Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1840 Excerpt:... travel where no license made it safe, where no preparations in roads, inns, carriages, made it convenient; that even five centmieo in advance of this era, little knowledge was generally circulated of any region, unless so far as it had been traversed by the Roman legions; considering the vast credulity of the audience assembled--a gulf capable of swallowing mountains; and, on the other hand, that here was a man fresh from the Pyramids and the Nile, from Tyre, from Babylon, and the Temple of Belus--a traveller who had gone in with his sickle to a harvest yet untouched--that this same man, considered as an historian, spoke of a struggle with which the earth was still agitated; that the people who had trinmphed so memorably in this war, happened to be the same people who were then listening; that the leaders in this glorious war, whose names had already passed into spiritual powers, were the fathers of the present audience; combining into one picture all these circumstances--one must admit that no such meeting between giddy expectation, and the very excess of power to meet its clamourous calls, is likely to have occurred before or since upon this earth. Hither had assembled people from the most inland and most illiterate parts of Greece; people that would have settled a pension for life upon any man who would have described to them so much as a crocodile or ichneumon. To these people, the year of his public recitation would be the meridian year of their lives. He saw that the whole scene would become almost a dramatic work of art; in the mere gratification of their curiosity, the audience might be passive and neutral; in the history of the war, they became almost actors, as in a dramatic scene. This scenical position could not escape the traveller-historian....