Roman history, is the defective method, which not only Niebuhr and his followers, but most of his opponents, have adopted. Instead of employing those tests of credibility which are consistently applied to modern history, they attempt to guide their judgment by the indications of internal evidence, and assume that the truth can be discovered by an occult faculty of historical divination. Hence, the task which they have undertaken resembles an inquiry into the internal structure of the earth, or into the question whether the stars are inhabited. It is an attempt to solve a problem, for the solution of which no sufficient data exist.

"The consequence is, that ingenuity and labour can produce nothing but hypotheses and conjectures which may be supported by analogies, and may sometimes appear specious and attractive, but can never rest on the solid foundation of proof. There will, therefore, be a series of such conjectural histories; each successive writer will reject all or some of the guesses of his predecessors, and will propose some new hypothesis of his own. But the treatment of early Roman history, though it will be constantly moving, will not advance; it will not be stationary, but neither will it be progressive; it will be unfixed and changeable, but without receiving any improvement; and it will perpetually revolve in the same hopeless circle. Like the search after the philosopher's stone, or the elixir of life, it will be constantly varying its aspect, under the treatment of different professors of the futile science; but truth and certainty, the aim of all rational employment of the intellect, will always be equally distant. Each new system of the early Roman constitution will be only (to use Paley's words) one guess among many; whereas, he alone discovers who proves. There is indeed no doubt that long habit, combined with a happy talent, may enable a person to discern the truth where it is invisible to ordinary minds, possessing no peculiar advantages. This may be observed, not only in historical researches, but in every other department of knowledge. In order, however, that the truth so perceived should recommend itself to the convictions of others, it is a necessary condition that it should admit of proof which they can understand. Newton might have perceived, by a rapid and intuitive sagacity, the connexion between the fall of an apple and the attraction of the earth to the sun; but unless he could have demonstrated that connexion by arguments which were intelligible and satisfactory to the scientific world, his discovery would have been useless, except as a mere suggestion. In like manner, we may rejoice that the ingenuity and learning of Niebuhr should have enabled him to advance many novel hypotheses and conjectures respecting events in the early history, and respecting the form of the early constitution, of Rome. But unless he can support those hypotheses by sufficient evidence, they are not entitled to our belief. It is not enough for a historian to claim the possession of a retrospective second-sight, which is denied to the rest of the world; of a mysterious doctrine, revealed only to the initiated. Unless he can prove as well as guess; unless he can produce evidence of the fact, after he has intuitively perceived its existence, his historical system cannot be received."

The allusion in this passage to the fruitlessness of the inquiry whether the stars are inhabited, we leave to be digested by the eminent philosophers who have lately occupied themselves with this question; but our author is not happy when he classes with it an inquiry into the internal structure of the earth. He had perhaps Burnet and Whitehurst in his mind. But when Arago sinks an Artesian well to the depth of two thousand feet, and brings up water of the temperature of 85° of Fahrenheit, or Airy ascertains the vibrations of the pendulum at the bottom of a coal-pit, they do give us information respecting the internal structure of the earth. And as regards the earth's revolution around the sun, we should maintain that one who preferred the Pythagorean to the Ptolemaic system, even while both were hypotheses, showed a sound and philosophical judgment, grounded on the best evidence which was then attainable. Can we be said, indeed, even now to have any proof of the Copernican system, except that it solves the phenomena, the test by which every historical hypothesis claims to be tried, however inadequately it may often fulfil the condition?

Niebuhr's historical investigations divide themselves into several periods-that which preceded the rise of Rome-the regal government-from the expulsion of the kings to the burning of the city-and from the rebuilding of the city to the war with Pyrrhus. Through all these Sir George Lewis follows him, for the purpose of establishing the thesis laid down in the extract which we have given above, and showing that, instead of solid and well-guaranteed facts, his work presents us with nothing but arbitrary assumptions and fanciful combinations. Occasionally he has a graver charge to prefer, of assertions made without proof, and evidence incorrectly stated, through the zeal of an advocate in the cause which he had undertaken. These criticisms on the work and its author are not hastily made. Sir George has evidently studied the whole history of Rome, with a view to the present discussion, in the original writers; he has besides consulted every author, even the most recent, who could throw any light upon the subject. His tone is decisive, but dispassionate; and could we agree with him as to the limit within which he would confine history, and the sources from which it must be derived in order to deserve its name, we should find little to object to against his special criticisms. As may be anticipated, he has no difficulty in showing that the attempts to construct a connected and credible history out of the traditions of the Italian nations who preceded the rise of Rome, have been attended with little success. His method is to place one in opposition to another, and then dash them together in order to pulverize both. The following extract will

show in what light estimation he holds this whole class of inquiries:

“When we come to examine the evidence on which the ethnological theories of the majority of antiquarian treatises are founded, our wonder at their wide, and indeed almost unlimited divergences is at an end. No probability is too faint, no conjecture is too bold, no etymology is too uncertain, to resist the credulity of an antiquarian in search of evidence to support an ethnological hypothesis. Gods become men, kings become nations, one nation becomes another nation, opposites are interchanged, at a stroke of the wand of the historical magician. Centuries are to him as minutes; nor indeed is space itself of much account, when national affinities are in question. Chronology, as Niebuhr remarks in the passage quoted above, forms no part of such history; dates, in such a context, are misleading and deceptive. To ask for the ordinary securities of historical truth-determinate assignable witnesses, whose credibility can be weighed and estimated-would be an impertinence; would imply an ignorance of the conditions of the problem, which are, that the events are antecedent to the period of regular history and contemporaneous registration.

