loins of Lilburne, and laughed aloud at | deed, belonged to the heroic ages. His the impassioned dagger of Burke.

Though oratory at Rome was naturally more prolific and its chances of survival greater, it has been the good fortune of Grecian oratory, as far at least as quantity goes, to justify its claims to a superior immortality. The single name of Cicero comprehends almost the sole pretensions of Italian eloquence to preservation, and certainly constitutes its claims for excellence. If we set Cicero against Demosthenes, we have no extant names to oppose to Eschines, to Lysias, or Isocrates. Had it been otherwise, had any of the great speakers upon whose merits and defects Cicero has bequeathed to us one of the most delightful pieces of antique criticism that exists, been represented at the tribunal of posterity, it is not unlikely that their reputation would have been as completely absorbed in that of the orator who has preserved their fame, as the reputation of Eschines and his compeers has been in that of Demosthenes.

generation could not understand a man whose whole intelligence was exhausted in identifying the moral and the virtuous with the political, or rather in substituting the one motive for the other. It speaks well for his noble reliance on, his hearty belief and confidence in, the better part of his nation. But had it not been their interest to appear disinterested, it is to be feared his system would have damned him as a politician. That the Thebans should forget their enmities and the Athenians their defeat on moral grounds, was an idea that could only have imposed on the sensitive soul of an orator flattered by his own warmth into conviction. The arms of Philip had more to do with it than the ethics of Demosthenes. With Cicero, on the other hand, expediency, as a principle of action, was all in all. A man so egotistic could have had no sublimer rule of conduct. His egotism was, in truth, disgusting. It certainly is better founded than that of Falstaff; but it is quite as With no author in antiquity have we a intrusive. It insinuates itself at every more familiar acquaintance than we have odd moment. When it is not arrogant, with Cicero. And unhappily, it may be it is affected. When it does not strut, it added, no author has ever suffered more creeps. The reader can not enjoy the by our familiarity. Of Demosthenes we familiar gossip of the letter-writer withknow with certainty little, and that little out being interrupted by the purple of is all in his favor. The collection of Ci- the Consul. We never lose sight of the cero's letters which time has left us, forms man who put Catiline to flight, and saved a stereoscopic view of the writer's habits the capitol. The boast is doubtless justiand dispositions for the purposes of charac- fiable, and in a modest man would not terization, unequaled in literature. Per- have been without a well-earned gracefulhaps the work that comes nearest to them ness. But Cicero had not a grain of in modern times is the Epistolary Essays modesty in his whole composition. He of Montaigne. As might be inferred, we was habitually vain, and every thing that have no affection for the character of Ci- he said or did was adulterated by his cero. He certainly is not a man after our vanity. His love of his country was of a heart. Plutarch, according to his fashion, peculiar kind. He certainly possessed it, has drawn an ingenious parallel in his des- but it was not disinterested. He loved tiny and that of Demosthenes. He has the welfare of his country because it inconfined it to their political careers. volved his own welfare. Its triumphs had There the parallel begins, and there it been his triumphs. All his personal glory most assuredly ends. Every thing else had been associated with the defeat of its about them must be illustrated by con- enemies and the success of its friends. trast. In their moral, as in their literary Hence a less vain man than Cicero might idiosyncrasies, they are wide as the poles have imposed on himself, might have misasunder. There was something of the taken the real motives of his patriotism. modern Greek in Cicero, tricky, time- This self-delusion was all that distinguished serving, and specious. There was some- him for the better from the men who thing of the old Roman about Demos- would sooner have seen their country thenes, firm, patriotic, undaunted against sink, provided their mullet-ponds were odds. The emphasis on the Tо TрETOV, safe. His selfishness leaks out from a which runs through his works, seasoning hundred little imprudent apertures in his and flavoring them with an honest pi- correspondence. It was by serving his quancy, is remarkable. His simplicity, in-country that he had gained his authority

daggers of Clodius, we have nothing but a dejected old driveler, half stifled with rheum and tears, and half-choked with cursing the day of his own birth. He would not be comforted. Never was a man oppressed with such a weight of calamity. Never had a man more reason to wish for death. He would not see his brother, because he would not have his brother see his inexpressible misery. Yet in the midst of all this the assumption of the man is marvel

lingbroke, as indeed they must remind any body who ever compared the letters to Atticus with the letter to Pope. He had given up the world. He intended to study, to bequeath himself to philosophy, to the nine Muses.* Indifference was a greater comforter than hope. He had no curiosity left. Though each remove from Rome extracted a more pitiable protest, and the courier who did not bring a letter full of gossip from his friend, was sure to take back one full of complaint and remonstrance. The least change in fortune rouses him. The repeal of his banishment puts him into the other extreme. In an instant all his resolutions are gone. The tears are dried up. Sunshine peeps out on the face that had relinquished hope. And in a little while no one can trace the philosopher or the exile in the correspondent who fills his letters with delirious accounts how all Brundusium rang with acclamations at his approach, how all Rome, whose greeting was worth having, turned out to greet him, how the gates of the city and the stairs of the public temples, up to the very capitol, thronged with shouting masses, eager to welcome the "Father of his country."

