kind, and assuredly never will exist again-the whole of the national funds for religious education exclusively set apart for the church of a small fractional minority! and expressly defended on the ground that, with a congregation or without one, does not matter the funds are equally to be expended upon the church! Well might Mr Galley Knight call it a monster 'church.' It stands alone among all human institutions. Mr Williams follows the example of Dryden in concluding with a prophecy: a few months ground Dryden's predictions into dust. It requires no foresight but that of common sense to see that there are years of hard and honest work to be yet gone through, before we can dream of peace on earth, or gratitude in Ireland.

·

The ingenuity of Mr Williams's experiment excited our curiosity. The liberal spirit in which he has executed it entitles him to great indulgence. Besides, a poem by a Vinerian Pro'fessor" could not but find favour in our sight. It ought to do something towards the removal of the stupid prejudice which the 'farewell to the muses' of his celebrated predecessor (Blackstone) did something towards countenancing. The prejudice supposes that a disclaimer of all cultivation of polite literature is one of the many negative qualifications necessary for a lawyer. It is a singular fancy in men of business and of the world, to take a sort of pleasure in representing taste and imagination to be inconsistent with their pursuits.

ART. V.-A History of Greece. By the Rev. CONNOP THIRLWALL, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Vol. I. London : 1835. (Published in LARDNER'S Cabinet Cyclopædia.)

WE have no right to expect, and certainly we very seldom find, in the separate histories contained in those cabinet miscellanies of which so many are now in the course of publication, any thing more than popular and superficial narratives of the chief occurrences in national annals. It was, therefore, with some surprise that we discovered, under the unpretending exterior of this volume, a series of acute and learned enquiries into the early history and antiquities of Greece. A neat steel-plate titlepage, with a cut representing Lycurgus proclaiming the infant Charilaus King of Sparta,' seemed a singular frontispiece to a mass of disquisitions on the cloudy legends of the Pelasgi and Hellenes, on the Homeric controversy, and the wanderings of the Dorians. Whether Mr Thirlwall's innovation will be approved

6

of in the class of readers for whom these miscellanies are, in the first instance, intended, we cannot presume to anticipate. But his work is certain to attract attention among those who are anxious to acquire something more than elementary knowledge on a subject of such unwearying interest as that which he has chosen to illustrate. His own reasons for the course he has adopted, in giving to his book a more learned character than is usual with works of a similar description, are candidly stated in his preface. He might have cited, in addition, the example of his fellow-Encyclopédiste, the poet and historian of Ireland, who has plunged quite as venturously into the depths of Hibernian as he into those of Hellenic darkness. And it is our duty to urge in his farther justification, that subjects of so recondite a nature cannot possibly be placed in a clearer light, or better stripped of all superfluous mystery, than we have found them in these pages. A spirit of good sense and temperate criticism pervades them throughout. And, although the author's fancy is every where subordinate to his correct historical taste, the student will not fail to detect traces of that scholar-like delight in the graceful and lovely fictions of antiquity, which is so peculiarly attractive to minds of congenial temper. It animates the reader through the toilsome intricacy of some parts of his progress, like a brook by the way-side, which, though it only sparkles occasionally in the traveller's eye, yet enlivens him by the sense of its constant companionship. Some portions of the narrative of early migrations and the intermixture of tribes, may perhaps appear detailed with unnecessary minuteness; although it is very difficult to assign accurate limits to the length of such investigations. it may be thought, that the author has in other parts too sedulously avoided pronouncing an opinion, when discussing questions of historical interest. There are few subjects on which it is safer to doubt, and more preposterous to dogmatize, than those connected with the primitive history of the Greeks. But in a work evincing no common ability and research, we naturally look for something more, when we reach points on which there exists a lis mota' between learned combatants, than a mere exposition of conflicting hypotheses, and of the difficulties which beset each.

And

Confused as the early history of Greece undoubtedly is, and presenting, at first sight, a series of migrations and conquests without adequate purpose, and apparently irreconcilable with each other, the patient investigations of recent critics have, we think, done much towards unravelling the complicated web. We cannot, it is true, boast of having arrived at any new certainties; but we have by their aid acquired clearer notions as to what we

may admit and what we must reject among those traditions in which we are compelled to search for authority. The most obscure, as students in foreign history are well aware, among these legends, are such as relate to the Pelasgi; a very enigmatical people, who meet us under every possible shape in the first stage of our enquiries. Sometimes they appear to enter Greece from the unknown north and west, sometimes from eastern regions beyond the sea; sometimes indigenous; by some authors represented as civilized men overcoming barbarians; by others as barbarian tribes retiring before the influence of civilisation; sometimes spread over the whole of Greece; sometimes confined to a few obscure corners. So long as we adhere to the opinion, that these people were of different origin and language from the Greek or Hellenic race-which undoubtedly derives countenance from some eminent authorities-we are involved in difficulties without end by these contradictory statements. But when we hold, as Mr Thirlwall conjectures in accordance with many recent writers, that they were themselves the original Greeks, many of these difficulties are removed or lessened.

