And then his female characters, in which above all things he excels. Not Imogen herself, whose breath like violets perfumes the page of Shakespeare, rises before us a more exquisite vision than Antigone, in her maiden purity, her unfathomable tenderness, her holy affection, filial and fraternal. Even Œdipos, supported and led into the light by such a daughter, appears glorious as a god, his involuntary stains worked off by years of suffering, his reverend old age garlanded by calamity, wreathed with the tendrils and snowy blossoms of a daughter’s love. And Tecmessa, does she not seem to be Desdemona ripened into a mother? There is no poet who has pourtrayed a wife of more unmingled gentleness, or who has better sounded the depths of a mother’s heart. Her affection expands like an atmosphere round the boy Eurysaces, menaced at once by treacherous enemies and by his father’s madness, and casts a pure and bright ray over the sea of blood and stormy passion and guilt that floats around her. His Dejanira, likewise, is a character of great beauty; but in the Clytemnæstra and Electra, in the Chrysothemis and Ismene, he has been less successful. Among his male characters Œdipos is the masterpiece. Compounded of ungovernable passion, a powerful will, a resolution invincible by suffering, extreme in love or hate, he stands before us in heroic grandeur, and like the sun’s orb dilates as he descends beneath the horizon. Next to him in originality and beauty are Neoptolemos and Teucer, youths of the greatest nobleness of soul, who contrast strikingly with his fox-like Odysseus and the mean-souled imperial brothers.

To Sophocles succeeds Euripides,^[991] whose genius inspired Milton with the deepest admiration, as it had before inspired Aristotle. Resembling Sophocles as little as the latter resembles Æschylus, he is more deeply imbued than either with the tragic spirit, interprets more unerringly the language of passion and the heart, and unlocks more surely the hidden springs of pity. In him, however, poetry is less an instinct than an art. His intellect, lofty, powerful, penetrating, ranged through the most untrodden paths of nature and philosophy, grasped at all learning, at all experience, enriched itself with prodigious stores of reflections, observations, imagery, over which it possessed the most perfect mastery, to render them subservient to the purposes of the drama. Other poets learned in effects, may exhibit action with no less truth and skill; Euripides dares to unveil causes, to give the wherefore and the why of actions, to descend into the abysses of the mind and lay bare the curious mechanism, and, so to say, central fires which produce and ripen our resolutions and our demeanour.

Without the stern grandeur or the rich physical imagery of his predecessors, he could more surely touch the feelings and create an intense interest in the story of his tragedies. No man, moreover, has given birth to nobler sentiments. A moral beauty broods over his scenes; he elevates,—he enlarges,—he purifies the affections. Truths of greatest importance make themselves wings of melody in his verse, and fly across the gulf of two thousand years from him to us. Above all things, he may almost be said to have discovered the inexhaustible mine of love, whence he drew the gold that fashioned the divine image of Alcestis, the noblest mixture of earth’s mould that ever bore the name of woman. It is true this image is but dimly beheld. Perhaps no genius, not even Shakespeare’s, could have filled up the outline of unearthly beauty which Euripides dared to draw. It embodies all the imagination ever conceived of love. Pure as the celestial Artemis, impassioned to perfect disinterestedness, all devotion as a wife, all tenderness as a mother,—content to die, yet jealous of posthumous love,—sacrificing everything for her husband’s life, yet haunted by the fear that death might snap the golden links of affection, she issues forth like a celestial vision to take her farewell of the sun. Euripides might well be proud of this creation. Not Andromache, not Nausicaa, not even the far-famed consort of Odysseus can exceed in truth and beauty his conception of Alcestis. Yet this is the poet whom Aristophanes had the bad taste to overwhelm with unceasing ridicule, and whom numerous critics, borrowing their canons from him, have rashly pronounced languid and insipid.

Moving on a level below this is the character of Electra in the Orestes. In the Alcestis we have rather the results than the developement of inexpressible love, which

But Electra’s affection unfolds itself before us. There she watches beside her brother’s bed, contending with the inexpiable guilt of matricide, sharing his remorse but comforting him, herself oppressed, yet courageously bearing up for his sake against the worst

With the most supreme delicacy is Polyxena conceived; and generally, whatever may be said of Euripides’ aversion for the sex, it may be affirmed that no poet has more ably or more nobly painted the female character.

