lowest of the animals in its savage state, to the highest after man--
viz., admixture of race--you can elevate into nations of majesty and
power the outcasts of humanity, now your compassion or your scorn. But
when my father got into the marrow of his theme; when, quitting these
preliminary discussions, he fell pounce amongst the would-be wisdom of
the wise; when he dealt with civilization itself, its schools, and
porticos, and academies; when he bared the absurdities couched beneath
the colleges of the Egyptians and the Symposia of the Greeks; when he
showed that, even in their own favorite pursuit of metaphysics, the
Greeks were children, and in their own more practical region of
politics, the Romans were visionaries and bunglers; when, following the
stream of error through the Middle Ages, he quoted the puerilities of
Agrippa, the crudities of Cardan, and passed, with his calin smile, into
the salons of the chattering wits of Paris in the eighteenth century,--
oh! then his irony was that of Lucian, sweetened by the gentle spirit of
Erasmus. For not even here was my father's satire of the cheerless and
Mephistophelian school. From this record of error he drew forth the
granderas of truth. He showed how earnest men never think in vain,
though their thoughts may be errors. He proved how, in vast cycles, age
after age, the human mind marches on, like the ocean, receding here, but
there advancing; how from the speculations of the Greek sprang all true
philosophy; how from the institutions of the Roman rose all durable
systems of government; how from the robust follies of the North came the
glory of chivalry, and the modern delicacies of honor, and the sweet,
harmonizing influences of woman. He tracked the ancestry of our Sidneys
and Bayards from the Hengists, Genserics, and Attilas. Full of all
curious and quaint anecdote, of original illustration, of those niceties
of learning which spring from a taste cultivated to the last exquisite
polish, the book amused and allured and charmed; and erudition lost its
pedantry, now in the simplicity of Montaigne, now in the penetration of