in the senate-house, and his figure at the bar. It was by continuing to serve his country that he could avoid the mortification he so much dreaded, that six hundred years hence Pompey should be better known than himself. This dread of extinction displays itself to a painful degree in his absence in Syria. Though that government justly authorized his se'congratulation of his friends, he was miserable. And why was he miserable? Not because Pacorus had crossed the Eu-ous. The expressions remind us of Bophrates with an army of Parthians, but because Cicero is determining causes at Laodicea while Plotius is pleading in the Forum; not because Cicero is at the head of two legions, but because Pompey is at the head of an army. His vanity made him the victim of every one who took the pains to impose upon him. The solemn trifler Pompey, the astute Cæsar, courted and won him by turns. On the other haud, his busy diplomacy gave him the semblance of imposing on others. He flattered his flatterers. He fawned upon Cæsar. He then fawned upon Cæsar's murderer, Brutus, and next he fawned upon Cæsar's heir, Octavius. He flattered Antony, yet he acknowledged it as a great omission that Antony did not suffer on the Ides of March. He flattered Dolabella, though he could not refrain from owning that he hated him. A good deal of this inconsistency, we believe, must be put down to any other feeling than that of deliberate villainy. It was probably a compound of that morbid sensibility that would have urged Quinctius to falsify history, and that morbid fear that attempted to urge Atticus to repudiate one of his early orations for him. He was always vacillating between a consideration for the safety of his life and a consideration for the safety of his reputation. He fled as soon as he thought it dangerous to remain. He returned as soon as his friends ridiculed him for flying.* His whole conduct presents a strange divorce between the philosopher and the statesman, between the man of letters and the man of action. He wrote against glory, and was the slave of it. He wrote about the philosophy of consolation, and he was inconsolable. His affectation of content indeed was marvelously strong, but it only helped to render his discontent more palpable. Instead of the consul who braved the

* Lib. 16, iii. Ep.

Demosthenes is egotistic. But his is an egotism of another kind from Cicero's. It was singularly unobtrusive and timid. He says himself that the mere thought of talking of one's self made him shrink as from a vulgar and offensive artifice.t Only once does he recapitulate his past services to his country, and that was for the purpose of authorizing and justifying a renewed offer of service. What he had said on former occasions would make them appreciate better what he had to say now. And if there is any vanity in the instances he proceeds to enumerate, his conclusion would more than apologize for it. It at once expresses the modesty and the high

famous comparison of the Cloud, on which | dices are seldom amenable to the mere his admirers love to dwell, has never been external influence of argument. It is not surpassed, except, perhaps, by the Great so with its passions and its sensibilities. Black Cloud of Burke.* Nothing is to Cultivated as it is, it has by its very culbe found in Cicero so imposing as the ture become the victim of its tastes. Consublime invocation of the heroic spirits viction, therefore, is to be come at through of Marathon. For modern oratory, no its feelings. Where it would despise an room is left for such invocations. They enthymeme, it surrenders to a trope. died out with the kindly superstition of Cæsar would never have absolved Deiothe pagan theogony. If they linger any tanes against his fixed resolution, had the where in any effectiveness, it is in the elo- Oration for Deiotanes contained simply quence of Roman Catholic senates. With all the subtlety of Lysias. The effect of Protestanism they lose half their force, Burke's appeal to the imagination of his by having lost all their credit. Talon in- hearers, as he detailed to them scene after voking on his knees the spirit of St. Louis scene, the desolating tyranny of Warren to look down with compassion on his divid- Hastings, the murders, the desecrations, ed Parliaments, and Pitt invoking the the confiscations, are well known. It is genius of the British Constitution, are as equally well known what was the effect different in nature as the concrete and the on the same class of hearers of his arguabstract. In minute painting, in histori- mentative efforts, the elaborate reasoncal characterization, Demosthenes is un-ings, the profound philosophy, and the ladoubtedly deficient. What he has left us borious historical illustrations. in that manner, however, speaks farther against his inclination than his ability. The scene in the city, on the seizure of Elateia by Philip, and the banquet scene in the house of Xenophon, are given with all the vivid coloring and the realizing skill of Herodotus. The comparison of Eschines to a fracture or sprain, most prominent where the body is most diseased, is at once a happy sarcasm and a nice analogy.