First, the different phases under which this people appears in different traditions, and the numerous migrations attributed to it, are thus in a great measure reconciled without calling in the arbitrary assistance of foreign settlers and conflicting races. If we suppose the Pelasgians to have been the first clan who took the direction of Greece, when the Caucasian tribes advanced westward from the early seats of the human family; we may imagine several detachments of this clan to have advanced in succession, like waves following each other, from the north and north-west, to which ancient tradition chiefly points as the quarters from whence they issued. All these may have been of the same origin, and, substantially, of the same language also. But as the tide of immigration was thus directed, as it were, from the broad base towards the apex of the triangle formed by Greece, jutting out as a promontory into the Mediterranean, the first comers must soon have been straitened for room. There must have been constant jostling and conflicting between the kindred hordes which thus arrived one after the other, and the strongest, no doubt, continually dispossessed their weaker neighbours of the most eligible districts. This state of things must have continued, at least, until that tide of immigration had ceased to flow-checked by some cause hidden in the abyss of far antiquity. Then, after an interval of comparative repose, tribes and dialects would begin to arise from among the Pelasgians themselves; Hellenes, and out of them Achaians, Dorians, &c., warring against each other, and by compulsory emigration spreading the Greek name and language far beyond the limits of Hellas.

Secondly, this supposition appears to answer the questions which have arisen respecting the language of the Pelasgians, better than any which gives them a foreign origin. The Athenians and the Arcadians, we know, both claimed the title of Autochthones, or Indigenous: nor does antiquity record any older inhabitants of their respective territories than themselves. They had never been subjugated, as far as history or tradition went; still less had any of those revolutions which expel or exterminate races befallen them. Now both these nations, and the Arcadian more especially, are signalized by the ancients as of Pelasgian stock. Yet we have no mention and no trace of any language, other than Greek, having been ever spoken even in the most remote part of their territories. It is ingeniously urged by Mr Fynes Clinton (in his Fasti Hellenici), that in the civilized of Greece there existed no clan, however savage age itself or its place of abode, in any district of Peloponnesus or Eastern Hellas, which spoke a dialect not of Hellenic origin. This is surely a weighty, if it cannot be advanced as a decisive, argument, that a population of different origin never existed there.

Nevertheless, there is a well-known passage in Herodotus about the language of the Pelasgians, on which, we suspect, the opinions which have prevailed, and still extensively prevail, respecting their foreign origin (Kruse, according to Mr Thirlwall, still labours to prove them Etruscan-Kreuser Phoenicians), are in great measure founded. The historian, in that passage, mentions having heard the tongue which he terms Pelasgian, spoken in three places; and that it was barbarous.' But before we deduce any conclusion from this passage, it behoves us to enquire, what Herodotus meant by that appellation. And when we find, as Mr Thirlwall observes, that he elsewhere calls the dialect used in certain Ionian cities barbarous,' although in this case it must have been only a variety of his mother tongue, we are forced to conclude that he employed this epithet to designate any patois which he could not understand; and he, an Asiatic Greek, may probably have been no more familiar with the speech of a Pelasgian inhabitant of the coast of Thrace, than a Kentuckian with that of a West-country Lowlander.

Thirdly, the supposition that the Pelasgians were true ancestors of the Greek family, serves very essentially in explaining the connexion between the Greek and Latin languages. Swarms of Pelasgians, who appear to have come from various quarters, but chiefly from that central region of Epirus, among the oak-clad hills of Pelasgian Jove, where lay the birth-place of so many nations, are reported to have settled in Italy at a very early period.

If we suppose the tribes out of whose colluvion the Roman people was formed, to have been in great measure Pelasgian, we have a satisfactory reason to give for the peculiar relation of these languages to each other.

If this is the right point of view,' says Mr Thirlwall, it would be capricious to doubt that the portion, or element-for it includes both substance and form-which the Latin language has in common with the Greek, was immediately derived from the Pelasgians; it will then follow that their language was at least the basis of the Greek itself, and that it may be far more correctly considered either as a dialect, or an early stage of it, than as totally foreign to it. This general result seems to be well established; but all attempts to define more exactly the relation between the two languages, and to describe their characteristic marks, can only rest on analogies arbitrarily chosen and applied. We must be content with knowing, both as to the language and the race, that no notion of them, which either confounds, or rigidly separates them, will bear the test of historical criticism.'—P. 56.

A curious result may be deduced from this speculation. The Pelasgians, spreading over the southern parts of Italy, never appear to have risen in that quarter into great or civilized communities. When the Hellenic colonies arrived in Magna Græcia, it is said that they treated these Pelasgians as humble dependents, or reduced them to slavery. Here we have an instance of two branches of the same family parting in different directions; the one, advancing in vigour and intelligence beyond the other, alights in its wanderings on the ground which the latter has occupied, and proceeds to subjugate its own kindred, now regarded as an inferior and barbarous race. Thus the Normans, after passing through a variety of changes, were brought in the process of time, as a new nation, to conquer and reduce to vassalage the descendants of those Danes, Jutes, and Angles who had set out originally from the same point with themselves. How often may the same result have occurred in the history of mankind— especially when we enlarge our sphere of observation to contemplate, on a larger scale, the various fortunes of that great variety of the human race to which we belong! When the Saracen and the Goth, coming from opposite quarters of the earth, encountered in Spain twelve hundred years ago, they bore with them, not only the ineradicable traces of the same type of form and feature, but some fragments of the same original tongue. They were brothers, who parted at the foot of Caucasus, to meet again after uncounted centuries, each having described in his march a wide curve over the earth's surface, on the coast of the Atlantic ocean. What, then, is meant by the Pelasgians becoming a Hel'lenic people?' What was this great transformation, which so essentially changed the condition of Greece and her people, that