Horace individual prevented from being less.' Greeley was one of our very great men, and one of the nation's great benefactors. I am glad that I, for one, am not obliged to-day to take back anything I ever said of him. I, for one, never forgot his great services in his frequent failings. I remembered always that during some twenty years the New York Tribune was the only conspicuous platform from which any distinct word on behalf of universal justice and freedom and humanity could get itself heard by the nation. His paper, conducted with such eminent ability and power, was always hospitable to every plea in behalf of downtrodden justice. When all other leading Whig and Democratic papers sneered at human rights, and made their silly jests at the anti-slavery movement, Horace Greeley's Tribune was always ready to give that cause an audience. He fought on that unpopular side like a hero during twenty long years, and fell at last, still soiled with the noble dust of that long struggle. He had the defects of his qualities; his faults came from exceeding strength of will, which often became wilfulness, and so 'toppled o'er on the other side;' for will, when it is too strong, is the source of many weaknesses. A wilful man is the fool of his own caprice and the cunning of others. Now, when the man is dead, all his merits are recognized, and his defects are no longer exaggerated, but are seen in their real perspective. Man for a moment becomes just to his brother, and this is better than mercy or charity, in such a case. I implore peace,' says the pathetic inscription on an Italian tombstone. 'I ask for justice,' is a nobler demand. man.' Over the grave, justice is done by man to THE TRIBUNE-FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF A BUSY LIFE. About five hundred names of subscribers had already been obtained for the Tribune-mainly by my warm personal and political friends Noah Cook and James Coggeshall before its first issue, whereof I printed five thousand, and nearly succeeded in giving away all of them that would not sell. I had type, but no presses; and so had to hire my press-work done by the "token;" my folding and mailing must have staggered me, but for the circumstance that I had but few papers to mail, and not very many to fold. The lack of the present machinery of railroads and expresses was a grave obstacle to the circulation of my paper outside of the city's suburbs; but I think its paid-for issues were two thousand at the close of the first week, and that they thenceforth increased pretty steadily at the rate of five hundred per week, till they reached ten thousand. My current expenses for the first week were about five hundred and twenty-five dollars; my receipts ninety-two dollars; and though the outgoes steadily, inevitably increased, the income increased in a still larger ratio, till it nearly balanced the former. But I was not made for a publisher; indeed, no man was ever qualified at once to edit and to publish a daily paper such as it must be to live in these times; and it was not till Mr. Thomas McElrath whom I had barely known as a member of the publishing firm over whose store I first set type in this city, but who was now a lawyer in good standing and practice - made me a voluntary and wholly unexpected proffer of partnership in my still struggling but hopeful enterprise, that it * April 10, 1841. might be considered fairly on its feet. He offered to invest two thousand dollars as an equivalent to whatever I had in the business, and to devote his time and energies to its management, on the basis of perfect equality in ownership and in sharing the proceeds This I very gladly accepted; and from that hour my load was palpably lightened. During the ten years or over that the Tribune was issued by Greeley & McElrath, my partner never once even indicated that my anti-Slavery, antiHanging, Socialist, and other frequent aberrations from the short and narrow path of Whig partisanship, were injurious to our common interest, though he must often have sorely felt that they were so; and never, except when I (rarely) drew from the common treasury more money than could well be spared, in order to help some needy friend whom he judged beyond help, did he even look grieved at anything I did. On the other hand, his business management of the concern, though never brilliant, nor specially energetic, was so safe and judicious that it gave me no trouble, and scarcely required of me a thought during that long era of all but unclouded prosperity. The transition from my four preceding years of incessant pecuniary anxiety, if not absolute embarrassment, was like escaping from the dungeon and the rack to freedom and sympathy. Henceforth, such rare pecuniary troubles as I encountered were the just penalty of my own folly in endorsing notes for persons who, in the nature of things, could not rationally be expected to pay them. But these penalties are not to be evaded by those who, soon after entering responsible life, 'go