Passing next to comedy, of which Aristophanes must be regarded as the representative, we have a department of literature peculiar to Greece, for its comedy resembles that of no other country. It has never, perhaps, been fairly characterised. They who take part with the poet against the philosopher exaggerate his merits: the admirers of Socrates, in revenge for the unjust death of that great man, generally undervalue them. Let us endeavour to be just. Aristophanes was a poet of vast genius, quick to perceive, and powerful to paint the imperfections, vices, follies, weaknesses, miseries of man in society. He was greedy, too, of reputation, in the acquisition of which he spared neither men nor institutions. The youthful, the gay, the thoughtless, reckoning laughter and amusement among the real wants of life, (as to the weak and frivolous perhaps they are,) he undertook to build his fame on easing the human character of those moral excrements which pass off in grinning and mirth. There is, in fact, a load of small malignity and mischief in most mental constitutions, which, if not expelled, might obstruct the healthful play of the faculties. Mirth is the form it assumes in its exit, and comedy is one of the means provided by Nature for promoting its discharge.

Aristophanes, who comprehended at least this part of philosophy, found an abundant harvest of follies in his fellow-citizens. He saw, too, that of all men they possessed the most inexhaustible good-nature,—to forgive if they could not profit by the satire which was directed against themselves. No one could complain of them on this score. Their risible muscles were at every man’s service who could coin a joke, or make faces, or draw a caricature or enact one. Athens was, in fact, the home of laughter: it was the weak side of the national character; and never, since merry-making was invented, did a more skilful manufacturer of this autochthonal production exist than Aristophanes. He could make round things square, or straight crooked; he could invest the noblest and most sacred things with burlesque and ridicule; he could convert patriotism into a laughable weakness, genius into puerility, virtue into a farce. He knew how to make the brave man (as Lamachos) seem a mere gasconader; the man of genius (as Euripides) a dealer in rhythmical jingles; the possessor of highest wisdom and most unsullied integrity a babbling impostor and a thief. Such were his prodigious powers. Another excellence he had, not unakin to the former; he could, when it suited his purpose, place the most nefarious vices on the same level with very harmless foibles, so that both should appear equally laughable or equally odious.

But the Athenians must have been a base people had these been the qualities which rendered him popular. They were not: on the contrary, they formed the great drawback on his reputation. His attack on Socrates caused the first cast of the Clouds to be hooted off the stage. But great and crying as were his delinquencies against morals and philosophy, his genius triumphed, and he became popular in spite of them; and in spite of them he has continued to be a favourite among scholars down to the present day. No mean amount of creative power could have achieved a triumph like this. He possessed, in fact, the quality, whatever it be, which confers vitality on the offspring of the mind. Each of his plays, however extravagant its conceptions, however improbable the plot or wild the scene or fantastic the characters, still developes a distinct cycle of existences into which the breath of everlasting life has been breathed. To every individual whom he brings upon the stage has been assigned a distinct type of character, a marked individuality, a moral and intellectual physiognomy as peculiar to himself as his mask. No man exhibits greater variety in a small compass. When he is working out a character every word tells, and his ease is infinite. Nothing appears to have proceeded from him in a hurry. Like the wind, which now rises in gusts, now sinks to a whisper, but never suggests the idea of weakness, Aristophanes may trifle, but always because he desires to trifle.

Moreover, however barren the subject may be, however rugged, bleak, intractable, he pours over it the dews of poetry, and clothes it magically with flowers and verdure. Look at the comedies of the Frogs and the Birds. By whom but Aristophanes could they have been rendered tolerable? And yet what marvellous effects grow out of them in his hands! How completely is the imagination detached from the common everyday world, and sent drifting down the dreamy intoxicating streams of poetry! Not in the island of Prospero or Philoctetes, not in the savage-encircled nest of Robinson Crusoe, not in the most visionary vale that opens before us its serene bosom in the Arabian Nights, do we breathe more at large, or more fresh and wholesome air, than among the fogs and fens of Acheron, or the eternal forests of the Hoopoo king.

