accomplished literature, which the world has known, was produced. The philosophy of Plato was the attraction, which drew to a morning's walk in the olive gardens of the academy, the young men of this factious city. Those tumultuous assemblies of Athens, the very same, which rose in their wrath, and to a man, and clamored for the blood of Phocion, required to be addressed, not in the cheap extemporaneous rant of modern demagogues, but in the elaborate and thrice repeated orations of Demosthenes. No! the noble and elegant arts of Greece grew up in no Augustan age, enjoyed neither royal nor imperial patronage. Unknown before in the world, strangers on the Nile, and strangers on the Euphrates, they sprang at once into life, in a region not unlike our own New-England,iron bound, sterile, and free. The imperial astronomers of Chaldæa went up almost to the stars in their observatories; but it was a Greek, who first foretold an eclipse, and measured the year. The nations of the East invented the alphabet, but not a line has reached us of profane literature, in any of their languages; and it is owing to the embalming power of Grecian genius, that the invention itself has been transmitted to the world. The Egyptian architects could erect structures, which, after three thousand five hundred years, are still standing, in their uncouth original majesty; but it was only on the barren soil of Attica, that the beautiful columns of the Parthenon and the Theseum could rest, which are standing also.

With the decline of liberty in Greece, began the decline of all her letters and all her arts, though her tumultuous democracies were succeeded by liberal and accomplished princes. Compare the literature of the Alexandrian with that of the Periclean age; how cold, pedantic, and imitative! Compare, I will not say, the axes, the eggs, the altars, and the other frigid devices of the pensioned wits in the museum at Alexandria; but compare their best productions with those of independent Greece; Callimachus with Pindar, Lycophron with Sophocles, Aristophanes of Byzantium with Aristotle, and Apollonius the Rhodian with Homer. When we descend to Rome, to the Augustan age, the exalted era of Mæcenas, we find one uniform work of imitation, often of translation. The choicest geniuses seldom rise beyond a happy transfusion of the Grecian masters. Horace translates Alcæus, Terence translates Menander, Lucretius translates Epicurus, Virgil translates

Homer, and Cicero,—I had almost said,-translates Demosthenes and Plato. But the soul of liberty did burst forth from the lips of Cicero, her form had not yet lost all its original brightness,' her inspiration produced in him the only specimens of a purely original literature, which Rome has transmitted to us. After him, their literary history is written in one line of Tacitus; gliscente adulatione, magna ingenia deterrebantur. The fine arts revived a little under the princes of the Flavian house, but never rose higher than a successful imitation of the waning excellence of Greece. With the princes of this line, the arts of Rome expired, and Constantine the great, was obliged to tear down an arch of Trajan for sculptures, wherewithal to adorn his own. In modern times the question is more complicated. Civilized states have multiplied; political institutions have varied in different states, and at different times in the same state; some liberal institutions have existed in the bosom of societies otherwise despotic; and a great addition of new studies has been made to the encyclopædia, which have all been cultivated by great minds, and some of which, as the physical and experimental sciences, have little or no direct connexion with the state of liberty. These circumstances perplex, in some degree, the inquiry into the effect of free institutions on intellectual improvement in modern times. There are times and places, where it would seem, that the muses, both the gay and the severe, had been transformed into court ladies. Upon the whole, however, the modern history of literature bears but a cold testimony to the genial influence of the governments, under which it has grown up. Dante and Petrarch composed their beautiful works in exile; Boccacio complains in the most celebrated of his, that he was transfixed with the darts of envy and calumny; Macchiavelli was pursued by the party of the Medici, for resisting their tyrannical designs; Guicciardini retired in disgust, to compose his history' in voluntary exile ; Galileo confessed in the prisons of the Inquisition, that the earth did not move; Ariosto lived in poverty; and Tasso died in want and despair.* Cervantes, after he had immortalized himself in his great work, was obliged to write on for bread. The whole

Martinelli, in his edition of the Decamerone, cited in the Introduction to Sidney's Discourses on Government, Edition of 1751, p. 34.

French academy was pensioned to crush the great Corneille. Racine, after living to see his finest pieces derided as cold and worthless, died of a broken heart. The divine genius of Shakspeare owed but little surely to patronage, for it raised him to no higher rank than that of a subaltern actor in his own and Ben Jonson's plays. The immortal Chancellor was sacrificed to the preservation of a worthless minion, and is said, (falsely I trust,) to have begged a cup of beer in his old age, and begged in vain. The most valuable of the pieces of Selden were written in that famous resort of great minds, the tower of London. Milton, surprised by want in his infirm old age, sold the first production of the human mind for five pounds. The great boast of English philosophy was expelled from his place in Oxford, and kept in banishment, the king having been given to understand,' to use the words of Lord Sunderland, who ordered the expulsion, that one Locke has, upon several occasions, behaved himself very factiously against the government.' Dryden sacrificed his genius to the spur of immediate want. Otway was choked with a morsel of bread, too ravenously swallowed after a long fast. Johnson was taken to prison for a debt of five shillings; and Burke petitioned for a Professorship at Glasgow, and was denied. When we survey these facts, and the innumerable others, of which these are but a specimen, we may perhaps conclude that, in whatever way the arbitrary governments of Europe have encouraged letters, it has not been in that of a steady, cheering patronage. We may think there is abundant reason to acknowledge, that the ancient lesson is confirmed by modern experience, and that popular institutions are most propitious to the full and prosperous growth of intellectual excellence.

