contrary to the custom and practice of the court of Madrid. I saw the King after the signature of the treaty, but he said very little. The minister conducted all business with the same authority that Cardinal Richelieu exercised in France." The other sketch is from the pen of a writer sufficiently known among the French literati of the seventeenth century. "On some occasions," says Voiture, "the Duke d'Olivarez shewed that all the reasons of state which could be urged had less influence on his mind than religion, and that he chose to be a bad politician rather than a bad Christian. Even his enemies do not dispute his integrity. He has always been liberal of his own property, and frugal of that of the public; and consequently, after having had the disposal of so many millions, he is at present sixty thousand pounds sterling in debt. In his house, his expences, and his suite, as well as in his affability and facility of access, he differs in nothing from a private individual. In his youth he was very well shaped, tall, and handsome. His entrance on public affairs took place at a time when the genius of Spain seemed on the decline. That monarchy, elevated to the highest point of its greatness under Charles V., supported itself with difficulty under Philip II., and appeared on the wane under his successors. In all the pressure of public business, Olivarez was in the habit of going daily from Madrid to the Escurial, with two secretaries, in a very plain equipage; and the minister who put in motion so many armies, and brought into action so many thousands of men, had, in general, only three or four attendants. His government had the good fortune of not being stained with blood: his suspicions and his fears did not thin the court to fill the prisons; and the charge of high treason was not used by him as a pretext to gratify vindictive feeling. Whatever may have been said or done against him, he had no enemies but those of the state." ART. IV. FRIEDERICH SCHLEGEL'S Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur, &c.; i. e. Lectures on Antient and Modern Literature, delivered at Vienna in 1812, by FREDERICK SCHLEGEL. 12mo. 2 Vols. Vienna. · 1815. THE HE author of these Lectures is, we believe, the elder brother of Mr. Augustus William Schlegel, whose work on Dramatic Literature was noticed by us at some length in our Number for October last, p. 113; and, as he had priority in birth, so has he also been longer known to the world as an author. In 1795 he printed Essays on Greek Literature and Cultivation; and in 1809 he sent abroad a speculative book on the Language and Learning of the Hindoos, in which he takes the Sanskrit for an unmixed and self-derived language, whereas it includes more more symptoms of having resulted from the confluence of several distinct dialects. He now undertakes the condensation of his comprehensive acquaintance with the literature of the world into two duodecimo volumes; which comprize the substance and imitate the arrangement of sixteen lectures delivered at Vienna. They are dedicated by permission to the Prince of Metternich. The first lecture is introductory, and sketches a plan of the entire course. Remarks occur on the great influence of literature over the morality, the spirit, the character, the intellectual developement, the political conduct, and the final celebrity of nations; and governments are advised to go more steadily and systematically hand in hand with the instructors of the people. With the progress and diffusion of the art of reading, the literary priesthood, if we may so call the mass of authors, has superseded the oral priesthood, whose alliance was formerly the more important of the two to the magistrate. A history of Greek literature is also given, from its commencement to the time of Sophocles. It is well observed that the Greek and the English theatres agree in having chosen national events and characters for the theme of representation; and that they have thus concentrated popular attention on domestic incident, which is favourable to love of country, to originality of turn, and to public spirit. The Roman theatre, like the French, was never a school of patriotism. Warm exhortations are made to the Germans to assert more nationality of taste; to disdain the imitation of foreign models, and the celebration of classical heroes; and to seek for that uniting principle, which the political constitution of their country has not bestowed, in the praise of the same native heroes, and in the study of the same native poets and sages. A good work of art, like a fine landscape in the natural world, attaches successive generations of men to the country which endowed it with shape and features. The great influence of Greek and Roman literature on the culture of modern nations renders necessary some previous account of the classical models: but, as the influence of a still previous oriental literature, which the Jews had preserved, was not felt in the antient world until the Alexandrian version of their Scriptures was promulgated, these Hebrew remains, M. SCHLEGEL thinks, may best find a place in the survey of the Alexandrian writers. Concerning Homer, nothing new occurs. Lecture II. treats of the later Greek Literature, of Sophistry and Philosophy, and of the Peculiarities of the Alexandrian School. The author much adheres to the track laid down down in Scholl's Greek Literature, of which a careful account was given in our Ixxiiid volume, p. 449. The third lecture endeavours to define the Influence of the Greeks over the Romans, and includes a rapid Sketch of Roman Literature until the termination of its Augustan age. The principal peculiarity in this section is the depretiation of Cicero. Even if we could now afford to desist from the anxious study of his writings, because so large a portion of his sentiments and of his very phrases has passed into the daily literature of every European nation; and though we constantly drink of his waters, if not at the source, yet at the other end of the aqueduct; still there would be something of ingratitude in forgetting the great obligations which, at the revival of learning, the whole modern world owed to the general predilection for Cicero's writings. If his example has tended to infuse into our written language an amplification that is proper only in a speaker, yet he taught morality to be liberal, philosophy to be inquisitive, and statesmanship to regard opinion. Lecture IV. opens with Reflections on the short Duration of Roman Literature, which began with Cicero and ended with Tacitus. On the accession of Hadrian, a regular preference of the Greek language was established at court; and the consequence was that the empire was obliged to obey the public opinion of those who read and talked in Greek. Henceforwards, the writers at Alexandria swayed the Roman world. Concerning the sources of their religious