With an art, in which Shakespeare was no mean proficient, he opens up a more culpable source of interest in the frequent satire of vices, condemned as commonly as they are practised. He unveils the mysteries of iniquity with a fearless and by no means an unreluctant hand. No abyss of wickedness was too dark for his daring muse. He ventured fearlessly upon themes which few since or before have touched on, despising contemporary envy and vindictiveness and the stern condemnation of posterity. To be plain, he evidently shared in the worst corruptions of his age, and, like many other satirists, availed himself joyfully of the mask of satire as an apology for entertaining his own imagination with the description of them. No one with the least clearsightedness or candour can fail to perceive and acknowledge the depraved moral character of this comic writer. Only less filthy than Rabelais, his fancy runs riot among the moral jakes and common sewers of the world, over which, by consummate art and the matchless magic of his style, he contrives unhappily to cast a kind of delusive halo, and to breathe a fragrance which should never be found but where virtue is.

Upon the subject of his attack on Socrates his defenders must grant one of two things—that he libelled him ignorantly, or that he exhibited a degree of wickedness capable, under other circumstances, of rising to the enormity of Judas Iscariot. Socrates, both for genius and for virtue, stands at the head of the pagan world. He whom Plato admired must have stood on a higher level than Plato,—that is, have occupied the apex of mere humanity: and in that position we find him in the Gorgias, the Republic, the Euthyphron, and the Phædon. Many charlatans, since the days of Aristophanes, have endeavoured to puff upward at him the smoke of their ignorance or their envy; and from those who tread the mire with them have for a moment hidden the all but divine serenity that smiles on humankind from that lofty and immovable basis where the homage of a world has placed him; but the next breeze has cleared away the stinking vapours, and left both him and them where they were,—the one on the highest, the others on the lowest step of the ladder which connects human nature with the skies.

Upon the dramatic poets whose fragments only remain, it is in this place unnecessary to dwell. I therefore pass to the historians and orators, who, no less vividly than her poets, reflect the genius of Greece. The first age of prose composition, there as elsewhere, exhibited the natural characteristics of dawning art—indecisiveness and timidity. Herodotus, properly speaking, was her earliest historian, and even he still walks within the gigantic shadow of epic fable which stretched far over the civilised and cultivated ages of Greece, as doth that of Memnon at dawn over the Theban plains. His character as a writer is very remarkable. He narrates like a prophet. His language everywhere bears the impress and image of the supernatural world wrought into its very substance. He had formed to himself a poetical standard of human character and human action, which accordingly in his work develope themselves in poetical forms. Long and profound meditation had spread out the past before him like a map, on which he could trace every fluctuation in the stream of events with something like the skill of a diviner. Men, past or present, may be interpreted by meditation, if we comprehend the science of human nature. Herodotus understood much of this science. Indeed his chief greatness lies in his wisdom.

Ordinary readers, who are always wiser than their dead instructors, discovering him to be frankly superstitious, to have faith in oracles, in dreams, in prodigies, to chronicle many trivial actions, many trivial remarks, feel or affect for him a species of contempt. But they know very little of what is contained in that vast treasury of epic events. Little do they suspect with how many great statesmen, generals and heroic kings the eloquent Halicarnassian could render them familiar. In his pages alone, perhaps, do we view in his true proportions that man of men, Themistocles, who overtops by a head and shoulders all the other statesmen of the ancient world. There, too, may we best discover the character of his contemporaries, those extraordinary personages who connect the heroic with the historical period, and constitute the steps by which we descend from the heights of mythos and fable to the stern level of realities. Such an epoch required an historian of peculiar character. In him were to be united the power to comprehend poetical motives to action, and the solemn eloquence fittingly to describe deeds springing from such a source. Both were found in Herodotus. He beheld Providence leading man as it were into the light from the wilderness of mythological times, still invested with many of his heroic habits and his forehead beaming with visionary splendours, but prepared to doff them one by one, and in their stead to substitute the iron theory and practice of civilisation.

Thucydides, a few years only younger than Herodotus, found himself placed in the midst of events the most extraordinary, produced by a system of civilisation prematurely decaying. Greece had not been suffered to grow wise and great according to the laws which usually regulate the ripening of states. She had been scorched into fruit-bearing by the fiery conflicts of the Median war; and her strength thus brought into play, and found to be great beyond calculation, was immediately by ambitious statesmen seized upon, parcelled out into lots which were directed against each other, and thus exhausted in petty struggles. In Greece we have an example of a state whose energies, turned inwards, corroded themselves by concentration; affording a contrast with Rome whose energies, worked outward and were gradually weakened and lost by expansion. The genius of the people begot corresponding historians. Rome, had its perspicuous ornate, diffuse, haughty and sublime Livy; Athens her Thucydides full of poetry indeed, and haughtier and more sublime, but condensed as an oracle, and as an oracle obscure.