II. If the perfectly organized system of liberty, which here prevails, be thus favorable to intellectual progress, various other conditions of our national existence are not less so, particularly the extension of one language, government, and character over so vast a space as the United States of America. Hitherto, in the main, the world has seen but two forms of political government, free governments in small states, and arbitrary governments in large ones. Though various shades of both have appeared, at different times, in the world, yet on the whole, the political ingenuity of man has

never found out the mode of extending liberal institutions beyond small districts, or of governing large empires, by any other means than the visible demonstration and exercise of absolute power. The effect in either case has been unpropitious to the growth of intellectual excellence. Free institutions, though favorable to the growth of intellectual excellence, are not the only thing needed. In order that free institutions may have their full and entire effect, in producing the highest attainable degree of intellectual improvement, they require to be established in an extensive region, and over a numerous people. This constitutes a state of society entirely new among men ; a vast empire, whose institutions are wholly popular. While we experience the genial influence of those principles, which belong to all free states, and in proportion as they are free; independence of thought, and the right of expressing it; we are to feel in this country, we and those who succeed us, all that excitement, which, in various ways, arises from the reciprocal action upon each other of the parts of a great empire. Literature as has been already hinted, is the voice of the age and the state. The character, energy, and resources of the country, are reflected and imaged forth in the conceptions of its great minds. They are the organs of the time; they speak not their own language, they scarce think their own thoughts; but under an impulse like the prophetic enthusiasm of old, they must feel and utter the sentiments which society inspires. They do not create, they obey the Spirit of the Age; the serene and beautiful spirit descended from the highest heaven of liberty, who laughs at our little preconceptions, and with the breath of his mouth, sweeps before him the men and the nations, that cross his path. By an unconscious instinct, the mind in the strong action of its powers, adapts itself to the number and complexion of the other minds, with which it is to enter into communion or conflict. As the voice falls into the key, which is suited to the space to be filled, the mind, in the various exercises of its creative faculties, strives with curious search for that master-note, which will awaken a vibration from the surrounding community, and which, if it do not find it, it is itself too often struck dumb.

For this reason, from the moment in the destiny of nations, that they descend from their culminating point, and begin to decline, from that moment the voice of creative genius is hushed, and at

best, the age of criticism, learning, and imitation, succeeds. When Greece ceased to be independent, the forum and the stage became mute. The patronage of Macedonian, Alexandrian, and Pergamean princes was lavished in vain. They could not woo the healthy Muses of Hellas, from the cold mountain tops of Greece, to dwell in their gilded halls. Nay, though the fall of greatness, the decay of beauty, the waste of strength, and the wreck of power have ever been among the favorite themes of the pensive muse, yet not a poet arose in Greece to chant her own elegy; and it is after near three centuries, and from Cicero and Sulpicius, that we catch the first notes of pious and pathetic lamentation over the fallen land of the arts. The freedom and genius of a country are invariably gathered into a common tomb, and there

can only strangers breathe

The name of that which was beneath.

It is when we reflect on this power of an auspicious future, that we realize the prospect, which smiles upon the intellect of America. It may justly be accounted the great peculiarity of ancient days, compared with modern, that in antiquity there was, upon the whole, but one civilized and literary nation at a time in the world. Art and refinement followed in the train of political ascendency, from the East to Greece, and from Greece to Rome. In the modern world, under the influence of various causes, intellectual, political, and moral, civilization has been diffused throughout the greater part of Europe and America. Now mark a singular fatality as regards the connexion of this enlarged and diffused civilization, with the progress of letters and the excitement to intellectual exertion in any given state. Instead of one sole country, as in antiquity, where the arts and refinements find a home, there are, in modern Europe, seven or eight equally entitled to the general name of cultivated nations, and in each of which some minds of the first order have appeared. And yet, by the multiplication of languages, an obstacle all but insuperable has been thrown in the way of the free progress of genius, in its triumphant course, from region to region. The muses of Shakspeare and Milton, of Camoens, of Lope de Vega and Calderon, of Corneille and Racine, of Dante and Tasso, of Goethe and Schiller, are strangers to each other.