this distance of time, is the most marvellous and the most touching in the annals of the human race--a story abounding with all that is wild and wonderful, with all that is pathetic and animating; with the gigantic caprices of infinite wealth and despotic power; with the mightier miracles of wisdom, of virtue, and of courage. He told them of rivers dried up in a day; of provinces famished for a meal; of a passage for ships hewn through the mountains; of a road for armies spread upon the waves; of monarchies and commonwealths swept away; of anxiety, of terror, of confusion, of despair!— and then of proud and stubborn hearts tried in that extremity of evil and not found wanting; of resistance long maintained against desperate odds; of lives dearly sold when resistance could be maintained no more; of signal deliverance, and of unsparing revenge. Whatever gave a stronger air of reality to a narrative so well calculated to inflame the passions and to flatter national pride was certain to be favorably received. Edinburgh Review, May 1828. GREECE. LORD BYRON (1788-1824). He who hath bent him o'er the dead, Have swept the lines where beauty lingers; The rapture of repose that's there- And-but for that sad, shrouded eye, The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon ;- Such is the aspect of this shore. 'Tis Greece-but living Greece no more! PASS OF THERMOPYLE, WITH TOMBS OF THE SPARTANS. So coldly sweet, so deadly fair, That parts not quite with parting breath; A gilded halo hovering round decay The farewell beam of feeling passed away! Spark of that flame, that flame of heavenly birth, Clime of the unforgotten brave! Whose land from plain to mountain cave Was freedom's home, or glory's grave! Shrine of the mighty! can it be, That this is all remains of thee? Approach, thou craven, crouching slave: Say, is not this Thermop'yla?* * Thermop'ylæ, a narrow mountain pass leading from Thessaly into Middle Greece. It is famous for the brave stand made here by Leonidas and his Spartans against the hosts of Xerxes the Persian invader (B. C. 480). DEATH OF PERIKLES, THE ATHENIAN STATESMAN. GEORGE GROTE (1794-1871). [Pericles, or Perikles, the greatest of Athenian statesmen, died in 429 B.C., soon after the commencement of the disastrous Peloponnesian War. Grote, who is "incontestably the historian of Greece" (Quarterly Review), began his great work in 1823, and after twenty-three years of study, published the first two volumes. The remaining ten volumes filled in the years up to 1855. Grote's treatment of Greek politics strongly leans to the Athenian or democratic sentiment. His style is philosophical and argumentative.] He lived about one year longer, and seems to have maintained his influence as long as his health permitted. Yet we hear nothing of him after this moment, and he fell a victim, not to the violent symptoms of the epidemic, but to a slow and wearing fever, which undermined his strength as well as his capacity. To a friend who came to ask after him when in this disease, Perikles replied by showing a charm or amulet which his female relations had hung about his neck,--a proof how low he was reduced and how completely he had become a passive subject in the hands of others. And according to another anecdote which we read, yet more interesting and equally illustrative of his character, it was during his last moments, when he was lying apparently unconscious and insensible, that the friends around his bed were passing in review the acts of his life and the nine trophies which he had erected at different times for so many victories. He heard what they said, though they fancied that he was past hearing, and interrupted them by remarking, "What you praise in my life belongs partly to good fortune, and is, at best, common to me with many other generals. But the peculiarity of which I am most proud you have not noticed -no Athenian has ever put on mourning on my account." Such a cause of self-gratulation, doubtless more satisfactory to recall at such a moment than any other, illustrates that longsighted calculation, aversion to distant or hazardous enterprise, and economy of the public force, which marked his entire political career, a career long beyond all parallel in the history of Athens-since he maintained a great influence, gradually swelling into a decisive personal ascendency, for between thirty and forty years. His character has been presented in very different lights by different authors, both ancient and modern, and our materials for striking the balance are not so good as we could wish. But his immense and long-continued ascendency, as well as his unparalleled eloquence, are facts attested not less by his enemies than by his friends,-nay, even more forcibly by the former than by the latter. The comic writers, who hated him, and whose trade it was to deride and hunt down every leading political character, exhaust their powers of illustration in