dying upon the average at about half the age of the present generation. Then what timid sailors! the earth they inhabited was unknown to them, and such was their backwardness in geography, navigation, and ship-building, that to cross the English Channel or the Mediterranean was with them a perilous and uncertain adventure.

A few leading discoveries almost preclude comparison between the ancients and moderns. In the arts, chemistry; in war, gunpowder; in knowledge and its diffusion, printing; in navigation, the compass, and astronomy; in politics and government, civil equality; in morals, manners, and social life, utility; and in the philosophy of mind, that the senses are the medium of ideas: these fundamental acquisitions in their various ramifications have effected entire revolutions in the material and intellectual world.

It is with the existing nations of the East, not those of the West, that the ancients bear the nearest analogy. Compare them with the Chinese, the Affghans, Turks, Persians, or Egyptians, and the points of resemblance are not so remote. In climate, soil, and geographical position, Italy and Greece belong more to Asia or Africa than to Europe. The Greeks and Romans were of Asiatic descent, but modern Europeans are of Teutonic or Celtic derivation. This diversity of origin is sufficient to account for important organic contrasts in national character, usages, and institutions. The civilization of the Chinese, Burmese, or Turks, is not strikingly dissimilar from that of the age of Augustus or Pericles. In passing from Pekin or Cabool to ancient Rome or Athens, a stranger would have met with little to excite his astonishment; for proof of this we have only to advert to a few leading features of coincidence.

For instance, an Asiatic of the present day would have felt no surprise at the seclusion of females, and the practice of infanticide. The absence of knives and forks at dinner would not have been a privation; nor a canopy over the table to protect from the dust of the ceiling held to be superfluous. A slave for a porter, an abundance of perfumery, and a troop of dancing girls or posture-makers to give variety and relish to the dessert, would have been matters of familiar acquaintance. A fricassee of sucking puppies in the estimate of Pliny the Elder was a matchless dish, and in this the Chinese gourmand would have agreed with him; for it is a fact, that one of our officers in the late expedition was actually offered a bonne bouche of the kind as a dainty. The Romans took their meals reclining on couches, the head of one guest resting on the stomach of his neighbour; a position of effeminacy and disagreeableness, that, however tolerable to a native of the East, would be quite repulsive to an European.

In the flowing open costume of the ancients the eastern fashion is discernible. But it is needless to describe it. The celebrated toga is well known to have been simply a cloak, or rather a piece of cloth woven of the requisite size, and worn over one shoulder, and under the arm of the other. There was no cutting, fitting, or stitching to the shape; for tailoring appears to have been an unknown craft to the Romans. In fact they were only half clothed; wearing neither shoes, stockings, nor shirt; which destitution of costume would necessarily be a source of great personal uncleanliness and discomfort. Febrile and cutaneous disorders of various kinds must in consequence have been almost universal among them, and account both for the necessity of the use and the transient ease and luxury resulting from their frequent recourse to baths and ointments. Naked and diseased as they undoubtedly were, and protected only by a buckler and armed with a sword not much larger than a carving-knife, they mastered the world-at least all that was known of it, and in its then capabilities of resistance.

The favourite amusements of the Romans attest their half savage character. The sports of the circus in horse and chariot racing, and in wrestling, are common to most nations, and might be tolerated; but not so their boxing matches, with armed gloves, or the still more barbarous exhibitions of the amphitheatre. Into the arena of this butchery 100 or 1000 of wild beasts were let loose, sometimes in a common melée, to tear each other to pieces. On the occasion of a spectacle given by Titus 5000 animals are said to have fallen in mutual destruction. Not only were lions and tigers and other ferocious beasts matched against each other, but sometimes human beings entered into deadly combat with them and with one another. The gladiatorial conflicts of the Coliseum fill one with horror and leave an indelible impression of Roman ferocity. Remains of this immense slaughter-house still subsist, and which is calculated to have been capable of holding 100,000 spectators. The monster Probus is said to have made 500 gladiators fight till they were all slain. The Romans used to diversify their private banquets by a fight of gladiators, who mangled each other among the supper tables. The victims of these savage sports were mostly slaves, chiefly captives of the German tribes; though people of superior condition were brutal enough to enter the lists and were proud of their exploits in the arena. The fortitude with which these unfortunate men met death has formed a fine subject to the sculptor, representing the Dying Gladiator,' of which appalling scene Lord Byron has given the well-known stanzas in his 'Childe Harold,' with which we shall beg to refresh the reader's memory.

VOL. I.-NO. VII.

2 L

I see before me the Gladiator lie;

He leans upon his hand-his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony,
And his droop'd head sinks gradually low-
And through his side the last drops ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one,

Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now

And now the arena swims around him--he is gone,

Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won!

He heard it, but he heeded not-his eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away;
He reck'd not of the life he lost nor prize,
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay;
There were his young barbarians all at play ;
There was their Dacian mother-he their sire,
Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday.-

All this rush'd with his blood-shall he expire,
And unaveng'd?-Arise, ye Goths! and glut your ire!

