secondary, and even third rate premiums for the same production. One point for which they have advertized premiums merits particular approbation; it is for the general neatness and order of gardens. This we consider an excellent plan, and likely, with the judicious distribution of premiums, to make complete practical gardeners, and to ensure to Scotland her established character in this particular.

We shall trespass on the patience of our readers with only one remark more as to the question, whether these Societies have taken the proper mode of attaining their avowed object, the promotion of horticulture? Every one knows that the true use of societies of this nature is to excite a taste in the wealthy for the pursuits of the Society, and to procure their patronage and sanction to the exertions of individuals. Viewing the subject in this light, we think both Societies have acted wisely, though differently, and that, as was said on another occasion, each is best in its own country. The splendid volumes of the London Society have been objected to as locking up valuable practical information from all who are not Fellows, or cannot purchase their works. But, whatever is truly valuable in a free and enlightened country soon finds its way to the public. The papers of these Societies form but a very trifling part of the services they may render the public; besides, a number of them are better enshrined in the pomp of a costly quarto for the rich, than transplanted into cheaper works to be bought by the practical man: some of them are frivolous, to say no worse, as one by the late President of the Royal Society in praise of an improvement by his gardener, which turns out, before the end of his paper, to be no improvement at all; others improper, as those by Messrs. Haworth and Salisbury, which are entirely botanical; and many trifling, as one forwarded by Sir John Sinclair, from Sir Brook Boothby, then at Brussels, to say, that he keeps under the red spider on his peach trees, by plucking off every leaf the moment he sees any on it,' &c. The Caledonian Memoirs likewise contain papers which the Society should not have admitted, of which Sir G. Mackenzie's on an economical hot-house, in which he proposes to ripen peaches in the dark, may be mentioned as an instance. Mr. Knight's papers on light and leaves appear to have been lost on this philosopher, as well as on Dr. Duncan, who had the ill fortune to laud him in one of his anniversary discourses.

But it is not (as we have said) by their papers that either Society will effect any great good. It is by the éclat and fashion which they will give to the study; and by bringing forward at their meetings, and through the influence of their premiums, the comforts and luxuries which horticulture can produce for the tables of the

wealthy.

:

wealthy. A demand will thus be created for superior operative gardeners, who will be more valued and better paid in proportion as they enlarge the enjoyments of their employers and as the improvement of the circumstances of any one class is always connected with that of the others, better vegetables and fruits will in time find their way to the lower classes; enjoyments will become comforts, and comforts, necessaries; and the beneficial impulse will be felt and acknowledged by the general mass of society.

IN

ART. VIII.—Abrégé de la Vie des plus illustres Philosophes de l'Antiquité. Ouvrage destiné à l'Education de la Jeunesse. Par F. de Salignac de la Motte-Fenélon. Nouv. Ed. 1820. Paris. N a work bearing such a title as that prefixed to the head of these remarks, it was easy to foresee whose character would furnish a prominent object of delineation: and, if we did not ap proach the portrait with all that reverence which the genius and virtues of the artist might seem to demand, we do not think the blame rests wholly with ourselves.

To that plastic intellect, by which alone any foreign literature, whether ancient or modern, can be seized and comprehended in its proper and national spirit, few people can make so little claim as the French. The most indulgent readers of Barthelemy (for we shall confine ourselves to a single branch of their aberrations) cannot always forbear to complain of that fine filagree work, which he has inlaid with the coarse ground of ancient republicanism and among the various sources of error, which make Voltaire the wonder of the half-learned, and not unfrequently the ridicule of the well-informed, must be reckoned that feebleness of intellectual vision, which so rarely allows him to see any object in its proper* dimensions that lies beyond the walls of Paris. To that portion of the French drama (and it is no inconsiderable one) which has been founded on Grecian history, and supported by Grecian characters, it is scarcely possible to allude, without calling up a spirit of mockery and derision. Rough heroes turned into coxcombs, and loquacious coquettes brought from a country where the portion of the female was seclusion, ignorance,

* Hence that mixture of intrepid ignorance' and impudence, with which he treats an author, whom he was utterly unable to read; whose poetical powers infinitely exceeded his own; and from whose writings, whatever may be their other defects, a reader does not rise, as from Voltaire's, with a mirth that inclines to sadness, and, what is still more dangerous, with a sadness that inclines to mirth. Ce poëte comique, qui n'est ni comique ni poëte, n'auroit pas été admis parmi nous à donner ses farces à la foire St. Laurent.' Such is the judgment which the writer of the prosing Henriade pronounces upon the author of the Knights, the Clouds, the Frogs and Birds!