Few have measured the greatness of this man. Ordinary critics missing the ostentatious display of what is termed philosophy, appear to imagine that Thucydides is not a philosophical historian, reserving this praise for Gibbon, Hume, or Voltaire. But each of these great writers would have contemned the praise of such persons. Thucydides in historical writing stands above rivalry or comparison. The political atmosphere in which he lived, dusky with thunderclouds and continual storms, his eye could penetrate through, and discover all the very extraordinary figures that moved beneath it. Calmly, from heights of speculation never trodden before, he contemplated the various groups of generals and statesmen dispersed over his horizon, pierced through every disguise into their characters, detected their motives, unravelled their plots, gave their secret maxims a tongue, weighed and described their actions with an impartial sagacity which among historians belongs to him alone. In this consists his philosophy. The society, whose developement he studied, was torn by two antagonist principles—aristocracy and democracy, whose struggles, undying in free states, were then more fierce than at any other period in the history of the world. To enable his countrymen and posterity to comprehend the whole chain of events, he opened up a long vista into the past, to the point at which those adversaries appeared upon the scene, and threw a broad light upon all their movements down to the time when Providence removed him from his post. His conception of an historian’s duty, somewhat different from that now entertained, was adopted by all antiquity, in which every succeeding writer bore testimony to his superiority by imitating him. He thought it not enough to narrate and describe, but, throwing open the council chamber and stilling the tumultuous agora, he brings the living statesman or demagogue upon the stage, developing in our hearing his views, his conceptions of surrounding circumstances and characters, his projects, his means for accomplishing them. That the speeches found in his history were actually in that form delivered, I will by no means affirm. He probably obtained but the substance from report, and himself clothed it in those vivid expressions which two thousand years have not stripped of their freshness. Nevertheless, the more trifling the amount of what he owed to the relations of others, the greater must appear his genius, his unerring sense of fitness, his dramatic power of projecting himself successively into a whole gallery of characters, and truly interpreting the opinions, maxims, feelings of each; for no one pretends that he has ever misrepresented a single individual. And if those speeches be examined on the score of eloquence, whether of thought or language, it will I think be found, that in almost every excellence they may rank with those of Demosthenes. In each a peculiar economy is observed in the management of the arguments, in the sentiments, in the opinions, in the logical tone, in the manifestations of individuality which diffuse themselves over the whole and give a colour to it.

The defects—for such there are—resolve themselves into a certain magisterial air, indicating a consciousness of superiority, sure, more or less, to offend in all cases, and a certain imperspicuity of style arising principally from the loose manner in which the drapery of language is flung over his ideas, which is chiefly observable in the orations, his narrative for the most part being free from this imperfection. Besides, whatever be the series of facts he relates, their importance appears to be enhanced by his manner of handling them. He casts aside, as unworthy both of himself and the reader, whatever is of inferior moment. These, in fact, the mere chaff of human affairs, only cling round the grain of action to conceal it, and must be blown aside by the reader if the historian neglect to do it.

The circumstances of the times conferred upon his subject all the interest and the gloom of tragedy. But it thus suited him the better. His genius delighted in terrible pictures: battles, plagues, earthquakes, general massacres, the storming of cities, the annihilation of great armies. His fancy vividly realised all,—the plague-tumbril rumbling, choked with dead, towards the sepulchral suburbs,—the streets of Corcyra streaming alternately with democratic and aristocratic blood,—the expected slaughter of Mitylene,—the reality at Melos,—two thousand Helots cut off by the perfidy of Sparta,—the butchery at Platæa,—at Skione,—in Sicily! Through all these scenes we are precipitated forward, shuddering, compassionating, detesting by turns. But we are neither overwhelmed nor inspired with disgust for human nature. Our sympathies cling closer and closer to the historian, who spares no villany, gratifies no malice, tramples on no noble principle, succumbs to no temptation of partiality. Faithful to his trust he deals forth truth to all, to none the slightest flattery. Not even for his country will he lie. It was she, in fact, with her heroic ethics and grandeur of sentiment, that had taught him his high principles, and he repaid her by recording all her errors, all her wrongs, all her imperfections: in which he acted like a great and a wise man. He would have sacrificed for her his life,—he would not sacrifice his conscience.

