AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 51 



Deriving their alphabet from the Phoenicians, their melodious 

 and deeply significant language became the embodiment of the 

 poetry of Homer and the oratory of Demosthenes. Euripides 

 and Sophocles have left imperishable monuments oS dramatic 

 power, while Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Epicurus have left the 

 materials from which it is easy to determine not alone what waS 

 the influence of these great minds upon their own countrymen, 

 but from the fact that all successive ages have been employed in 

 their examination, what was their value. Grammar, rhetoric, 

 logic, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, constituted the 

 circle of seven liberal arts which formed the range of their study. 

 In one important respect they excelled modern nations, I allude 

 to the fact that next to the acquisition of a critical knowledge of 

 their own language, the object of Athenian education was to 

 develop the physical powers of the human body, to strengthen the 

 muscles by athletic exercises and public games. The result iS 

 seen in the artistic delineations yet remaining in the works of 

 their sculptors, of figures evidently drawn not from imagination 

 but from the life. Those schools were called Gymnasia, and upon 

 the necessity and importance of imitating their example, or rather 

 upon the degeneracy of the moderns who have neglected it, I for- 

 bear to enlarge. From tables embracing nine centuries, and ter- 

 minating 300 years before the commencement of the Christian 

 era, it would appear that out of a list of 863 distinguished names, 

 more than 400 were poets, painters and musicians, 152 were legis- 

 lators and philosophers, ninety-five were statuaries and sculptors, 

 twenty-eight were astronomers, mathematicians and geometers, but 

 of mechanics there were only nine, and of founders and metal- 

 lurgists only six. From these data it appears that among the 

 Greeks far more persons were engaged in poetry, music and paint- 

 ing, and in statuary and sculpture than in all the other classed 

 collectively. In the absence of the art of printing, their public 

 libraries hardly deserved the name. 



In genius and taste, perhaps, the Greeks have ever been unri- 

 valled. In learning, their profound and curious examination of 

 metaphysical subjects has never been surpassed. They indulged 

 the spirit of patriotism, of love of country, to an extent incom- 



