But this is a vain wish, and I can only offer you this sentiment

The birth-day of Webster - Then best, then only well celebrated - when it is given as he gave that marvellous brain, that large heart, and that glorious life, to our country, our whole country, our united country.

APPENDIX.

TRANSLATIONS.

HORE THUCYDIDIANÆ.

1 August, 1845.

[I BEGIN to-day the study of Thucydides. I have read him before and read of him, but I propose now to translate, meditate, and retain him. I have Arnold's, Bloomfield's, and Haack's editions, with Smith's translations and the best Greek histories. My great want is a good Greek Lexicon. The prefatory chapters I must stop occasionally to verify, fill out, and correct; but I shall hasten forward to his history itself. The period, however, from the Persian to the Peloponnesian War will demand careful attention.

Even in the introduction, you mark the unity of design which distinguishes all Grecian art. He has composed the history of the war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians. All the earlier history of Greece is excluded from his subject. Yet a rapid and general sketch of that history would usefully, and should naturally, precede and introduce the immediate great work. He presents such a sketch, therefore, but he, in form, appears to do it solely for the purpose of justifying his actual choice of a subject, by displaying the superior importance of his period and his scenes to all which had gone before. You set out, then, with a useful review of other facts, but you advert to them mainly and immediately as having for various reasons less interest or certainty or consequence than the facts of the Peloponnesian War.]

(TRANSLATION.)

THUCYDIDES.

Book I.

I. THUCYDIDES, an Athenian, has composed the history of the war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians, as the belligerents conducted it, having commenced the undertaking immediately upon the breaking out of the war, and having even then anticipated that it would be one of great importance, and more worthy of record than any that had preceded it; a belief to which he was conducted by observing that the two contending States were in an extraordinary degree and by every form of resource

prepared for it, and that the entire Greek race was to range itself on the side of one or the other of those States, some cities instantly doing so, others meditating it. 2. For this civil commotion constituted the most considerable war that ever befell the Greeks, or that ever befell a large part of the nations not Greek, or, as I may say, the great body of the race of man itself; since of those which immediately preceded it, and those still more ancient, it is in the first place impossible, from remoteness of time, surely to discern the historical truth; and then, in so far as I may judge from all the evidence on which, after the widest and farthest view, I can rely, I do not think that they were really great transactions, either as wars or in any other aspects.1

II. It is certain that the region now called Greece was anciently not inhabited in a permanent or settled and secure manner, but that in the earliest time there was a continual practice of transmigration from one spot to another, and every one was

1 The point on which the reader of history craves assurance is its trustworthiness. In this particular, I do not know that any affords higher promise than this of Thucydides. He was born B. C. 471. The war began 431 B. C. He was therefore forty years of age at its commencement; and he declares that, foreseeing its importance beforehand, he determined to write its history, and began the great task with the breaking out of the war. What means had he to be accurate? He was an Athenian, and I think at Athens at that precise point of time; his faculties at their best, his intellect deep, capacious, full, intimate with the great scientific and practical minds of the day, -intensely stimulated by the stormy scene beginning to open. There he staid, acting and observing, till the seventh year of the war, when he was assigned the command of a naval and military force for the coast of Thrace. This presupposes character, experience, and activity at Athens, as well as ties, relatives and property in Thrace itself. He was sent to encounter Brasidas, among the most energetic of the Peloponnesian generals; he conducted a single enterprise, that for the defence of Amphipolis, with vigor and skill; he was unsuccessful, was banished by a demagogue, and retired to Scapte Hyle in Thrace, at the age of forty-eight, calm, firm,

passionless, to observe, to study, and to write. In all historical literature, I know no combination of circumstances giving such assurance of certainty of knowledge. During his banishment, he is said to have availed himself of Peloponnesian sources of information. Treason to Athens, infidelity, revenge, never have been imputed to him. Perhaps we have gained impartiality, judicial calmness and indifference, truth and use, by the campaign and the condemnation which withdrew Thucydides from participation in one side, and gave back to mankind, to posterity, and to history the mind which belonged to them.

How can Thucydides say of the Persian War that it was not intrinsically and absolutely great, both as a war and in all aspects? Is this true? Could he have thought so? I think the ma órɛpa alone were in his mind, or chiefly; for he blends the difficulty of discerning the truth and the far view from which his researches had set out with the want of greatness, as applicable all to the same events or times.

Yet, ch. 23,- he speaks of the brief duration of the Persian War and the fewness of its battles as showing its comparative insignificance. Therefore does not Thucydides rhetorically depreciate the past and exaggerate the present?