J. N. Larned

“ Corinth itself, a city sanctified by its antiquity, by its gods, by its arts, by the beauty of its women, by its fountains, its cypresses, its very ruins themselves, whence its unrivalled situation had always restored it, fell anew, buried in its flames, by the hands of Tourakhan, that ancient and ambitious vizier of Amurath. Its flames were seen from Athens, from Ægina, from Lepanto, from Cytheron, from Pindus. The inhabitants, as also those of Patras, were led into slavery in Asia, to the number of 60,000. ”

“ For in the hour of trial Athens alone among her contemporaries is superior to the report of her. No enemy who comes against her is indignant at the reverses which he sustains at the hands of such a city; no subject complains that his masters are unworthy of him. And we shall assuredly not be without witnesses; there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages; we shall not need the praises of Homer or of any other panegyrist whose poetry may please for the moment, although his representation of the facts will not bear the light of day. ”

“ Recognising her as the true nurse of Hellenism and the chief missionary of human refinement, the best spirits of the age held her worthy of admiring love not unmixed with awe. As the seat of the most brilliant and popular university, young men of talent and position flocked to her from every quarter, studied for a time within her colonnades, and carried thence the recollection of a culture which was not always deep, not always erudite, but was always and genuinely Attic. ”

“ The city which Rome in her jealousy had crushed, which, not content with crushing, she had obliterated from the face of the earth, had at the bidding of Rome's greatest son risen from her ashes, and by her career almost verified the poet's taunt that the greatness of Carthage was reared on the ruin of Italy. For in truth the African capital was in all but political power no unworthy rival of Rome. It had steadily grown in commercial prosperity. Its site was so advantageous as to invite, almost to compel, the influx of trade, which ever spontaneously moves along the line of least resistance. ”

“ Keen, subtle, capricious, satirical, sated with ideas, eager for novelty, yet with the eagerness of amused frivolity, not of the truth-seeker: critical by instinct, exquisitely sensitive to the ridiculous or the absurd, disputatious, ready to listen, yet impatient of all that was not wit, satisfied with everything in life except its shortness, and therefore hiding all references to this unwelcome fact under a veil of complacent euphemism--where could a more uncongenial soil be found for the seed of the Gospel? ”

“ Paul saw such dangers to the growth of Christian manliness and to the unity of the Christian body--the idly curious and gossiping men of Athens; the vain and shamelessly ostentatious Corinthians, men in intellect, but in moral seriousness babes; the Ephesians, 'like children carried away with every blast of vain teaching,' the victims of every impostor, and sport of every deceit; the Cretans, proverbially, 'ever liars, evil beasts, slow bellies;' the passionate, volatile, Greek-speaking, Celts of Asia, the 'foolish' Galatians. ”

“ Here while on the one hand we see the grand spectacle of a nation in the last extremity refusing to part with the treasures of its higher life, on the other hand that higher life is no longer unnaturally divorced from political life. It is prized as one of the bulwarks of the State, as a kind of spiritual weapon by which the enemy may be resisted. And in the new and public-spirited generation of thinkers, of which Fichte and Sehleiermacher were the principal representatives, culture returns to politics the honour that has been done to it. ”

“ The horrors of the retreat form one of the darkest passages in English military history. In bitter cold and snow, which took all life out of the wretched Sepoys, without proper clothing or shelter, and hampered by a disorderly mass of thousands of camp-followers, the army entered the terrible defiles which lie between Cabul and Jellalabad. Whether Akbar Khan could, had he wished it, have restrained his fanatical followers is uncertain. As a fact the retiring crowd--it can scarcely be called an army--was a mere unresisting prey to the assaults of the mountaineers. ”

“ It is singular, in the history of nations, to meet with a people distinguished at once by mercantile aptitude, and by an exquisite feeling and sympathy for works of art; to see the vanity of wealth compatible with a nice discernment for the true principles of taste; to behold a nation, inconstant in ideas; inconceivably fickle in prejudices, worshipping a man one day and proscribing him the next, yet at the same time progressing with unheard-of rapidity ”

“ I have paid the required tribute, in obedience to the law, making use of such fitting words as I had. The tribute of deeds has been paid in part; for the dead have been honourably interred, and it remains only that their children should be maintained at the public charge until they are grown up: this is the solid prize with which, as with a garland, Athens crowns her sons living and dead, after a struggle like theirs. For where the rewards of virtue are greatest, there the noblest citizens are enlisted in the service of the state. ”

“ The coarse and ferocious manners prevalent in the Universities of the Middle Ages are every where in singular contrast to their intellectual pretensions: but the Universities of the Continent were peaceful, decorous, dignified,--compared with those of England. The storms which were elsewhere occasional, were at Oxford the permanent atmosphere. For nearly two centuries our 'Foster Mother' of Oxford lived in a din of uninterrupted furious warfare; nation against nation, school against school, faculty against faculty. ”

