those writers who made the antiquities of the nation their especial study; by the poets, the tragic and the comic writers; by Thucydides in his admirable summary of Grecian history prefixed to his work: by Strabo, the most accurate of geographers; and by Pausanias, the most diligent of antiquaries. From these authorities, a sketch consistent with truth and probability, correct in its outlines, though mingled in its minuter delineations with prodigies and fables, may be de rived, fully adequate to that degree of illustration on those obscure subjects which will satisfy the philosophic inquirer. The most finished portraiture of early manners is unquestion ably that which has been traced by the powerful pencil of Tacitus: it is a picture of a rude yet not a barbarous state of society: but some progress had been made in the necessary arts and institutions of social life, before it presents itself to our view. In Greece, the inventors and the inventions are commemorated. The benefactor of his species, who first taught them to exchange the savage production of the oak for the nutritious food of grain, →→→→ "Chaoniam pingui glandem mutavit aristá," the ruler who introduced the institution of marriage, and placed under the yoke of manners and of laws the wildest and most intractable of passions; and the enlightened legistator who carried the knowlege of the East into Boeotia, and taught the sublimest operation of the mind, that of arresting the fleeting sounds of the voice by the use of determinate characters; have in the persons of Cecrops and Cadmus been consecrated by the grateful traditions of their country. They have fixed those epochs in its history, to which in the midst of uncertainty we may refer with almost perfect confidence. To guide us through this uncertainty, chronology, which is the lamp of history, presents but a broken and glimmering light. Mr. Mitford (vol. i. p. 164.) has rejected, and in our opinion with great judgment, the recent system of Dr. Blair's tables; which are indeed built on the ambiguous faith of the Oxford marbles, and the suspicious fragments of some old chronologers, of so little authority even in their own day that Strabo, Plutarch, and Pausanias, though coming immediately after them, have not condescended to quote them. Not to lose ourselves in the labyrinths of such a controversy, it may be sufficient to remark that our immortal countryman, Sir Isaac Newton, conceived the project worthy of his comprehensive and accurate genius, to frame a chronological system for the early Grecian ages from political tradition, and those genealogies which are the most intitled to credit; and and he endeavoured to verify it from accounts of astronomical computations. The result is that, instead of an interval of three hundred and twenty-eight years, or according to M. Freret three hundred and ninety-five, between the return of the Heraclidæ and the victory of Choraebus at the Olympic games, Newton assigns only fifty-three years to that period; and, though the inquiry is rugged and almost intolerable to those who read history for its moral and social philosophy, yet the absurdity (a bold word!) of Blair's and Freret's hypothesis is manifest from the necessities to which it is driven; viz. supposing the existence of two kings of Elis of the name Iphitus, and of two Spartan kings and legislators named Lycurgus, who, at the distance of one or two centuries, did the same things and acquired the same réputation; — a train of coincidences scarcely consistent with the order of nature, and certainly of little accordance with that of history. Mr. Mitford, however, having in a laboured dissertation assigned his reasons for adopting Newton's computation, does not impose it on his readers, but cites the dates of each system in his margin. * The Abbé Barthélémy has with great judgment divided the history of Greece, from the period at which the Athenians took the lead in its transactions, (about 150 years from the first Olympiad,) into three epochs; which trace the beginning, the progress, and the decline of their empire. The first is the age of Solon, or that of legislation; the second, that of Themistocles and Aristides, the age of military renown; the third, the age of Pericles, which was that of refinement aud art. This distribution brings us down to the time when his young philosopher sets out on his travels, which was a few years before the age of Alexander. Following this perspicuous arrangement, we shall rapidly advert to the course of events traced by Mr. Mitford in his first three volumes, before we bring under the notice of our readers the substance and the execution of the two which we have not yet noticed: passing over passing over the transactions which occupy the greater part of the first volume, such as the two Theban and the Trojan wars, with the important revolutions which followed the return of the Heracleids. We must also forbear, on account of our circumscribed limits, to pronounce an opinion on the theory adopted by Mr. Mitford concerning age of Homer, which makes the bard almost contem the * Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis, tom. i. p. 234. The Abbé follows the chronology of Dodwell in his Commentary on Thucydides. porary with the war that he commemorated, instead of placing him, as some historians have done, four hundred years after it; yet without hesitation conceding to Mr. M. that Homer must have lived before the return of the Heracleids, of which no mention whatever occurs in his poem. - After a masterly recapitulation of events attending the progress of this last revolution, which changed the inhabitants and the very face of society in the southern part of the country, and broke it up into new divisions, the historian traces the growth of the three institutions; the oracles, which became afterward such mighty engines in the political affairs of Greece, the Amphyctionic council, and the Olympian games: institutions which, he rightly observes, prevented a relapse into utter barbarism. The fourth chapter gives a concise history of the southern provinces, from the return of the Heracleids to the conquest of Messenia by the Lacedæmonians, with a sketch of the legislation of Lycurgus. Our attention is then by a judicious arrangement transferred to the northern division; which, comprehending Athens, the theatre of the most memorable transactions of war and policy, is of course the commanding position from which we have been accustomed to contemplate Grecian history. A void occurs in the