suggests that this does not prove it a native, as the scenes represented may be foreign or symbolical. But the caution is unnecessary. The date-palm was certainly common of yore in maritime Italy, though no doubt in single specimens.* "Vulgo in Italiâ, sed steriles," says Pliny: who accurately distinguishes it from the dwarf-palm or chamærops, then, as now, more characteristic of Sicily. We have already noticed the use for which Virgil recommends it in the 'Georgics.' Varro, ‘De Re Rusticâ,' is still more to the point, when he classes the fibres of the palm along with flax, hemp, and reeds, among materials grown on the farm, which may be turned to account for making cordage.

"Thus we perceive," concludes our naturalist," that the vegetable world, and in particular the list of cultivated vegetables, has undergone many changes since the age when Pompeii flourished; and that, while the ancient Pompeians enjoy ed a great superiority over the moderns in respect of many enjoyments of life, particularly those arising from the arts, they lacked nevertheless some very valuable plants which increased geographical knowledge and extended commerce have procured for their descendants."

But however this may be, no one can well contemplate in earnest these relics of a most curious and refined civilisation - in some respects perhaps the most curious and refined which the world has ever seen and return with satisfaction to the coarse generalisation of the disciples of universal progress in the affairs of humanity, with whose speculations we have been lately surfeited. The feelings which such inquiries excite are assuredly more akin to those with which they inspired the proud and melancholy Leopardi, when he turned from them and from the wealth of conception and nobleness of sentiment

with which the ancient world abounded, to that long degradation of subsequent ages, out of which humanity is in truth only now emerging. Very grand, though profoundly sorrowful, are those lines of his, entitled 'Bruto minore,' in which he portrays the expiring patriot, not as bewailing his present catastrophe, nor calling on the gods for present revenge, but as brooding, in utter hopelessness of spirit, over "the dark forward and abysm of time "-the Erebus-like blackness of that prospect of coming degeneracy and decay: the trance of ages, into which the human soul was about to fall.

"In peggio

Precipitano i tempi: e mal s'affida
Ai putridi nipoti

L'onor d'egregie menti, e la suprema
De' miseri vendetta."

For the duration of that era of decline was indeed such as we are sufficiently accustomed to measure backwards, in historical reflection; but such as, when contemplated as a future, the conception shrinks from with a painful sense of incapacity. Thirteen centuries were to elapse ere the first Italian could stretch his hand across the chasm to the last Roman. As the paradise of cultivation, in which those Campanian cities nestled, was separated from the fertile aspect of the same region in modern times by a formidable blank of centuries of duration, so was the ancient civilisation from the modern by a similar space of intellectual desert; and in each instance alike, the succeeding age can scarcely appreciate its predecessor as a reality.

"Credetne virum ventura propago, Cum segetes iterum, cum jam hæc deserta virebunt,

Infra urbes populosque premi."

And yet there are those who persist in cramming us with that dry formula of Positivism, that each generation enjoys the "accumulated knowledge" of preceding ones! Ask

those countless millions of Chinese who vegetate, generation after generation, in the vast interior of their empire apart from all foreign influence, how much of "accumulated knowledge" their community has gathered since the days of Confucius; ask the black nations of the interior of Africa what amount of "progress" distinguishes them from their ancestors known to Herodotus or to Leo Africanus; ask the wretched remnants of tribes which wander over the American wilderness, whether their progenitors, the sons of those who came thither over the ocean, were fewer and feebler and more ignorant than they? For those who seek truth and not phrases, "progress," as the term is used in social science, is an attribute not of mankind, but of the European family alone; and of that family only since the discovery of printing. What that incomparably greatest of all merely human events may have done towards fixing the elements of social improvement, and converting into a permanent advance that which was before only a precarious, oscillatory movement, we need not now consider. It may be that the so-called triumphal march of humanity is now secured from repulse, and that, as some of our latest speculators seem to hold, the powers of nature which we employ will begin of themselves to decay before our capability of employing them abates. But all this, if so, does not annul the melancholy record of previous periods of loss and retreat. It is extremely difficult, no doubt, for us to realise those periods. In our healthy exuberance of life we can hardly conceive a state of chronic political ebb or decline a state, that is, in which each generation, instead of profiting by the "accumulated knowledge" of its predecessors, lets something of the results of that knowledge drop from its enfeebled grasp; is reduced in numbers, less provided with the external comforts of life, weaker against aggression, poorer in substance, feebler in spirit, in