To him succeeds Xenophon, a writer whom it is difficult to characterise. There was in the temper of his mind something parasitical, which led him to lean on others for support,—on Socrates, on Cyrus, on Agesilaos. Incapable of acting in a republic the part of a good citizen, he would have been that rare thing—a virtuous courtier. From this the tone of his writings may be conjectured. Almost everywhere we discover a degree of gentleness, sweetness, modesty, which steals imperceptibly into the heart, and creates the impression that he was a man highly amiable and upright. His piety, likewise, causes itself to be felt. He never mentions the gods but with due reverence, exhibits a strong reliance upon Providence, and, according to his best apprehensions, justifies its ways to men with earnest solicitude. The style of his composition, necessarily harmonising with the qualities of his mind, is full of suavity, polished elegance, gentlemanliness, bonhomie, the very characteristics of a popular writer. Readers of moderate understanding can everywhere perceive his drift, can accompany him without feeling out of breath. He is communicative, sensible, rational, indulges in no cloudy flights, never dives out of sight in the ocean of speculation.

Xenophon, however, misunderstood himself when he conceived that it was for him to continue the history of Thucydides. It was as if Andrea del Sarto had undertaken to complete a picture left in parts unfinished by Michael Angelo. He had neither the penetrating sagacity necessary to comprehend the internal plan of the picture, the vivifying energy to preserve the intense tragedy of the action, nor the colours to harmonise with what he found painted. Still, considered by himself, he has great merits. Several scenes in his history, the trial, for example, of the generals, the death of Theramenes, the battles on the Hellespont, exhibit a force of conception and a scope and flexibility of style uncommon in any literature; and the Anabasis, without comparison his greatest work, reads like a chronicle of the most chivalrous knight-errantry. The attempt, however flagitious on the part of Cyrus, had the merit of extreme boldness.boldness. It was the model expedition which disclosed the secret of Asia to Alexander, and showed with how little danger its vast empires might be shattered to pieces. Xenophon who, young and adventurous, accompanied the Persian prince and the heroic mercenaries in his pay, contemplated with delight the physical aspect of the East, its luxurious population, its roving tribes, with the triumphs of his disciplined and warlike countrymen over innumerable barbarian hosts. This we discover from the interest and animation of his narrative, in which stern realities exceed in grandeur and wildness the creations of romance. But it is equally clear that he did not fully comprehend the moral of the scene. For, otherwise, he could never, with these facts before him, have endeavoured by his Cyropædia, to recommend to his countrymen those institutions which rendered Persia, with all its wealth, a constant prey to the small republics of Greece.

Of the other writings of Xenophon little need be said: they are the parsley and the rue of Greek literature, bordering and adorning its entrance, and therefore beheld of all. But most of these have their beauty. Even in the hunting treatise, amid the breeding of dogs, and nets, and knives, and boar-spears, and the slaughter of animals, we catch glimpses of better things,—of glades where the hare frolics by moonlight, and grassy uplands, dewy and fragrant, where does, poetical as she of Rylstone, lead forth their fawns at break of day. The treatises on the states of Athens and Sparta have, I trust, been falsely attributed to this able and accomplished writer. They are contemptible productions, conceived in the spirit of a servile flatterer of the Dorians, and of a satirist, equally servile and stupid, of the greater and infinitely more intellectual Ionic race.

I pass over the historians known to us only by a few scanty fragments, that I may at once come to the orators, the peculiar ornament and pride of Greece, whose greatest statesmen were equally great as speakers, more especially at Athens, where, as an art, eloquence was most assiduously cultivated, and achieved its greatest triumphs. Tradition attributes to Themistocles, to Pericles, to Alcibiades consummate skill in guiding the currents of human sympathy, and a sense of their glory lingered on the high places of society like sunshine on the Alps long after they had quitted the world. But as they did not augment the stores of their country’s literature, we can have nothing to speak of them here. The orators whose fragments time has been unable to destroy are however sufficient, if not to satiate our thirst of admiration, at least to show, by the grandeur of their proportions, how great and glorious Attic eloquence, when entire, must have been. More than any other department of literature it is the growth of patience and toil. A man may be born with the instincts of eloquence,—fancy, constitutional fire, vehemence,—but unless these instincts be broken in and trained by consummate art, nature will in vain have bestowed her gifts. These truths were early understood at Athens. It was perceived that without eloquence political distinction was unattainable, and therefore all who aspired to

subjected themselves to a course of laborious study, to which our more phlegmatic natures would not submit.

