fully scrutinized, and their bearings towards each other critically and philosophically weighed. There are, it is on all hands admitted, at least a dozen pieces which ought to be thrown entirely out of the collection-puerile and meaningless mimicries of the great master's peculiar manner of writing; and as many more which ought to be placed in a volume by themselves, not without their value as specimens of Lucian the professional sophist and declaimer, but which, mixed up among his riper compositions, have no effect but that of disappointing and confusing the reader. In the course of such an arrangement, new light would no doubt be thrown on the author's personal history; but in the meantime we must dismiss this, and turn once more from the man to the period, of which his works, even in their present condition, present, perhaps, a more complete as well as lively picture, than any other single author could supply with respect to any other period of the ancient world. For this nephew of the image-hewer of Samosata had climbed as many steps in the social scale as any Gil Blas or Hajji Baba of them all; and though we are denied the advantage of surveying the objects in precisely the same order in which they met his view, the sketches from the life have been preserved, and it is a matter of secondary importance in what order we may stick them into our portfolio. A Fenélon or a Barthélémi might find in these volumes abundant materials for an historical romance, worthy, to say the least, of a place on the same shelf with Telemachus and Anarcharsis; and, admirable as Wieland's translation is, it is impossible not to regret that the three years which it cost him had not been given to a labour in which his genius might have been exercised as well as his ingenuity.

There is almost as little of politics in Lucian as in Horace; but the one was careful to avoid such topics, the other could not have found them had he had a mind. It is only in his contemptuous sketches of Roman manners that we trace that deep-rooted hatred of the Roman sway, which yielded to nothing but the longdeferred pleasure of bearing a part in its administration. His family was of Greek origin; and his anxiety to be considered as thoroughly a Greek, is betrayed in his frequent jokes upon himself as a Syrian, a semi-barbarian, a person whose proper habit ought to be the candys, about as distinctly (for who dreads a jest like a jester?) as in his direct and elaborate flatteries of the Greeks proper-above all, of the Athenian community. It was in vain for Hadrian and his successors to lavish every species of imperial patronage on the vainest of all human tribes; to hellenize dress, manners, and language; to disgust their own countrymen by proclaiming Grecian taste the sole standard of excellence in letters

as

as well as arts; and by surrounding their persons, wherever they moved, with secretaries, parasites, and paramours of the chosen race. The Austrian dynasty might as well hope to make themselves and their nation beloved beyond the Alps by pensioning prima donnas, and choosing their confessors at Milan or Bologna. Nothing could soften the bitterness of Greek recollections; new bridges, new temples, even new theatres were as much the emblems of their degradation as prætorian palaces or triumphal arches. They gazed, listened, applauded, and hated on as fervently as ever. Lucian, until, at the height of literary celebrity, he begins to have place in view, never alludes to the sovereignpeople without a sneer of far deeper spleen than any Greek absurdity whatever is able to provoke. But it is in his description of Rome itself that his feelings on this head come out the most fully: nor is it the least artful of his expedients that he puts all his abuse into the mouth of a Roman. But no Roman satirist ever seized on the same points which he delights to labour: they condemn patrician luxury and debauchery, but with him these are only secondary matters; the object of his relentless spleen is what every Roman author overflows with in his own person-the universal pride of the nation. A Roman, by patronizing an Attic philosopher, no more conciliated him, than he would have done so by fondling a lapdog from Melita, or a Thessalian palfrey. The air of perpetual, incontestable, serene superiority was what was intolerable; and the emigrant Abbé of Aix or Caen who has taught the language of the Great Nation in London or Vienna, or perhaps the Brahmin whom an appointment in Bishop's College has brought from Benares to Calcutta, may be among the persons most likely to sympathise with his views of the Eternal City.

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Not that he spares the patricians-even in Nigrinus. The interior of this ancient Platonist's simple dwelling forms a striking contrast to the prospect which he shows the satirist from its window. The old man is found with a book in his hand, and surrounded with busts of sages; a board covered with geometrical figures leans against the wall behind him, and on the table there is a sphere of reeds, to represent, as it seemed, the universe.' He has no attendant but a single boy, who does not immediately admit the visitor into this retreat. The philosopher, who had studied at Athens, greets Lucian with something like the warmth of an old fellow-collegian, and hastens, as Wieland expresses it, 'to lighten himself of his long-hoarded gall upon the frivolities and vices of his countrymen.' The Romans, says he, dare to speak truth once in their lives-when they make their wills; and what use do they make of this liberty? why, to command some favourite robe to be burnt with them, some particular slave to

keep

keep watch by the sepulchre, some particular garland to be hung about the urn! And this is the end of a life spent in being carried on soft litters to luxurious baths, slaves strutting before, and crying to the bearers to beware of the puddles, and gorging at banquets, and being visited at noon-day by physicians, and all the bustle and tumult of the hippodrome, all the noise about statutes to charioteers, and the naming of horses.* These are the people whom one must approach ες το περσικον. Kissing their vest, their hand, their bosom-never, oh, never, thank heaven! their lips; these are the gentry whose fingers are so overburthened with rings, whose hair is so fantastically curled out, who answer one's humblest salute by proxy, and who are accustomed, nevertheless, to see beggars become viceroys, and viceroys beggars, as at the shifting of a scene!-The old man proceeds to compare the repose of sober Athens with the pomp, glare, and tumult of the imperial metropolis; and one feels, in reading the passage, in every line of which we recognise the sadness wherewith disappointed age looks back to the season of youth and hope, as if we were listening to some hoary, unbeneficed Oxonian unburthening his heart in a garret of St. James's.

