sentiment. It should be his endeavour to give a comprehensive view of the prevalence of particular ideas at particular times, and from the tone and temper of the work under review to argue upon its age and author. There is a consistency of thought and of style in most ages and countries, less infallible than the mere apposition of dates, and it should be his business to point out the force of these coincidences. An estimate of the general state of manners and feeling drawn from works written at the different epochs into which Grecian literature may be divided, should also undoubtedly be attempted. By a person of sound taste and judgment, with critical powers to detect faults, and sensibility to taste beauties, this part of the work might be rendered very interesting; and if he would elucidate his position by literal, and at the same time spirited translations, an unity of plan might be preserved, and the value of the history would be increased. It is to her literature that Greece is indebted for her purest glory. It is this which makes her a conqueror even in captivity. The empire which she has obtained can perish only with the world. And in her history shall we not endeavour to ascertain the causes of its excellence and the effect of its power? When so much inquiry and thought are bestowed upon what in general are not worth investigating, the deep-laid intrigue, the tortuous policy, the supposed sagacity of a minister, and when we assign to his mind results over which he had no control, ought we to refuse to examine the influence which those higher spirits, the spirits of reason and of fancy working in solitude and speaking in their writings, exercised over the political elements? Obvious as is this justice, it has rarely, if ever, been acted upon. In almost every history, from that of Herodotus to those of the present day, the narration, the observations, the surmises of the author have been occupied exclusively on the apparent and superficial part of our nature, on human actions, without any attempt to sound the depth of the minds and intellects which governed those actions. We are anxious that a History of Greece should be free from these errors. We wish to see mind weighed against mind, and the palm of superiority assigned to the most worthy. How then would those who now occupy the chief place on the historic roll shrink at the comparison! How would Pericles, Epaminondas, or Alexander bear juxta-position with Socrates and Plato, and Aristotle? These were the real benefactors of their country, the true directors of human affairs, the unsullied patriots; these were conquerors without crime and statesmen without corruption. Surely there is more advantage to be derived from the study of such minds, than from merely tracing the chain of events, and describing, with scrupulous exactness, a siege, a battle, or a state-intrigue.

Nor

Nor will the philosophic historian pass by in his inquiry the rise, progress, and perfection of the arts in Greece. Their excellence is acknowledged without a murmur of dissent, without a whisper against their supremacy. It would be curious to investigate the causes of this pre-eminence and to ascertain the influence which it has had on that nation, and on mankind. How far were the artists indebted to literature, and what advantages did they confer in return? Did the laws and government assist them in their progress, or did they rise to the surface entirely by their own buoyancy? What share had the institutions of religion in promoting the production of those admirable works of the chissel, which are to us at once objects of admiration and despair? A great deal of light may be thrown on these questions from the works of the Greek poets, particularly the minor ones, and their incidental testimony will be more valuable than any professed treatise by an artist. For we would not recommend a mere detail of the works executed and the artists employed, nor would we insist upon the merit of mere manual execution; but we would endeavour to point out the connection between the mind and the operations of the hand; we would trace a similarity of power between the creations of fancy embodied in words, and those expressed in stone; we would show that there must be a connecting link, an intellectual association between faculties apparently most dissimilar, and that the mental process by which the artist analyses beauty, and represents its truth, has an intimate connection with that, which investigates the concordance and discrepancy between things and ideas. This subject, it is evident, is of wide and general application, but the disquisition would be peculiarly appropriate in a history of that people, whose art is so intellectual and whose philosophy has so much of passion and fancy.

But one of the most important and curious subjects which would engage the historian of Greece is an inquiry into the state of society prevalent in that country. By society we mean not only the prominent part of social intercourse displayed in the public exhibition of feasts and banquets, but that more private intercourse which may be called the society of the heart. In the investigation of this subject the condition of the females would be minutely examined, and its effect upon the general tone of manners and morals fairly ascertained and estimated. It is true that women were excluded from general society, and we might, therefore, at first suppose that their influence on their contemporaries was quite insignificant; but when we read the numberless passages of consummate beauty scattered over the works of the Greek and Tragic poets, in which the feelings of conjugal and parental affection are described with resistless simplicity and

pathos,

pathos, we feel assured that an audience who could listen with pleasure to such sentiments could not be devoid of those affections, the indulgence of which is a homage to the power of the softer sex.

A picture of the state of society would not, however, be complete, unless we ascertained the comforts which the members of it enjoyed, and the privations which they endured. Under this head the condition of the lower classes would especially engage our attention, and we should prosecute the inquiry by considering their rural economy and commercial intercourse with other nations. The state of their agriculture would be examined and illustrated by a comparison drawn between its operations and those of more modern practice. The first authors of the nation, both in poetry and prose, did not disdain to write professedly on the subject: it was, therefore, an art held in high estimation. Of the philosophy of agriculture, both as it regards the supply of the wants of mankind, (which may be called its material philosophy,) and as it influences the disposition and pleasures of those who pursue it as an amusement, (which may be denominated its intellectual philosophy,) the Greeks seem to have entertained just and exalted notions. Their poets sang its praises, and their statesmen and warriors investigated and executed its operations. When an art of such primary necessity as agriculture becomes a work not of labour or anxiety, but a pursuit of pleasure, we are warranted in assigning a high state of civilization to the society in which it is so practised.

