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166 importe, ce ne sont point les personnes, mais les choses." This saying is like him who uttered it—great, honest, simple, and tacit, just like Carnot the soldier and republican. But may I at the present moment speak thus of a Frenchman, nay, a republican, to Germans? Perhaps not; perhaps I may not evell recall to mind what Neighbour in his day felt at liberty to say to Germans: that nobody ever made such an impression of true greatness on him as Carnot did. —What do I admire in Thucydides, why do I honour him more highly than Plato? He has the most extensive and most impartial delight in every typical side of men and events, and finds that each type is possessed of a certain amount of good sense, which he tries to discover. He shows greater practical fairness than Plato, he is no reviler or letracter of men whom he dislikes or who have wronged him in life. On the contrary, in seeing but types he, by an effort of imagination, adds something noble to all things and all persons; how could posterity, to whom he dedicates his work, trouble about things not typical. Thus in him, the sketcher of men, that culture of the most unprejudiced knowledge of the world gives forth its last elicious bloom, which found its poet in Sophocles, its statesman in Pericles, its physician in Hippocrates, its natural philosopher in Democritus—that