shall cite two: Una (neque multorum annorum spatio divisa) ætas per divini spiritus viros, Eschylum, Sophoclem, Euripidem, illustravit Tragediam. Not that this trinity of poets was so contemporary as brothers are; but they were contemporary as youthful uncles in relation to elderly nephews: Eschylus was viewed as a senior by Sophocles, Sophocles by Euripides: but all might by possibility have met together (what a constellation!) at the same table. Again, says Paterculus, Quid ante Isocratem, quid post ejus auditores, clarum in oratoribus fuit? Nothing of any distinction in oratory before Isocrates, nothing after his personal audience. So confined was that orbit within which the perfection of Greek tragedy, within which the perfection of Greek eloquence revolved. The same law, the same strong tendency, he insists, is illus trated in the different schools of Greek comedy; and again of Greek philosophy. Nay, it is more extensively illustrated amongst Greek artists in general: "Hoc idem evenisse grammaticis, plastis, pictoribus, scalptoribus, quisquis temporum institerit notis -reperiet."

From Greece Paterculus translates the question to his own country in the following pointed manner: summing up the whole doctrine and re-affirming it in a form almost startling and questionable by its rigour-" Adeo artatum angustiis temporum," so punctually concentrated was all merit within the closest limits of time, "ut nemo memoria dignus, alter ab altero videri nequiverint:" no man of any consideration but he might have had ocular cognizance of all others in his own field who attained to distinction. He adds-" Neque hoc in Græcis quam in Romanis evenit magis."

His illustrations from the Roman literature we do not mean to follow: one only, as requisite for our purpose, we cite:" Oratio, ac vis forensis, perfectumque prosa eloquentiæ decus (pace P. Crassi et Gracchorum dixe rim) ita universa sub principe operis sui erupit Tullio, ut mirari neminem possis nisi aut ab illo visum, aut qui illum viderit." This is said with epi grammatic point: the perfection of prose, and the brilliancy of style as an artificial accomplishment, was so identified with Cicero's generation, that no distinguished artist, none whom

you could greatly admire, but might be called his contemporary; none so much his senior, but Cicero might have seen him-none so much his junior, but he might have seen Cicero. It is true that Crassus, in Cicero's infancy, and the two Gracchi, in the infancy of Crassus, (neither of whom, therefore, could have been seen by Cicero,) were memorably potent as orators; in fact, for tragical results to themselves, (which, by the way, was the universal destiny of great Roman orators;) and nobody was more sensible of their majestic pretensions, merely as orators, than Cicero himself, who has, accordingly, made Crassus and Antony predominant speakers in his splendid dialogues De Oratore. But they were merely demoniac powers, not artists. And with respect to these early orators, (as also with respect to some others, whose names we have omitted,) Paterculus has made a special reservation. So that he had not at all overlooked the claims of these great men; but he did not feel that any real exception to his general law was created by orators, who were, indeed, wild organs of party rage or popular frenzy, but who wilfully disdained to connect themselves with the refinements of literature. Such orators did not regard themselves as intellectual, but as political, powers. Confining himself to oratory, and to the perfection of prose composition, written or spoken, in the sense of great literary accomplishments, beginning in natural power but perfected by art, Paterculus stands to his assertion-that this mode of human genius had so crowded its development within the brief circuit of Cicero's life, (threescore years and three,) as that the total series of Roman orators formed a sort of circle centring in that supreme orator's person, such as, in modern times, we might call an electrical circle; each link of the chain having been either electrified by Cicero, or having electrified him. Seneca, with great modesty, repeats the very same assertion in other words:

"Quicquid Romana facundia habuit, quod insolenti Græciæ aut opponat aut præferat, circa Ciceronem effloruit." A most ingenuous and selfforgetting homage in him; for a nobler master of thinking than himself, Paganism has not to show, nor when the cant of criticism has done its worst

a more brilliant master of composition. And were his rule construed literally, it would exclude the two Plinies, the two Senecas, Tacitus, Quinctilian, and others from the matricula of Roman eloquence. Not one of these men could have seen Cicero; all were divided by more than one generation; and yet, most unquestionably, though all were too reason. able to have fancied themselves any match for the almighty orator in public speaking, yet not one but was an equally accomplished artist in written composition, and under a law of arti ficial style far more difficult to

manage.

However, with the proper allow ances for too unmodified a form of expression, we must allow that the singular phenomenon first noticed by Paterculus, as connecting itself with the manifestations of human genius, is sufficiently established by so much of human history as even he had witnessed. For, if it should be alleged that political changes accounted for the extinction of oral eloquence, concurrently with the death of Cicero, still there are cases more than enough, even in the poetry of both Greece and Rome, to say nothing of the arts, which bear out the general fact of human genius coming forward by insulated groups and clusters; or, if Pagan ages had left that point doubtful, we have since witnessed Christian repetitions of the truth on the very widest scale. The Italian age of Leo X. in the fifteenth century, the French age of Louis XIV. in the seventeenth century, the German age, commencing with Kant, Wieland, Goëthe, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-all illustrate the tendency to these intermitting paroxysms of intellectual energy. lightning and the storm seem to have made the circuit of the whole European heavens, to have formed vortices successively in every civilized land, and to have discharged themselves, by turns, from every quarter of the atmosphere. In our own country there have been three such gatherings of intellectual power:-1st, the age of Shakspeare, Spenser, and the great school of dramatists that were already dying out in the latter days of Ben Jonson, (1636,) and were finally extinguished by the great civil commotions beginning in 1642; 2dly,

