Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 | Page 7

unknown or are comparatively
of recent introduction), the machinery of which prove them to have
been invented about the time when Christianity was first preached in
these islands.
Tradition may well be named the eldest daughter of Time, and
nursing-mother of the Muses--the fruitful parent of that very learning
which would, in the cruel spirit of its pedantry and malice, make her
the sacrifice while it lays claim to the inheritance. What is learning but
a laborious, often ill-drawn, and almost invariably partial deduction
from facts which tradition has first collected? When we consider in
whose hands learning has been, almost ever since its creation; the uses
which have been made of it by priests and politicians; by poets, orators,
and flatterers; by controversialists and designing historians;--how
commonly has it been perverted to abuse the very senses of mankind,
and to give a bias to their thoughts and feelings, only to mislead and to
betray! Let the evidence be well compared, and a view taken of the
respective amounts of doubt and certainty which appertain to human
history as it appears in written records; and it will be seen that, to verify
any given fact, so as to prevent the possibility of doubt, we must throw
aside our reverence for the scholar's pen and the midnight lamp, which
seem, like the faculty of speech, only given to men, as the witty
Frenchman observed, "to conceal their thoughts." This comparative
process is precisely what has been adopted by M.L. Petit Radel in his
new theory upon the origin of Greece. "Not satisfied with the
mythological equivocation and contradictory statements which till now
have perplexed the question, after a residence of ten years this learned
man returns with a new theory, which would destroy all our received
ideas, and carry the civilisation and cradle of the Greeks much beyond
the time and place that have till now been supposed. It is their very
architecture that M. Petit Radel interrogates, and its passive testimony
serves as a basis to his system. He has visited, compared, and meditated
on the unequivocal vestiges of more than one hundred and fifty antique
citadels, altogether neglected by the Greek and Roman authors. Their
form and construction serve him, with the aid of ingenious reasoning,
to prove that Greece was civilised a long time before the arrival of the

Egyptian colonies. He does not despair of tracing back the descent of
the Greeks to the Hyperborean nations, always by the analogy of their
structures, which, by a singular identity, are found also among the
Phoenicians. The Institute have pronounced the following judgment
upon his theory:--'If the developments which remain to be given to us
suffice to gain the votes of the learned, and induce them to adopt this
theory as demonstrated truth, M.L. Petit Radel may flatter himself with
having made in history a discovery truly worthy to occupy a place in
the progress of human genius.'"
Thus the very time in which a living historian of England has chosen to
inflict an impotent blow, from the leaden sceptre of Johnsonian
criticism, upon all facts which claim an existence anterior to the
invention of books, appears pregnant with a discovery of a method of
investigating the most remote eras, which presupposes an inherent
spirit of fallacy and falsehood in all written records of their existence.
About three hundred years after the era of the Olympiads, the first date
of authentic history, Herodotus astonished his countrymen by the
writings he brought forth. Who kept the records out of which his work
was elaborated ere he was ready to stamp the facts with the only seal
which our modern historians will acknowledge or allow? Tradition
doubtless was his guide, which the learned themselves complain of as
the source of what they term his errors and his fables. But the voice of
tradition has often reinstated his claims to our belief, where it had been
suspended either by ignorance or pretensions to superior knowledge. A
modern traveller found, in one of the isles of the Grecian Archipelago,
undoubted vestiges of a state of society similar to that of the Amazons.
The order of the sexes was wholly inverted. The wife ruled the husband,
and his and her kindred, with uncontrolled and unsparing rigour,
sanctioned and even commanded by the laws. Yet the very existence of
any such people as the Amazons of ancient history has not only been
questioned, but denied. Learning has proved it to be impossible.
The Marquess of Hastings told the Rev. Mr Swan, chaplain of the
Cambrian, that he had found the germ of fact from which many of the
most incredible tales in ancient history had grown during his stay in
India. One instance only we would relate. A Grecian author mentions a
people who had only