and

and contempt, are among the most pardonable of its errors. How could a Frenchman of the old régime be made to understand, that where men can sacrifice to anibition, the altars of love stand neglected! We have too many sins of our own to answer upon the score of the Greek Comedy, to allow us to be very severe with the trespasses of others. And yet, to see a man of Brumoy's stamp taking the elder branch of that deserving family under his protection, and brushing her up for the polite circles of Paris, as a fine lady does her country cousin, with some consciousness of the creature's wild graces, yet with more fear of her bold step and unaccountable stare;-all this is such an effort of mistaken patronage and condescension as might create mirth in the most inflexible follower of Heracleitus, or even in Heracleitus himself. We have not time to compare with this the opposite course pursued by the English and the Germans, or to do justice to that spirit of enterprise, which, instead of contenting itself, like a small annuitant, on its own stock, endeavours with true commercial spirit to pour into its literature all the treasures of its neighbours. Rousseau, in picturing to himself the pleasures which unlimited wealth confers, could imagine none more delightful than that which enables its possessor to sail from shore to shore, and taste the peculiar fruits of every country in their native raciness and flavour. These two most distinguished of modern nations seem to be forming their idea of the pleasures of intellectual wealth upon the same plan. Unsatisfied with the resources, vast as they are, of their own literature, the great writers (and it should in fairness be added), the great readers of Germany and England make themselves masters, not merely of every language and tongue in their general bearings, but of their separate epochs and divisions, that they may seize with nicer discrimination, and taste with greater pungency of appetite the peculiar attributes and distinctions of each. Strong peculiarities of dialect and idiom, wide difference of customs and manners, striking varieties of religious and political relation-these, instead of being thwarted by the current of more general and habitual feelings, are the very object that animates pursuit, and the prize that repays it. With a daring intrepidity, they lift up the covering which lies upon the most distant periods of history, and leave each portion of literature to find its own proper station and value: with equal versatility, they turn from the gloomy mythology of the North to the glowing reveries of the East; and it is but a variation in their pleasures, to pass from the tenderness and sensibility of what is now termed the Romantic literature to the severe graces and masculine austerity of the classical. The fish, which assumed the colour of whatever object it came nearest to, may

be

be a fable in natural history, but it is none now in the intellectual history of man.

Something, we hope, has been said to justify the proposition with which we set out, and to explain in what sense our reverence for the author of Telemachus did not hinder us from surmising, that the taste of his nation might operate upon his own, and that the son of Sophroniscus might come out of his hands, not in, the strong outline and manly cast of his national character, but somewhat such as Mrs. Montague, in her earlier years, wished: to see him, with his whiskers clipt, his beard shorn, and such general smoothness of face and aspect, as might enveigle young ladies into the art of drawing, without feeling the difficulties of their progress. If the good sense of Fenelon has saved us from this mortification, it has only been to open upon us another source of disappointment, and to make us see, that though his good taste could preserve him from adapting the character of Socrates to the meridian of Paris, his learning was not sufficient to dispel some of those mistakes and errors with which the biography of that extraordinary man has usually been surrounded.

We shall make the reader but a very slender compensation by substituting our observations in place of those which would come recommended to him by the magic graces of Fenelon's style, but there are some lighter pieces of antiquity connected with the biography of Socrates, which do not appear to have fallen under the learned Archbishop's notice; and perhaps as much real instruction may be afforded by them as by the graver tone in which the life of Socrates is usually conducted. By resuming a train of thought in which we lately indulged, these will necessarily fall under our notice; and before we conclude, the reader will have occasion to see why, in alluding to the entertainments of the higher classes of the Athenians, our mirth deviated into something not unlike a sneer. We shall, without further preface, resume our inquiries into the 'Private manners of the Athenians,' as if two Numbers of our Journal had not since intervened.

What people like in action, they soon begin to like in description; a theory of banquets became therefore as much in request at Athens, as the practice. Time has fortunately preserved for us four of these amusing legacies, and we shall proceed to take a short review of each.

The Banquet of Plutarch is posterior in date as a compo

* If you design to make any proficiency in the art of drawing, I would advise you not to draw old men's heads. It was the rueful countenance of Socrates or Seneca, that first put me out of conceit with it. Had my papa given me the blooming faces of Adonis and Narcissus, I might have been a more apt scholar.'

Mrs. Montague's Letters, Vol. i. p. 14. sition,

sition, but earlier in reference than the other three. It ought to describe the state of manners in the times of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, for they are the principal guests at it, and the feast itself is given by a real member of the literary Pleiades, Periander the king of Cori Solen, the great legislator of Athens, forming one of the most prominent figures in the group, this banquet is not altogether unconnected with our present subject. A convivial party was not quite so easily arranged in those days as it is now; but embassies, visits to oracles, and a peculiar taste in monarchs, which led them to apply to learned men for assistance in the subjects of their epistolary correspondence, often threw men of merit together in large numbers. By one or other of these means, Æsop the fabulist and Anacharsis the Scythian are added to the present society. A physician (Diocles), a poet (Chersias), and Neiloxenus, a stranger from Naucratium, with a royal packet, which will be better understood hereafter, are among the decent gentlemanly kind of men (επιεικείς* ανδρες) so necessary as foils to the greater luminaries at a well-arranged feast. An admirable opportunity, and such as would satisfy the most passionate readers of romance, offered for introducing the celebrated lyrist, Arion. The narrator has made use of the circumstance to bring forward, not the lyrist himself, but all the stories he could collect on the subject of dolphins, and certainly, after the character here given of those tenants of the deep, no blame can attach to the Saints of the Romish church for making them, as they commonly did, in after-times, their substitutes for post-horses and packets. It is to the worthy son of Esculapius, anxious that matters of fact should be described as they really occurred,' that we are indebted for the materials which the great biographer of Charonea professes to have afterwards thrown into this narrative.

There is an amenity about this little performance, which makes us regret that we are obliged to quit it hastily. The petty bustle of town preparation antecedent to the quiet serenity of a sea-side retirement-the politeness of Periander, who, to obviate the inconveniencies of dust and summer heats, sends a carriage to convey each of the guests to the scene of action-Thales, like a true philosopher, preferring the use of his legs to this piece of royal luxury, and making his way over the quiet fields to the place of rendezvous--the amusing conversation with which himself and his companions beguile the road, all these open the way for the Banquet with touches as delightful (and we can say nothing more)

* In the Greek language of Plutarch's day (for it was otherwise in Aristotle's time) Eng held the middle place between Tvxwv (ordinary, common-place,) and naλoçrayados (a gentleman par excellence, nara Thу Teλeιav ageтny, as Aristotle, with his usual accuracy, expresses it.)

as