which may be repeated here for the sake of the twofold illustration of our argument which it affords. Aristides had incurred the enmity of his fellowcitizens on account of his pre-eminent virtues. A clown, ignorant even of his person, applied to him to mark his own name for banishment on the shell used in the ballot of ostracism. Having complied with this request, the philosopher enquired what the accused had done to deserve such a punishment. "I don't know," replied the fellow; "but it provokes me to think that he, of all men, should strive to be called the just.” This story confirms the assumption that the common people of Greece, in her glory, were not generally taught to read and write, and that not only moral feeling, but intellectual discernment also, was much lower among them than among our contemporaries.

The Common People of Rome.

The founder of Rome seems to have been as much of a savage as might be expected of one who was suckled by a wolf. It was the genius and sagacity of his successor which established by wisdom what he had begun in violence, and gave to "the eternal city" the principle of duration. Romulus had formed a body; Numa Pompilius lent the soul; he made his own soul immortal upon earth in it; and his spirit swayed the counsels and led the enterprises of its senators and warriors in every stage of its progress to universal sovereignty. If but for Romulus Rome had never been-it may be affirmed, that but for Numa Pompilius, Rome had not continued to be,

or had not risen above the level of the petty commonwealths that surrounded and harassed it without cessation, till they were all engulphed in its vortex. This great prince, in a dark age, at the head of a horde of barbarian adventurers, by his transcendent policy and enlightened institutes, not only perpetuated the civil polity of the infant state on the basis of knowledge being power, but, by virtue of the same victorious principle, enabled the youthful republic, in the sequel, to extend her empire beyond the ditch over which Remus leaped in contempt, and was slain in it by his brother, from the Euphrates on the one hand, to the Atlantic on the other; and from Ethiopia, within the precincts of the torrid zone, to Britain, "divided from the world," towards the north.

The Romans laboured under the same disad vantages in acquiring and communicating knowledge as the Greeks; and they laboured under many more, from the rough, fierce manners of the plebeians, and the unquenchable thirst for martial glory that distinguished the patricians. Education, of consequence, was low among all classes, not excepting the highest, till after the reduction of Greece, when the polite arts of the vanquished brought the conquerors under the liberal yoke of instruction. Meanwhile, however, even in these youthful days of Rome, we meet with more examples, and those examples of a higher order, of pure virtue, self-denial, self-devotion, self-sacrifice, than pagan antiquity can furnish from all its records beside. Simple manners, generous sentiments, unaffected scorn of corruption, public spirit, and a certain peculiar intellectual courage, as well as that personal

valour which was a matter of course, being called into continual exercise by the economy of war in those times, in which, during every battle, innumerable single combats were waging at once throughout the whole field; - these were the common qualities of the earlier Romans, and their descendants, for five centuries.

The circumstance to which this cast of character may be traced is honourable to the people, and glorious to that sex, which, among the Romans, was always treated with the reverence, not less than the affection, which "man that is born of a woman" owes to her from whom he not only derives life, but to whom he is indebted even until death for life's best comforts and sweetest enjoyments. That reverence among uncivilised tribes is rarely paid by the savage of the forest or the wilderness to his help-meet; and even among the polished nations of antiquity, Greece herself not excepted, woman had not the honour due to her; her lord and master, therefore, derived not from her the benefit of that influence which she was intended to exercise over him, without appearing to exercise any influence at all. The Roman matrons and the Roman maidens are equally illustrious in the primitive annals of their country. The mothers were the instructors of the youth of both sexes; they taught them at home; every family was a school of industry and a school of virtue; frank, simple, and austere. Regarding their children as their jewels, it was their duty, their pride, and their happiness, to make them as in

trinsically valuable and externally ornamental as might be.

Roman Literature.

At length, Carthage destroyed, and Greece subdued, literature began to be cultivated with enthusiasm by this hardy and heroic people; and, once introduced, it soon began to show its benign influence on the manners of all classes, from the patrician to the domestic slave, and to produce its fruits in minds of every mould, wherein the seeds of knowledge were sown. About this era flourished Ennius and Plautus; and thenceforward Rome rose as rapidly in letters as in arms; so that, within a generation or two, Lucretius, Catullus, and Cicero had advanced the intellectual glory of their country to the verge of its consummation. But even in the Augustan age, which followed, when we consider the base means by which the Roman people were bribed into slavery, held in gorgeous fetters, and their ferocious passions glutted with cruel and bloody spectacles, to restrain them from reflecting on their degradation, and conspiring against the new tyranny;-who can doubt, that, in morals and understanding, London, at this hour, is as classic as pagan Rome was in the proudest moment of her splendid infamy?

The verses of the elder Romans, so far as can be collected concerning their character, were burlesque and satirical (like those of the modern Greenlanders) rather than warlike and devotional, as the earliest poetry generally is. But from the expulsion of the

Tarquins, and the establishment of a consular government, eloquence was always in special esteem, and diligently cultivated, though of a kind corresponding with the simple habits, narrow learning, and turbulent circumstances of the times. The tongue was the weapon with which civil war was carried on, and political ascendency gained, in the conflicts between the patricians and the plebeians, — at everlasting strife with each other in the forum, but in perpetual league in every other field, where the sword was the arbiter, and the spoils of the world the prize of victory. Hence the Latin language, even before it was employed for the more brilliant exercises of literature, had been highly wrought, and condensed into a most energetic vehicle for the commerce of thought; and afterwards, by the practice of its best speakers and writers, grace and vigour became equally blended in its construction and idiom. ferior in copiousness, splendour, and flexibility, to the inimitable Greek, it is itself inimitable in pithy and sententious brevity; while in grandeur and beauty, its orators and poets have left examples of its capabilities which those of its rival tongue can scarcely excel. From Ennius to Virgil, there was a rapidly ascending succession of master-minds, formed not only to rule the taste of contemporaries, but to give laws of thinking to all posterity, by whom their labours of thought should be possessed, with the power of appreciating such models of excellence.

In

During the triumvirate of Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus, there were living at once in Italy the greatest number of poets, orators, historians, and