The results we may, in part, still contemplate in that body of Athenian oratory, which to the author and the statesman is in itself a library. Every legitimate form of eloquence is there beheld. In Antiphon and Andocides it appears in rough simplicity, employing contrivance and art, but employing them awkwardly. Lysias makes considerable advances beyond them, clothes his style with grace, constructs his narrative with extraordinary skill, and moves the passions by considerable pathos. Isocrates it is common with the moderns, who echo one another, to underrate: their delicate ears, offended by his too nicely balanced periods, his antitheses, his monotonous cadences, refuse to relish that stately harmony, and majestic flow of language, which recommend the thoughts of this “old man eloquent,” whose greatest panegyric is pronounced by Plato^[992] in the Phædros. In Isæos we have an argumentative, able pleader; in Deinarchos a vigorous accuser; in Demades the power of splendid improvisation; in Lycurgus noble sentiments clothed in poetical language, haughty patriotism, the rough virtues of a stoic; in Æschines an union of magnificent style, thoughts full of weight, admirable arrangement, warmth, vivacity, wit. Yet Demosthenes soars far above Æschines,—far above all. On him nature had bestowed every quality which constitutes an ingredient of eloquence,—originality, love of labour, a clear head, a warm heart, a judgment all but unerring, with an impetuous vehemence perfectly irresistible.

A very extraordinary impression is created by the study of this writer. He seems never to put forth all his strength. You see him, indeed, bear down every thing before him, overwhelming the arguments and the gold of Philip, crushing his rivals, annihilating his enemies; but the persuasion rests with you that he could have done more. You discover amid the waves and foam of his terrible eloquence indications that that vast ocean had never been stirred to the bottom, that occasion had never called forth all its latent powers of destruction. He measures himself with his antagonist, and is secure of victory. He presents a front bristling with the deadliest points of logic, like the spears of the Macedonian phalanx, and wherever he moves he is invincible. Nevertheless he appears to advance nothing for the sake of effect, to be in search of none of the beauties of style, but rather to avoid them. He is neither draped, nor painted, nor adorned; but a naked colossus whose sublimity springs from the perfection and greatness of its proportions.

Other orators persuade, Demosthenes enforces conviction. They who listen to him have no choice,—they must believe. Without offending the reader’s pride, he makes him ashamed to hesitate. He reminds one of the Nile at the cataracts, where, confined by rocks within too narrow limits, it pours resistlestly along, swelling, deep, with scattered whirlpools and foam scarcely visible on its vast surface, seemingly calm at a short distance, but, to those who look near, agitated, angry, full of unstemmableunstemmable currents and boiling motion. He had profoundly studied human nature, chiefly, of course, as it developes itself in free states, and, better than any man, knew by what motives it may, in spite of corruption and degeneracy, be impelled to strenuous action, though but for a brief space. His language, flashing through the moral gloom around him, called forth bright reflections from whatever was brilliant or polished, and kindled the fragments of patriotic emotions into a flame. If genius could regenerate, could pour the blood of youth into the veins of age, could substitute loftiness of sentiment, heroic daring, disinterested love of country, religious faith, spirituality, for sensual self-indulgence, for sordid avarice, for a base distrust in Providence, Demosthenes had renewed the youth of Athens. The spirit of the old democratic constitution breathes through all his periods. He stands upon the last defence of the republican world, when all else had been carried, the representative of a noble but perished race, fighting gallantly, though in vain, to preserve that fragment sacred from the foot of the spoiler. The passion and the power of democracy seem concentrated in him. He unites in his character all the richest gifts of nature under the guidance of the most consummate art, and, doubtless, Hume was right when he said that, of all human productions, his works approach the nearest to perfection.