We have thus given a slight outline (which we hope soon to see filled up by some consummate artist) of a philosophical history of Greece. Such a work would lay open the whole mind of the illustrious people to our view, and enable us to form a real estimate of their mental and moral character. Their most signal victories, glorious as they were, would sink into insignificance compared with the triumph which such an inquiry would call us to witness and admire, the subjugation of thought and fancy to their empire with a power, though diminished, yet felt and venerated at the present hour. To attempt such a work is no less than what we owe to the genius of the Greeks; it is the homage of gratitude to our benefactors; it is an acknowledgment of the mighty debt which we have contracted with them on the score of intellectual advancement. Without their warriors and without their statesmen, we might have been what we are; without their poets, philosophers, and historians, we never should. The present age seems particularly adapted to the undertaking. Our country is filled with excellent scholars, in the highest sense of the word; not mere grammarians and hunters of false quantities,

but

but scholars imbued with the noble spirit of the classic writings, Greece itself has been, and is still explored by our intelligent travellers, whose observations throw much light on the geography, the history, and even the manners of antiquity. We ourselves, as a nation, stand on an eminence as commanding as that which the sons of Athens and of Lacedæmon occupied, and in our valour, our freedom, our philosophic and poetic genius, we bear no remote resemblance to that extraordinary people. Like them we have stemmed the tide of barbaric warfare, and burst asunder the chains that would have confined our minds as well as bodies in hopeless subjection. We have met, like them, the Xerxes of the day, with our small band of brothers, and defied, with the arms and hearts of freemen, the myriads of slaves which he led against us. We are hailed with the gratitude of the civilized world for the accomplishment of an enterprize, similar to that for which Greece is immortalized-the vindication of liberty, and the preservation of social order. The sentiments of freemen should only be interpreted by the free. The wild ardour of debate, the popular collision of intellect, can be understood and explained only by those of whose government they are constituent parts; they would be unintelligible to a Frenchman or an Italian. We are the only nation that can produce names equal in philosophy and in poetry to the master-spirits of Greece, and we are, therefore, the only people that can approach on equal terms to judge and to pronounce on their merits. Our philosophy, like theirs, is daring, profound, and original; like theirs it has changed the course of public opinion, and exercises a manifest influence, an undisputed supremacy over the thoughts, and consequently over the actions of mankind. Our poetry has the same high character of force, of dignity, and of independence, and we can, therefore, come to the task of criticism unshackled by those arbitrary rules which modern fastidiousness has in some nations affixed to opinion. Like the Greek, our poets have given the full scope to their real powers, and have not clipped the wings of their genius, in order to enable men of paltry intellectual growth to accompany their flight. We should not call the healthy vigour of composition extravagance, lest the authors of our own country should appear shrunk and shrivelled beside them. We should not, in the true spirit of French criticism, make our own defects a measure of their excellencies, but we should at once see and comprehend the direction of the highest and wildest flights of imagination. In a word, whilst illustrating the intellect, the character, and the patriotism of the Greeks, we should in no slight degree do homage to the similar qualities of our own countrymen.

ART.

ART. IX. Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a NorthWest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, performed in the Years 1819-20, in his Majesty's Ships Hecla and Griper, under the Orders of William Edward Parry, R.N. F.R.S. Com munder of the Expedition. With an Appendix, containing the Scientific and other Observations. Published by Authority of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. London. 1821. I the North-West Passage unto Cathay and lands Orientall,'

6

which for two centuries and a half has scarcely ceased to be an object of anxious research, has not yet been completed, at least we may now say the ice is broken,' the door opened, the threshold passed, and the first stage of the journey accomplished. It may be recollected that, on the return of the first expedition, we stated' our conviction of the existence of a communication between Baffin's Bay and the Polar Sea, and between that and the Pacific, adding that, so far from that conviction being in the smallest degree shaken by any thing that Captain Ross had done, it was considerably strengthened by what he had omitted to do.' And though we could not take upon ourselves to declare positively, with Burleigh, that considering Groyneland is well known to be an islande, and that it is not conjoyned to America in any part'*-yet we entertained very little doubt that the whole of the western coasts of Davis's Strait and Baffin's Bay were one continued chain of islands; and that little was completely removed from the moment we were certified of the existence of those numerous inlets which Baffin, for want of a fitter word, named Sounds.† It was enough that

* Burleigh Papers. In the Lansdown Collection, British Museum, vol. c. No. 4. This discourse Concerning a Straighte to be discovered towards the North-west Passing to Cathaia and the Orientall Indians,' is in Burleigh's own hand-writing. +lf Captain Ross's voyage did nothing more, it at least removed all doubts of the authenticity of Baffin's third voyage, by the extraordinary coincidence of the chart of Baffin's Bay with the same portion of a polar chart annexed to the printed voyage of that old navigator who quaintly calls himself the North-West Foxe.' That Captain Luke Foxe did trace this part of his chart from that of Baffin there can be little doubt, as none but Baffin could have laid down such a chart, agreeing, as it does, most remarkably, even to a few minutes of longitude. We state this with great confidence. A map or chart may be faulty in a thousand ways, but can be correct only in one; and as no navigator but Baffin, before Foxe's time, ever was in the bay that bears his name, none but Baffin could draw a correct chart of it. All attempts that we have seen to lay down this bay geographically from the vague journal of Baffin, have utterly failed; some of them have made it to extend from thirty to forty degrees of longitude more than it actually does, while others, unable to trace any thing like an outline from Baffin's description, have left it entirely open to the northward for future discovery. That Foxe was in possession of Baffin's chart, which Purchas found somewhat troublesome and too costly to insert' in his collection, we can readily conceive. He tells us indeed that he got acquainted with Mr. Thomas Sterne, globe-maker,' whom,' says he, 'I have found to have engrossed all those former voyages by relation, manuscripts, and maps,' and he ends his preface by saying, that, when brought before his Majestie (King Charles I.) I received