acquainted with ancient writing, happened to step in, and saved it from total destruction.

The Harleian collection of manuscripts, the catalogue of which contains 8000 numbers, is still more copious : this is considered almost as the greatest treasure of the kind in England. A similar collection bears the name of royal,

The printed works are contained in sixteen halls and rooms in the lower story. The Librarian, Dr. Baber, who is as polite as he is learned, made me acquainted with the regulation and order of the library. As the greater part thereof has arisen from legacies and presents, whereby it was frequently requested that every collection should be preserved together, containing its own works, the partitions, on this account, bear the name of their original possessors. The proper Royal Library, which was formerly concealed in the dark corners of Westminster Abbey, has now been placed in a beautiful and light situation. The most costly of sumptuous works, which printing and literature can show, appear to be here united. A copy must be delivered of every thing which appears in London, and you are carefully informed of the enormous prices of many capital works.

The present King, when he was Prince Regent, granted an unusual large sum (my memory has not clearly retained to what amount), in order to represent, in print, a perfect facsimile of one of the most celebrated of all manuscripts of holy writing, the Codex Alexandrinus. Some of the letters have been cast entirely after the traits of the original. Only a moderate number of copies is struck off, and they are rather made a present of, than sold, by the government. The commencement that has already been made, under Mr. Baber's direction, awakens the best expectations of the undertaking, This venerable document, which is at least twelve hundred years old, of a religious industry, brings to lively remembrance great names, who once were, and are still, dear to science.

The Gallery, in which the works of art of antiquity are exposed in fourteen partitions, has been lately extended by a very light, and, it is to be hoped, only temporary, erection, for the Elgin collection. A sight of these ancient and modern treasures of the Museum, must afford every connoisseur a high treat, although Italy and France, particularly when the latter possessed the property of all countries, may have been richer. We wander here, indeed, amongst many lamentable ruins, and must, probably, bring with us as much power of imagination as love of the arts, in order to give a perfection to what is wanting by analogy, and to find particular parts,

crippled as they are beautiful. But what has no longer charms for the eye, may still be instructive to the artist; and thus it is that we must allow the zeal and animation of the antiquarian to reverence every fragment of a period, which appears before his eyes as the Golden Age. He must only allow those who are uninformed in these matters, but whom he may probably find more natural in their observations than those who affect to be connoisseurs in the arts, to pass their time more willingly by the side of a pleasing imitation in plaster, than by that of the most celebrated Torso, the value of which they are not able to comprehend.

Yet above all the ancient works of art which the British Museum possesses, scarce any thing rivets the attention more than the modern acquisition made by the collection of Lord Elgin, or the Elgin marbles, as they are generally called.

Like Hamilton had done in Italy, Lord Elgin, a Scotchman, who was from the year 1799 ambassador at the Ottoman Porte, availed himself of his high situation, in order to perfect a plan which he had already formed in England, and which he had deliberated upon with friends of the art, viz. to collect not only accurate drawings of the remains of ancient Grecian architecture and sculpture, but casts in plaster, and thus to snatch from entire destruction every thing that had escaped the ravages of time, and the barbarity of conquerors. Attended by six artists, whom he had particularly associated with himself, at his own expense, in Rome, he came to Constantinople, and after many difficulties, which he overcame by prudence and perseverance, finally received permission from the Turkish government to send his attendants to Athens, in order to commence the work. Indefatigable as they were, still three years were consumed before all the monuments in Athens, and partly beyond its territory, were measured, drawn, and cast off. Still, however, a nearer acquaintance with the situation in which they were found, furnished him with a further conviction that the continual injuries done to them by the Turks, the mouldering of whole statues, and their being crushed to mortar, would shortly leave no trace of them behind. On that account, every thing was now sacrificed to save what still could be saved, and they succeeded so well therein, that a Firman was delivered to the senior officer of Athens, by which Lord Elgin was justified, not only to make casts of every thing, but also to carry away, to order to be packed up and shipped, whatever he might find serviceable to his views. Thus he returned to England with a rare booty of preserved remains of the magnificent period of Grecian art.

Are we to complain of him in the present situation of

affairs in Greece? Are those acquisitions to be called an unworthy theft? There is no doubt, that in order to enjoy to the full the magnificent works of art, it is necessary to tread on the soil and neighbourhood in which they have arisen; that in a mixed collection they are only laid out to the view of the curious, and never produce the same effect; on that account I have seen many a noble Frank, proud indeed at the victory of his nation, still wander in mournful melancholy amongst the statues, which he had earlier admired as property of the Vatican, in the Belvidere, or in the Medicean palaces of Italy. But does that man deserve blame and reproach, who probably avails himself of the only moment left, in order to prevent the creations of masterly hands from being broken by the hammers of barbarians, and the pestle of the mortar crushing the marble which represented god-like forms? Or is the Briton to suffer himself to be outdone by the Frenchman, who has long sighed after the possession of these treasures?