The

The Goths did arise and overwhelm their tyrants. Romans are said to have been beguiled of their liberties, and their virtue corrupted by the frequent gratuitous exhibitions of the amphitheatre. But the virtue which could be corrupted by such afflictive spectacles of human suffering must have been of a very peculiar kind, and very different from the modern version. The Romans, however, do not appear to have been correctly appreciated. They were not a refined or civilized people, but a brave and well-disciplined camp of soldiers. Their patriotism and the other good attributes patronized by them were directed solely to the subjugation of their neighbours and all who opposed them. Their glory was that of the Iroquois; they did not exactly exclaim, as that cannibal American tribe were wont to do when they went to war,- Let us go eat our enemies!' but they said, let us go conquer and subdue them, and make them contributary to the power and greatness of Rome. In the steady pursuit of this object they were a nation of one idea, and like one-idea'd people generally they were successful in the limited point they aimed at.

But the consummation of their restless ambition was their ruin. The spoils of the world that they had coveted and acquired, enfeebled their power and became the source of degeneracy. They had risen by self-denial, they fell by self-indulgence. From ascetics they became Sybarites. From the simplicity of the Cincinnatus age, when a raw turnip formed a sufficient repast for a dictator, they plunged into the opposite extreme of luxurious license. To heighten the zest of their

wines they threw pearls into them. The brains of peacocks and of the rarest singing birds were served up at their entertainments. The world was ransacked for dainties to satisfy their epicurean cravings. A voyage to Sicily was not thought too much for a dish of lampreys. The gastronomic art was, of course, in high estimation; and cookery, which had been neglected in the pure days of the republic, rose into the dignity of a science. A cook, who had formerly been considered the meanest of slaves, became a Ude-the most important officer of the household. The purchase of a good one cost as much as a triumph, and no mortal was so valued, according to Pliny, as the slave who was most expert in the art of ruining his master by the titillation of his appetites.

Of course the toils and hardships of war became distasteful; baths, theatres, and the circus more eligible resorts than the camp and frontiers. Soldiers complained of the weight of their helmets; their stature dwindled under the general effeminacy, and the irruption of the giants of the north was requisite, according to Gibbon, to renovate the puny breed.'

But we must hasten to conclude. The general facts mentioned will enable the reader to form some estimate of the ancient standard of civilization, and the relation it bears to that of the moderns. We have more particularly dwelt upon the state of the Romans, because they are the greatest and most recent people of antiquity. It would certainly imply an overweening conceit in ourselves to suppose that our own age had reached the highest climax of refinement, that no further advances could be made, no greater improvements achieved in manners, morals, science, and political government. Still we may, without any excess of self-complacency, safely indulge the hope that we have greatly, prodigiously we may affirm, outstript our instructors. It is reasonable that it should be so. The ancients have been our platform; what they possessed we inherit; we stand upon their shoulders and ought in reason to present a more majestic front. From the pinnacle we have reached we certainly cannot yet see all the kingdoms of the earth, but that our intellectual horizon has been vastly extended and in what direction has been already partly indicated. In the material sciences our superiority admits of no dispute, and in the more difficult sciences of social and political philosophy our claims are as little questionable. The boast of our age, our proudest triumphs, our greatest and most glorious distinctions, are the love of humanity, our love of justice, and respect for the universal and inalienable rights of man-not of one man only, or one caste, or one sex, or one complexion, but the whole human family-all are held equal and imprescriptible as God

and nature made them. This is our boast; it is a proud, just, and honourable one, and far transcends all Greek, all Roman fame!

That our acquisitions have not been made more available to the general weal forms the great problem we have yet to master. We are rich, but do not comprehend the use of our treasures. Knowledge abounds, but is not diffused or applied. But there seems no fear of ultimate and universal benefits. With civil freedom and the means of discussion, with the universal toleration of opinion-another distinction over the past-we have no apprehension that men will not be made to understand their own interests, despite of bigotry and every other monopoly of selfishness or error that may temporarily impede the onward expansion of truth and justice.

RABELAIS.

Vous l'avez ouy-l'avez-vous entendu?'

Pantagruel Prol. Book v.

MORE than three centuries have silently rolled away since on le Quai des Augustins in Paris, opposite l'Hotel d'Hercule, (where Chancellor Duprat lived,) there appeared one day a strange figure, dressed in a long green robe, with an Armenian cap and huge spectacles tied to it, and an enormous inkhorn at his girdle, and a mob of all the loungers behind him. Attracted by the noise of the crowd, the chancellor comes to the window, and, on seeing this strange being, demands who he is, and receives as answer, Je suis écorcheur des veaux.' Duprat is a son of Eve; his curiosity is excited, and he sends a page to inquire further into the matter. The page advances and receives a reply in Latin. Away he goes to fetch one who understands that language, and the stranger bursts forth into Greek. A Greek scholar appears, and is saluted in Spanish; and every new interpreter hears a new language, till the mighty linguist has gone through Italian, German, and Hebrew, and perhaps Arabic, Dutch, and Danish. The astonished chancellor then himself gives him an audience, and the stranger all at once addresses him in the vernacular tongue, and discovers his name and object, namely, that he has come on behalf of the privileges of the Faculty of Montpelier, and that he adopted this method of introduction after having in vain tried every other.