into business," as the phrase is, when it is inevitable that they must be thereby involved in debt. He who starts on the basis of dependence on his own proper resources, resolved to extend his business no further and no faster than his means will justify, may fairly refuse to lend what he needs in his own operations, or to indorse for others when he asks no one to indorse for him. But you cannot ask favors, and then churlishly refuse to grant any, borrow, and then frown upon whoever asks you to lend, seek indorsements, and then refuse to give any: and so the idle, the prodigal, the dissolute, with the thousands foredoomed by their own defects of capacity, of industry, or of management, to chronic bankruptcy, live upon the earnings of the capable, thrifty, and provident. Better wait five years to go into business with adequate means which are properly your own, than to rush in prematurely, trusting to loans, indorsements, and the forbearance of creditors, to help you through. I have squandered much hard-earned money in trying to help others who were already past help, when I not only might, but should, have saved most of it if I had never, needing help, sought and received it. As it is, I trust that my general obligation has been fully discharged. The Tribune, as it first appeared, was but the germ of what I sought to make it. No journal sold for a cent could ever be much more than a dry summary of the most important or the most interesting occurrences of the day; and such is not a newspaper, in the higher sense of the term. We need to know, not only what is done, but what is purposed and said, by those who sway the destinies of states and realms; and, to this end, the prompt perusal of the manifestoes of monarchs, presidents, ministers, legislators, etc., is indispensable. No man is even tolerably informed in our day who does not regularly "keep the run" of *** LABOR FROM POLITICAL ECONOMY. First of Man's material interests, most pervad of human faculties and sinews to create, educe, or shape articles required by his needs or tastes. Though Providence is benignant and Nature bounteous, so that it was possible, in the infancy of the race, that the few simple wants of a handful of savages might be fitfully, grudgingly satisfied from the spontaneous products of the earth; and though a thin population of savages is still enabled to subsist, on a few fertile tropical islands, without regular, systematic industry, their number being kept below the point of mutual starvation by incessant wars, by cannibalism, by infanticide, and by their unbounded licentiousness, the rule is all but inexorable that human existence, even, is dependent on human labor. To the race generally, to smaller communities, and to individuals, God proffers the stern alternative, Work or perish! Idlers and profligates are constantly dying out, leaving the earth peopled mainly by the offspring of the relatively industrious and frugal. Philanthropy may drop a tear by their unmarked graves; but the idle, thriftless, improvident tribes and classes will nevertheless disappear, leaving the earth to those who, by planting as well as by clearing away forests, and by tilling, irrigating, fertilizing, and beautifying the earth, prove themselves. children worthy of her bounty and her blessing. Even if all things were made common, and the idle welcomed to a perpetual feast upon the products of the toil of the diligent, still, the former would rapidly pass away, leaving few descendants, and the children of the latter would ultimately inherit the earth. events and opinions, through the daily perusal of at least one good journal; and the ready cavil that "no one can read" all that a great modern journaling, most essential, is LABOR, or the employment contains, only proves the ignorance or thougtlessness of the caviller. No one person is expected to take such an interest in the rise and fall of stocks, the markets for cotton, cattle, grain, and goods, the proceedings of Congress, Legislatures, and Courts, the politics of Europe, and the ever-shifting phases of Spanish-American anarchy, etc., etc., as would incite him to a daily perusal of the entire contents of a metropolitan city journal of the first rank. The idea is rather to embody in a single sheet the information daily required by all those who aim to keep "posted" on every important occurrence; so that the lawyer, the merchant, the banker, the forwarder, the economist, the author, the politician, etc., may find here whatever he needs to see, and be spared the trouble of looking elsewhere. A copy of a great morning journal now contains more matter than an average twelvemo volume, and its production costs far more, while it is sold for a fortieth or a fiftieth part of the volume's price. There is no other miracle of cheapness which at all approaches it. The Electric Telegraph has precluded the multiplication of journals in the great cities, by enormously increasing the cost of publishing each of them. The Tribune, for example, now