While the great world of Rome was thus pursuing the career of silken debauchery amidst the din of hireling applauses, and the literati of Athens were lounging in their beautiful porticos, and consuming life in the discussion of the merits and demerits of fantastic theories, it is curious indeed to look below the surface of things, and see what sentiments prevailed in the various classes of society concerning subjects which, however pride may seek to disguise it, have in all ages possessed the deepest interest for the human mind, educated or uneducated. It is from Lucian alone that we can gather any distinct notion of the religious con dition of the heathen world in the second century. The Christian authors condemn things in the mass, and justly; they understood not, or they disdained to describe, the strange and irreconcileable feuds which were secretly tearing in pieces what seemed, to distant eyes, an unbroken web of congenial abominations. It was the want of an universally recognised supreme ecclesiastical authority, which dealt the first deadly blow to the false church of heathenism ; and the lesson was not thrown away. Infidelity and superstition might have gone on for many more ages, understanding, bearing with, nay aiding each other; but the old superstition split into sects, and that enmity, where there was no common

*Perhaps some of our readers may be amused with hearing what sort of names were fashionable in the old Roman stud: Spon has published an inscription which gives, among others, Dædalus, Ajax, Romulus, Roman, Gætulian, Victor, Memnon, Wolf, Pard, Pegasus, Argo, Ether, Arrow, Bolt, Dart, Sparrow, Spider, and Flea; of which the majority were Africans.

authority

authority to control its energies, was hopeless. Lucian, like a cunning general, is careful to attack his foes separately. In the piece which he dedicates to Paphos or Delphi, he keeps clear of Heliopolis and Bombyce, as cautiously as Rabelais, had he written somewhat earlier, and with more serious purposes, would have avoided lashing Franciscans and Dominicans in the same romance. But it is easy to see which he considered as the more formidable enemy. The proper Greek mythology is to him the object of broad jesting, and a merry contempt-with very few exceptions, (the tract concerning Sacrifices is the chief of them,) he is not betrayed into anything like earnest indignation by its absurdities; and the piece which forms the main exception is, we may safely pronounce, from the internal evidence of style, among the earliest of his productions that have descended to us. It is in a far different mood that he deals with those dark Asiatic temples from whose recesses an older, severer, and, above all, more mysterious variety of the same blasphemous quackery was spreading its influence wider and wider every day over the Roman world, at the very moment when the pure light before which all these painted meteors alike were, ere long, to wax dim, had begun to manifest its growing splendour in the same quarter of the globe. His bitterness is betrayed by the gravity with which he paints the true Loretto of his time at Manbog; and we at once perceive the real state of relations between the European and the Asiatic systems of religious fraud in this remarkable particular, that he attacks systematically the ridiculous deities of the former, the audacious priests of the latter.

Dr. Franklin, by the way, treats, as a mere fiction, one circumstance in Lucian's description of the famous Hieropolitan temple, namely, the presence of lions and bears walking about and feeding quietly in the outer court of the goddess, in the midst of horses, oxen, and tame birds of various kinds; and Wieland thinks he solves the difficulty by suggesting that the cunning Galli disguised sheep and calves in the skins of wild beasts, and took care to arrange matters so that the uninitiated should not approach them too closely. We confess we are weak enough to think it far from impossible that the beasts were what they seemed; and perhaps Wieland's scepticism might have been more Pyrrhonic on this head, had he been acquainted with the tiger-packs, and certain other pets of the modern princes of Hindostan, to say nothing of a crowd of traditions too diverse in origin, and too uniform in essentials, to be easily dismissed as resting on mere invention. How should we guess, from mere European experience, to what extent the art of taming might be carried among a body of wealthy jugglers, devoting themselves, through a long succession of

ages,

ages, to the craft and traffic of popular deceit ?-But, not to go beyond Europe, or very recent times, had Wieland forgotten altogether the lion that lived four weeks in Rubens' chamber, when he was painting his 'Daniel'? There can be no doubt that the success of this piece of trickery, however accomplished, was perfect in its way, since Lucian mentions these monsters as coolly as he does the dimensions of the area in which he saw them; and who can doubt what the effect must have been on those who came prepared for every superstitious impression, of a spectacle which seemed to proclaim so distinctly, in the midst of so many congenial accompaniments, the actual presence of a deity, before whom every form of universal nature was subdued in the quiescence of a common awe?*

The satirist's unextinguishable hatred of those intrusive superstitions peeps out, even where we should have least expected anything of the kind, amidst the merriment and drollery of his famous Milesian tale, (the origin of all modern novels and romances,) where the thievery of the itinerant priests brings so many blows upon the innocent shoulders of their poor comrade the ass.

It is a favourite object of modern infidel writers to represent the progress of Christianity in those days as having been comparatively easy, in consequence of the utter previous demolition of the old heathen creed; but every circumstance in Lucian's picture of the religious condition of his time may be set up in evidence against them. We all know where, and among what classes of Gentile society, the true religion first established itself-and, surely, if we are to put any faith in this great painter of manners, among those classes in the Asiatic provinces of the empire, there was no tabula rasa of the popular mind ready and willing to receive any new impression that might chance to come. Every line speaks of a people sunk in abject subjection to a most elaborate system of superstition, hoary indeed with age, and high-blown with presumption, but not, therefore, the less on the alert, nor the less vigorous in its activity. His account of Alexander of Abonoteichos is, in every point of view, one of the most extraordinary documents to which the historian of human delusions can refer; and we venture to recommend that single tract to the serious attention of those who, though bearing the name of Christians, are

* Gilbert White is not ashamed to quote, upon a somewhat similar occasion, the words of sacred writ, every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind.' (St. James, iii. 7.) And, by the way, let us use the license of a note, to remark that White's delightful work is no longer shut up in a quarto. It is most pleasing to witness the exertions made by eminent writers of our time to produce food for the juvenile mind. Shall we be par doned for observing, that the Natural History of Selborne' ought to have a place among the household books of every English family?

not