Isaac Taylor

“ Now, during those times, the people of Palestine were passing from the lower to the upper culminating point of their national existence. Where, then, in this great assemblage of the nations of antiquity—where is Palestine? Are there none here to represent her, and to challenge a place for a people whose literature has pervaded the civilised [Pg 402] world? The books of the people of Palestine are in every home—in every sacred edifice—they are found in palaces, and in cottages, and they are treasured near to the hearts of the good—high and low, and are extant in the memories of all. ”

“ Cicero’s great man is, of course, a warrior; Aristotle’s is a statesman: the Roman obtains glory; the Greek, honour, dignity. The one, if destitute of probity, becomes the factious destroyer of his country, and is regardless of dangers and toils: the other—merely vain. The Greeks addicted themselves to war to defend their liberties, and to determine their intestine quarrels; but the Romans did so from the innate love of combat, and the insatiable desire of conquest. Both moralists make true virtue essential to true magnanimity ”

“ If then there were room to entertain a doubt of the authenticity of the body of ancient history—taken in the mass; or if the credibility of a single author comes to be questioned; or if a particular fact be opened to controversy, it is far from being the case that we are left to rely, alone, upon the validity of general arguments in proof of the apparent competency, veracity, and impartiality of the ancient historians; on the contrary, we may, in almost all cases, appeal to unquestioned facts, supporting the affirmative side of such questions. ”

“ Coins, therefore, concentrate several kinds of evidence; and, like books, by their multitude, by their wide diffusion, and by the mode of their conservation to modern times, they are, with very few and unimportant exceptions, placed far beyond the reach of fraud or deception. The cabinets of the opulent, in all countries, are filled with series of these historical records; and the spade is every day turning up counterparts to those already known. Statues and buildings have been discovered here and there; but coins are the produce of every soil which civilization has at any time visited. ”

“ Among all the inestimable advantages which have raised the inhabitants of England and of France and of Germany, above those of Turkey or of China, very few can be named that have not—directly or indirectly—sprung from a knowledge of the civilisation, the arts, and the literature of ancient nations. What is it that would be left to the people of Europe, if all this knowledge, and all its remote consequences, could at once be subtracted from their religious, their political, and their intellectual condition? ”

“ If we did but possess a complete vocabulary of an ancient language, and if we were to digest the mass in accordance with an exact principle of synthesis, we should frame a model of the people that once used it—a model more perfect than any other monuments can furnish: and on this ground we need fear no falsifications, no concealments, no flatteries, no exaggerations. The precise extent of knowledge and of civilisation to which a people attained—nothing more and nothing less, is marked out in the mass of words of which they were accustomed to make use. ”

“ Though the knowledge of books is more widely diffused in modern, than it was in ancient times, yet among those who addict themselves to literature, there is not now more of erudition, of intelligence, of discrimination, than were displayed in the three or four centuries of which the Augustan age formed the centre. To issue a voluminous history, and to persuade the world that it had been known during the last two hundred years, is an attempt not more impracticable in the present day, than it would have been in the times of Dionysius, of Cicero, of Quintilian, or of Plutarch. ”

“ More complete proof of the utter subjugation of the popular will in ancient Egypt cannot be imagined than what is afforded by the fact, that so much masonry should have been piled, for such a purpose, almost to the clouds. The pyramids could never touch the general enthusiasm of the people, they could only gratify the crazy vanity of the man at whose command they were reared. ”

“ No principle can be much more obviously true than this; and if the reader chooses to call it a truism, he is welcome to do so: and yet none is more often disregarded. With the same sort of inconsistency which impels us to measure the punishment of an offence—not by its turpitude, but by the amount of injury it may have occasioned, we are instinctively inclined to think the most slender evidence good enough in proof of a point which is of no importance; while we distrust the best evidence as if it were feeble, on any occasion when the fact in question involves great and pressing interests. ”