Niebuhr remarks, that unless some boldness of divination be allowable, all researches into the early history of nations must be abandoned. The subject may be interesting, and our curiosity may be great; but because the authentic information is scanty, we must not therefore assume the liberty of setting aside well-ascertained rules of historical evidence. To permit boldness of divination to supply the place of well-attested fact in inquiries into primitive ethnology, is similar to the ancient legal maxim, now happily exploded, that, in trials for atrocious crimes, a less degree of proof, than in ordinary cases, would suffice, and that the judge might outstep the law."

The ethnologists who have exercised themselves on the problem of the early population of Italy, would hardly admit that they have proceeded on a principle equally bad in law and logic. They would probably allege that they have only followed out the sound maxim, that when primary and positive evidence is not to be obtained, secondary and circumstantial may be admitted; and that, not because it would be a great dishonour to the law that a crime should be committed and no one be punished for it, but because experience has shown that such evidence is capable of furnishing a safe conclusion. No doubt much evidence is tendered on this subject which is of no value, and some has been admitted which did not deserve reception, but the sweeping condemnation in which our author involves the whole, appears to us not to be deserved. He makes no discrimination between witnesses according to their character and means of knowledge; indeed, he assumes that none of them

did or could know anything of times preceding the establishment of the Roman power, and that therefore none of them should be listened to. This we think an unfounded assumption. Herodotus and Dionysius are at variance on the subject of the origin of the Etruscans or Tyrrhenians. Dionysius, writing immediately before the Christian era, pronounced them to be in no way related to the Lydians, either in religion, language, or manners. Herodotus, in the fifth century, B.C., tells us that they were a colony from Lydia.* Is no account to be made, in weighing their authorities against each other, of the circumstances that one lived four centuries and a-half before the other; that Herodotus knew both Lydia and Italy, and had seen the Lydians when their traditions were so much more recent, and their manners and institutions so much less changed, than in the days of Dionysius? There is no perspective in Sir G. Lewis's estimate of evidence; what does not stand in the foreground of contemporary testimony vanishes at once from his view, be it nearer or more remote. Nor does he allow any weight to the traditional belief and historical consciousness of a nation, in regard to its own origin, which we should consider, when its existence can be ascertained, as at least good prima facie evidence, to be received and held valid till it can be proved also groundless. It is true that Niebuhr has said, and our author repeats the assertion, that popular belief requires no long time, in spite of the most obvious facts, and the clearest historical proofs, to become national, provided people are only roundly told that it was what their forefathers knew and believed. Niebuhr was very inconsistent, for he often argues from this belief as evidence of a true historical tradition: Sir G. Lewis is consistent in its rejection. We should hesitate to lay down an absolute rule. First of all, indeed, it must be ascertained that the belief is national, and not a mere literary or poetic fiction, like the deduction of the Britons from Brutus the Trojan, or the Milesian colony in Ireland. If it be truly national, its evidence is not to be set aside by any general assertion that it may have been produced by bold asseverations of its truth; the burden of proof is fairly thrown on those who maintain its falsehood. We do not mean, of course, that they are bound to show when and by whose means it originated, for it is not a thing of individual creation and instantaneous birth; but neither is it generated by the wind, or produced by a fortuitous concourse of atoms. It is a fact, for which a cause has to be assigned, a phenomenon, which demands an explanation, not indeed an explanation of every ornamental circumstance or minute variation in the story, but of that which is its substance

* Ant. Rom. i. 30. Herod, i. 94.

and underlies all its forms. Our author has collected from different ancient writers a number of traditions or legends respecting the original population of Italy. We readily concede to him that there is no one which deserves to be set up as history to the exclusion of the rest, and that to select from each what we think probable would be an arbitrary and uncritical proceeding. Yet they all involve an historical consciousness on the part of their authors, that in the language, religion, and customs of the Latins, to whom the Roman people owed their origin, there was a large infusion of a Grecian element, along with another which was not Grecian. Further, they all denote the existence of a conviction that it was not in any recent time, or from the Grecian people in any of its later divisions of Eolians, Dorians, Ionians, that this element was derived. They were Pelasgians,* the predecessors of the Hellenes, not any of the branches of the Hellenes themselves, who were believed to have crossed the Adriatic into Italy; or Arcadians, older than the moon, the primeval possessors of the Peloponnesus, who settled in Latium, and brought with them some of the arts of life and the simplest form of the alphabet. If these accounts of Greek colonization were nothing but fictions, the effect of a desire on the part of the Romans to claim for themselves the respectability of a Greek origin, how has it happened that they correspond so well with facts so little popular and obvious as the agreement of the Latin language with the oldest form of Greek, of the oldest Italian alphabet with the most archaic Greek letters, and the worship of the Roman Penates with the primitive mythology of the Pelasgian Cabiri? Etymology may have amused itself with tracing a resemblance between the Roman palatium and the Arcadian town Pallantium ; but if there had not been some other and better reason for fixing on Arcadia as the special source of the Grecian colony, this similarity of name, though something greater than that between Macedon and Monmouth, would hardly have given origin to the legend. We do not claim historical reality

Sir G. Lewis says (i. 282, note 50) that two opposite and inconsistent views respecting the Pelasgians prevailed in antiquity, one representing them as a fixed and stationary, the other, as a migratory people; and he thinks this radical inconsistency a proof that the accounts of them rest on no historical basis. He quotes Herodotus i. 56, as an instance of the former opinion; but the words ovdaμn κw eέexwpnoe refer only to the Pelasgians of Attica, who, according to him, were the progenitors of the Ionian population. In the next section he speaks of the Pelasgians migrating into the countries which they occupied in his own time.

† Livy i. 7. Plin. vii. 58. Repertores literarum Cadmus ex Phoenice in Greciam et Evander ad nos transtulerunt literas numero sedecim. Gramm. ap. Putsch. 2458. In Latium literas attulerunt Pelasgi. Plin. vii. 56.