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398 we come into immediate contact, whose disposition toward us constantly elicits from us the greatest interest and anxiety, that we do not think worthy of systematic study. It is of this alone that we are notoriously ignorant.

The best way, perhaps, of appreciating how wide the extent of this ignorance is, will be by considering how great is the variety of knowledge which an Oxford or Cambridge first-class man will often possess respecting the whole national being of Greece and Rome. To begin with, he will know the whole political development of those countries; he will trace with accuracy the consistent progress of Athens to an equal liberty among her citizens, through Solon, Cleisthenes, Aristides, Pericles; he will know by what causes she finally fell from her strength and supremacy. From Demosthenes, he will know a good deal of the nature of her laws, in their application to the manifold interests of men—to the injuries which one man may suffer from another, in person or property, by fraud or violence. He will know something from the same source of the way in which the rich Athenians managed their properties, of the number of their slaves, of their commerce, of their loans. He will know how the Athenian navy was provided and kept up, what was the pay of the sailors, how they manœuvred against the enemy. He will be intimately acquainted with every incident in the external history of Athens; and in the geography of Greece he will know the situation of the minutest villages, the least important islands. All the varied history of the Greek colonies, and their relations to their respective mother-cities, will be familiar to him. Besides this, he will know how the Greeks themselves felt, thought, and theorized, on all these matters of their national existence; he will have read the "Republics" of Plato and of Aristotle; he will be no stranger to their religious feelings, or to their deepest speculations in philosophy. Finally, in their poetry—epic, tragedy, or comedy—he will have felt the flow of their fancy and imagination. All this, and much more, our first-class man will be in a position to know about Greece; and in Rome he will have no less rich a field of information; for, if the philosophy and poetry of Rome do not possess an equal interest with those of Greece, the law, politics, and military system of Rome possess much more.

Such and so great a thing is it to know the whole being of a nation. And this knowledge is actually held by no inconsiderable number of people in England; and there are many more who, though they do not have it at their fingers' ends, would yet be readily able, by means of excellent text-books and their own previous knowledge, to test in half an hour any random assertions respecting the ancients made by an incompetent authority.

Now, let it be considered that there are five modern nations—England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain who have each a history of equal length with the authentic history of Greece or Rome, a literature (at least in the first four cases) not greatly inferior, institutions and a