ON THE LITERARY EyiuCaT/ON OF FORMER TIMES. 289 



faculties of the intellect. But for this, every thing would be doubt, and dark- 

 ness, and death-shade ; all knowledge would be traditionary, and all expe- 

 rience local ; civilized life would relapse into barbarism, and man would have 

 to run through his little, and comparatively insignificant round of existence, 

 the perpetual sport of ignorance and error, uninstructed by science, unregu- 

 lated by laws, and unconsoled by Revelation. Have 1 not, then, justly cha- 

 racterized it as the noblest art that has ever been invented by the unassisted 

 efforts of human understanding ? 



LECTURE XI. 



ON THE LITERARY EDUCATION OF FORMER TIMES ; AND ESPECIALLY THAT OP 



GREECE AND ROME. 



We have taken a brief survey of the nature of oral language, and of the 

 means devised in different ages and parts of the world to render the transi- 

 tory ideas it communicates permanent, by means of picturesque or symboli- 

 cal signs ; so that what is once spoken may conveniently be copied or writ- 

 ten down, and treasured up for future ages. 



It yet remains for us to take some notice of the chief methods, that have 

 been adopted in different eras, to turn this accumulating treasure or bank 

 of intellectual knowledge to the best account ; or, in other words, to develope 

 the mode of education adopted among those nations that have been most 

 celebrated for literary and scientific acquirements, especially in Greece and 

 Rome ; and to compare them with the means possessed in our own day, and 

 the general and laudable desire of improvement manifested in every quarter, 

 and prospective of no small addition to the best sort of wealth and prosperity 

 with which a nation can ever be enriched. 



We have already traced whatever degree of art or science may have de- 

 scended from the antediluvian to the postdiluvian race, through the narrow 

 link of human beings preserved in the ark, or whatever the earliest genera- 

 tions of the postdiluvians may have been able to strike out for themselves, to 

 the plains of Babylon as their centre ; and observed that, in their radiations 

 from this central point, they have been peculiarly influenced by the political 

 character of the people who cultivated them, and that of the country and the 

 climate in which they took up their abode. 



When, in the prosecution of the present subject, we shall come hereafter to 

 examine more particularly into the furniture and faculties with which the 

 mind is endowed, we shall have to show that its chief trains, as well of feel- 

 ings as of ideas, of passions, and rational pursuits, have derived a strong 

 tinge from these circumstances. 



Of the birth or first growth of the Grecian states we know little or nothing, 

 though we are made acquainted with the region from which they sprang. 

 The exquisite beauty of the country in which they had the good fortune to 

 fix themselves ; its rich and picturesque variety of hill and dale, the sponta- 

 neous fertility of its soil, the sweetness of its temperature, the almost un- 

 broken serenity of its skies, and the smooth and glassy sea that surrounded 

 and deeply indented its coasts, harmonized all the ruder passions, and called 

 forth the noblest and finest feelings of the soul. They soon became en- 

 amoured of the graceful and the beautiful ; their language was melody, and 

 they were led by nature to delight in music, poetry, and painting, from the 

 first. Hence these are the eldest employments we find them cultivating; the 

 earliest historians were their rhapsodists. Homer, Hesiod, and the writers 

 whose works constituted the very valuable Epic Cycle of Greece; a work, 

 unhappily, long lost to the world, and from which Statins is supposed to have 

 drawn the materials of his Thebaid.* Their earliest artists were their musi- 



* For the particulars of this celebrated work, see note in vol. ii. p. 262, 263, af the author's translation 

 of Lucretius. 



T 



