthian roue, or that his father committed him to the care of an imaginary but (we are bound to say) very like " skipper," named Phylarchus, or that he fell in love with an Athenian damsel at first sight, or that he got the worst of a boxing match at Sparta.

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But our object in noticing this book is not to review it as a whole-for it deals with many countries which do not fall within the province of this Review,-but to take occasion from it to present our readers with some of the most interesting observations of the father of history on the countries, which, on political or geographical grounds, stand in close connection with India.

We see no reason indeed why we should not be allowed to treat Herodotus himself as an Asiatic writer, and to pass him under review as such. It is common, we are aware, to identfy the first

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Greek historian, as to mental characteristics, with the ordinary European Greek type as exemplified in the Athenians. Whewell,* for instance, calls him a lively and garrulous Ionian, pace tanti viri, we demur as a matter of opinion to his applying the epithet garrulous "to the painstaking and scrupulous historian," but an Ionian he certainly was not. He was born, according to his own statement, at Halicarnassus, a Doric colony in Caria. This would imply that he was a Dorian by extraction; but we shall be greatly mistaken if we suppose that the Dorian idiosyncracies, of which the Spartans were the peculiar exponents, must necessarily be found in such a place as Halicarnassus, and at the period at which Herodotus was born. Six hundred years of colonial life-which is the period between the Doric occupation of Halicarnassus and the birth of Herodotus-under, first, Lydian, and afterwards Persian, government, and that too in a country differing widely in its physical aspects from the bleak and mountainous regions from which the Dorians first emigrated into Greece, must have produced a considerable change in the character of the inhabitants. We do not indeed think it likely that the colonists had intermarried with the natives to any great extent. Some Ionian emigrants from Athens Herodotus tells us, had done so; but it is clear from the way in which he speaks of the occurrence that this was a solitary exception, and that it was customary for emigrants to take their wives with them,-an example, by the way, which our Australian colonists would have done well to imitate. There is however quite sufficient influence in the climate, and especially in the political position of the Asiatic Greeks under their Lydian and Persian rulers, to account for their comparative degeneracy from the bold, unyielding character of their European brothers. And this view of the character of the Asiatic Greek colonies will account for Herodotus' adopting the Ionic dialect in the composition of his history. His vernacular, the Doric, was rugged and unmusical, and but ill-adapted to give appropriate expression to those exuberant and highly poetic thoughts with which the historian's travels had enriched his mind.

In following Herodotus in his remarks on the various nations which he visited, or about which he obtained what he thought reliable information, we shall begin by noticing a few of his geographical remarks on the Peninsula of Asia Minor. The intelligence he gleaned in different quarters about the north eastern parts of Asia Minor, and especially the Caspian sea, will next engage our attention. We may then follow him to Egypt, the country in which he was most interested, and concerning which he has left us the most valuable information. Modern researches in the ruins and inscriptions of Babylon and Persia will amply repay us for * History of the Inductive Sciences. Vol. I. p. 30.

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