Greatly as every thing may deserve the attention of the connoisseur, which belongs to those times when the arts flourished in Athens, still we feel ourselves most penetrated and captivated, when, on the sides of the gallery, we view the remains of those celebrated reliefs which formed the frieze of the temple of Minerva, the greatest architectural work with which Pericles adorned Athens. Little as this celebrated Parthenon, executed in white marble, remained like its original form, still the hand, or direction, of the great Grecian master could not be concealed, neither in the magnificent statues of Theseus and Ilyssus, nor in the friese, originally 600 feet long, which went over the Doric row of pillars, on both sides of the temple. For Plutarch and Pausanias leave us in no doubt that we here behold the works of that Phidias whose high sense of the beautiful in the art, first conceived, and whose chisel has executed, or at least perfected them.

No description can be expected here of these costly works "of such powerful effect by their grandeur, inimitable in their grace and beauty." Such, after what Hamilton, Millin, Bottiger, and Thiersch, have said upon them, would prove only very deficient, and would be moreover beyond the limits of this work. Even the extent of the value which they possess as one whole and separately, for the arts and for students, can only be properly prized by a connoisseur living amidst these archæological studies, and who is well versed in the secrets of the same. Still, however, the unpractised eye could not avoid noticing what filled such competent judges as Viconti and Canova with astonishment-that variety and truth in the movement of so many figures, particularly in the treatment of the Battle of

the Centaurs, which adorned the entrance of the temple over the colonnade, and still more of the great train at the festival of the Panathenaon, which was represented in the frieze of the proper temple in a long row of half-size statues. What grandeur of design in the horses and animals, what richness and taste in the drapery, what beauty in the positions adapted to the purest models!

What, however, more than all overpowered me was, the reflection upon the wonderful vicissitudes of time, which are brought so lively to our remembrance upon beholding these treasures of Athens transported to London!

What was Britain when these statues first came out of the workshops of Phidias? when that temple of Minerva first stood perfected in all its magnificence before the astonished Athenians? A distant island, for the most part only known to a few Phoenician sailors for its copper mines, the name of which was hardly uttered by any Grecian lip, in the most highly polished and elegant city of the former world. And now this same elegant city, the abode of sciences and arts, without which Rome in her intellectual acquirements would scarcely have become what she did become, at whose sources of learning the noblest spirits of all centuries have drank-what is this Athens in these days? A melancholy heap of ashes and of ruins, towards which the metropolis of then unknown Britain, which has risen like a colossus, has stretched forth her saving haud, of that metropolis more than double as large in number of inhabitants as the whole territory of the republic of Attica, in order that whatever still remained possible to be preserved, might not become a prey to those barbarians, at the sight of whom the Muses have long since fled. They have taken their flight over the sea, and what once flourished under an Ionian sky, has found its asylum in the cold north.

"Is it, then, really so"-said I often to myself-as frequently as I wandered amongst and under these treasures," or is it illusion? Has Pericles once stood before these marble statues directing how they should be divided in the temple? Did Socrates, Plato, Sophocles, Euripides, and Pindar, once pass musing by the same? Under these metopes on the frontispiece of the entrance, did the stately Pompa once move, at the festival of the Parthenon, into the interior of the sanctuary, to the statue of the goddess carrying the holy veil, woven by the noblest ladies of quality, as an offering of incense?"

Since I was considering the Elgin marbles amidst such monologues, the history of our days has attracted the attention irresistibly to the country whence they are derived. Greece is under arms from the streams of Epirus to the banks of the

Danube; Macedonia, Peloponnesus, the coast of Asia Minor, even Athens, are in contest, not with centaurs and statues, but with a dreadful tyranny, destructive of all the rights of humanity and of religion. Has the counsel of the Omnipotent determined, every earnest reflecting man enquires, that ancient Hellas should awaken anew, and the long-expired phoenix again lift its head above the ashes? May not, probably, many of these marble statues, like a banished foreigner, again return to their liberated native land ?

But if

Who can dare to look into the book of Providence? victory should crown the oppressed, and if a real Liberty, under the protection of the Laws, put an end, too, to its own degeneration, what an unexpected catastrophe would not attend all that is great, which the history of our times has to hand over to posterity!

The age of Phidias and Praxiteles, for the arts, may then once more return, which may be connected too closely with that mythological world, and those old gods, which no one can wish back again, who possesses not, what a well-known writing of Winkelman calls, an heathen nature. That Plato whom the ancients called the godly, drove even poets from his republic, who had imputed every human passion and folly to the godhead, and had induced them to all the errors of a degenerate humanity. There is something higher than art, although the talent of art belongs to the godly, which lies in the spirit of man. The addressing the godhead in spirit, is a more majestic idea than any imagination which can float before the mind of a Phidias, or a Raphael.

May then that truly classic soil become again the seat of free, happy, and as it is to be wished, of far better men than the mass of those ancient Hellenians were, and probably could be at that time. May the resurrection of Greece, Heathen or Mahomedan bigotry, give place to Christian superstition. May the God, unknown to the ancient Athenians, whom an apostle announced upon the Areopagus, be adored; and a religion thus be exalted which is more than a sensual culture, and from which moral maxims are inseparable; then may the nation return to the enjoyment of a more real humanity than antiquity was acquainted with, and much of that superstition which belonged only to the time, and which was obliged to conform itself to that period, and deserved to perish with it, will never return. We shall the more joyfully celebrate the victory of justice over oppression, and reckon it amongst the events of our times which gladden the heart, that we have survived such a period.