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the office of an Athenian Rhetor, he was acting consistently. Not contented to rest in speculation, he was experimentally illustrating his recommendation, "to call Antiquity from the old schools of Greece." In this way making manifest his own readiness to contribute a full contingent toward introducing into his native land customs and institutions, which might contest the superiority with those of Athens in her golden age of liberal Arts and Science, of Philosophy, Elocution, and Poetry. For those whom he describes in the work under review, 66 as the "Men who professed the study of Wisdom "and Eloquence" in that city, the 'Propes, seem to have been of two orders. larger number, as Pericles and Demosthenes, with his enlightened Co-rival, mixed personally in the Debates of the assembled Citizens: others, declining any share in the administration of the Commonwealth, neither filled any employment of public trust, nor spoke in the public Meetings. Like Isocrates and Aristides the Sophist, and others, instead of being practically eloquent, they discussed the interests of the State in writing, and so offered their advice to their fellow

The

citizens on measures of importance, and sometimes by the same means counselled foreign Potentates and foreign Nations. It was to designate Dio Chrysostom as belonging to the class of Politicians who abstracted themselves from active business and from official eminence, or state-dignities, that in this Speech our Authour styles him "a "private Oratour." His mind was tenacious of this youthful attachment to Greece: it betrays itself continually. With all his fondness for Grecian Philosophy and Literature, Cicero has nowhere given a more emphatic testimony of grateful acknowlegement toward Athens, as the preceptress in civilization, than MILTON's commendation, that it was she who had humanized the western world: "to her polite Wisdom and Letters "we owe that we are not yet Goths and Jutlanders," is his forcible phrase. It cannot, indeed, but be evident to the most inattentive observer, how constantly he cherished the memory of her departed œconomy while drawing out a prospectus for the right Education of ingenuous youth. This would have been clear, though we did not know that he had told his Athenian Friend

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Philaras, that his acquisitions in classic Learning, such as they were, he ascribed chiefly to a sedulous cultivation of the Greek Writers in the early part of life*. He even sighed for the expulsion of the Turks, and the independence of Greece, with the re-establishment of Grecian Liberty; wherefore in the same Letter he breathes this earnest wish"Quod si mihi tanta vis dicendi accepta ab "illis et quasi transfusa inesset, ut exercitus "nostros et classes ad liberandam ab Ottomannico tyranno Græciam, Eloquentiæ patriam, excitare possem, ad quod facinus egregium nostras

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opes pene implorare videris, facerem pro"fecto id quo nihil mihi antiquius aut in vo"tis prius esset. Quid enim vel fortissimi "olim Viri, vel eloquentissimi gloriosius aut

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se dignius esse duxerunt, quam vel sua“ dendo vel fortiter faciendo ἐλευθερους καὶ ἀυποιείσθαι τοὺς Ἕλληνας ? Verum et

τονόμους

"Quâ ex urbe cum tot Viri disertissimi prodierint, eorum "potissimùm scriptis ab adolescentiâ pervolvendis, didicisse 66 me libens fateor quicquid ego in Literis profeci."—And of the praise this Correspondent had given to his first Defensio, says, " et ipsa Græcia, ipsæ Athenæ Atticæ, quasi jam « redivivæ, nobilissimi alumni sui Philaræ voce, applau"sere."-Pr. W. II. 341, ed. 1788.

he

"aliud quiddam præterea tentandum est, "meâ quidem sententiâ longe maximum, ut

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quis antiquam in animis Græcorum virtu"tem, industriam, laborum tolerantiam, an

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tiqua illa studia dicendo, suscitare atque "accendere possit." (Epist. Fam.) In Iconoclastes, he glanced at this desired resuscitation of the Greeks once more. Charles, he complains, had demanded and the Parliament had granted him a larger sum of money than would have "bought the Turk out "of Morea, and set free all the Greeks." (Sect. 10)-Without any doubt, both Letters and Poetry sustained no slight loss by the sudden termination to his travels before he had visited Greece and Sicily.

The primordial seeds of Paradise Lost are still in existence as the elements of a Tragedy, which he once projected to have wrought up with the machinery of the AtheIn the same rude and indi

nian Stage.

gested mass, " Moses προλογίζει.” From another of these disjecti membra Poeta, we find that he purposed to introduce the Christian Virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity, for supernatural agents; on the authority, as I suppose, of Eschylus, who impersonated

Force and Strength in his scene. The part of the Chorus was to have been supplied by Angels. Recollections of antient Greece seem to have been rarely absent from his thoughts. In the long list he left behind him of incidents gathered from our early Annalists, singular and eventful enough to furnish arguments for dramatic story, there is the subsequent memorandum for a close parallel with Homer's Hero in the Odyssey: "A He"roicall Poem may be founded somewhere in

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Alfred's reigne, especially at his issuing out "of Edilingsey on the Danes, whose actions "are well like those of Ulysses." The same impulse gave birth in after life to Samson Agonistes. This production of his riper years he moulded professedly and punctiliously to Grecian proportions: whence any Man unacquainted with the language of his originals, may, as it has been remarked by one well qualified to judge*, form to himself a much juster idea of the beauties and perfections of the Greek Tragedians than from Translation.

We ought to regard him in this rhetorical exercise as scarely less studious of these fa

* Gilbert West.