PART IV.-EUROPE CHAPTER I. THE TEMPLES OF GREECE. Where'er we tread 'tis haunted, holy ground; Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold WE are naturally less inclined to associate our own country and race with the present than the past, and pursue our investigations into its primitive history rather as a means of illustrating modern customs and events, than from the spirit of curiosity which incites our inquiries into evidences of primeval history. It is with a spirit somewhat akin to this that we turn to the ruins of ancient Europe, after having explored those of Asia and Africa, and even of that strange continent on which the novelty of re-discovery has conferred the title of the New World. The usual course of modern education largely tends to increase this feeling. Familiarized as we are, from early studies, with the literature, history, and the social habits of the Greeks and Romans, we cannot learn to look upon them as peopling a remote antiquity like that of the Egyptian or Assyrian nations, or even of the Phoenician and Carthagenian colonists, through whom Greece and Rome, and even, as we believe, Britain, learned some of the earliest useful arts. Turner observes in the early part of his Anglo-Saxon history: "That the re-peopling of a globe which is nearly twenty-four thousand miles in circumference, should have been immediately effected, no reflecting mind will suppose; and the slow progress which population must have made over so large a surface, could not but be more gradual from the mountains, deserts, lakes, woods, and rivers, which divide its various regions, and obstruct human access. "The impenetrable forests, ever increasing from the vegetative agencies of nature, till checked by human labour; and the continual and deleterious marshes, which rain and rivers are, every year, producing and enlarging in all uninhabited countries, must have long kept mankind from spreading rapidly, or numerously, beyond their first settlements. These seem generally to have been made along the inland rivers, or on the maritime shores of the earth. Almost every where the high mountains are uninhabited, while the valleys and the plains abound with towns and villages. "No ancient history exhibits mankind as first inhabiting Europe. Although this is now the most important part of our globe, it was once to Asia what the Americas were, until the last three centuries, to us-an unknown, and unexplored world. All the records of human transactions in the earliest times of our knowledge agree with the Mosaic, and with the researches of modern science and antiquarian curiosity, to place the commencement of population, art, and knowledge, in the easterr. portions of the earth. Here men first appeared and multiplied; and from hence progressively spread into those wilder and ruder districts, where nature was living in all her unmolested, but dreary, vacant, and barbarous majesty." This interesting confirmation of sacred story has already been abundantly illustrated in preceding sections; while we have found that even the antiquities of the American continent assume so singular and unfamiliar an aspect, when investigated with a view to the illustration of primitive history, that it becomes a conceivable thing to look upon the primeval aborigines of America as already establishing their locations amid its forests, while the first Asiatic nomades were passing onward into the younger continent, which forms the chief seat of modern civilization. Behind each there lay the Asiatic plains, and the contiguous Nile valley, the established seats of arts and social refinements, while the wanderers of the great human family passed onward to privations, and, for a time at least,-frequently including in it many generations, to increasing barbarism, and the utter extinction of many useful arts, altogether incompatible with the nomadic state. Yet it was a change indispensable to new developments. From these very barbarian nomades have sprung the modern originators of a civilization far beyond that which was lost to their primitive forefathers. "It was impossible for any portion of the civilized population of the world to wander from their domestic localities, and to penetrate far into these unpeopled regions, without changing the character and habits of their minds, or without being followed by a progeny, still more dissimilar to everything which they had quitted. In some, the alteration was a deteriorating process, declining successively into absolute barbarism. But in the far greater number it became rather peculiarity than perversion, and a peculiarity not without beneficial operation on the ulterior advances of human society, for it is manifest to the impartial eye, as it calmly contemplates most of the less civilized populations which have come within the scope of our knowledge, that original forms of character, and many new and admirable habits and institutions, often grew up in these abodes of want, exertion, independence, and vicissitudes. The loss of some of the improvements of happier society was compensated by energies and principles, which such must necessarily sacrifice, or cannot obtain; and it will be nearer the actual truth, to consider the barbarous and civilized states of antiquity, as possessed of advantages distinct from each other; and perhaps not capable of continuous union, although often becoming intermingled, for a time, with mutual improvement. "In our late age of the world, the term barbarian is often correctly applicable to many countries which we have visited; but it will be unjust to the ancestors of all modern Europe, not to consider, that the appellation had not anciently a meaning so directly appropriate. The Greeks denominated all nations as barbaroi but their own; although Egypt, Phenicia, Babylon, and Carthage had preceded them in civilization. "The rise of the two ancient grand divisions of mankind may be dated from their dispersion at the confusion of human language. When their unity was by this event broken up, and they had separated from each other to form independent tribes in new and wilder districts, the differences of their manners and social life must have soon afterwards begun. The choice of northern or southern regions the effects of colder or warmer climate-the preference of indolent pasturage to laborious agriculture, and of changeable abode to the fixed mansions of a monotonous city, must have caused their posterities to become very dissimilar to each other. To many active spirits, it was then more gratifying to hunt the eatable animals in their woods, than to cut down the trees, grub up their roots, erect log-houses, or drain bogs: while some would submit to these patience-needing and slowly-rewarding toils. Hence the hunter state, the shepherd state, the rude first-clearers' state, and the industrious tillage state, would be arising in many places simultaneously with each other, and with the more stationary and self-indulgent accumulation of city populations in those warmer and longer cultivated localities, where the arts, industry, and enjoyments of regular life under kings, hierarchies, and aristocracies, first appear to the researches of an investigating curiosity. All these conditions of society have been always found too coincident to have been originally converted into each other; and when we consider mankind to have early branched off into unconnected ramifications, separating for ever from their parent root, we shall perceive that their coincidence involves no inconsistency. We even now, at this late age of the world, see the Esquimaux, the wild Indian, the backsettler, and the cultivated Philadelphian, existing at the same time in North America; so did the Egyptian, the Scythian, and the Greek; so did high polish and rude barbarism at all times appear in disparted but coeval existence, whenever the ancient traveller or historian sufficiently extended his geographical inquiries. But all the early great divisions of mankind were not, at once, as strongly unlike, as the New Hollander, or Caffre, is to a modern European. They were at first to each other, what the Dorians were to the Athenians in Greece; the one a settled population, the other migratory and restless. And though we may retain the expression of civilization, as the character of the settled races, it will less mislead our imaginations, if we call the other portion of mankind the Nomadic race. These had improvements and civilization of their own, though of a sterner and more hardy nature. They differed in attainments from their more polished relatives; but |