relics of a primitive civilisation, but with some gradually learnt
knowledge of the simpler arts, with some tamed animals and some
little knowledge of the course of nature as far as it tells upon the
seasons and affects the condition of simple tribes. This is what,
according to ethnology, we should expect the first historic man to
be, and this is what we in fact find him. But what was his mind; how
are we to describe that?

I believe the general description in which Sir John Lubbock sums up
his estimate of the savage mind suits the patriarchal mind.
'Savages,' he says, 'unite the character of childhood with the
passions and strength of men.' And if we open the first record of
the pagan world--the poems of Homer--how much do we find that suits
this description better than any other. Civilisation has indeed
already gone forward ages beyond the time at which any such
description is complete. Man, in Homer, is as good at oratory, Mr.
Gladstone seems to say, as he has ever been, and, much as that
means, other and better things might be added to it. But after all,
how much of the 'splendid savage' there is in Achilles, and how much
of the 'spoiled child sulking in his tent.' Impressibility and
excitability are the main characteristics of the oldest Greek
history, and if we turn to the east, the 'simple and violent' world,
as Mr. Kinglake calls it, of the first times meets us every moment.

And this is precisely what we should expect. An 'inherited drill,'
science says, 'makes modern nations what they are; their born
structure bears the trace of the laws of their fathers;' but the
ancient nations came into no such inheritance; they were the
descendants of people who did what was right in their own eyes; they
were born to no tutored habits, no preservative bonds, and therefore