Herodotus, young Greece spring up into life, or note with him how
already the wondrous old Orient world is crumbling into giant decay; or
go with Carpini and Rubruquis to Tartary, meet 'the carts of Zagathai
laden with houses, and think that a great city is travelling towards
you.' (2) 'Gaze on that vast wild empire of the Tartar, where the
descendants of Jenghis 'multiply and disperse over the immense waste
desert, which is as boundless as the ocean.' Sail with the early
Northern discoverers, and penetrate to the heart of winter, among sea-
serpents and bears and tusked morses with the faces of men. Then, what
think you of Columbus, and the stern soul of Cortes, and the kingdom of
Mexico, and the strange gold city of the Peruvians, with that audacious
brute Pizarro; and the Polynesians, just for all the world like the
Ancient Britons; and the American Indians and the South-sea Islanders?
How petulant and young and adventurous and frisky your hypochondriac
must get upon a regimen like that! Then, for that vice of the mind
which I call sectarianism,--not in the religious sense of the word, but
little, narrow prejudices, that make you hate your next-door neighbor
because he has his eggs roasted when you have yours boiled; and
gossipping and prying into people's affairs, and backbiting, and
thinking heaven and earth are coming together if some broom touch a
cobweb that you have let grow over the window-sill of your brains what
like a large and generous, mildly aperient (I beg your pardon, my dear)
course of history! How it clears away all the fumes of the head,--
better than the hellebore with which the old leeches of the Middle Ages
purged the cerebellum! There, amidst all that great whirl and sturmbad
(storm-bath), as the Germans say, of kingdoms and empires, and races and
ages, how your mind enlarges beyond that little feverish animosity to
John Styles, or that unfortunate prepossession of yours that all the
world is interested in your grievances against Tom Stokes and his wife!