HISTORICAL OUTLINE, &c. &c. THERE is no nation, as far as history has left us the means of judging, that has so little changed in a long course of ages as the Greeks. It may be sufficient, without adverting to the less certain indications of manners or physical aspect, to remark, that the Greeks still employ the same character in writing which was used in the remotest age of their history; that their language has received only such corruptions as cannot fail, for the greater part, to fall into disuse, as literary education and a familiarity with their ancient writers shall be diffused among them; that a great number of places in Greece, as well as of the productions of nature, are known by the same names which were attached to them in the most B ancient times; and that this language and this people still occupy the same country, which was always peculiarly considered among them as Hellas, or Greece properly so called, namely, the south-eastern extremity of Europe from the Tænarian promontory to upper Macedonia, together with the islands and coasts of the Ægæan sea. Nor are their eastern neighbours much altered, when we consider the state of Asia in comparison with that great change which civilization has effected in the human species, and on the surface of the earth throughout the greater part of Europe. The countries of western Asia are undoubtedly, like Greece itself, less populous, less opulent, and more barbarous than they were twenty or thirty centuries ago; but we find that, notwithstanding the vicissitudes which have occurred among the Asiatic nations themselves, the Persian of the present day closely resembles, both in features and dress, his ancestor, as represented on the walls of Persepolis; and that, although the predominant power in western Asia has passed into the hands of a different race of Asiatics, the strongest general affinity still prevails between the ancient and the modern inhabitants in cha racter, in manners, and in customs, both civil and military. The present contest between the Turks and their late subjects in Greece is probably the beginning of a new change in that preponderancy which has been alternating between south-eastern Europe and western Asia, since the earliest records of history. By the successful resistance of the Greeks to the great Oriental invasion of that country under Darius and Xerxes, the invaded people raised themselves to as high a degree of glory, civilization, and intellectual enjoyment as it is possible, perhaps, for a nation to attain, deprived as they were of revealed religion, and of all the modern improvements in science. By their superiority in the art of war they were soon enabled not only to attack their former invaders, but to carry their victorious arms into the heart of Asia. From this height, they gradually and inevitably declined, as the sun declines from the meridian, until, having first lost their own military spirit and skill and then the martial discipline which they learnt in the service of their Roman conquerors, they became unable to contend with the ferocious valour of the people of Asia inspired by religious zeal and guided by the energy of the early Ottoman sultans, and at length fell under the attacks of the Asiatic barbarians, nineteen centuries after the former invasion. The situation in which the two people have been placed for the last 400 years has now produced a new revolution. While luxuries, chiefly borrowed from the conquered people, added to the effects of a general decline of Musulman enthusiasm, have led to the degeneracy of the Asiatic masters of Greece, their subjects have been so much improved by adversity, and by the light transmitted from Christendom, that the Oriental invaders are once more threatened with expulsion from Europe. It is but a very few years since the Greeks had no higher views than the hope of witnessing the downfall of their oppressors, and of obtaining an easier yoke under the conqueror, often applying to themselves the humble language of the vine to the goat, in the elegant epigram of Evenus: Κἤν με φάγῃς ἐπὶ ρίζαν, ὅμως ἔτι καρποφορήσω But they now seem to think of sacrificing the goat themselves. While their mountaineers and seamen are asserting the cause of independence in arms, many a lettered Greek is undoubtedly engaged in noticing occurrences as they come under his immediate observation. Until these memoirs, together with those of a few European eye-witnesses, shall be collected, we can hardly hope to obtain correct particulars of a series of events, which are not less interesting from their scene of action, than from their singularity, compared with the common course of modern history: for as to those mixed compilations of truth and error called Histories or Memoirs of the Revolution, which have been published in several of the capitals of Europe, it is in vain that the reader attempts to extract from them any clear and connected description of the contest. Their obscurity is not a little heightened by the defectiveness and inaccuracy of the existing maps of Greece; as well as by the want of that authentic guidance to the truth which in civilized Europe is afforded by the official reports of military transactions, but which it is contrary to the custom of one of the contending parties to publish, and the other has not yet been in a state of government to attend to. And thus the inquirer, however diligent, is exposed, almost without re |