France fifty-four years ago, would any one have named the man who was, even then, in the secret of his own thoughts, preparing to furnish a triumphant solution to the enigma of that day? God never leaves himself without a witness, and never, until he shall give over a people to swift destruction, will he leave himself without a vicegerent to govern them. Such a one is always "walking among them, whom they know not, but whose shoe-latchets the great ones of the earth are not worthy to unloose." Just one hundred years ago such a one was toiling through the passes of the Alleghany, leaning on his Jacob staff, and, in the depth of that wilderness, preparing himself, by communion only with God and his own brave upright heart, to render to his own country and to the world, the noblest service ever performed by man. Such men are never foreknown, and it is vain to seek them. The event that calls for them makes them known.

There is nothing earthly that men do so truly venerate and trust in as a great man. There is nothing, next after the craving of the human heart for the revelation of a God of wisdom, justice and mercy, that men so feel the need of as the bodily presence of one most like him on earth, to whom they may look up, whose wisdom is to be their wis dom, whose justice and mercy are to be for them. Their misfortune is, that in their eagerness for such they are always ready to imagine such, "and when the God is an ape what must be the worshippers?" But let the true man show himself, and there is no more mistake. Whether he coine from Nazareth or Bethlehem, from Corsica or Paris, they do not stop to ask. When the ship is laboring, with breakers under her lee, and one springs to the helm and lays her head to the wind, men do not inquire of his right to be there. His voice is heard above the storms, and they obey it as the voice of a God. Go into a deliberative body. Is there a great man there, or the nearest approximation to a great man the unhappy time affords? You ask for him. You fix your eyes on him. His countenance, his bearing, his gestures occupy you wholly. The rest are but the figures in the "shin-piece" in the capitol, whose legs attract more notice than their heads. Unfortunate for man were it otherwise.

There is work for such a man, and if God has vouchsafed such a man to this generation he will know his work and

do it. There is no need of a revolution to call him forth or to perfect his work. The way to the prime ministry is as open to every man in the kingdom as it was to Chatham or Canning, and the power of the minister, backed by a confiding House of Commons, is equal to every emergency. Let the right man show himself, and the needful confidence will not be lacking any more than the needful power. The three estates of the realm are ever present in Parliament. To some purposes this is a fiction; but when a thing is to be done by those who are there represented, for the benefit of those who are not there, it is, for that purpose, no fiction. Blackwood and the tories may clamor about invasions of the right of property, but if they to whom the property belongs choose to put the act by which they dispose of it into the form of a statute, we see no more to be objected to it than to certain annual statutes, which import that "the Lords and Commons of Great Britain do give and grant to the Crown" certain taxes for the support of government. The power to ascertain the duties of property, while securing its rights, is clearly within the competency of a body in which every acre of land in the kingdom is represented. Let the landholder endeavor conscienciously to apportion the interest of his paltry evanescent fee simple "to him and to his heirs forever," as he presumptuously calls it, and that of the great allodial proprietor, whose it has been, and is, and will be, from everlasting to everlasting. None but a socialist or communist questions his fee simple; but the Lord of the Fee, whose liegeman he is, calls on him for aid to rescue his children from captivity. Let him see to it that it be duly paid. There is no danger that men will wrong themselves. Let them be careful that they do no wrong to HIM.

We have extended our remarks to an unreasonable length, and yet have not said the half of what we propose to say. For the present we leave the subject here, hoping to find a proper occasion for resuming it. B. T.

ART. II.-Charicles: or Illustrations of the Private Life of the Ancient Greeks; translated from the German of Professor Becker, by the Rev. FREDERICK METCALFE, M.A., Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. 1845.

THERE are few of us, perhaps, whose sympathies are limited to the brief period circumscribing our own earthly existence-who have never wept nor rejoiced with generations which have passed, nor looked with anxious, hopeful eye to the future destinies of our race; few who do not hail, with lively pleasure, any well directed efforts to dispel the uncertainty which obscures the revelations of by-gone times, and to bring us, as it were, into familiar intercourse with distant generations, between whom and ourselves a gulf of centuries is interposed. Such an effort, and we may add a very happy one, is the little book now before us.

In the preface to that clever, though somewhat frigid work, "Pericles and Aspasia," Landor boasts of having avoided "every expression and every thought attributed to Pericles by the ancients." Our less pretending German has been content to stand literally on the fragments of antiquity, and to sacrifice any credit which might have been gained by originality to the faithful execution of what has been evidently a labor of love-a beautiful piece of literary mosaic, worked up, for the most part, with admirable ingenuity, from various passages of the Grecian writers-a story illustrative of "the every day pursuits and occupations of the Greeks," affording "a glimpse at their domestic scenes, and an introduction, so to speak, to the interior of their dwellings."

