are necessarily subordinate--endeavours to attain. According to Dr
Arnold, a nation's life is twofold, external and internal. Its external
life consists principally in wars. "Here history has been sufficiently
busy. The wars of the human race have been recorded when every thing
else has perished."

Mere antiquarianism, Dr Arnold justly observes, is calculated to
contract and enfeeble the understanding. It is a pedantic love of
detail, with an indifference to the result, for which alone it can be
considered valuable. It is the mistake, into which men are perpetually
falling, of the means for the end. There are people to whom the
tragedies of Sophocles are less precious than the Scholiast on
Lycophron, and who prize the speeches of Demosthenes chiefly because
they may fling light on the dress of an Athenian citizen. The same
tendency discovers itself in other pursuits. Oxen are fattened into
plethoras to encourage agriculture, and men of station dress like
grooms, and bet like blacklegs, to keep up the breed of horses. It is
true that such evils will happen when agriculture is encouraged, and a
valuable breed of horses cherished; but they are the consequences, not
the cause of such a state of things. So the disciples of the old
philosophers drank hemlock to acquire pallid countenances--but they are
as far from obtaining the wisdom of their masters by this adventitious
resemblance, as the antiquarian is from the historian. To write well
about the past, we must have a vigorous and lively perception of the
present. This, says Dr Arnold, is the merit of Mitford. It is certainly
the only one he possesses; a person more totally unqualified for writing
history at all--to say nothing of the history of Greece--it is difficult
for us, aided as our imagination may be by the works of our modern
writers, to conceive. But Raleigh, whom he quotes afterwards, is indeed
a striking instance of that combination of actual experience with