Athenian annals for some generations after the death of Codrus. Twelve archons follow by. hereditary succession: but the vanity of after-times has not ascribed to one of them a single action worthy of record; nor does it appear, during this interval, that the Athenians had any connection with the rest of Greece. The next changes in their political constitution were the limitation of the archonship, first to ten years, then to one year, and next its distribution among nine persons. The people exercised the right of legislation, but the whole executive magistracy rested with the archons. Above a century, from the appointment of annual archons to the Persian invasion, is filled with domestic dissentions. It was to quell the disorders of faction, and to supply the defects of jurisprudence, that Athens had recourse to Draco; a man of rigid morality, but who unfortunately imprinted the severity of his manners on his legislation, and punished every infraction of his laws with death. They were abolished, says Aulus Gellius, (1. xi. c. 18.) not by any formal act of repeal, but by the tacit and unrecorded consent of the Athenians. Intestine factions, principally of the poor against the rich, tore the commonwealth; and though the Cretan Epimenides lulled them to a temporary repose, * About 900 years before the Christian æra. yet, yet, having their foundation in a defective constitution, they broke out with redoubled fury. (Mitford, vol. i. p. 269.) While many, consequently, were looking to the establishment of regal power, or as the Greek language then called it tyranny, as their only refuge from public tumult and its attendant calamities, the eyes of all were fixed on Solon; who was unanimously appointed archon, with powers to reform the constitution. To those, who are anxious to acquire a profound knowlege of this subject, we earnestly recommend the learned work of Archbishop Potter on Grecian Antiquities, and the diligent consultation of the authors whom he cites in his delineation of the Athenian constitution as it was settled by Solon but those who are satisfied with a more compendious sketch will find it in the fourth section of Mr. Mitford's fifth chapter. The fundamental principle of Solon's government was the supreme power which he gave to the people of voting in the public assemblies; a foundation of evil so broad, says Mr. Mitford, that it counteracted the wisdom of his other regulations. The Council of the Four Hundred, afterward the Five Hundred, was the only counterpoise to this inordinate degree of popular power; and that it was not effective, the subsequent history of Athenian troubles has incontestably demonstrated. The assumption of the whole power of the state by Pisistratus, who, it seems from the best authority, introduced scarcely any other change into the political system as it was left by Solon, became rather a lenient and wise administration than a tyranny; and, after the expulsion of the Pisistratids, the same species of government continued with few or no modifications. An elaborate and learned view of the eastern nations in political connection with Greece occupies an appropriate space in Mr. Mitford's history. The regular stream of narrative is indeed broken by the retrospective histories of the Asiatic Grecian commonwealth, and of the conquests of the Persian monarchy in Asia, Egypt, Thrace, and the Ægean islands: but this is necessary to a clear elucidation of the remote and immediate causes of the memorable wars between Persia and Greece, which occupy the second division of Grecian history, or, according to the philosophical. arrangement of Barthélémy, the age of its military glory. Mr. Mitford, in the five following chapters of his first volume, with the exception of the tenth, (which is an elaborate and learned review of the Greek settlements in Sicily and Italy,) brings down his work to the death of Xerxes, and to those memorable successes under Cimon which established the security security of Greece against the Barbarians. During this glorious space, the pillars of the earth were shaken by the mighty hosts of the East that were sent out to overwhelm an inconsiderable republic; which, after a variety of fortunes, having soared to the height of naval and military greatness, wound up the eventful drama by imposing an ignominious peace on the greatest monarch of the world, more humiliating in its conditions than he himself would have exacted from a horde of robbers who had insulted his frontier. * The age of Athenian refinement may be said almost to begin with Fericles, under whose administration Athens arrived at the summit of her greatness. Mr. M.'s first volume closes the affairs of Greece at the truce of thirty years with Lacedæmon, and contains, perhaps, too concise a summary of that interesting period, which is the era of the most extensive power obtained by the Athenian state. From that truce to the Peloponnesian war, but with an intermediate view of the history of Macedonia from the earliest accounts, and the commencement of that war to the death of Pericles, interrupted by a summary view of the history of Thrace, the history proceeds in a regular course of narration. The retrospective disquisitions impede indeed its progress: but, in the history of a country whose dependencies were so widely se parated, this is a necessity that could not be evaded. The death of Pericles happened in the third year of the war, and Lacedæmon sued for peace in the seventh. It was in the tenth that tranquillity was established between the two republics: but the war still subsisted; and, having brought it down to its sixteenth year, the historian follows the Athenian expedition into Sicily, and gives us a preliminary account of the affairs of that country. In the twenty-fourth year of the Peloponnesian war, Alcibiades returned to Athens, and the his tory continues with no interruption from that event to the conclusion of the war; an interval that comprehends the memorable siege of Athens. After the termination of this long and complicated struggle between Lacedæmon and Athens, which is philosophically designated by Mr. Mitford to have been a civil war between the oligarchical and the democratical factions dispersed through the different states of Greece, we have a rapid but masterly enumeration of the principal events of that protracted warfare. It was at this period that the defect of Solon's constitution was strikingly illustrated. The people were sovereigns: the Council of Five Hundred was no efficient control on that |