PREFACE

TO THE FIRST EDITION.

THE following pages were ready for the press in the month of September last, but circumstances, over which the Author had no controul, have prevented the publication until the present time. The reader will find it necessary to bear this fact in mind, in the perusal of some parts of the work. If it has lost any interest by the delay, an opportunity has, on the other hand, been thus acquired, of adding a statement of the principal events which have occurred in Greece to the close of the fourth campaign of the Insurrection.

In regard to the Map, it may be right to mention, that the scale and general outline have been borrowed from the "Ancient Greece" of M. Barbié du Bocage, which, in the year 1811,

accompanied a new edition of the " Jeune Anacharsis" of Barthelemy; but many corrections have been made in the details of that delineation, and the names have been inserted solely with a view to illustrate the present publication.

LONDON, January, 1825.

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

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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