pays more than one hundred thousand dollars per annum for intellectual labor (reporting included) in and about its office, and one hundred thousand dollars more for correspondence and telegraphing, in other words, for collecting and transmitting news. And, while its income has been largely increased from year to year, its expenses have inevitably been swelled even more rapidly; so that, at the close of 1866, in which its receipts had been over nine hundred thousand dollars, its expenses had been very nearly equal in amount, leaving no profit beyond a fair rent for the premises it owned and occupied. And yet its stockholders were satisfied that they had done a good business, that the increase in the patronage and value of the establishment amounted to a fair interest on their investment, and might well be accepted in lieu of a dividend. In the good time coming, with cheaper paper and less exorbitant charges for "cable despatches" from the Old World, they will doubtless reap where they have now faithfully sown. Yet they realize and accept the fact, that a journal radically hostile to the gainful arts whereby the cunning and powerful few live sumptuously without useful labor, and often amass wealth, by pandering to lawless sensuality and popular vice, can never hope to enrich its publishers so rapidly nor so vastly as though it had a soft side for the Liquor Traffic, and for all kindred allurements to carnal appetite and sensual indulgence. Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; riches take wings; the only earthly certainty is oblivion; no man can foresee what a day may bring forth; while those who cheer to-day will often curse tomorrow and yet I cherish the hope that the journal I projected and established will live and flourish long after I shall have mouldered into forgotten dust, being guided by a larger wisdom, a more unerring sagacity to discern the right, though not by a more unfaltering readiness to embrace and defend it at whatever personal cost; and that the stone which covers my ashes may bear to future eyes the still intelligible inscription, "Founder of The New York Tribune." Labor begins by producing and storing the food and fabrics required to shield men from the assaults of hunger and thirst, from storm and frost, from bleak winds and the austerity of seasons and climates; but it does not end here. Man's wants expand and multiply with his means of satisfying them. He who would once have deemed himself fortunate if provided with the means of satisfying his most urgent physical needs, and "passing rich on forty pounds a year," learns gradually, as his means increase, to number a stately mansion, with spacious substructures and grounds, a costly equipage, sumptuous furniture, rare pictures and statuary, plate and precious stones, among his positive needs. "The heart of man is never satisfied" with its worldly goods; and this is wisely ordered, that none should cease to struggle and aspire. The possessor of vast wealth seems more eager to increase it than his needy neighbor to escape from the squalid prison-house of abject want, The man of millions, just tottering on the brink of the grave, still schemes and contrives to double those millions, even when he knows that his hoard must soon pass to distant relatives to whose welfare he is utterly indifferent. The mania for heaping up riches, though it has a very material, tangible basis, outlives all rational motive and defies all sensible limitations. Many a thoroughly selfish person has risked and lost his life in eager pursuit of gain which he did not need and could not hope to enjoy. Yet, when poets, philanthropists, and divines, have said their worst of it, the love of personal acquisition remains the main-spring of most of the material good thus far achieved on this rugged, prosaic planet. Columbus, wearily bearing from court to court his earnest petition to be enabled to discover a new world, insisted on his claim to be made hereditary Lord High Admiral of that world, and to a tithe of all the profits that should flow from its acquisition. The great are rarely so great or the good so good that they choose to labor and dare entirely for the benefit of others; while, with the multitude, personal advantage is the sole incitement to continuous exertion. Man's natural love of ease and enjoyment is only overborne, in the general case, by his consciousness that through effort and self-denial lies the way to comfort and ease for his downhill of life and a more fortunate career for his children. Take away the inducements to industry and thrift afforded by the law which secures to each the ownership and enjoyment of his rightful gains, and, through universal poverty and ignorance, even Christendom would rapidly relapse into utter barbarism. But, though Industry is mainly selfish in its impulses, it is beneficent, and even moral, in its habitual influences and results. Closely scan any community, and you will trace its reprobates and criminals back to homes