Where each old poetic mountain Every shade and hallow'd fountain Murmur'd deep a solemn sound : And coward vice, that revels in her chains. They sought, oh Albion! next-thy sea-encircled coast! XXVII. Gray. It is impossible for any one, that has contemplated the ignorance of savage, or the vanity of half civilized nations, to contemplate the map of Greece without the liveliest emotion. There is an eloquence, residing in the very lines and letters of its various parts. Contemplated, as a whole, what a magnificent mental panorama is presented to the imagination! The very thought of this country refreshes the soul;-particularly in an age, when wealth is the great god of almost every man's idolatry; from the beggar, who wants every thing, to the peer, who wants nothing essential to the purposes of life, but the mind to estimate the grace, and the heart to enjoy the bounty of his fortune. If, in the map of the world, from the peninsulas, promontories, islands, and coasts of Greece, we turn to the north-west coast of Africa, all our associations, except those attached to Carthage and the temple of Jupiter Ammon, present images of ferocious rapacity. Scythia, to the north, awakens some recollections of a people hardy, but rude and VOL. IV. H uncivilized. Asia presents pictures of despotism; and America detached groups of savages, in comparison with whom the Goths, the Huns and the Vandals, were Greeks and Romans. Greece, then, monopolizes most of our ideas of taste, elegance, patriotism, the elegant arts, and the domestic virtues. As to the Archipelago, there is not such a cluster of islands in the world. Let us, for a moment, cast our eyes upon the Archipelago, of the North Pacific; or of the Indian Ocean :-what nests of comparative barbarians monopolize their soils and climates! In those of Greece what beauty! what grace! what science! and, above all, what a multitude of virtues! There is scarcely a city, or even a town, that is not hallowed by some great action; by the memory of some model of art; or by having been the cradle, or the grave, of an eminent man. Not a mountain is there, that has not been celebrated; and not a river, but what is almost as familiar to us, as the Wye, the Avon, the Thames, or the Severn. In fact, the islands, capes, bays, and promontories of Greece are the mental properties of the whole world. To this splendid country Rome is indebted for many of its best laws; and for almost the entire circuit of its literature. For Roman literature is little more than Greek; divested of the Greek dress. Even the generals of Rome imitated the generals of Greece. Who has not read, and who has not admired, the example of arrogance, afforded to Antiochus by Popilius?-Yet the thought was originally taken from Greece. In the Peloponnesan war, the Spartans and Athenians equally sought an alliance with the Persians. When the Athenian ambassador had finished his oration, the Spartan drew two lines;-one crooked and the other straight;-but both finishing in the same point.-These lines the Spartan exhibited to Tissaphernes, and exclaimed "chuse." CHAPTER IX. Places thus impart a charm to the pages of poets and historians. Who, that has perused the Greek and Roman writers with pleasure, would not read them with still greater delight on the spots, which they commemorate; or in the places, in which they were written. Hence it would be a gratification of the first order to read Virgil's Episode of Orpheus and Eurydice on the banks of the Hæmus:-Lucan's Pharsalia in Thessaly; Cæsar's Commentaries on the Lake of Geneva; and Plutarch's Lives in Rome, at Athens, at Corinth, on the hillocks of Sparta, or upon the plains of Mantinea. Former ages, says Quintilian, seem as if they had laboured only for us:-antiquity having left us so many examples, that we have little more to do, than quietly enjoy the advantages, she has bequeathed to us. If such remarks were applicable in the time of Quintilian, how much more so are they in the present! When we stand among the African architraves, capitals and pillars, sent to the Regent of England by the Dey of Tripoli:-when we cast our eyes on the Rosetta stone, commemorating the coronation of Ptolemy the Fifth, at Memphis: and when we behold the bust of Memnon, the younger, once decorating those ruins, which, having survived the art that formed them, are still more magnificent in decay, than the noblest of modern buildings;-the imagination supplies the deficiencies of barbarism, and the accidents and wastes of time. When from the Theseus we turn to the Ilyssus; thence to the sarcophagus of Alexander; and lastly to the Portland vase; the mind transports itself to distant ages, and imparts a glow of eloquence, worthy the most poetical of poets. II. At Parma we may study the masterpieces of Corregio;-at Bologna those of the Carracchi;-and at Venice those of Titian, Tintoret and Paul Veronese. -But at Rome pictures present only subordinate attractions. There we trace the glory and decay of empires: for, from the monuments of Roman authority, we revert to the dynasties of Macedon, Persia, Babylon, Assyria, and the still more ancient ones of China. In imagination, we behold the mud palace of Romulus, the farm of Cincinnatus, and the cottage of Curius; which we contrast with the "marble city of Augustus," or associate the whole with the triumph of Aurelian, made glorious to the Romans, but melancholy to posterity, by captives, belonging to no less than fifteen different nations. Heightened by these moral and classical associations, we seem to be cotemporary with all ages; and every spectacle, familiar to our youth, seems to be renewed; from the first triumph of Tarquinius Priscus to those of Diocletian and Maximian ;-the last celebrated in Rome. Thence to that of Belisarius, the last recorded to have been witnessed at Constantinople.-Spectacles exceeded only by the splendid march of Xerxes into Greece through Asia Minor; or by Alexander's magnificent entry into Babylon. - But what a reverse presents itself in the subsequent devastations of the Goths: when Totilas having sacked the city, the wife of Boethius, and many of the most illustrious ladies in Rome, were reduced to such distress, that they begged their bread from door to door. Nor, since intellectual power stands in the first rank of Nature's phenomena,—do we reflect without scorn and derision, that in a time, when Rome was threatened with a famine,' three thousand female dancers, and many other persons connected with theatrical exhibitions, were allowed to remain ; when vast numbers of persons, who professed the liberal arts, were desired by a public edict to withdraw! III. When Da Rosa entered Genoa, he remembered the history of the time, when the families of Spinola and Doria filled the whole city with slaughter and dismay. When, for four and twenty days, they fought in the streets, and raised battering rams against each other's 1 Ammian. Marcellin. lib. iv. |