The Characters of Theophrastus Author:Theophrastus Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THEOPHRASTUS TO POLYCLES. I Have always been perplexed when I have endeavored to account for the fact, that, among a people who, like the Greeks, inhabit the ... more »same climate,1 and 1 The annotators on the Characters of Theophrastus have been not less perplexed in endeavoring to free the first paragraph of this preface from apparent solecisms, than he professes to have been by the fact to which it relates. Some of them have dismissed the difficulties under which it labors, by supposing the whole of the dedication to be spurious. But the suspicion is unfounded ; and indeed a preface is the last part of a book that ought to be condemned as not genuine, merely on the ground of incongruities, or apparent want of sense. Critics know, or might know, that when a preface must be written, it is too often some unmeaning fortuity of thought that is expanded and elaborated, broken up and recomposed, until a complete disruption of all the natural and ordinary connexions of ideas has taken place. I will not affirm that our author's dedicatory epistle ought to be considered as furnishing an instance of this sort. Indeed I am rather disposed to think that the difficulties which have exercised much learned ingenuity to little purpose, are more apparent than substantial; and that they arise from our want of familiarity with the colloquial sense of the phrases he employs. Most of my readers will be satisfied with a very brief account of this grave matter. It seems then as if our author's initial proposition ought to have been the very reverse of what it is. He might for example very plausibly have said : ' No one who considers the influence of climate and of education on the manners of a people, can wonder that in Greece, where the climate is so various, and where each state has its peculiar instit...« less