fairy land to the Greeks, and rich in the materials of poetry. These wonders were still more

thickly sown towards the pillars of Hercules; and as the period of Grecian fables separated the time of genuine history from the unknown ages of which all traces were lost, so there was an everwidening horizon, peopled with unreal and shadowy shapes, which separated the discoveries of the Tyrian mariners from that ocean of darkness into which no sail had ever entered, and which was supposed to be beyond the bounds of nature and her laws.

The Grecian states were full of life, because full of liberty; their freedom proceeded from their diminutive size; their intersection made them small, and their smallness free. For a town is always democratical, and the Grecian states consisted of a town and the neighbouring vale. The kings fell like ripe fruit without a struggle, and even in the kingly period, the states were ruled by eloquence, persuasion, and free consent. Their size and freedom made every thing tell-every man was at his full speed-to him patriotism and glory, the great movers to great actions, were not abstractions but sensible realities-his country was

the scene before his eyes-glory was the daily voice of his countrymen.

The time of the world they lived in was in favour of the Greeks-it was the morning- the youth of existence-hope had received no blight -it was the "sweet hour of prime." All things ministered to fancy, not poetry alone, but religion and philosophy alike partook of its airy essence, and were indeed its creatures; and in return furnished its food, and fed its fires-the mind ran in one current, all was "compact of imagination."

The

Grecian literature had the advantage of a double originality in language and in materials. Greek, as a mother language, had vast advantages over mixed dialects and lingua-Francas, which, combined of ill-assorted elements, rest upon feet of iron mixed with clay; and, like unorganized substances, can only be enlarged by the accession of foreign materials; while original languages, having the principle of life in them, increase by the extension of their own vital energy, and as the skin fits itself to every growth of the body, so their flexibility adapts itself to every expansion and tone of the national mind. Mixed dialects, on the contrary, retain, throughout, the propensities of their Mulish nature, are stubborn

and unproductive; formed for the purposes of barter, they savour of their origin, and have a direct tendency to business.

Grecian genius received hints, rather than materials from Egypt and Phoenicia; and these were soon so filtered as to be free from any foreign taint. Their literature, like their language, was primitive and homogeneous, and like the giant trees of the forest which have never been transplanted, and whose tap root has not been destroyed, it grew great in its native seat, and imbibed the full nourishment of the soil.

VII. On the contrary, when learning was transferred from Greece to Rome, it never took deep root, and made few spontaneous shoots, but still retained the delicacy of an exotic, and only grew with continued culture and carefulness;-the lite rature of Rome was not national, and consequently not popular-it was at best a free imitation, often a mere translation, of thoughts which had received their birth in another country, from other events, and under other laws. After the Grecians had ceased to be inventors, the human mind for a long series of ages seemed to have lost the power of originality :-Three great races of men placed all their learning in studying the Grecian models,

with no other variety than what proceeded from their greater or lesser inability to enter fully into the thoughts, or copy the style of their masters. While the Romans, the Saracens, and the Goths, were attempting to tread in the footsteps of Grecian genius, and the nations of the east had already reached the greatest height which the genius of their civilization permitted them to ascend, it may safely be asserted that the whole human race did not make one step in advance for more than a thousand years, and thereby gave a full confutation to the opinion of a necessary and continual progress in human society.

The Romans, deriving their stock from a common origin with the Grecians-speaking a cognate language-having a climate not greatly inferior, and laws rather improved-possessing the same intellectual horizon-credulous of the same fablesand worshipping the same deities, had scarcely the trouble of translating from the Greek language into their own, so naturally did the thoughts pass from one into the other; but still there is the dif ference between originality and imitation, and the loss which accompanies all transference of thought in its expansiveness as well as in its freshness. The Greeks, with only nature to borrow from,

were inexhaustible in their copiousness;-the Romans, with nature, and Grecian literature to boot, to pillage from, shrink into much narrower limits, and the spoil of many volumes scarce suffices to compose one. The airy and speculative disquisitions of Greece disappear in the plainer and practical philosophy which was naturalized at Rome, and the more ethereal inquiries concerning the essences and first causes of things which had been the exercise of Athenian subtilty, yielded the first place, among the Romans, to the maxims which directed states, or regulated the conduct of private life.

The Romans were borrowers in all things-they studied but one art, the art of conquering the world; and even the weapons by which they extended their conquests, were borrowed from the vanquished. The Roman state was like the Roman soldier-to him the day of battle was the time of relaxation, and war a season of pastime, compared with the severer toils of peace. The state when at war had only to contend with foreigners, and men whom it was habituated to overcome; but when it ceased to be invaded from without it was attacked from within, and when conquest had been achieved, a new struggle commen