and haunts of youthful idleness. Of the hundred youth this day living in a rural village or school district, or on a city block, if it be found on inquiry that sixty are diligent, habitual workers, while the residue are growing up in idleness, broken only by brief and fitful spasms of industry, you may safely conclude that the sixty will become moral, useful, exemplary men and women, while the forty will make their way, through lives of vice and ignominy, to criminals', drunkards', or paupers' graves. The world is full of people who wander from place to place, whining for Something to Do," and begging or stealing their subsistence for want of work, whose fundamental misfortune is that they know how to do nothing, having been brought up to just that. They are leeches on the body politic, and must usually be supported by it in prison or poorhouse, and finally buried at its cost, mainly bẹcause their ignorant or vicious parents culpably failed to teach them or have them taught how to work. Now they will tell you, when in desperate need, that they are "willing to do anything"; but what avails that, since they know how to do nothing that is useful, or that any one wants to pay them for doing? There have been communities, and even races, that proclaimed it a religious and moral duty of parents to have each child taught some useful calling whereby an honest living would be wellnigh assured. That child might be the heir of vast wealth, or even of a kingdom; but that did not excuse him from learning how to earn his livelihood like a peasant. The Saracens and Moors, who bore the faith of Mohammed on their victorious lances to the very heart alike of Europe, Asia, and Africa, so trained their sons to practise and honor industry; unlike the Turks and Arabs, who, since the decay of the empires of Saladin and Haroun al Raschid, have inherited the possessions, but not the genius, of the earlier champions and disseminators of their faith. Greek and Roman civilization had previously rotted away, under the baneful influences of that contempt for and avoidance of labor which Slavery never fails to engender. Not till the diversification of industry, through the silent growth and diffusion of manufactures, had undermined and destroyed serfdom in Europe, was it possible to emancipate that continent from medieval ignorance and barbarism. Not while the world still waits for a more systematic, thorough enforcement of the principle that every child should in youth be trained to skill and efficiency in some department of useful, productive industry, can we hope to banish able-bodied Pauperism, with its attendant train of hideous vices and sufferings, from the civilized world. So long as children shall be allowed to grow up in idleness must our country, with most other countries, be overrun with beggars, thieves, and miserable wrecks of manhood as well as of womanhood. Every child should be trained to dexterity in some useful branch of productive industry, not in order that he shall certainly follow that pursuit, but that he may at all events be able to do so in case he shall fail in the more intellectual or artificial calling which he may prefer to it. Let him seek to be a doctor, lawyer, preacher, poet, if he will; but let him not stake his all on success in that pursuit, but have a second line to fall back upon if driven from his first. Let him be so reared and trained that he may enter, if he will, upon some intellectual calling in the sustaining consciousness that he need not debase himself, nor do violence to his convictions, in order to achieve success therein, since he can live and thrive in another (if you choose, humbler) vocation, if driven from that of his choice. This buttress to integrity, this assurance of self-respect, is to be found in a universal training to efficiency in Productive Labor. The world is full of misdirection and waste; but all the calamities and losses endured by mankind through frost, drouth, blight, hail, fires, earthquakes, inundations, are as nothing to those habitually suffered by them through human idleness and inefficiency, mainly caused (or excused) by lack of industrial training. It is quite within the truth to estimate that one-tenth of our people, in the average, are habitually idle because (as they say) they can find no employment. They look for work where it cannot be had. They seem to be, or they are, unable to do such as abundantly confronts and solicits them. Suppose these to average but one million able-bodied persons, and that their work is worth but one dollar each per day; our loss by involuntary idleness cannot be less than $300,000,000 per annum. I judge that it is actually $500,000,000. Many who stand waiting to be hired could earn from two to five dollars per day had they been properly trained to work. There is plenty of room higher up," said Daniel Webster, in response to an inquiry as to the prospects of a young man just entering upon the practice of law; and there is never a dearth of employment