Beyond this point it is irksome to proceed in our view of Grecian literature, which, after the battle of Cheronæa, was overshadowed by despotism and dwindled gradually into insignificance. Not that genius wholly and suddenly disappeared. The soil of Hellenic intellect was not entirely exhausted, but the fruit it bore was comparatively insipid. A courtly stamp was set upon every thing. Men no longer obeyed their genuine impulses. It was dangerous generally, and always profitless to be frank and manly. Instead of addressing themselves to the healthy natural sympathies of the people, writers servilely laboured by conceit and flattery to wring reluctant patronage from princes. The spirit of affectation, accordingly, for the first time made its appearance. Men tortured their ingenuity to invent smart things. Enthusiasm and passion and earnestness, characteristics all of popular writers, are never fashionable among courtiers, who consider sincerity vulgar, and hypocrisy a virtue. In the later Greek writers, therefore, who all wrote for some court or other, we discover the usual frigidity and extravagance which invariably deform the literature of such states. Along with these faults, others also are found far more pernicious: the inculcation of selfishness, gross sensuality, base maxims, a depraved taste. Man in the savage state is a garden in which noxious weeds and the most beautiful flowers and useful plants grow together; civilised and free, he is the same garden cleared, as far as possible, of its weeds; but, when verging a second time into barbarism, the weeds again become luxuriant, and entirely choke or conceal the flowers. And thus too it is in literature. In the literatures of Greece, Rome, and modern Italy we can now contemplate the complete process; in our own, a part only, how great a part—it is not here my business to inquire.

Whether the Greeks received their earliest system of philosophy from the East, as is commonly believed, or themselves invented it, as to me seems most probable, there can I think be little doubt that once engaged in philosophical speculations they exhibited in the pursuit a degree of boldness and originality, a patience of research, a power of combination rarely if ever equalled in succeeding times. For some ages, it is true, from the days of Thales down to those of Socrates (B. C. 600 to B. C. 450) physical investigations and researches chiefly occupied the philosophers of Greece. They conceived it to be within the power of man to discover the nature of the principal elements which compose the world, and the law’s that regulated its formation.^[993] The origin likewise of the human race, of which nothing is yet known but that which has been revealed, naturally awakened their curiosity and led to many theories wild and fantastic in the extreme.

Into any consideration of these it is not my design to enter; but the Greeks had another philosophy, which, resting on the basis of theology, comprehended religion, morals, and politics, and may be regarded as the instrument, the soul, and the measure of their civilisation. It seems to be a truth frequently overlooked, that man is civilised exactly in proportion as he is religious; at least this was the case in Greece, where the highest developement of the national mind concurred in Socrates and Plato with the utmost developement of the religious instinct, and began immediately to decline in Aristotle and his successors, arriving at the lowest degradation among the grovelling sophists of the lower empire. This division of philosophy occupied among the Greeks the place, which in modern times is assigned to religion,^[994] that is, it was their guide through this life, and their preparation for a better. It may, indeed, be regarded as the spiritual part of paganism, teaching man his duties, and explaining the grounds and motives which should lead to their performance.

There is one article of faith without which no religion can of course exist—the belief in God. Devoid of this, it may be doubted whether an individual or a nation ought not rather to be classed among the inferior animals than among men. It is superfluous, therefore, to say that the Greeks, preëminently endowed with the highest attributes of humanity, were a religious people, and held firmly all the doctrines which entitle a people to such an appellation. From their ancestors, the Pelasgi,^[995] they inherited a pure and lofty theism, which seems to have always continued to be the religion of the more enlightened; while among the mass of the people, this central truth of religion was gradually surrounded by a constantly expanding atmosphere of fable, which obscured its brightness, and in a great measure concealed its form. Mr. Mitford, whose acute and philosophical mind clearly discerned this verity, also seems to have understood the cause. “A firm belief both in the existence of the Deity, and in the duty of communication with him, appears to have prevailed universally in the early ages. But religion was then the common care of all men, a sacerdotal order was unknown.”^[996]

The institution of an order of priests, however effected, almost necessarily corrupted the simple truths of religion, but it is unphilosophical in the highest degree to consider those ancient priests as impostors on this account, or to speak of their propagation of error as craft. Meditating, in seclusion and solitude, on the few truths which had come down to them by tradition or been discovered by reason, they soon bewildered their own wits, and wandered into superstition.^[997] As was too natural, they conceived that the Divinity must be desirous of giving them signs, marking what was to be done and what avoided. The mistake of concomitance for causation, often made in more learned and refined ages, would confirm them in this view. They would, for example, find that in the order of time the flight of certain birds over their heads, the appearance of a serpent in their path, the apparition of certain objects in a dream, was followed by certain misfortunes; while other apparitions were succeeded by contrary events. Out of these observations the science of augury, divination, &c. arose. Yet the inventors were not therefore impostors, but rather, in their intentions, benefactors of mankind; and to be respected accordingly.

