with an imagination in the least ardent and creative, if he has boldness enough to disdain whatever impedes the fluency, and restrains the copiousness of more modest and correct speakers? If it is eloquence, to pour forth every thought in metaphors incongruous, incomplete and clashing with each other; to seize every illustration which occurs from the sacred volume or the meanest occupation of life; if every third sentence may mean not but blunder round about a meaning;' if the language may disdain not merely purity and precision, but even grammar; if the expressions are to be confined by no regard, we will not say, to propriety but to decency, (for there are terms, favourite terms with Mr. Irving, which we dare not quote,) then indeed our orator is worthy of the name. But if abundance without selection, fluency without correctness, perpetual repetition without perspicuity; in short, a total want of judgment in the application of extraordinary fertility and exuberance, are imperfections, much is still wanting, before we can accede to the high pretensions of this celebrated preacher.

Finally, we intreat Mr. Irving, for his sake as for our own, in the name of that cause which he is pledged to advocate, not to waste his extraordinary powers; not to sacrifice a permanent and extensive influence to a transient, theatrical success. His usefulness must depend upon his real and lasting excellence; let him therefore despise the poor pride of sending forth his works, crude, disjointed, and unconnected; let him lower his pretensions, without in the least compromising the boldness of a minister of divine truth; let him be more cautious in his assertions, and the subjects which he introduces into the pulpit, without being restrained or timid; let him set us an example of that ' solemn sequestration of the mind,' of which he speaks, for the great conception and perfect execution of some enduring work in favour of Christianity, and we assure him that none of his fondest admirers, or more eager followers will hail his appearance more proudly, gladly or affectionately. We speak in perfect sincerity, when we add, that the pleasure which we shall then derive, from giving him our hearty and unrestrained tribute of praise will be heightened by the desire of compensating for the unwilling severity of our present remarks.

ART. II.-Œuvres complètes de Démosthène et d'Eschine, en Grec et en François. Traduction de l'Abbé Auger, de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres en Paris. Nouvelle Edition, revue et corrigée par J. Planche, Professeur de Rhétorique au Collège Royal de Bourbon. 1822. Tom. ii. vii. FROM the sublime to the ridiculous, it has been said, there is

but one step, and that step we make by passing at once from the warriors to the jurymen of Athens.

The

The happiest of nations, according to Beccaria,* is that which has the fewest laws; or where, to be more accurate, the laws have not become a science. The eloquent Marquis does not appear to us always right, even when his thoughts have been reduced to that geometrical precision in which he so much delighted; and here, with something of the Code Solon in our mind's eye, and more than something of the English Code before our bodily eye, we do not hesitate to pronounce him decidedly wrong. If simplicity of jurisprudence could suffice to make a nation happy, Athens would certainly have had that benefit; for the advocate, whose office it was to expound the laws, had but a comparatively slender task imposed on him; and the English student, who surveys the battery before him, and knows the Monthly and Annual Reports which are letting slip behind him, will hear with a sigh, that the person entrusted with deciding the laws at Athens, had no task at all his code, pandects, institutes, and statute book, lay-in a bean field. While the bean was in blossom, he inhaled law, and the fruit once shed into his hands, HE WAS HIMSELF THE LAW!

Of all the amusing pictures which Aristophanes has left us, there is none perhaps more exquisitely ridiculous than his Athenian Dicast; and we pity Mr. W. Schlegel, that, with his keen relish of the Aristophanic writings, his knowledge of antiquity was insufficient to make him see, that, though the Wasps' may be considered the weakest of the poet's productions, when viewed on the side of taste, it is one of the most artful and bold as applied to the times which saw its birth. The dramatist knew as well as +Demosthenes and Aristotle, (or, to speak more properly, the orator and the philosopher gained that knowledge from him,) that the very essence of the Athenian democracy centered in her tribunals; and that any attack upon them required to be conducted under the most covert disguise. If the poet, therefore, stooped, it was only to gain a more secure victory. The Wasps consequently became in parts the most farcical of farces; and the most successful translator must accordingly expect to find passages in it, for which he can hardly demand any shade of mirth between the broad grin and the simper, in which his reader can indulge with safety to his dignity.

The first part of a dicast's establishment (we draw our picture from that humorous comedy, and one-third of the population of Athens, it must be remembered, sat for the portrait) was a little nursery of beans, and the second a loose cloak, somewhat resem

*Felice quella nazione, dove le leggi non fossero una scienza!- -Dei Delitti e delle Pene, sect. 7.