opinions, the following curious passage occurs: (vol. i. p. 151.) Among the nations who partook this early oriental culture, the high antiquity of which is attested alike by monuments in Egypt, in Persia, and in India, the Persians were certainly most nearly allied to the Jews in the spirit of their traditions. From the Greeks, on the contrary, the Persians differed most widely. Under the mild sway of a friendly Persian sovereign, the dispersed nation of the Jews was allowed to re-assemble, and their ruined temple was rebuilt at the cost of the publie treasury: but the idolatrous worship of the Ægyptians was held in abhorrence by the Persians, not less than by the Jews. The yoke of the Persians was insupportable to the Egyptians, precisely because it aimed at the extirpation of their favourite superstitions and idolatries. Long before the Greek Gelo, in a treaty with the Carthaginians, induced by a philanthropy natural to his country, had exacted of them to abstain in future from human sacrifices, the Persian Emperor Darius, probably from religious considerations, had also prohibited these horrors. The Persians honoured and acknowleged the same God of light and truth that the Hebrews adored; although something that was invented and mythological might be mixed in their creed, and even several essential errors. The Holy Scriptures call Cyrus Cyrus "the anointed of the Lord;" which expression no warmth of gratitude would have applied to an idolatrous Pharaoh of Egypt. The entire habits of private life, and the formal constitutions of the Persian empire, were grounded on this sublime monotheism. The monarch, as the sun of justice, was to be a visible image of the supreme God, and of the eternal light; and the seven superior princes of the empire answered to the seven Amshaspands, or seven invisible planetary angels, who ruled by their influences this sublunary region of nature. Such points of view were strange to the Greeks. The same king of Syria, who so severely persecuted the Jews on account of their religion, and wanted to force them to adopt the Greek worship, was also a persecutor of the Persian religion. Even Alexander wished to root out an order of Magi, not merely to display his power, but because their influence counteracted his views. He was desirous of confounding the Greeks and Persians into one nation; and there was no middle course. Either the Greeks must have adopted fireworship, and have abandoned those temples the destruction of which by Xerxes they came to avenge; or the faith of Zoroaster was to be impugned, and a Greek or Ægyptian ritual substituted in its stead. The great error of the Persian system seems to have consisted in this, that to those tendencies or forces in nature, which operate against human happiness, they attributed an independence of the supreme God; and they assumed a twofold original fundamental being, or primæval cause, a good and a bad God.' Considerable difficulty, no doubt, is found in accounting for the identity of Persian and Jewish religion. Shall we introduce a new conjecture for the animadversion of this author, and of those enlightened Scripture-critics to whose speculations he attends? Suppose that Cyrus and Darius, who conquered the Persian empire, and there established the ascendancy of monotheism, were clan-chiefs of those Jews of whom entire tribes had been transported into Media by Tiglath-pileser, (2 Kings, xv. 29.) and by Shalmanezer, (2 Kings, xvii. 6.) three or four generations before Cyrus. The father of Cyrus is indeed called a Persian: but the words Persian and Parthian are originally derived from Prath, the name of the river Euphrates, and were used to designate all those nations who thence migrated and carried with them the Hebrew language. It appears from Herodotus (Clio 129.) that the Persians had been captives to the Assyrians, which agrees with the condition of the Jewish clans. Concerning Darius, it is the more probable that he was of Jewish descent, at least on his mother's side, because his father, (Herodotus, Thalia, 70.) though a Mede, was a commander of the Persians, and because he selected the Jew Daniel for his own prime minister. That Darius is the Ahasuerus of the book of Esther Esther has been established by Usher: for his earlier wife he had Vashti, or Atossa, a daughter of Cyrus; for his later wife he had Esther, or Artistona, of the royal family of Palestine; and it is expressly stated in the book of Esther (ch. ix. 1—6.) that the Jews were employed to conduct that proscription, which Herodotus (Thalia, 79.) describes by the name of the Magophonia, and which was yearly commemorated both in the Persian and the Jewish church. Arioch, a chieftain of the Elamites, which was a Jewish clan, who is known to have been on courteous terms with Daniel, (ch. ii. 24.) was intrusted with the conduct of this severe measure (Daniel, ch. ii. 14, 15.); and every thing conspires to prove that the Persian or Parthian empire, from the time of Cyrus to the conquest of Alexander, adopted Hebrew for its court-dialect, and acknowleged a religious allegiance to the high-priest at Jerusalem, analogous to that of some Chinese provinces for the Lama of Thibet. Peculiarities recorded in the Levitical law may have been retained in Palestine, which had been disused by the transplanted clans of Hebrews; and the name of Moses may never have acquired at Babylon the same veneration with that of Ezra, or Zoroaster as the Greeks call him: still it appears that Abraham was recognized as a common progenitor by the Parthian emperors, as well as by the kings of Palestine, and by all the clans originally subject to both. The fifth lecture is allotted to the Literature of Hindostan. The Sacontala, the Institutes of Menu, the Ramayuna of Valmiki, and other works which Sir W. Jones and Mr. Wilkins have made known to Europe, are curiously discussed. As in the Persian empire, so in Hindostan, two hostile primæval sects of fire-worshippers, or monotheists, and of idolaters, or polytheists, may be traced: but in India the eventual ascendancy was acquired by the idolaters, possibly in consequence of the massacre of Magi and expulsion of idolaters, carried into execution by Darius. Now that the Jewish Scriptures can be compared with the antient records of the Hindoos, we may hope to acquire a more complete historical knowlege of these early revolutions. In the sixth lecture, the writer comments on the Influence of Christianity over the Latin Language and Literature ; — it was not immediately favourable to good taste, but it sowed the seeds of modern culture. He then passes on to the history of poetry in the north, on which topic some extracts will be welcome to our readers. 6 As soon as the Romans make mention of the German nations, they notice the passion of that people for poetry. If those songs have perished which commemorated the deeds of Herman, and if those pro |