The

the age of Queen Anne and George I.; 3dly, the age commencing with Cowper, partially roused, perhaps, by the American war, and afterwards so powerfully stimulated (as was the corresponding era of Kant and Wieland) by the French Revolution. This last volcanic eruption of the British genius has displayed enormous power and splendour. Let malice and the base detraction of contemporary jealousy say what it will, greater originality of genius, more expansive variety of talent, never was exhibited than in our own country since the year 1793. Every mode of excellence, except only dramatic excellence, (in which we have nothing modern to place by the side of Schiller's Wallenstein,) has been revealed in dazzling lustre. And he that denies it may he be suffocated by his own bilious envy!

But the point upon which we wish to fix the reader's attention, in citing this interesting observation of the Roman officer, and the reason for which we have cited it at all, is not so much for the mere fact of these spring-tides occurring in the manifestations of human genius, intermitting pulses (so to speak) in human energies, as the psychological peculiarity which seems to affect the cycle of their recurrences. Paterculus occupies himself chiefly with the causes of such phenomena; and one main cause he suggests as lying in the emulation which possesses men when once a specific direction has been impressed upon the public competitions. This, no doubt, is one of the causes. But a more powerful cause, perhaps, lies in a principle of union than in any principle of division amongst men viz. in the principle of sympathy. The great Italian painters, for instance, were doubtless evoked in such crowds by the action of this principle. To hear the buzz of idolizing admiration settling for years upon particular works of art and artists-kindles something better than merely the ambition and rivalship of men; it kindles feelings happier and more favourable to excellence-viz. genial love and comprehension of the qualities fitted to stir so profound and lasting an emotion. This contagion of sympathy runs electrically through society, searches high and low for congenial powers, and suffers none to lurk unknown to the possessor. A vortex is created which

statesman, captain-general, administrator of the national resources, can be mentioned as approaching to these two men in splendour of reputation, or even in real merit. Pisistratus was too far back: Alcibiades, who might (chronologically speaking) have been the son of Pericles, was too unsteady, and (according to Mr Coleridge's coinage) "unreliable;" or, perhaps, in more correct English, too "unrely uponable."

Thus far our purpose prospers. No man can pretend to forget two such centres as Pericles for the elder group, or Alexander of Macedon, (the "strong he-goat" of Jewish prophecy,) for the junior. Round these two foci, in two different but adjacent centuries, gathered the total starry heavens the galaxy, the Pantheon of Grecian intellect. All that Greece produced-of awful solemnity in her tragic stage, of riotous mirth and fancy in her comic stage, of power in her eloquence, of wisdom in her philosophy; all that has since tingled in the ears of twenty-four centuries, of her prosperity in the arts, her sculpture, her architecture, her painting, her music-every thing, in short, excepting only her higher mathematics, which waited for a further developmentwhich required the incubation of the musing intellect for yet another century-revolved like two neighbouring planetary systems about these two solar orbs. Two mighty vortices, Pericles and Alexander the Great, drew into strong eddies about themselves all the glory and the pomp of Greek literature, Greek eloquence, Greek wisdom, Greek art. Next, that we may still more severely search the relations in all points between the two systems, let us assign the chronological locus of each: because that will furnish another element towards the exact distribution of the chart representing the motion and the oscillations of human genius. Pericles had a very long administration. He was Prime Minister of Athens for upwards of one entire generation. He died in the year 429 before Christ, and in a very early stage of that great Peloponne

sian war, which was the one sole intestine war for Greece, affecting every nook and angle in the land. Now, in this long public life of Pericles, we are at liberty to fix on any year as his chronological locus. On good reasons, not called for in this place, we fix on the year 444. This is too remarkable to be forgotten. Four, four, four, what at some games of cards is called a "prial," (we presume, by an elision of the first vowel a, for parial,) forms an æra which no man can forget. It was the fifteenth year before the death of Pericles, and not far from the bisecting year of his political life. Now, passing to the other system, the locus of Alexander is quite as remarkable, as little liable to be forgotten when once indicated, and more easily determined, because selected from a narrower range of choice. The exact chronological locus of Alexander the Great is 333 years before Christ. Every body knows how brief was the career of this great man: it terminated in the year 320 before Christ. But the annus mirabilis of his public life, the most effective and productive year throughout his oriental anabasis, was the year 333 before Christ. Here we have another" prial,” a prial of threes, for the locus of Alexander.

Thus far the elements are settled, the chronological longitude and latitude of the two great planetary systems into which the Greek literature breaks up and distributes itself: 444 and 333 are the two central years for the two systems: allowing, therefore, an interspace of 111 years between the foci of each. It is thought by some people, that all those stars which you see glittering so restlessly on a keen frosty night in a high latitude, and which seem to have been sown broadcast with as much carelessness as grain lies on a thrashing floor-here showing vast zaarrahs of desert blue sky; there again lying close, and to some eyes presenting

"The beauteous semblance of a flock at rest,"

are in fact all gathered into zones or