nians!-the man who proposed the last of all your expeditions, and betrayed your soldiers to the enemy! Why then the dead are dishonoured, and the living become dispirited, when they behold death the appointed prize of valour, and the memory of the dead fading away.

But, what is the most important of all, if your youths should inquire of you, upon what model they ought to form their conduct, what will you answer? For you well know, that it is not the Palæstras alone, nor the schools, nor musick, which instruct your youth, but much more the publick proclamations. Is any man, scandalous in his life, and odious for his vices, proclaimed in the theatre as having been crowned on account of his virtue, his general excellence and patriotism!-the youth who witnesses it is depraved. Does any profligate and abandoned libertine, like Ctesiphon, suffer punishment! -all other persons are instructed. Does a man, who has given a vote against what is honourable and just, upon his return home, attempt to teach his son? He, with good reason, will not listen; and that, which would otherwise be instruction, is justly termed importunity. Do you, therefore, give your votes not merely as deciding the present cause, but with a view to consequences-for your justification to those citizens, who are not now present, but who will demand an account from you of the judgment which you have pronounced. For you know full well, O Athenians! that the credit of the city will be such as is the character of the person who is crowned; and it is a disgrace for you to be likened, not to your ancestors, but to the cowardice of Demosthenes.'

[The Orator here notices their depraved usages, generally, as compared with the better times of the republick, which, not to swell our extract too much, we omit. He then resumes the particular subject thus.]

There once was-(I grieve so often to bring to mind the disasters of the city)-a private man here, who, for only attempting to sail away to Samos, was that very day condemned to death by the Senate of the Areiopagus as a traitor to his country. Another private person, having set sail for Rhodes, was lately brought to trial, because he could not face danger like a man, and the votes were even for him; but if one single vote had fallen short, he would have been banished, or put to death. Let us compare the present case. † A man of words, the cause of all our evils, has deserted his post

*This is not the only passage where honourable mention is made of Musick. Socrates, in Plato's preface to his Funeral Oration, accounts for his proficiency in speaking from the excellent tuition under which he was,-Aspasia instructing him in Rhetorick, and Connus in Musick. δυτοι γάρ μοι δύο εἰσὶ διδάσκαλοι—ὁ μὲν μουσικῆς, ἡ δὲ ρητορικής.

&c.

† Ανὴς ῥήτως, ἁπάντων τῶν κακῶν ἄιτιος, ἔλιπε μὲν τὴν ἀπὸ στρατοπέδου τάξιν,

in battle, and run away from the city,-and this man demands to be crowned, and thinks it fit that he should be proclaimed!-Will you not dismiss him as the common calamity of the Greeks, or seize and punish him as the plunderer of your affairs, * sailing through his public administration upon words? Remember also the season, at which you are giving your vote: In a few days the Pythian games are about to take place, and the assembly of the Greeks to be collected. Our city is scandalized on account of the measures of Demosthenes at this very crisis. And you will appear, if you should crown him, to be of the same mind with those who are violating the common peace; but if you act contrariwise, you will acquit the peo. ple of the charge.

Do you therefore deliberate, not as on behalf of a foreign country, but your own, and do not distribute your honours as of course, but discriminate, and set apart your rewards for more wor thy persons and men of better account. And make use not of your ears only, when you consult, but of your eyes, looking round amongst each other to see, what manner of persons they are, who are about to come forward in support of Demosthenes ;-whether his partners in the chase, or companions in exercises during his youth. But no,-by the Olympian Jupiter!-he has not been in the habit of hunting the wild boar, or attending to graces of the body, but he has been constantly practising arts to rob the wealthy of their estates. Bear, also, in mind his boastfulness, when he asserts, that he rescued Byzantium out of the gripe of Philip as ambassador, and drew off the Acarnanians from his cause, and roused the Thebans by his harangues. For he supposes that you are arriv ed at such a pitch of simplicity as to be gulled into a belief of all this, as if you were cherishing amongst you, not a vagabond of a common informer, but the goddess of persuasion herself.

But when, at the conclusion of his speech, he shall call before you, as advocates, the partakers of his bribes, believe that you see, upon this rostrum, where I am now standing to address you, drawn up in array against their effrontery, the great benefactors of their country-Solon, who adorned the democracy with the most excellent laws, a wise man, a good lawgiver, mildly, as befitted him, entreating you not to make the speeches of Demosthenes of more avail than your oaths and the laws;-Aristides too, who settled their contribu tions for the Greeks, and upon whose death the people portioned his daughters, exclaiming against the dishonour of justice, and demanding, if you are not ashamed that your ancestors were upon the very point of putting to death Arthmius of Zelia, who brought the money of the Persians into Greece, and journeyed in to our city being

ἐπ' ὀνομάτων διὰ τῆς πολιτείας πλέοντα, &c. The idioms of the languages agree here.

then a publick guest of the people of Athens, but did expel himfrom the city and all the dependencies of the Athenians, and that you are about to crown Demosthenes, who did not bring the money of the Persians into Greece, but himself received bribes, and moreover even now retains them, with a golden crown! Do you not imagine that Themistocles also, and those who fell at Marathon and at Platææ, and the very tombs of our ancestors, will raise a groan, if this man, who, avowedly siding with Barbarians, opposed the Greeks, shall be crowned?

I then, I call you to witness, ye Earth, and Sun!—and Virtue, and Intellect, and Education, by which we distinguish what is honourable from what is base,-have given my help and have spoken. And if I have conducted the accusation adequately, and in a manner worthy of the transgression of the laws, I have spoken as I wished-if imperfectly, then only as I have been able. But do you, both from what has been said, and what has been omitted, of yourselves, decide as is just and convenient on behalf of the country.'

