ciated with a bad heart; and we can forgive him much about his, eight wives (though the ladies may not) for those honest epithets, which he bestowed on his Chancellor for his officious interference with the wisest of the number. Of his treatment of Anne Boleyn, we observe a discreet silence for her sake; and his religious persecutions were part of a defensive system, against the powerful and insidious machinations of Rome. But his learning, his magnificent spirit, and the princely generosity of his youth, and even of his death-bed, should not be overlooked. His 'care about Cranmer,' as Burnet terms it, and his treatment of Lord Cassillis would tell even in a romance: and a king, who could so command the affections of such a royal brother as Francis, as to hasten his death by supposed regret for his loss, must have had something about him not quite consistent with that broad and brutal abuse, which now accompanies every mention of his name. And what then tarnished the promise of his outset ?-Power, that most dangerous of all possessions; an early and innate love of power in himself, and a succession of weak parliaments, who fostered and pampered the feeling, till themselves had cause to curse the tyranny which they had been the first to create.

We have been led into this digression, because we see, or think we see, many points of resemblance between the majesty of England, as it then stood, and the sovereign multitude of Athens, as it always stood, and not least in the perversion of natural character by the mere possession of power and had a good private life of Henry VIII. reached us, we feel no doubt that there would have been found in it some of those ludicrous traits of the fears and jealousies' which despotic power always feels, whether it reside in a single individual or in a body. How those 'fears and jealousies' displayed themselves in England during the short reign of our first and (it is to be hoped) our last People-King, the readers of the great historian, from whom the words are quoted, need not be reminded. Lord Digby's coach and six was a ' fear and a jealousy'; Lord Portsmouth's acts of good fellowship and hospitality lay under the same construction. It was a 'fear and a jealousy' to report that the commonwealth's soldiers had received hurt or damage from the royal troops, and a great mark of malignity' to believe it; and where neither fault nor folly, levity nor indiscretion, could be found to implicate an obnoxious person, the people-king of England had the same loop-hole left as their predecessor in Greece' they could not confide* in him!' Man, indeed, in the same situation of circumstances, is ever precisely the same sort of being, and the 'fears and jealousies' of Athens were just as

Lord Clarendon, b. v. p. 827. Xenophon in Symposio, p. 76.

terrible, as vexatious, and as ridiculous, as those of her counterpart in London. To wear a long beard sometimes argued danger to the democracy; and too high a roof to the house betrayed a manifest departure from democratical equality; disaffection lurked in a woollen skirt to the mantle, in too loud a voice, in a quick step, in a walking-stick: to have the least hankering for kings was flat treason; and above all, any attempt at restriction on the excesses of the popular orators, the watch-dogs of the republic, was a crime for which instant death was scarcely thought a sufficient atonement."

Is it objected that we have recourse chiefly to the satirical language of the poets? we own the charge, and, as far as our own feelings are concerned, would willingly not depart from the poets: when we empty pitch-wells, we like to do it, as the modern Zantiotes, with laurel-branches. But if more to the reader's taste, we can make the pitch stick pretty closely to his fingers by dint of mere prose. Of all persons Demosthenes was probably the last to indulge in any mirth at the expense of his country; and yet a faint approximation to a smile, a sort of subdued simper, (for the venerable man never laughed outright,) may be observed about his lips, whenever he alludes to the fears and jealousies' of power at Athens. It has been asked,' (says the orator on some occasion, not necessary to specify more particularly,) it has been asked, (and that by no ordinary person, but by one of those, who would die of envy, if he saw my advice made the guide of your actions)—" And what extraordinary advantage have the people of Athens derived from the speeches of Demosthenes? When it happens to be his good pleasure, he ascends the bema, fills our ears with fine words, inveighs bitterly against the present times, lauds vehemently the past, lifts us into the air with commendations of our ancestors, and having blown us up with words-he even leaves the bema as he found it....." Men of Athens, if the speeches of Demosthenes have no other advantage in them, they at least have this, that they accustom you to hear wholesome truths; and the first care of every well-intentioned person towards this city ought to be an honest endeavour to cure her ears; for let me tell you, that, from the habit she has of listening to lies and falsehoods, to any thing, in short, rather than the truth, they are grown most dreadfully diseased. For instance (and I beg that I may be obliged with a fair hearing, till I have made an end)— the other day the treasury was broken open; and presently all the orators were on their legs-" the democracy is gone-the laws of Athens are at an end!" Gentlemen, I appeal to truth and common

* Euripides in Medeå.. Demosthenes in Pantæneto. Lysias contra Andocidem. Hyperides contra Aristog. Isocrates in Lochite.

sense:

sense: the criminals in this case undoubtedly deserved deathbut the democracy was not gone, nor were the laws at an end. Again, a few oars were stolen from the dock-yards, and immediately the cry was" Let them be scourged, let them be tortured: or there is no safety for the democracy." And here again, what is my opinion? It is as before-that the delinquents in this case too deserve death, but that whether they die or not, the democracy is in perfect safety. And what then does endanger the democracy? If no one else has the courage to tell you, that want of courage shall not be imputed to me.'-As the courage of Demosthenes is not the subject of our present inquiry, and good advice was given at Athens only to be admired and neglected, we may be excused for proceeding farther with our translation.