Such works, trifling as they may appear to the uninitiated, are in truth the exponents of weighty things. Toil and learning, to an extent of which the unsophisticated reader has but slight conception, are among the conditions indispensable to their production; they give an insight into the spirit of by-gone times, from which no small share of valuable instruction may be derived, and as atoms, furnished by a puny insect, have been supposed to form the immoveable foundations of whole islands, rising from the depths of ocean, a knowledge of minutiæ, seemingly unimportant, may aid us in the solution of even that vast question: is all human

improvement destined to decay? is there any law in the constitution of humanity, or in the nature of things, by which art, science, liberty, religion, have an inevitable period of decline and dissolution, like the ephemeral beings, generations of whom live, suffer and die, at their gradual development; or are there, as we would hope, in modern civilization, elements of life, of vigor and perpetuity, proof equally against the ravages of time, the strokes of accident and the pernicious tendencies of the lower part of our nature ?

Before the appearance of "Charicles," Becker was known favorably to the general reader as the author of "Gallus," a work of similar character, the scene of which was laid in Rome. There, however, he was on ground already, to a certain extent, occupied by the learned Böttiger, in his "Morning Scenes at the Toilette of a rich Roman Lady;" but on the private manners and customs of Greece there existed nothing similar until the appearance of "Charicles."

Appended to the fictitious portion of the work are twelve excursus, containing, in the dry form of concise propositions, facts with which the story is gracefully interwoven, and a large number of quotations in their support, notwithstanding that many of those contained in the original have been omitted as superfluous by the English translator. Through these excursus, few but the student would be apt to wade, and an unfortunate omission on the part of the author, in neglecting to embody in the more readable portion of his book much valuable information which they contain, with reference to the condition of woman in ancient Greece, we shall endeavor to supply, by throwing into a connected form the materials which he has amassed, with some additional facts derived from other sources.

Not the least interesting question, with regard to any people, is what social position has been occupied by their women? It is a question of something more than empty curiosity, a question of the gravest practical bearing, what have been the effects produced on woman by the various institutions, customs and opinions of different nations and different times? By such inquiries, only, is it possible to determine how much that we see in her is attributable to nature, and how much the result of circumstances alone, of what development she is really susceptible, and within what limits it is rational to suppose that Providence intendVOL. XVI.-No. 32.

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ed her to be restricted. In his view of woman, as has been aptly remarked by Heeren, the ancient Greek "stands between the East and the West." In vain would we seek in him traces of that generous devotion to the sex, which is compatible only with confidence and respect; at the same time that he is evidently above the stolid selfishness of oriental sensuality, which would degrade it to a level with the brute creation.

In the heroic age of Greece, concerning which Homer is our chief authority, the position of woman was evidently more elevated than in subsequent periods, boasting of a higher civilization. Nowhere, in the productions of the poet alluded to, do we find any hint at that disgusting sen. suality which formed a striking characteristic of a later age. A certain decency, and even decorum, may be observed in his descriptions of intercourse between the sexes, and in woman a satisfied self-respect, belonging neither to the abject domestic drudge nor to the still more abject prisoner of the harem. Even Helen, the wanton adultress, in spite of the strongest prejudices, wins insensibly upon us by a gentle plaintive dignity and grace-we long to think her worthy of better things, and mourn over the error we cannot forgive. It is true that there is reason for supposing Homer to have been far from destitute of partiality for the sex, although, to read the so called translation of the little English misogynist, one would hardly imagine that he could either have labored under this pardonable weakness or ever have given utterance to such words as these: "Virgins all, joy attend you! Remember me hereafter, and when any stranger from afar, coming here, shall ask: O virgins, who is the sweetest poet that attends your festival, and with whom you are most delighted? do you all kindly answer, with one applauding voice, 'Our favorite is the blind man who lives in rocky Chios.'" No allowance, however, which can justly be made for this amiable bias of the brave old Greek, is sufficient to counterbalance the evidence to be derived from the general tenor of even his own productions. It is not to be supposed that, throughout poems so long as the Iliad and Odyssey, he has upon this, or any other point, been false to the sentiment and usage of his times.

Several passages in which Helen is introduced strikingly illustrate the courtesy extended to the sex in those days,