ferior in mental acquirements; nevertheless, such periods have been beyond all doubt. The history of the Byzantine empire furnishes one well known to all; and many such have rolled drearily away in the dimmer ages of early time, since the subjects of Nimrod were dispersed on the plain of Shinar. But let us take the most familiar, and at the same time the truest, instance of what we mean, and which happens also to be most germane to the matter in hand. Could a modern really do what many a visitor to Pompeii has striven to do in intense eagerness of fancy; could he restore those truncated columns and repeople those desolate streets, and actually converse with some cultivated contemporary of Pliny and Juvenal, or Cicero and Horace; one can fancy that the feeling on both sides, after the first strangeness of the meeting had been got over, would be one of surprise, that two specimens of humanity of such distant origin could have so much in common. In moral and social philosophy; in political speculation; in appreciation of eloquence, literature, art, they would really find themselves some exceptions apart which would give zest to the conversation almost on the same ground. In respect of matters of still more intimate interest-the inner clothing, as it were, of civilised existence-in their estimate of physical and mental pursuits, tendencies, weaknesses, pleasures, and pains, and their relation to each other-each would feel that he understood his companion; each would be conscious, as it were, of possessing a key to many of the other's inmost feelings. This would be partly owing, no doubt, to the circumstance that the ancients have been our tutors, and that much of our mental furniture is derived directly from them. But also, in great measure, to mere similarity of circumstances, which engenders similarity of ideas. Civilisations so nearly resembling each other, even in many points of

--

minuteness, as those of modern Europe and of the Rome of Cicero or the Athens of Demosthenes, must, from the necessity of the case, have strongly corresponding spiritual and mental emotions, and corresponding language wherein to express them.

Now let us alter the picture: let the man of the nineteenth century wake up under the shadow of Winchester or Canterbury Cathedral, such as the Saxons had reared them, and, to give him the best company of the day, let him consort with a baron or an abbot of the time of the Norman conquest. Except the subject of religion, of which we would not now speak, what single topic could they have in common? Would they not be separated from each other by a barrier as high and strong as any which divides contemporary civilised from savage man? What object (except possibly horses and dogs), could they appreciate together?

What

points of morals or science or politics, small talk, sentiment, or humour, would suit them both? How could they argue on premises which one would assume as certain and the other would treat with contempt? The medieval wight would certainly rate the modern at a very different value from his own estimate of himself; and if the modern escaped with a whole skin from the interview, which is greatly to be doubted of, he would find his romantic respect for the baron, or veneration for the ecclesiastic, very little increased. They would be denizens of alien spheres, and would converse in utterly dissonant tongues.

And yet the Norman was our countryman; was nearer to us by many an age than the Roman; and possessed the "accumulated knowÎedge" (had such a thing really existed before the invention of printing), of many an intervening generation. But these were in truth generations of decline, not of advance; a decline often hardly sensible, or arrested for a time, but on the whole prodigious. And if the

enthusiastic disciple of progress chooses to count these ebbs as insignificant exceptions to his general theory of flow, let us remember that a space of a thousand years, however unimportant to a geologist, is a considerable fraction of the historical existence of man.

And this, as many have said, though not many truly feel it, is one of the most real advantages of classical study, and one of the charms which make us turn back to it with recurring affection, after resultless wanderings in company with the "Positivists." He who has imbibed its lessons deeply can hardly find his judgment much affected by those metaphors turned into arguments which pass commonly current, likening the youth, manhood, and old age of the world to those of an individual; nor will he readily adopt the formulas of a recent clever writer of the Positive school, that "we may expect to find, in the history of man, each successive age incorporating into itself the substance of the preceding," and that "this power, whereby the present ever gathers into itself the results of the past, transforms the human race into a colossal man, whose life reaches from the creation to the day of judgment." Classical study made men pedants, after a fashion, two centuries ago; at present its effect is to preserve them from an equally tasteless and less innocent pedantry. By bringing clearly before our view that magnificent phantasma of great communities entombed, and great conceptions buried with them, it weakens the ordinary temptation to overvalue ourselves and our age. displays to us the vast ocean of moral and intellectual being such as it really is, subject to æons of rise and fall, and not a steady onward current continually gaining ground; and, by so doing, administers a reasonable check to that "Excelsior" tendency which elevates but often misleads us-an indiscriminating confidence in the destiny and powers of our species.

It

It is not probable that many of our readers will meet with the volumes, lately published in Wash ington, containing the correspondence of American diplomatists during the period of the civil war; but, after perusing some of the specimens we shall offer, they will no doubt agree with us in thinking it a pity that these productions should not be generally known. Under any circumstances, most people would find something comical in a set of elderly gentlemen, engaged in important business, exchanging by letter moral sentiments suited to a schoolboy's theme. But when the compositions thus embellished are of the kind known to the world as State Papers, and when the writers, who thus aim, like the interlocutors in a religious novel, at the instruction of the universe through the medium of dialogue, are American politicians, the effect produced is such as few professed humorists could hope to rival. For most people are aware nowadays that the atmosphere through which those politicians must pass before they can attain to that eminence, one condition of which is the writing of state papers, is much more likely to develop in them the wisdom of the serpent than the guilelessness of the dove. Remembering the pushing and scrambling, the elbowing of vile competitors, the truckling and corruption, the wire-pulling and log-rolling, the acquaintance with all the small and dirty ramifications of tickets and platforms, which success in politics demands in the States, the very last vein of composition we should expect to find these gentlemen especially cultivating would be that in which the sage Imlac addresses Rasselas, or in which the good godmother improves every occasion in a children's story. A difficulty to believe in the existence