for men or women of signal capacity or skill. In this city, ten thousand women are always doing needlework for less than fifty cents per day, finding themselves; yet twice their number of capable, skilful seamstresses could find steady employment and good living in wealthy families at not less than one dollar per day over and above board and lodging. He who is a good blacksmith, a fair millwright, a tolerable wagonmaker, and can chop timber, make fence, and manage a small farm if required, is always sure of work and fair recompense; while he or she who can keep books or teach music fairly, but knows how to do nothing else, is in constant danger of falling into involuntary idleness and consequent beggary. It is a broad, general truth that no boy was ever yet inured to daily, systematic, productive labor in field or shop throughout the latter half of his minority, who did not prove a useful man, and was not able to find work whenever he wished it. Yet to the ample and constant employment of a whole community one prerequisite is indispensable, that a variety of pursuits shall have been created or naturalized therein. A people who have but a single source of profit are uniformly poor, not because that vocation is necessarily illchosen, but because no single calling can employ and reward the varied capacities of male and female, young and old, robust and feeble. Thus a lumbering or fishing region with us is apt to have a large proportion of needy inhabitants; and the same is true of a region exclusively devoted to cotton-growing or gold-mining. A diversity of pursuits is indispensable to general activity and enduring prosperity. Sixty or seventy years ago, what, was then the District, and is now the State, of Maine was a proverb in New England for the poverty of its people, mainly because they were so largely engaged in timber-cutting. The great grain-growing, wheat-exporting districts of the Russian empire have a poor and rude people for a like reason. Thus the industry of Massachusetts is immensely more productive per head than that of North Carolina, or even that of Indiana, as it will cease to be whenever manufactures shall have been diffused over our whole country, as they must and will be. In Massachusetts, half the women and nearly half the children add by their daily labor to the aggregate of realized wealth; in North Carolina and in Indiana, little wealth is produced save by the labor of men, including boys of fifteen or upward. When this disparity shall have ceased, its consequence will also disappear. And, though Man is first impelled to labor by the spur of material want, the movement outlasts the impulse in which it originated. The miser The miser toils, and schemes, and saves, with an eye single to his own profit or aggrandizement; but commodious public halls, grand hotels, breezy parks, vast libraries, noble colleges, are often endowed in his will or founded on his wealth. Whatever the past has bequeathed for our instruction, civilization, refinement, or comfort, was created for us by the saving, thrifty, provident minority of vanished generations, many of whom were despised and reviled through life as absorbed in selfishness and regardless of other than personal ends. How many of those who flippantly disparaged and contemned him while he lived have rendered to mankind such signal, abiding service as Stephen Girard or John Jacob Astor? ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY, THE late editor of the North American Review, was born in Beverley, Mass., March 19, 1811. He was graduated at Harvard in 1826; studel at the Cambridge Divinity School; remained a year at the college as mathematical tutor in 1882 and 1833; and was ordained in the latter year pastor of the South Congregational Church in Portsmouth, N. H., to which he is still attached. It In the course of his ministerial life he has published in 1844, Lectures on Christian Doctrine, and in 1847, Sermons of Consolation. He has written memoirs, and edited the writings of the Rev. Jason Whitman, James Kinnard, Jr., J. W. Foster, and Charles A. Cheever, M. D. His published sermons and pamphlets are numerous. is chiefly as a periodical writer that Mr. Peabody has become generally known. He was for several years one of the editors of the Christian Register, and has been for a long time a prominent contributor to the Christian Examiner and North American Review, of which he became the editor on the retirement of Mr. Francis Bowen, at the commencement of 1854,* and remained till 1861. Mr. Peabody's review articles cover most of the social and educational questions of the day, with the discussion of many topics of miscellaneous literature. He handles a ready and vigorous pen, is clear and animated in style, and well skilled in the arts of the reviewer. His address before the united literary societies of Dartmouth College on "the Uses of Classical Literature," is a suggestive analysis of this important question. Mr. Peabody was subsequently engaged in editing and preparing for the press, a Memoir of the late Gov. William Plumer of New Hampshire, from a manuscript life, left by his son the late Hon. William Plumer, which appeared in 1857. FIRST VIVID IMPRESSIONS IN THE ANCIENT CLASSICS.