OF SAVAGE AND CIVILIZED LIFE. 



419 



cresses, and no other drink than water. They were all educated at public schools, 

 provided by the state, and superintended by masters of the highest character 

 for sobriety and science ; who were enjoined by the constitution to use every 

 means of inspiring them with a love of virtue for its own sake, and an equal 

 abhorrence of vice. With the exception of the Macedonians, the Persians 

 are the only people who enacted a law against ingratitude, punishing with a 

 brand on the forehead every one who was convicted of so heinous a crime ; 

 a regulation which, I shrewdly suspect, if carried into execution in the pre- 

 sent day, would wofully disfigure the faces of great multitudes of our con- 

 temporaries. The ear of the prince, moreover, was open to the advice of 

 every one, but with this salutary limitation, to prevent the royal presence from 

 being pestered with political busy-bodies : the adviser in proposing his opi- 

 nion was placed upon an ingot of gold : if his counsel were found useful, the 

 ingot was his reward ; if trifling, or of no value, his reward was a public 

 whipping. 



So long as this system of simplicity and political jurisprudence continued, 

 the Persians were the most powerful people in the world ; but the temptations 

 of a warm luxurious climate, and the influx of enormous wealth, from the 

 conquest of surrounding countries, threw them gradually off their guard; 

 their discipline became relaxed, their laws slighted, their manners changed; 

 and the nation which was able to conquer Phrygia, Lydia, Egypt, and the 

 proud empire of Assyria, not two centuries afterward, fell prostrate before 

 an army of little more than thirty thousand Greeks, under the banners of 

 Alexander the Great. 



If we turn our attention to the Greeks who triumphed on this proud occa- 

 sion, their whole history will furnish us with a repetition of the same lesson. 

 The mildness of their climate, the luxuriance of their soil, the picturesque 

 beauty of their country, attuned all the rougher passions to harmony, and 

 gave birth to an equal mixture of the gentler and the sublimer virtues. Com- 

 posed of a variety of small separate states, united by a confederate tie, they 

 felt a generous rivalry to surpass each other in whatever could contribute to 

 enlarge or adorn the human understanding. And hence, while the well- 

 balanced liberty they possessed inspirited them to defend it against every 

 foreign aggression, in philosophy and ethics, in poetry and oratory, in music 

 and painting, in sculpture and architecture, they became models of excellence 

 for all other countries, and for all future ages. They, too, had their supersti- 

 tions and their mythology ; but the genius that pervaded every thing else per- 

 vaded these. A few grossnesses, indeed, which it is wonderful they should 

 ever have allowed, deformed the whole machinery : but every thing besides, 

 though wholly fictitious and ideal, was uniformly elegant, and for the most 

 part instructive. Every grove, and stream, and mountain was, in their 

 opinion, instinct with some present deity, and under his immediate protection; 

 and while the sacred heights of Olympus, the bright residence of their gods, 

 was peopled, not with savage heroes and bloody banquets, as among the 

 Scandinavians, but with the divinities of wit, and wisdom, and beauty — with 

 the Loves, the Graces, and the laughing Hours, and the sister train of Music 

 and Poetry. 



Such was Greece: but what is she nowl Her climate and bewitching 

 scenery are the same ; but her spirit and constitution are no more. — W^hat, 

 then, is she now ? or rather, what was she till of late 1 for the spirit of past 

 ages has again, in some measure, revived in several parts of her. A few of 

 her islands are under British protection ; and a few others are struggling to 

 throw off the yoke that has for ages equally subjugated them in body and in 

 mind. But, with the exception of these insular and more fortunate spots — 

 NANTES IN GURGiTE VASTo — what is shc uow ] Thc cyc sickens at the sight, 

 and the tongue falters while it tells the change. A land of slaves and of 

 barbarous usurpers ; where the scourge of the cold Ottoman flays at his will 

 the descendants of those who fell at Thermopylae, and triumphed at the 

 Granicus — while the tame victims that still submit to it, prove themselves 

 well worthy of the fate that has befallen them :— 



Dd2 



