contemplate the improvement of man as man, of man as a spiritual and thinking being, but of man as a citizen, as a component part of the State. Hence their contempt for all those arts which constituted the true glory of Athens, and hence, too, their brevity of speech has become proverbial. And now let me ask, how do these two States stand in the general history of Greece. Athens, it is true, was obliged to submit to her haughty and imperious rival. But her intellectual supremacy still continued. The ascendency which she retained was really greater than that which she lost. But how fared it with Sparta, when she, in her turn, stood trembling before Epaminondas? She flew for assistance to her former rival, and then sullenly retired from the history of the world, indebted to Athens for the place which she holds in the history of Greece. The very arts she so much affected to despise, are those alone by which she has been rescued from oblivion.

The same truths will appear more clearly if we descend to individual cases. Mr. Grote, in his elaborate history of Greece, has given us a fine parallel between the Spartan and Athenian character as exemplified in the conduct of the Greek captains who conducted the celebrated retreat of the "Ten Thousand." In this case, the Spartan and Athenian culture are brought into comparison under circumstances in the highest degree favorable for testing their superiority in the closest emergencies of practical life. Here are ten thousand men gathered from all the States of Greece, and marshalled under their respective captains, without supplies, without

τεια,

guides, without a leader, and in the midst of a hostile country. There was Cheirisophus, who had been trained under the institutions of Lycurgus, who had passed through the severe ordeal of the ovπTELα, and was a noble specimen of the Spartan soldier. There was Xenophon, the soldier of fortune, the pupil of Socrates, the fellow-student of Plato, he had learned and recited, we may fancy, with that great philosopher, the verses of Homer and the poetry of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, he had listened, we know, to those harangues which had aroused the drooping spirits of his countrymen in a thirty years' war, and amidst the horrors of an all-consuming pestilence. Who was it, that, under these circumstances, was felt of one accord to be the presiding mind? Who was it to whom Jupiter revealed himself in that prophetic dream? Who was it that, in all the exigencies of that protracted march, in advance or retreat, on mountain or plain, in heat or cold, in council or fight, by land or by sea, in diplomacy or strategy, was ever found equal to the necessities of the occasion? Was it the pupil of Lycurgus or of Solon, the citizen or the man? Who, that has traced the progress of the great expedition which Athens sent for the reduction of Syracuse, has not kindled with emotion at the glowing description which Thucydides gives us of the departure of that great armament from the Piræus? and, after reading its subsequent history, and observing how enthusiasm degenerated into indifference, indifference into dread, and dread into despair, has followed those cultivated, but mis

guided Athenians, from that glorious midsummer's morn, the brightest that ever shone on the harbor of Athens, to that final death-struggle at the mouth of the greater harbor of Syracuse; and thence through that dreadful retreat to the banks of the Asinărus, whose waters, while red with the blood of their expiring countrymen, they so greedily devoured; and then, after entrusting themselves to the mercy and honor of their enemies, has seen them consigned to a living grave in those terrible quarries on which Sicilian suns so " fiercely shed intolerable day;" who, I say, can refrain from a burst of rapture to see them rise superior to all their misfortunes, disarm Sicilian cruelty and Spartan perfidy, and, finally, emancipate themselves, not by corruptible things, as silver and gold, but by a few verses from their own poets. Nor should we forget that some credit is due to those Sicilian task-masters, whose souls were touched by the poetry of Euripides, and who felt that they could not hold in slavery the men whose minds had been refined and ennobled by the highest culture of Athens. And what must have been the emotions of Euripides himself, as the last remains of the best appointed land and naval force which Athens ever mustered, returned one by one, as Plutarch and Diodorus inform us, to acknowledge him. as their deliverer! And so it was with Athens, throughout her history. Whenever her arms have failed, her classics have come to her rescue and extended her moral and intellectual empire, while her temples and her palaces have sunk beneath the ruthless hands of her barbarian invaders.

Again, it was practical education that filled the valley of the Nile and the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the valley of the Mississippi, and the plains of Central America, with those imposing monuments which serve to astonish, but do nothing towards instructing or benefiting, mankind. It was practical education, shaped according to the temper of a despotic age-practical education eminently successful in overcoming the obstacles of merely inert matter, and rising in numerous instances even to a high degree of artistic skill-but yet it was mind simply in contact with matter; it was not "spirit in mysterious contact with spirit, thought kindling itself at the fire of living thought," and producing those results which cannot die. Again, why is it that on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, between the Nile and the Euphrates, there has existed a people whose lineage may be traced by authentic records from the deluge to our own times? Why is it that this people has preserved its nationality so distinct through all the mutations of time and race? What is the central force which binds the Israelite to his faith and to his ancestry, and which the persecutions of eighteen centuries have not been able to destroy? I will not deny that there is something here of higher import than any classics possess; that the same power which, in ages long gone by, appeared in the cloud by day and in the fire by night, is "present still, though now unseen," and guiding the destinies of this people. But go to the synagogue; go and listen to the reading of a law, most simple and most perfect; of a

history most fruitful in exciting incidents in bold and vigorous and decided character; of a poetry most tender, touching and sublime; of a philosophy the most conclusive, and, at the same time, the most simple, —go, I say, and listen to all this, in the vernacular Hebrew, and you will learn what instrumentality heaven has appointed as the visible symbol around which to gather the scattered tribes until their redemption shall appear. Here, as in the case of the Athenian people, we see an existence independent of the accidents of the material world, a nation whose practical talent has even become proverbial, and who may, perhaps, now be said to hold in their hands the financial destinies of Europe. Do I then claim all this as the result of the study or diligent reading of their vernacular Classics? By no means. I only mention this as an important element, as a heaven-appointed instrumentality, that may be most distinctly traced in the history of this people.

But we shall be told that the true end of education is to discipline the mind, to accustom it to habits of patient thought. And this leads me to speak of the discipline which may be secured by the study of our English Classics, and which always must be secured whenever they are studied rightly. The Mathematics are regarded in our schools generally, as the great means of discipline. In most of our schools, I apprehend, from the time the scholars enter, until they complete their education, they are led through the mazes of Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry and Trigonometry. They read, in the meantime, a collection of extracts, varying in length from one