† The Greek and Roman authors lived in a newer, younger world than ours. They were in the process of learning many things now well known. They were taking first glances, with earnestness and wonder, at many things now old and trite,-no less worthy of admiration than they were then, but dropped from notice and neglected. They give us rarely-impressions, which we first impressions of many forms of nature and of life, can get nowhere else. They show us ideas, sentiments, and opinions in the process of formation, exhibit to us their initial elements,--reveal their history. They make known to us essential steps in human culture, which, in these days of more rapid progress, we stride over unmarked. They are thus invaluable aids in the study of the human mind, and of the intellectual history of the race,―in the analysis of ideas and opinions,—in ascertaining, apart from our artificial theories, the He who is emphatically a worker has time or taste for crime or vice. Nature is so profoundly imbued with integrity, so implacably hostile to unreality and sham, so inflexible in her resolve to give so much for so much, and to yield no more to whatever enticement or wheedling, that the worker, as worker, is well-nigh constrained to uprightness. The farmer or gardener may be tempted to cheat as a trafficker, - to sell honey that is half molasses, or milk that he has made sky-blue with water, yet even he knows better than to hope or seek to defraud Nature of so much as a farthing; for he feels that she will not allow it. Every thousand bushels of grain, wherever produced, cost just so much exertion of mind and muscle, and will be commanded by no less. Stupidity, seeking to dispense with the brain-work, may make them far too costly in muscular effort; but Nature fixes her price for them, and will accept no dime short of it. Work, wherever done, bears constant, emphatic testimony to the value, the necessity, of integrity and truth. To recapitulate the different editorships of the North American, from a passage to our hand in the recently published "Memoirs of Youth and Manhood," by Prof. Sidney Willard, of Harvard. Mr. William Tudor commenced the work in May, 1815, and edited it for two years. Then, from May, 1817, to March, 1818, inclusive, it was edited by Jared Sparks from May, 1818, to Oct. 1819, inclusive, by Edward T. Channing; from Jan. 1820, to Oct. 1823, inclusive, by Edward Everett; from Jan. 1824, to April, 1880, inclusive, by Jared Sparks; from July, 1830, to Oct. 1835, by Alexander H.Everett; from Jan. 1836, to Jan. 1843, by John G. Palfrey; from 1843 to 1853, by Francis Bowen; from 1854 to 1861, by Andrew P. Peabody. † From the address on the "Uses of Classical Literature." ultimate, essential facts in every department of nature and of human life. For these uses, the classies have only increased in value with the lapse of time, and must still grow more precious with every stage of human progress and refinement, so that classical literature must ever be a favorite handmaid of sound philosophy. On subjects of definite knowledge, what we call the progress of knowledge is, in one aspect, the growth of ignorance. As philosophy becomes more comprehensive, it becomes less minute. As it takes in broader fields of view, it takes less accurate cognizance of parts and details. Even language participates in this process. Names become more general. Definitions enumerate fewer particulars. What are called axioms, embrace no longer self-evident propositions alone, but those also, which have been so established by the long and general consent of mankind, that the proofs on which they rest, and the truths which they include, are not recurred to. A schoolboy now takes on trust, and never verifies, principles, which it cost ages of research to discover and mature. What styles itself analysis goes not back to the " primordia rerum." Now, the more rigid and minute our analysis, the more accurate of course our conceptions. Indeed, we do not fully understand general laws or comprehensive truths, until we have traced them out in detail, and seen them mirrored back from the particulars which they include. A whole can be faithfully studied only in its parts; and every part obeys the law, and bears the type of the system, to which it belongs, so that, the more numerous the parts with which we are conversant, the more profound, intimate, vivid, experimental, is our knowledge of the whole. This minute, exhausting analysis we may advantageously prosecute by the aid of ancient philosophy and science. Laugh as we may at the puerile theories in natural history, broached or endorsed by Aristotle and by Pliny, they often, by their detailed sketches of facts and phenomena, which we have left unexamined because we have thought them well