“ The writers of this period, therefore, abound with references of all kinds to their predecessors and contemporaries. A second age of literature holds up a mirror of the first. Erudition, amplitude, comprehension, method, labour, take the place of spontaneous effort, and of intuitive taste. Commentators, compilers, and collectors abound; and the writers of such an age seem to perform the functions of caryatides in the temple of learning; as if their only business was to sustain the pediment which chiefly attracts the admiration of spectators. ”

“ I wonder that Cicero should have designated Herodotus alone as the father of history, whom all antiquity accuses of falsehood; for there cannot be a greater proof that an historian is unworthy of credit, than that he should be manifestly convicted of error by all writers. ”

“ Thus it is that the written records of distant ages, with the knowledge of which the intellectual, moral, and political well-being of mankind is inseparably connected, are secured from extinction by a mode of conservation that is less liable to extensive hazards than any other that can be imagined. If Man be cut off from the knowledge of the past, he becomes indifferent to the future, and thenceforward sinks into the rudeness and ferocity of the sensual life. ”

“ If those works which we believe to be genuine are not so in fact, we may be said to hold all the blessings of social and intellectual advancement by a forged title. For on such a supposition the first stock, or the rudiment of our advantages has sprung from a mass of fabrications. No one entertains such a supposition; and yet it must be admitted if any general objections are to be allowed to disparage the mode in which ancient literature has been transmitted to modern times. ”

“ The Grecian sculptures give proof that the superstition to which they belonged, however false or absurd it might be, was open to all the ameliorations and embellishments of a highly refined literature. In contrast with these are the sacred sculptures of India, which disgust us as undisguised and significant representatives of the horrid vices enjoined and practised by the priests. But the lettered taste of the Greeks taught their artists to invest each attribute of evil with some form of beauty. The hideousness of the vindictive passions must be hid beneath the character of tranquil power ”

“ Thus then, by the mention of some leading facts, we have traced the remains of ancient literature up to the time when they passed to the press, and when their history can no longer be regarded as obscure or questionable. Nor can it be thought that this body of literature is now liable to the hazards of extinction from political changes, or from the decline of learning in this or that country; for unless a universal devastation should take its course, at once, over every region of the civilized world, the literature now extant in books can neither perish, nor suffer corruption. ”

“ Yet how great soever were the evils of atheism, he deemed those arising from superstition to be greater. According to his testimony, when the only theology known to the Greeks took possession of timid minds, it rendered life intolerably burdensome.—Of all kinds of fear, none produces such incurable despondency and perplexity as superstition. He who never goes on board a ship, does not fear the sea; nor he the combat, who is not a soldier; nor he the robbers, who stays at home; nor does the poor man fear informers, nor he who is low, the eye of envy ”

“ Let it now be granted as possible that a writer of a later age, who was a perfect master of the Greek language, who possessed an endless fund of various learning, and who was gifted in a high degree with the imitative faculty, might produce nine books like those of Herodotus, which, supposing there were no external evidence to contradict the fraud, might pass as genuine. To affirm that a forgery such as this is possible, is to allow the utmost that our knowledge of the powers of the human mind will permit to be granted ”

“ The plains of Greece are burdened by no huge monuments, the only intention of which is to crush the common feelings of a nation beneath the weight of one man’s vanity; but its surface was thick set with temples which were the property of all—temples, free from gloom, and unstained with cruel rites.
A more striking point of contrast cannot be selected than that presented by a comparison of the human figures (above-mentioned) that are attached to the Egyptian temples, with those that decorate the Grecian architecture. ”

“ Here then are the monuments of a world, such as that outlying and distant eastern world whereof we find scattered notices in the extant remains of the Greek literature. These notices serve as the interpretation, so far as they go, of these ponderous remains. The historians, the orators, the poets, flourishing under a refined civilisation, look over their enclosures, and they sketch, at points, the far-off barbaric civilisation of Asia, and we recognise, in the written memorials of that ruder social life, the features and characteristics of its sculptured memorials—as they are now in view. ”

