Hellenism in England

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to [www.million-books.com](http://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: HELLENISM IN ENGLAND INTRODUCTION It is with particular pleasure that I comply with the wish of the Authors of this Short History that I should add to it a brief introduction; and this, not only because I thus find myself associated, in a measure, with a treatise which is the outcome of much research, and of a friendly interest in the Country I have the honour to represent, but also because the subject treated is one which occupied my attention for a considerable time past, and led me to accumulate a rich store of information on the relations between Greece and England, and on the history of Greek establishments in Great Britain and Ireland. The pressure of official duties compelled me to postpone the realisation of a somewhat ambitious scheme. It is therefore a source of gratification to find myself unexpectedly called upon to revert, even cursively, to a subject the more exhaustive treatment of which I shall have in view at a time of hoped-for leisure. For the moment, I may add a few items of interest to this first venture into an attractive and, as yet, untrodden bypath of history. And in doing so I shall avoid restating facts already referred to by the Authors. The reader of the following pages will be impressed, at the very outset, by the salient fact that the first scientific explorer of these Islands, the first to give a reliable account of them from personal research and knowledge, was a Greek. Pytheas was a distinguished astronomer, a great and courageous navigator, and a man of acumen and power of observation. He has been styled the Humboldt of Antiquity.1 He has left it on record that he travelled on foot through Britain; he refers to lerne (Ireland); he sailed far into the Baltic, thence up the Norwegian coast, to the Shetlands and the Orkneys, and some thin...