We alluded lately to an orator, of whom it was observed, that he did not appear to have come under the notice of the English historian of Greece. That orator was Lycurgus; and a brief analysis of a single speech of his will give us the double advantage of bringing another member of our oratorical band before the reader, and of illustrating still further the Athenian law of treason. When it is said that Lycurgus was the friend of Demosthenes, and his associate in government, we bespeak for him no common attention as an orator, and no small share of patriotism as a man; and we cannot but regret Mr. Mitford's double blindness, who would not see that the dissolute Chares was the friend of the great orator by political necessity, as he did not happen to observe that Lycurgus was his friend by political choice. Time has spared us but one of the speeches of Lycurgus; and from its loud tones and its lofty flight, that speech reminds its readers of the shepherd's pipe, which was formed of an eagle's wing. Earnestness, vehemence, disdain, and a quick sense of feeling to all that reflected disgrace or honour upon his country, are the most prominent features of his oratory. With a nice discrimination between public and private duties, his ideas on both less resemble those of a lively and versatile Greek, than of a stern and severe Roman, when Rome was at her best.* Hence, as in the present attack, he follows up the object of his indignation with unsparing animosity; there is a convulsive grasp in his manner of handling his victim; and if he lets the wretch slip from him for a time, it is only that he may clutch him again with a stronger energy of compression. The

Rome was at her best when her government most resembled our own, that is, when the regal power, lodged in the Consuls, formed a balance between patrician arrogance and plebeian licentiousness. Machiavelli, who never talks idly but when he professedly and voluntarily puts himself in opposition to all received opinion, (cap. 58.) has put this in a very full light in the 2d and 4th of his Discorsi.' lib. primo.

Y 3

fatal

fatal battle of Cheronea, the yet incomplete subjugation of Greece, and the tottering power of Demosthenes, made it, indeed, of consequence, that every single individual should be kept immoveable to his post, and not be permitted to desert his country at her utmost need, as the present defendant (Leocrates) is charged with having basely done.

Eight years had elapsed since the commission of the offence, but the first moment of Leocrates's return to Athens was the immediate moment of accusation; under the glowing colours and imagery of Lycurgus, time disappears, and the feelings of the audience are made as much alive to the defendant's guilt, as if it had been but of yesterday.

The very exordium of the speech betrays the determined spirit of the accuser. Into a few lines are crowded all that could most interest or affect the minds of the hearers the gods, the patroness of their town, the city itself, the whole Attic land, with its temples, its groves and sacrificial rites-the ancestors of his audience their fathers, wives and children:—and having heaped all these into his opening paragraph, Lycurgus drops them with an overwhelming weight upon the offender, as if to crush him at the very outset. The prejudices that might operate against the speaker himself he wards off with the nicest circumspection, adroitly interposing between himself and the odium belonging to a public accuser a triple shield, by telling his audience that there are three things which guard and preserve republics generally, and the happiness of Athens in particular-first, the ordinances of the law; secondly the votes of the dicasts; and thirdly the trial, which puts into the dicast's hands the visitation of offences: for the law,' says the orator, 'by its very nature was intended to say beforehand, what is improper to be done; with the accuser it rests to denounce those who have exposed themselves to the terms and penalties of the law, while to the dicast it belongs to punish those, whom the law and the accuser equally bring before his notice so that the law and the dicast would be inefficient instruments, did not some third person stand forward to put offenders into their hands.' The orator then proceeds to work upon the feelings of the court by exaggerated expositions of the importance of the present cause, and of the enormity of the guilt which its object was to bring under their notice and it here behoved the orator to put forth all his strength-for he makes very little further progress before he is obliged to admit that, great as the offence was, the law contained no definite punishment for it; and the remainder of a long speech consists of hints, arguments, and appeals to the feelings; of hints that this deficiency of the law originated from no carelessness or indolence of former legislators, but

from

from the mere circumstance that, as no such guilt existed in their days, it was not thought possible that such guilt ever would exist; -of arguments not uncommon in Grecian oratory, that in such cases it became the dicasts to consider themselves rather as legislators than as judges, not so much trying the fact, as assessing the punishment; and of appeals to the feelings, such as we shall try presently, whether mere readers can peruse with absolute indifference, and readers too who have been stopped at the very moment when the feelings of an English jury would have begun to operate against the orator himself rather than against the object of his eloquence.

We cannot present this speech at length; but the reader, who is master of the whole, whatever he may think of the case, will allow it to have been conducted with all the powers of a consummate orator. An ardent admirer of Homer, and deeply versed in the tragic compositions of his countrymen, the diction of Lycurgus is perhaps somewhat too poetical; and he plunges into the mythical tales much more than was customary in the serious oratory of Greece; yet in the midst of matter apparently extraneous, he does not forget those little hints, which recal the main point to his hearers, and which have the effect of leaving a future coldness for his opponent, after the warmth excited for himself. His views of political events are luminous in the extreme: by a single word he often enlists the feelings on his side; he reasons equally well from the less to the greater, and from the greater to the less; and in a climax of bitter reproaches he knows how to rise in his attack at every step, and yet reserve the sting for the concluding word. As a specimen of his appeals to the feelings, we select that portion of his harangue, which describes the state of Athens after the fatal battle of Charonea.

'At that period of desolation, where was the person, whether native or stranger, who did not feel for the city's calamity? Who was there with such a hatred of democracy in general, or of Athens in particular, that at such a period-when every mouth was full of the defeat and recent calamity, when the city was on the tiptoe of fear and expectation as to the future, and when every hope centered in the men who had already exceeded the usual age of military service-who, I say, at such a period could endure to see the ranks of the army filling, and himself not among the number? And oh the spectacles of that horrid time! women of the first quality thronging to the gates in all the agonies of terror and consternation; the only question upon their lips, "Does be still live, my husband, my father, .... my brother!" (a sight as degrading to their own dignity as to that of the republic!) and every street crowded with age and imbecility, with men past the age of military service, tottering on the very brink of the grave, yet clothed and equipped in the strictest habiliments of war! Yet, bitter as all this was,

....