Hume, in contrasting the austere, rational manner of Demosthenes with the rhetorical and richly-decorated style of Cicero, has hesitated at the apparent inconsistency involved by the distinctive character of the separate audiences. He is puzzled that the rhymes, the puns, the jingles, and all the artifices of wit and pathos should have been bestowed on the refined assemblies of Rome; and the vehement reasoning, the chastened harmony, be reserved for the lowest vulgar of Athens. The fact is, it is precisely because the Roman assemblies were more refined than the Grecian that the oratory of the Roman speaker was more effective. Ratiocination is, generally speaking, thrown away on a cultivated audience, where the common-sense of the common people demands and yields to it. Its own reasons are generally founded on acute discrimination, and are therefore less likely to be moved by the reasons of another, Its principles are prejudices and its preju.

*Speech on Nat ob of Arect's debts.

To return to Demosthenes. In comparing his juridical with his deliberative pieces, we are at once struck with his superior self-adaptability over his Roman rival. Cicero's style is always uniform. Whatever be the nature of his subject, he is always on stilts. In the private orations of Demosthenes we come at once on a new manner. In that against Androtion, and in that against Leptines, for example, we look in vain for the author of the Embassy and the Crown. The copiousness, the force, and the grandeur are exchanged for a simple, temperate, and rational conciseness. In point of legal assimilation, the orations of the Greek master come nearer to modern models than those of Cicero. The causes why legal arguments, and the observance of legal forms, especially at Rome, were so lax, have been already hinted at; and though Cicero himself complains of the ridiculous arrogance of the illiterate swaggerers that loiter about the courts of justice and the tribunals of the proctors, ready to undertake any suit, however intricate, of guardianship, agnation, circumluvions, wills, or property, his own pleadings predicate no necessary acquaintance with prescriptive laws. This renders the likeness between his forensic and his political efforts more conspicuous. In Demosthenes. it is otherwise, though even in Demosthenes, there are anomalies, sometimes ludicrous and sometimes criminal, which stand out from the otherwise equable canvas, and mar the general re

semblance. The speech against Midias, No sketch of ancient oratory, we are for example, whether delivered or not, is well aware, could have any pretensions to read with tolerable complaisance, till a completeness without a more than casual sudden regret on the part of the speaker, reference to one department almost conthat he had no children to produce be- fined to ancient oratory, that of epideictic fore the jury, shocks our propriety, and eloquence. It is, however, for this very the production of a categorical table of reason, that a casual reference is inadethe defendant's misdeeds since his child-quate to its treatment, that we must leave hood confirms the revulsion. it untouched.

From the London Review.

OCEAN GEOLOGY OF THE DRIFT.*

THE northern and central parts of Eu- | are distinct from those of India, and the rope, Asia, and North-America, appear to deer of Northern Asia alike differ from constitute one vast province within which those of Northern Europe and of America; the animals have a common character, so are most of the fossil creatures distinct though the species vary in the different from the living ones. The former have countries. The bear, the fox, the badger, passed away; the latter, which have supthe beaver, the deer, and various wild plied their places, have not been lineal oxen, appear to constitute the leading descendants of their predecessors, modimammalian types found through these fied by time, but new creations, though wide areas. As we proceed southwards cast in molds similar to the species which from any part of this vast province, we they have supplanted. Just as at present, find southern types largely intermingling the ancient Northern Province of Europe, with the northern ones. Thus, as we ad- Asia, and America, has been the widest vance through the Southern States of in its range. In addition, it has contained America, the opossums of Virginia and elements which, in the present day, are Mexico become mingled with the deer limited to India and Africa. Elephants, and bears of the North. In like manner, now confined to tropical and subtropical Southern Asia approaches the African regions, then ranged over a great part of provinces in the elephants, rhinoceri, and the world. They have abounded from gigantic flesh-eating animals of the Indian Cape Comorin to the shores of the Icy jungles. Ocean, and from Eastern Siberia to the Rocky Mountains. Even in our own island there have been found in the Drift remains of at least two species of oxen, the extinct Bos primigenius, and the living musk-ox of the Polar Circle; two stags, the red deer and the Irish elk; one elephant, but that existing in vast numbers; an extinct native horse, a leopard, a hippopotamus, a hyena, two species of rhinoceros, and four species of bear-an appalling catalogue, making us thankful for the geological changes that have freed us from such ferocious neighbors. In the corresponding district of North-America, there also abounded the gigantic Mastodon, belonging to another type of elephants now extinct.

Even from these hurried sketches we see that animals are not accidentally scattered over the globe, but that their distribution is regulated by law; and it af fords interesting proof of the long continued operation of such laws, that as various parts of the globe are now characterized by the nature of their living animals, so it was when the Drift was deposited. With some special modifications, such dry land as formerly existed, in the provinces we have described, was tenanted by animals belonging to the same tribes as are now living there; but the fossil remains that are so abundantly met with, are chiefly those species that have long been extinct. At the present day the elephants of Africa

* Continued from page 64.

In South-America, the fossil animals chiefly belong to the class of Sloths and