S20 



ON THE LITERARY EDUCATION 



to develope the mode of education adopted among those nations that hav^ 

 been most celebrated for hterary and scientific acquirements, especially in 

 Greece and Rome ; and to compare them with the means possessed iri 

 our own day, and the general and laudable desire of improvement mani- 

 fested 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 nar- 

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

 generations of the postdiluvians may have been able to strike out for them- 

 selves, 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 here- 

 after 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 feelings as of ideas, of passions and rational pursuits, have de- 

 rived 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 spontaneous fertihty of its soil, the sweetness of its temperature, the 

 almost unbroken serenity of its skies, and the smooth and glassy sea that 

 surrounded and deeply indented its coasts, harmonized all the ruder pas- 

 sions, and called forth the noblest and finest feehngs of the soul. They 

 soon began enamoured 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 Statius is supposed to have drawn the materials of his Thebaid.* 

 Their earhest artists were their musicians ; as Orpheus, and the priests of 

 Cybele, and others of like power ; the first of whom is represented not only 

 as having harmonized the passions of men, but broken the ferocity of the 

 beasts of the forest, and even tranquillized the tortures of the infernal re- 

 gions. And of their early knowledge of colours and the art of desigmng 

 we have a suflicient proof in various passages of the Cyclic poets that 

 have reached us ; while in Homer we have occasional references to their 

 being applied, and by ladies, through the medium of tapestry, to the most 

 important subjects of history. Thus Iris, in the third book of the Ihad, 

 finds Heleri occupied in representing in tapestry the evils which the Greeks 

 and Trojans had suflTered on her account in their battles ; and when An- 

 dromache first heard the melancholy tidings of the death of Hector, she 

 was engaged in a similar occupation. These, indeed, were employments 

 of Trojan ladies, but what was common to them must have been common, 

 also, to their neighbours of Greece. 



Among the Greek states, however, that of Athens was by far the most 



* For the particulars- of this celebratea work, see note in vol. ii. pp. 262, 263, of the au- 

 thor's Translation of Lucretius. 