The generation of polytheism is to be in like manner explained. It was an abuse of the inductive method of philosophy. Men perceived, as soon as they began to observe nature and draw inferences from what they beheld, that the sun and moon^[998] exert extraordinary influence, beneficial or hurtful, upon mankind and the world they inhabit; and the supposition was neither unnatural nor absurd that those glorious bodies, by whose rising and setting, by whose approximation or retreat, they were in turn affected with gladness or melancholy, with comfort or discomfort, with good or evil, must be themselves possessed of intelligence as well as power, or at least be inhabited and directed by beings on whom they bestowed the name of gods. The air, too, “which bloweth where it listeth while thou canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth,” sweeping around them invisibly, and appearing only in its effects, soon obtained the rank of a deity,^[999] as did the ocean which appears to be alive in all its extent, and the earth on whose inexhaustible bounty we subsist.

Out of these elements the sacerdotal families of Greece framed its religion, which, however, is by no means to be considered a system of materialism. They conceived every portion of nature to be animated by its particular soul, just as they believed the whole, as a whole, to have one universal soul, the source of all the others. Their mythology was based on unity. At every step backwards we find the number of gods diminish, till at length we arrive at the Great One, surrounded by the unfathomable splendours of eternity. This is the θεὸς ὁ θεῶν Ζεὺς, of whom Plato^[1000] and Aristotle constantly speak when they employ the expression τὸ δαιμόνιον.^[1001] Philosophy, indeed, considered it to be its chiefest task to deliver men from their multitudinous errors respecting the nature of God, and of our duties towards Him; so that, in their speculative notions, very little difference from our own can be detected. Above all men, Plato sought to elevate the sphere of philosophy. In his works, in truth, it moves frequently within the confines of theology, and seldom quits them except for the purpose of infusing spirituality into politics and morals.

This great man, whose profound veneration for the Deity equalled, perhaps, that of Newton himself, conceived that human happiness consists wholly in the knowledge of God, concerning whose character and attributes he was anxious that no unworthy ideas should be entertained. His doctrine was, “that we should ever describe God such as he is.” But, as Muretus has well observed, this was requiring too much of human nature, for, most assuredly, we should never speak of God if we waited to discover language befitting His majesty. “For the mind of man is incapable of comprehending the essence of God; the nature of God is known to God alone; he alone perfectly understands himself, and in himself all things. The mind of man waxes dim, beholding that stupendous light whose brightness excels all other lights; and, in proportion as it endeavours more daringly to soar, is it conscious of falling below its great aim.”^[1002] The Egyptians expressed the same conviction in the celebrated epigraph on the base of the veiled statue of Neith at Saïs: “I am whatever has been, is, or shall be, and no mortal has drawn aside my veil.” To the same purpose was the saying of Simonides to Hiero, “that the more he contemplated the Divine Nature the less he appeared to comprehend it.” And Socrates, in the Philebos of Plato, observes that he shuddered as often as the Great Name was to be pronounced lest he should bestow upon it some unworthy epithet.

It would appear, indeed, that the idea which the theologians of Greece had formed of the Almighty was very nearly the same as our own; though, in compliance with popular prejudices, they often made use of the plural for the singular. Goodness, power, and knowledge were his characteristics, which in substance are the same as the types of the theologians of modern times—goodness, immutability, truth,—goodness leading the van in both cases, and the remaining conditions answering perfectly to each other. For in supreme power and supreme wisdom must be immutability and truth, since the Almighty can do all he wills and must ever will what is right.^[1003] In accordance with these views, the spiritual philosophy of Greece maintained that the Deity is the source of no evil, though traces of a far different theory are here and there discoverable among the poets. Thus, speaking of the calamities arising from the anger of Achilles, Homer says