of craft or guile or self-interest as motives of political conduct, yielding at last to a surprised and mournful conviction of the sad truth, and a touching and simple style of moralising over human delinquency, are the characteristics, on paper, of the diplomatists who have particularly distinguished themselves in the pleasing and pastoral pursuits we have attempted to enumerate. Everybody who has read American speeches must have noticed in them a tendency to flowery sentiment and to ancient and fish-like metaphors, such as the audiences of the Old World would reject. Why the not very immaculate or poetical classes who constitute a New York mob should especially relish this style of oratory, we cannot explain; but it is the fact that it seems to succeed in America whether the audience be a constituency, or a house of assembly, or the population of a Boston lectureroom, or the entertainers of an American celebrity, or a jury in a criminal case-and all the scribes of their newspapers indulge in the same vein. That it does succeed may appear to be a sufficiently good reason why the parliamentary and stump orators of America should habitually launch at their audiences such sentences as are, on this side of the water, never addressed to any but the galleries at a Surrey melodrama. But directly the speakers are placed in relation to foreign Governments, they think it necessary to engraft on the florid RosaMatilda style which deals with "starspangled banners," " great, glorious, and free people," and the best Government the world ever saw," the virtuous didactic style we have attempted to describe, and which we suppose they imagine to be particularly likely to influence the counsels of such guileless and simple-minded statesmen as Gortcha

66

koff, Rechberg, Russell, Palmerston, and the Emperor Napoleon.

The principal agent in the pious attempt to inoculate mankind, through their Governments, with virtuous principles, is Mr William Henry Seward. The circumstances under which the benevolent sage perseveres in his philanthropic efforts are not such as are favourable to placid meditation or composition. His lucubrations must have been disturbed not unfrequently by the booming of Confederate cannon. The sudden irruption on his privacy of a distracted Finance Minister, a desperate War Secretary, or a bewildered President, must have been extremely unfavourable to the prosecution of the task. Yet that he struggled successfully with those hostile influences is proved by the enormous volume of his essays, which must, we estimate, be equal in bulk, for one year, to about four volumes of the original edition of The Rambler'-under which title, indeed, they might not inappropriately have been published. Seated at his desk, with the copybooks of his boyhood at hand for quotation, in a glow of philanthropy that cannot fail to warm what he would himself call the "moral atmosphere" of barbaric Europe, he can shut his eyes to passing events, and find sermons in civil wars, and good in everything. Immediately on his accession to office, he begins a circular to all the Ministers at foreign courts in the following style: "Sir, The advocates of benevolence, and the believers in human progress, encouraged by the slow though marked meliorations of the barbarities of war which have obtained in modern times, have been, as you are well aware, recently engaged,"

&c.

Since that was written, the advocates of benevolence and the believers in human progress have been further encouraged by the "meliorations" of stone fleets, of corps of licensed plunderers, of the submersion of great tracts of cultivated land, of the devastation of half a

State, of the incitement to servile insurrection, and of the rule of Benjamin F. Butler at New Orleans

illustrations of his remark, which the eminent essayist probably did not at that time expect.

In the early part of his correspondence, Mr Seward's opinions of the policy to be pursued towards the South are much more indulgent than at a later period. "The Union," he says, on March 22, 1861, "was formed upon popular consent, and must always practically stand on the same basis." He says, on April 10, that Secession is "a bad enterprise," and that the Secessionists are "a misguided portion of our fellow-citizens." But he goes on to say that the President" would not be disposed to reject a cardinal dogma of theirs (the citizens of the Southern States), namely, that the Federal Government could not reduce the seceding States to obedience by conquest, even although he were disposed to question that proposition. But, in fact, the President willingly accepts it as true. Only an imperial or despotic government could subjugate thoroughly disaffected and insurrectionary members of the State. This Federal republican system of ours is, of all forms of government, the very one which is most unfitted for such a labour." And he goes on to suggest the following paternal method of bringing back the prodigal South, and providing a fatted calf for it :—

quate peaceful, conservative, and recu"The system has within itself ade perative forces. Firmness on the part of the Government in maintaining and preserving the public institutions and property, and in executing the laws where authority can be exercised without waging war, combined with such forbearance as will disarm reasoning measures of justice, moderation, and opposition, will be sufficient to secure the public safety until returning reflection, concurring with the fearful experience of social evils, the inevitable fruits of faction, shall bring the recusant members cheerfully back into the family, which, after all, must prove their best and happiest, as it undeniably is their most natural, home. The constitution of the United States provides for