setting forth the one and the other. Telekleidês, Kratīnus, Eu'polis, Aristoph ́ănês, all hearers and all enemies, speak of him like Olympian Zeus, hurling thunder and lightning, like He'rakles and Achilles, as the only speaker on whose lips persuasion sat, and who left his sting in the minds of his audience; while Plato the philosopher, who disapproved of his political working and of the moral effects which he produced upon Athens, nevertheless extols his intellectual and oratorical ascendency" his majestic intelligence"-in language not less decisive than Thucydidês. There is another point of eulogy, not less valuable, on which the testimony appears uncontradicted throughout his long career, amidst the hottest political animosities, the conduct of Perikles towards opponents was always mild and liberal. The conscious self-esteem and arrogance of manner with which the contemporary poet Ion reproached him, contrasting it with the unpretending simplicity of his own patron Kimon, though probably invidiously exaggerated, is doubtless in substance well founded, and those who read the last speech given above out of Thucydides will at once recognize in it this attribute. His natural taste, his love of philosophical research, and his unwearied application to public affairs, all contributed to alienate him from ordinary familiarity, and to make him careless, perhaps improperly careless, of the lesser means of conciliating public favor...... : Taking him altogether, with his powers of thought, speech, and action,—his competence, civil and military, in the council as well as the field,—his vigorous and cultivated intellect, and his comprehensive ideas of a community in pacific and many-sided development, his incorruptible public morality, caution, and firmness, in a country where all these qualities were rare, and the union of them in the same individual of course much rarer, we shall find him without a parallel throughout the whole course of Grecian history. History of Greece. EVANGELINE: A TALE OF ACADIE. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882). [In 1713, by the Treaty of Utrecht, Acadia, or, as it is now named, Nova Scotia, was ceded to Great Britain by the French. The French colonists were with difficulty induced to take the oath of allegiance, and in some districts they refused outright. In June 1755 an expedition came from Boston under Monckton to reduce the French stronghold of Beauséjour (Fort Cumberland), and after a fortnight's siege it capitulated. As was natural, the Acadians sympathized with the besieged. They rashly furnished them with ammunition and supplies; and, after the fort was taken, three hundred Acadians were found with arms in their hands. During the summer unsuccessful attempts were renewed to administer the oath of allegiance to the French inhabitants of Minas and Pizéquid. On the 2nd of September, Colonel Winslow, acting under the instructions of the Home Government to Governor Lawrence, issued a written order to the French inhabitants of Grand Pré, Minas, and neighboring localities to attend the church at Grand Pré; and eight days later Winslow announced to the astonished assemblage, "It is peremptorily His Majesty's orders that the whole French inhabitants of these districts be removed.' The orders, while providing transports to the New England colonies, prescribed the destruction of all means of subsistence, and even shelter, at the present homes of these unfortunates. The miseries that followed the execution of this stern ukase may be easily conceived without the help of Abbé Raynal's romantic_narrative, which Longfellow evidently adopted with an easy faith, and made the groundwork of his poem. The poet, writing to a Canadian inquirer on February 9th 1882, said, "The poem of 'Evangeline' is so far historical only as it is founded on the dispersion of the Acadians. The story itself, of a maiden separated from her lover and after life-long wanderings finding him dying in a hospital, is a legend of tradition. The name 'Evangeline' is of my own invention, as are all the details of the poem. I am sorry to say that I was never at Grand Pré." Within ten years from its first publication in 1847, 37,000 copies of "Evangeline" had been sold. To Canadians the poem is of the deepest interest. M. Lemay, a French-Canadian, has executed a graceful translation into French. 'Evangeline" is written in dactylic hexameter verse, which, in external form, is the representative of the metre of the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer and the Eneid of Virgil. In reading the poem with care and expression, we notice in each line an ebb and a flow, with a momentary pause (cæsura) between the outgoing and returning wave. This rhythmical movement yields effects of great beauty, and throws over the shores and woodlands of old Acadie the dreamy languor of the Indian Summer.] In the Acadian land, on the shores of the Basin of Minas, |