“ The proof of the genuineness of books, even if it should not gather particles of evidence, yet remains, from age to age, unimpaired. Nor is the proof of the genuineness of modern works more satisfactory, although it may be more abundant, than that of ancient books. We could not be persuaded that the Paradise Lost was written in the last century by some obscure scribbler; nor would it be a whit less absurd to suppose that the Æneid was composed in the tenth century, or the Iliad at any time subsequent to the invasion of Greece by Xerxes. ”

“ Learning and the sciences can flourish and advance only where there are the means of a wide and quick diffusion of the fruits of intellectual labour: but they may exist even under the almost total absence of such means. This was the case in Europe during the middle ages. Knowledge rested with the few whom the inward fire of native genius constrained to pursue it: and these few were often insulated from each other, and unknown beyond the walls within which they spent their lives; and often secluded also by their tastes, even from their fellows of the same society. ”

“ Even if it could be made to appear probable that, in the first ages of the world, Asia—and in Asia, Persia, was the centre of civilisation, yet it must be granted, that, so far as authentic history reaches, the picture of the Asiatic nations is uniform in its character and colouring. Asia has indeed produced some races distinguished by a fierce energy, by romantic courage, by loftiness and richness of imagination. ”

“ An inquiry of this kind, if pursued in its details, would prove the existence and operation of an ethical system, so pure and perfect, that all after nations to whom it has been made known, have found nothing left to them but to admire and adopt its principles. What can the modern moralist do but work up the materials which he finds ready to his hand in the New Testament? To devise a new theology, or to invent a new morality—which should recommend itself to the common sense of mankind, would be as impracticable as to propose a new set of mathematical axioms. Truth is single and simple ”

“ Although, to a certain extent, the genius or talent of an historian may be held to vouch for his veracity; yet it is also true that a writer may possess a sort of genius which tends to bring his fidelity into suspicion. If, for example, he continually indulges his taste for scenes of splendour, or terror, or extraordinary action, or if he loves to exhibit images of magnanimity or wisdom, surpassing the ordinary reach of human nature ”

“ THE ANTIQUITY AND GENUINENESS OF ANCIENT BOOKS MAY BE INFERRED FROM THE HISTORY OF THE LANGUAGES IN WHICH THEY ARE EXTANT.
A language is at once the most complete, and it is the least fallible of all historical records. A poem or a history may have been forged; but a language is an unquestionable reality. The bare circumstance of its existence, though it may long have ceased to be colloquially extant, proves, in substance, what it is which history has to communicate. ”

“ The writer must, in his own country, have seen examples of heroic virtue which approached the perfect image he exhibits. One is not surprised to learn that he belonged to the race which produced Aristides, Cimon, Epaminondas, and Phocion. It is observable that Aristotle’s magnanimous man is decked only with the honours that befit a citizen, or a distinguished leader in a republic—not with the gaudy shows of oriental despotism: it is not deemed a becoming part of his hero’s glory that millions of his species should lay in the dust at his feet. ”

“ Thus, in the plains of Asia, and in the deserts of Africa, we find nations which, as to their physical peculiarities, their manners and their usages, differ little, if at all, from the descriptions given of their predecessors on the same soil by Herodotus, or Strabo. Meanwhile the successive occupants of the European continent—active, intelligent and free, have passed under all forms of human life, and therefore have retained few resemblances to their remote ancestors.
One climate, indeed, necessitates a much greater degree of permanency in the habits of the people than another. ”

“ Those who have been long accustomed to inspect and examine ancient manuscripts acquire a certain tact in judging of the age of a book from the condition of the ink, its colour and composition, which cannot be explained to others, and for the exercise of which no rules can be laid down. But in cases where a fraud is suspected, this nice habit of the eye often detects at once the imposition. It is perhaps more practicable to give to a picture, than to a manuscript, the hue of antiquity by artificial means. ”