+ Demosth. c. Timocr. 700. 711. 748. also v. ii. 1316. Arist. in Politicis et Ethicis.

bling the modern capote:-a stomach on which a strong oath did not sit too heavily, and a hand that could open and shut very conveniently, formed his other principal requisites. Lysias, or Demosthenes, we forget which, tells us that the dicasts were continually misled in their verdicts by a feeling of too much compassion. We can easily conceive that a bench of mobjudges were accessible to any feelings which it might suit moborators to put into them; but too much compassion is certainly not the foible which Aristophanes attributes to those oracles of the law. His beau ideal of a dicast is extreme severity. Stone walls might be melted, but not he. He was to be sharp, sour, and inflexible. All the senses (as Miss Edgeworth will be happy to hear) were highly educated at Athens; and the eyes, in particular, were expected to be extremely expressive. The dicast, in his softest moments, was accordingly expected to look scourges, whips and thongs: on ordinary occasions he carried nasturtium in his countenance, but when the wind was N. E. by N. his look was wine whereof all the sweetness is sodden away, and which is in a state of transition into vinegar (rigalov). Bile, that great basis of controversy, satire, and patriotic zeal, was an indispensable quality in the Athenian dicast; and therefore as the Greek soldier and sailor, before setting out on an expedition, always laid in a store of three days' provision; so the Athenian dicast, on extraordinary occasions, was required to lay in a three days' stock of wrath. Like the rest of his superstitious countrymen, the dicast had his oracles and his predictions-and his favourite one came from Apollo's own shrine-it imported, that his very existence depended upon his severity, and that absolution to a criminal would be dissolution to himself!

Aristophanes has enabled us to make the Athenian dicast ridiculous; and graver authors (should we be extreme in our purpose) will hereafter oblige us to make him hateful; but meantime let us command for him a feeling which partakes neither of mirth nor hatred, and which is equally his due.

If any proofs were wanting of the astonishing acuteness, taste and intellectual powers of the Athenian mob, we should find them all in those comedies, to which we so often advert—and even the baser alloy, with which they are too plentifully mixed, forms perhaps, to those who speculate on human society, no small part of their attraction. A mob possessed in the highest sense of all those intellectual endowments, which in modern society belong almost exclusively to the higher classes, yet losing none of those characteristics which every where form the property of the lower orders, is a phenomenon which the world will never perhaps exhibit a second time. But in the oratory of the Greeks, all the animal

VOL. XXIX. NO. LVIII.

Y

part

part of this curious Centaur disappears, and, considered intellectually, only the rational part remains. We might select five hundred of the most cultivated of our own countrymen for a jury, to whom should be left the task of deciding the matter of law as well as the matter of fact; and we confidently say, that the most cautious orator would as little venture to commit any one error against good taste in his mode of addressing them, as the Greek orators in addressing the uncultivated audience, whose favour it most behoved them to win. Taste, indeed, among the Greeks, had that severe sway in the intellectual world, which conscience holds with us in the moral world.

Having discussed one branch of ancient oratory, of which imagination (not absolutely, indeed, in the modern sense of the word) formed the principal ingredient, we now come to another, which if we had to characterize by a single word, that word would be good sense.* In treating of the legal eloquence of the Greeks, we hope to be able to keep more steadily to the object, which we principally had in view; that of illustrating the political character of the Athenians and the nature of their government by means of their oratory.

The first two points, which a resident in a foreign country is anxious to ascertain, are how the laws stand which affect person and property: as, of the laws affecting life, all governments show their chief caution in the construction and maintenance of those which concern religion and the state. How property stood at Athens, we had a former opportunity of showing; and as to the laws more immediately affecting life in that metropolis, the disagreeable task of censure has been pretty well taken off our hands. The atrocity' of the Athenian law of treason has been explained by Mr. Mitford with so much power of language, and so much light of illustration, that he has left us little more than the task of collecting some lighter sallies on the subject, and of further illustrating the subject by the speech of an orator, who does not appear to have fallen within his reading.

We shall no doubt shock the admirers of Miss Benger and other lady-historians, when we venture to acknowledge, that, in the great object of their aversion, the eighth Henry, we occasionally discern qualities which, properly fostered, might have placed him among our greatest monarchs. Even in his worst days, there is a bluff English frankness of speech about him rarely asso

* How Voltaire came by the knowledge, we cannot pretend to say; but he had evidently some intimation of this division of the Greek oratory. Les Grecs savoient trèsbien distinguer l'histoire de la fable et les faits réels des contes d'Hérodote; ainsi que dans leurs affaires sérieuses, leurs orateurs n'empruntaient rien des discours des sophistes, ni des images des poetes.'

6

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.