dawn of human civilisation. The man of the flint implement and the
fire-drill, who could only count up to five, and who was content to
live in a hut like a beehive, has drawn interest away from the man of
the market and the parlour. The literary passion for primitive times
and the raw material of man has thrust polished man, the manufactured
article, into a secondary place. All this is in the order of things.
It is fitting enough that we should pierce into the origins of human
nature. It is right, too, that the poets, the ideal interpreters of
life, should be dearer to us than those who stop short with mere
deciphering of what is real and actual. The poet has his own sphere
of the beautiful and the sublime. But it is no less true that the
enduring weight of historian, moralist, political orator, or preacher
depends on the amount of the wisdom of life that is hived in his
pages. They may be admirable by virtue of other qualities, by
learning, by grasp, by majesty of flight; but it is his moral
sentences on mankind or the State that rank the prose writer among the
sages. These show that he has an eye for the large truths of action,
for the permanent bearings of conduct, and for things that are for the
guidance of all generations. What is it that makes Plutarch's Lives
"the pasture of great souls," as they were called by one who was
herself a great soul? Because his aim was much less to tell a story
than, as he says, "to decipher the man and his nature"; and in
deciphering the man, to strike out pregnant and fruitful thoughts on
all men. Why was it worth while for Mr. Jowett, the other day, to give
us a new translation of Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War?
And why is it worth your while, at least to dip in a serious spirit
into its pages? Partly, because the gravity and concision of
Thucydides are of specially wholesome example in these days of
over-coloured and over-voluminous narrative; partly, because he knows
how to invest the wreck and overthrow of those small states with the