and social communion. Their existence was the worm in the bud of Greek civilisation, the test of its merits, and the prognostic of its doom. We have only to read a few Greek Comedies which delineate the prevailing features of the manners of Greek society, to be satisfied that its liberty was base, and under sentence of death from the Judge of all. The only spirited women that appear in these Comedies are the Hetairai. These are the women of Greece; the matrons and maids are locked up at home, and can only appear as dawdles and slaves, without courage, without wit, without intelligence, without interest. The soul of the sex is all concentrated in the female companion, not the wife; and regarding this woman as the true representative of liberty in Greece, we discover what we would otherwise have been at a loss to perceive. So prevalent, so very prevalent, was this habit of association with free women, that even Solon, the great Sage and Lawgiver of Greece, could or would do no more for the married women than enact a law which compelled a husband to sleep at least three times a month with his wife. "Ex uno disce omnes." From this one illustration imagine the rest.

It is now time to speak of the slaves. They very naturally come in along with the women to damn the liberty of Greece; but not the Greeks personally, for they only played the part which the Great Dramatist and Manager of the Amphi

theatre of Civilisation prescribed to them. Slavery prevailed over all Greece, and slaves were sold in the markets by auction. They were the labourers, the agriculturists, the miners, the tradesmen, who conducted all the useful arts, whilst the fine arts were left to the citizens, their masters. These human cattle were not Niggers, nor even always barbarians, but Greeks from the colonies, or unfortunate persons taken in war, who could not redeem themselves. They were much more numerous than the citizens, but undisciplined, and without military resources, though very often attempting to redeem themselves, like French and other modern proletaires, by means of insurrections. Between these and the citizens a class of aliens existed, who were neither slaves nor citizens, and who, for the most part, engaged in commercial affairs, and rented houses and lands from the citizens, who were the only proprietors of immoveable property. The citizens, therefore, were a very small body-an aristocracy-who made slaves of the populace, and tenants and clients of the middle classes. It was a triune system, such as exists amongst ourselves at the present day in a different form; for the archetype exists in Nature as one of Plato's eternal ideas, of which the universe is but a model. But though ever existing, the model is ever undergoing translations from lower to higher meanings, from rougher to smoother outlines.

The very offensive and coarse form which the

social distinctions took in Greece, was incompatible with a high order of civilisation. It might ennoble and dignify the first class; but the cost was too great, and the injustice monstrous, when this was done by means of the degradation of the lower caste. But it is scarcely possible to conceive how the cultivation of the fine arts, which constitutes the principal mission of Greece, could have been otherwise effected in primitive times. Society was then imperfectly organised. Wars were frequent and inevitable-roads were few and very bad-national and provincial intercourse was difficult-there was no press, no stage coaches, no railways. Without an exclusive and independent class, above the fear of want, and entirely devoted to the refinements of art and of thought, such a nursery of genius as Greece was such abundant provision for all that is noble in Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Poetry, and the Drama, as Greece made-could never have existed. It does not exist even now in modern times, with all our superior advantages. It existed then as if on purpose to give the fine arts a birth, and send them forth into the world. The Athenians expended upon art alone almost the whole of their revenues. Their theatre cost more to support it per annum than their army and navy. Their performers were more extravagantly rewarded than our modern stars. Even flute-players of distinction, according to Xenophon, lived in a most magnificent manner; and Athenæus

relates that Amoebæus the harper was paid at the rate of about £200 for one performance at the theatre. Their Acropolis, within an area of several miles in circumference, was a splendid museum of palaces and temples, statues and pictures. And it was just because the Athenians were idlers-independent gentlemen socially combined in one city-that they were enabled to become amateurs and connoisseurs in art; devoting all their time to gymnastics, to pleasure, and to the study of elegance and beauty in form and manner. It was because they were not labourers, and held it even disreputable to be merchants, that they could be what they were a club of gentlemen, patrons of art and passionate admirers and students of idealities. The slaves enabled them to be this; the clients enabled them to be this. And yet the system was an evil, and therefore doomed to destruction. It was the green and sour grape, and not the ripe one. But the man who can understand, and make others understand, how a grape may and ought to be ripe and plump before it is green, hard, and sour, may also understand, and make others understand, how the birth of the arts might and should have taken place in any other mode than it did, amid the travail pains of slave labour and the throes of pression. So very natural did slavery seem to all the sages of Greece, that they never questioned the propriety of it. It is one of the elements of Plato's Republic, and Aristotle divides men into free and

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bond, as if the distinction were natural and inevitable; making, however, his own people, like the Jew, the legitimately free, and the barbarians legitimately bond. It was the spirit of the times; and the state of society, and the mutual dependence of its elements, rendered it difficult, if not impossible, to translate the word servitude into a higher meaning than slavery.

SCENE EIGHTH.

THE GREEK EMPEROR AND HIS SUCCESSORS.

The cultivation of philosophy and the arts in Greece would have been of little use to the world, if means had not been found to disseminate abroad the benefit of the acquisition which had thus been made. The wranglings of the orators in the schools, and the competition of the artists in the studios of Athens, were a series of interminable subtilties and refinements, which, after having attained a certain advancement, only tended to foster the pride of the Greek, and increase his contempt for the less cultivated barbarian. Such refinement ends in viceevil comes out of good at last, like good out of evil. When once a stratum of geological deposit is thick enough, another is ordained to overlay it. History is full of epochs and eras, and they are all useful.

The mission of Alexander the Great and his vic