known, invest common things with absorbing interest, as the exponents of far reaching truths and fundamental laws. In like manner, in Plato's theories of the universe and of the human soul, or in the ethical treatises of Cicero, though we detect in them much loose and vague speculation, and many notions which shun the better light of modern times, we often find the constituent elements of our own ideas,-the parent thoughts of our truest thoughts,-those ultimate facts in the outward and the spiritual universe, which suggest inquiry and precede theory. A similar train of remark applies emphatically to the departments of rhetoric and eloquence. I know of no modern analysis of the elements and laws of written or uttered discourse, which can bear a moment's comparison with those of Cicero or Quintilian. We may, indeed, have higher moral conceptions of the art of writing and of oratory than they had. We may perhaps hold forth a loftier aim. We may see more clearly than they did, the intrinsic diguity of the author's or the orator's vocation; and may feel, as none but a Christian can, of what incalculable moment for time and for eternity his influence may be. But these eighteen centuries have only generalized, without augmenting, the catalogue of Instruments by which mind is to act on mind, and heart on heart,--of the sources of argument and modes of appeal, which those master-rhetoricians defined in detail. Nor is it possible that, eighteen centuries hence, the "De Oratore" of Cicero should seem less perfect, or be less fruitful, or constitute a less essential part, than now, of the training of him, who would write what shall live, or utter what is worthy to be heard. Modern rhetoricians furnish us with weapons of forensic attack and defence, ready cast and shaped, and give us technical rules for their use. Cicero takes us to the mine and to the forge,-exhibits every stage of elaboration through which the weapons pass,--proves their temper, trics their edge for us. By his minute subdivision of the whole subject of oratory, by his detailed description of its kinds, its modes, and its instruments, by his thorough analysis of arguments, and of the sources whence they are drawn, he wrote in anticipation a perfect commentary on the precepts of succeeding rhetoricians; and we must look to him to test the principles and to authenticate the laws, which they lay down. And this preeminence belongs not to his transcendent genius alone; but is, to a great degree, to be traced to the fact, that he wrote when oratory as an art was young in Rome, and had perished before it grew old in Greece,when it had no established rules, no authoritative canons, no prescriptive forms, departure from which was high treason to the art, when therefore it was incumbent on the orator to prove, illustrate, and defend whatever rules or forms he might propose. The view of ancient literature now under consideration obviously extends itself to the whole field of poetry. In our habitual straining after the vast and grand, we pass by the poetry of common and little things, and are hardly aware how much there is worthy of song in daily and unnoticed scenes and events,--in the unenduring clouds, In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone The region of the partly known and dimly seen, the confines of the unexplored, constitute in all ages the poet's chosen field. But that field has been continually diminishing before the resistless progress of truth and fact. Science has measured the stars, sounded the sea, and made the ancient hills tell the story of their birth. Fancy now finds no hidingplace in grove or cavern,--no shrine so secluded, so full of religious awe, as to have been left unmeasured and uncatalogued. Poetry, impatient of the line and compass of exact science, is thus driven from almost every earthly covert; and dreary, prosaic fact, is fast establishing its undivided empire over land, and sea, and sky. It is therefore refreshing and kindling to go back in ancient song to The power, the beauty, and the majesty Then the world was young, and infant science had not learned to roam. Mystery brooded over the whole expanse of nature. Darkness was upon the face of the deep. The veil was unremoved from grotto and from forest. We often talk of the poetry of common life. What now styles itself thus, is, for the most part, stupid prose on stilts. The real poetry of common life was written when what is our common life was poetic, -heroic,-when our merest common-places of existence were rare and grand. The themes of ancient song are almost all of this class; and the great poems of antiquity derive an absorbing, undying interest and charm from the fact, that they bring out the wayside poetry of ordinary life, which gunpowder, steam, the loadstone, and the march of mind have banished from the present age, and which can never be written again unless the world strides. back to barbaris:n. The expedition of the Argonauts,-so vast that they paused two years on their |