We have, on more than one recent occasion, been called upon to remark, that there are amongst us, at present, sufficient indications of a false and perverted taste. Nor is it a matter of surprise. Persons, who despair of arriving at the destined point of eminence by the highway of nature and good sense, plunge into devious courses, like mariners at sea without a compass, throwing the reins upon the neck of a fiery and drunken imagination,-a headstrong and runaway fancy, under no guidance or discipline, and free from the control of reason. Those who, like the Carians and Mysians of old, according to Cicero, are of a gross and greasy appetite, can relish nothing but what is fit to lay before an alderman,-the well-fed, sleek, plump, stuffed and larded species of composition; whilst the delicate, the exquisite and refined, with an affected or morbid sensibility, require clouds of aromatick incense, and pungent odours to be continually applied, till their concentrated virtue tortures the sense. And this is not an affair of manner merely. A relish for false and glaring ornament, the dulcia vitia in expression, fully acquired, leads, by a necessary and immediate transition, to the introduction of unnatural incidents, far-fetched thoughts, and the numerous et cæteras of vitious composition.-Not that we would insinuate that the great body of public opinion is not sound,-to preserve which we unceasingly use our best endeavours,—or that there is now the same danger as formerly beset, not good taste

* See the remark of Longinus, already quoted. VOL. XXXVI. No. 72. Kk

merely, but the English language itself, from the desperate innovations of Johnson and Gibbon. In the conflict which then took place between the enemies and defenders of our mother tongue, the army of Englishmen,-the idiomatic writers-Addison, Dryden, Pope, Steele, Swift, and their associates,--had no snall advantage from being firmly intrenched behind the precedents and models of antiquity. Although the practice of Cicero may not always have been in perfect conformity with his best and most deliberate opinion,-owing, doubtless, in a great degree, to his prodigious ascendency in the art, even to superfluity and redundance; yet when we see, in his most highly finished and matured work on Composition (for what else is Oratory when we are speaking of such a master?), that there can be in his judgment no more capital fault than a wilful departure from accepted and idiomatical expresssion, '-* in dicendo vitium vel maximum esse, a vulgari genere orationis, atque a consuetudine communis sensus abhorrere;'-when, above all, the purity and simplicity of the universally admired Grecian models are attended to, the weight of such authority could not but have been of great avail on the side of the true men. But for this assistance, we confess that we think the issue of the contest between the canonical and apochryphal authors might have been more doubtful. The very assumption of innovation has an imposing air; and those who are either without any principles to regulate them, or are content with the first blush and appearance of things, readily take for granted that there is, in the departure from an established course, at least the merit of invention, and the recommendation of overcoming difficulties; whereas the pleasant part of the story is, that directly the reverse is the fact. We doubt not that there are in this country five hundred persons (probably fifty times the number) who could, if they thought it worth their while, in the course of a month, produce an Essay, which might be bound up in the next edition of the Rambler, and pass, with ordinary observers, for a paper of Johnson. But how few are there, who, if they were ever so anxious to do so, could rival the apparently easy and familiar, but really elaborate, grace and elegance of Addison, who in his way, and as far as he professes to go, can hardly be surpassed?

We here abstain from renewing the course of observation, which we fell into in our last Number, upon the application of the ancient, and particularly the Greek style to modern use, and have not space for farther examining the opinion of Hume, that if the manner of Demosthenes could be copied, its suc

* De orat. Lib. 1.

Nor

cess would be infallible over a modern assembly.' shall we waste our reader's time and our own by unnecessary, and, to those who had not already anticipated us we may add, unavailing, recommendations. We are in possession of no short or summary method of snatching this manner, though the French dash through the subject in a page or two, (Moyens d'acquerir la veritable eloquence.' Pref. Vol I. p. 71.); and Longinus himself seems to think (we own we cannot agree with him), that he has furnished a hint of some value, when he suggests that, in order to acquire the style of Demosthenes or Plato, a person should sit down and reflect how either the one or the other would have 'elevated' (sav) the subject. We shrewdly suspect that this would prove to be a barren and unprofitable. speculation, and that Horace is much nearer the truth, when he recommends, for the desired object of imitating the Grecian models, a daily and nightly perusal of them.'-But this in passing: For we purposely confine these, our concluding remarks, to one single point,-the safety with which these great masters of antiquity may be studied. Assuredly, and at all events, they will never mislead us into any error from which it may become necessary to retrace our steps, or undo what has been done. No person will acquire from them a craving and aching desire for the incessant application of noxious stimulants, the dramming of composition. In them will be found no luscious and surfeiting sweetness,-no misplaced and tawdry ornament,-no mawkish and distempered sentiment, no sparkling and extravagant conceits. Amongst them roses are not covered with vermilion to heighten their colour, or smothered with some nice titillating powder to add to their perfume. Theirs are the solid, vigorous, general, enduring beauties of Nature.-You may add if you please,-you may alter if you dare,-you may improve if you can;-but there stands the building, of ample and well-adjusted proportions, of subdued and retiring, but exquisite beauty, of severe but real grandeur, upon which twenty centuries have not been able to commit any ravage-nor shall it sink under the stroke of Time. To them, therefore, (Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes are

Essay on Eloquence.

Isocrates, we learn, was fifteen years in completing his principal Oration: Yet, so far was he from loading this his favourite daughter, patch by patch, with gorgeous apparel, so as to bring her out, at last, in a fuil birth-day suit of magnificent decoration, that one would rather think, from the perfect absence of all glitter, he had spent the time in undressing her.