Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Quarterly Review, Vol. 48: October and December, 1832
IN all nations poets have been the first historians. The annals of every race are lost in the mists of a mythic or fabulous penod, in which the dimly-humanised forms of the gods, or men magnified by the uncertain haze to preter-human stature, people the long-receding and shadowy realm. Even where that Is no} the case, over every event, and eveiy character, is thrown a poetic and imaginative colouring; the bard-chronicler never abandons the privilege, the attribute of his art; and until history has condescended to the sober march of prose, it does not restrain itself from the licence of fiction, or assume the authority of truth. And when at length this division of labour takes place, when the poet recedes into his own province, and leaves the domain of real life to a colder hand, the legends of former times, under his magic influence, have either assumed a sacred character, or become so completely incorporated with the popular belief, that the earliest prose historian, who of course could more easily have disengaged the latent truth from its fictitious or allegoric veil, is restrained by religious awe, or labours iri vain to disenchant the fond and willing credulity of his countrymen. The mythic narrative therefore te mains undisturbed the reverential historian allows the gods to stand at the head of the genealogical tree he relates, with grave fidelity, the established wonders of the olden time.' Sometimes (ao Niebuhr would persuade us has been the case as to the Roman kings) the epic of the hard becomes the groundwork, or rather the actual substance of the national history, and retains its primeval authority - to be first called in question by the severer ace ticism of a more intellectual age. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
