He Proceeds On These Sound Grounds To Attack The
Accuracy, The Honesty And The Learning Of The Mighty Dead.
This may be
Christian zeal; it is not Christian charity.
Of late years it has been
the fashion for every aspirant to ecclesiastical honours to deal a blow
at the ghost of Gibbon. And, as has before been remarked, Mr. Foster
gratuitously attacked Burckhardt, whose manes had long rested in the
good-will of man. This contrasts offensively with Lord Lindsay’s happy
compliment to the memory of the honest Swiss and the amiable eulogy
quoted by Dr. Keith from the Quarterly (vol. xxiii.), and thus adopted
as his own. It may seem folly to defend the historian of the Decline
and Fall against the compiler of the Historical Geography of Arabia.
But continental Orientalists have expressed their wonder at the
appearance in this nineteenth century of the “Voice of Israel from Mount
Sinai” and the “India in Greece”[;] they should be informed that all our
Eastern students are not votaries of such obsolete vagaries.
[FN#2] This is said without any theory. According to all historians of
long inhabited lands, the advenae—whether migratory tribes or visitors—find
indigens or [Greek].
[FN#3] They are described as having small heads, with low brows and
ill-formed noses, (strongly contrasting with the Jewish feature),
irregular lines, black skins, and frames for the most part frail and
slender. For a physiological description of this race, I must refer my
readers to the writings of Dr. Carter of Bombay, the medical officer of
the Palinurus, when engaged on the Survey of Eastern Arabia.
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