60 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



tenance of a priesthood, but of a less ancient, in fact, a new agent, 

 the Power of the Sword. Alexander wept because there were no 

 more worlds to conquer, and Rome once covered with her victo- 

 rious legions the greater part of the then known habitable globe. 

 Greece and Rome had their periods of increment and decay. Evi- 

 dently then, the spirit of Universal Annexation, the cultivation of 

 the military spirit is not the element destined to perpetuate the 

 existence, much less the greatness of any people. 



Is the stamp of vitality associated with peculiar forms of gov- 

 ernment ? Monarchs have done much for the promotion of the 

 fine arts. Statuary, poetry, architecture — which reacheti their 

 culminating point among the republican nations of the old world, 

 owe much to the patronage of modern tyrants. But there is 

 something in Life higher than the cultivation of the Ideal. The 

 poetry of existence is only an ornamental not an essential condi- 

 tion. Of most of these men it may be said, as Evelyn remarked 

 of Charles the 2nd, " He is governed by his passions, and by the 

 women and the rogues about him." So Louis 15th, plunged his 

 kingdom into the ruinous war of 1756, to gratify the anger of 

 Madame de Pompadour, who had been pointed at in an epigram; 

 while Charles IX., under the control of his mother, Catharine de 

 Medicis, madly gloated over the horrible slaughter in one night 

 of seventy thousand persons, merely because of the peculiarity of 

 their religious creed. Could this have occurred among an edu- 

 cated people 1 



Of the early social history of the republics of Greece we know 

 comparatively little. The denizens of its lovely isles and of the 

 continent where Athens was once the chief seat of polite learning, 

 as they gazed from Olympus or from the lofty Acropolis, crowned 

 by that magnificent temple which though now a ruin yet lives an 

 indestructible model for all successive ages, could not but be 

 enamoured of the grace and beauty of that picturesque region. 

 Music, poetry and painting took their tinge from sky, rock, wood 

 and water, distributed in graceful groups around them. 



Education among the Greeks appears to have been directed 

 rather to purposes of elegant accomplishment, than to what in 

 these utilitarian days we should designate as the acquisition of 

 useful knowledge. 