“ In no part of Western Europe do we find districts inhabited by men differing in speech and national feeling, lying in distinct patches here and there over a large country. A district like one of our larger counties in which one parish, perhaps one hundred, spoke Welsh, another Latin, another English, another Danish, another Old French, another the tongue of more modern settlers, Flemings, Huguenots or Palatines, is something which we find hard to conceive, and which, as applied to our own land or to any other Western land, sounds absurd on the face of it. ”

“ The Jewish position was better adapted to the mass, which needed first to be trained before it could apprehend Christianity in its purity,--needed to be disabused from paganism. Out of Christianity, now become independent, a principle once more sprang forth akin to the principles of the Old Testament,--a new outward shaping of the kingdom of God, a new discipline of the law which one day was to serve for the training of rude nations, a new tutorship for the spirit of humanity, until it should arrive at the maturity of the perfect manhood in Christ. ”

“ While the chief dialects of Greece survive, each not as a mere dialect but as the language of literature,--a thing unknown in the history of any other people,--the Attic idiom, in which the characteristic elements of other dialects met and were blended, has become to us, as it did to the ancients, the very type of Hellenic speech. Athens was not only the 'capital of Greece,' the 'school of Greece;' it deserves the name applied to it in an epitaph on Euripides: 'his country is Athens, Greece of Greece.' The rays of the Greek genius here found a centre and a focus. ”

“ Why do Holland and Belgium cling to their existence as separate States, in spite of all the efforts of statesmen to join them? Why do the people of Bohemia and Croatia, of Finland, and of Poland, refuse to coalesce with the rest of the population of the empires of which they form but small sections? Why, finally, do the new kingdoms of Roumania and Servia show such astonishing vitality? ”

“ In all the Greek communities there was a primitive stage in which kings ruled over therm in a patriarchal way. In most of them the kingship surrendered to an oligarchy,--the oligarchy in time, was overthrown by some bold adventurer, who led a rising of the people and snatched power in the turmoil to make himself a "tyrant,"--and the tyrant in his turn fell after no long reign. In Athens that course of revolution was run; but it did not end as with the rest. The Athenian tyranny gave way to the purest democracy that has ever had trial in the world. Æthel democracy. ”

“ One of the rarest qualities of national character is the capacity for applying and working out the law, as such, at the cost of constant miscarriages of abstract justice, without at the same time losing the hope or the wish that law may be conformed to a higher ideal. The Greek intellect, with all its nobility and elasticity, was quite unable to confine itself within the strait waistcoat of a legal formula; and, if we may judge them by the popular courts of Athens, of whose working we possess accurate knowledge, the Greek tribunals exhibited the strongest tendency to confound law and fact. ”

“ She will not be left desolate, and she will be safer. For a man's counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger. To those of you who have passed their prime I say: "Congratulate yourselves that you have been happy during the greater part of those days; remember that your life of sorrow will not last long, and be comforted by the glory of those who are gone. For the love of honour alone is ever young, and not riches, as some say, but honour is the delight of men when they are old and useless." ”

“ Abelard's wonderful success is easily explained. All the lore and learning which had been smothered under the heavy, dogmatical forms of clerical instruction, and hidden in the rude Latin of the middle age, suddenly appeared arrayed in the simple elegance of antiquity, so that men seemed for the first time to hear and recognise a human voice. The daring youth simplified and explained everything; presenting philosophy in a familiar form, and bringing it home to men's bosoms. ”

“ The Democracy of Athens was in truth the noblest fruit of that self-developing power of the Greek mind which worked every possession of the common heritage into some new and more brilliant shape, but which learned nothing, nothing of all that formed its real life and its real glory, from the Barbarians of the outer world. Men tell us that Greece learned this or that mechanical invention from Phœnicia or Egypt or Assyria. ”

“ These races whom the Empire of the Cæsars left like scattered sheep to the mercy of the barbarians, lived through a succession of the most appalling storms, and kept themselves together, holding fast, resolute and unwavering, amid all their miseries and all their debasement, to the faith of their national brotherhood. ”

“ As a consequence, it happens to-day that the House of Austria has neither place nor voice in the political organization of Germany; has no footing in Italy; has no dungeons of tyranny in its dominions; has no disciples of Metternich among its statesmen. Its face and its feet are now turned quite away from the paths of ambition and of policy which it trod so long. It has learned, and is learning, so fast that it may yet be a teacher in the school of liberal politics which it entered so late. ”

“ For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war. ”

“ These great primeval and enduring principles of our Constitution are as follows: The government of the country by an hereditary sovereign, ruling with limited powers, and bound to summon and consult a parliament of the whole realm, comprising hereditary peers and elective representatives of the commons. That without the sanction of parliament no tax of any kind can be imposed; and no law can be made, repealed, or altered. That no man be arbitrarily fined or imprisoned, that no man's property or liberties be impaired, and that no man be in any way punished, except after a lawful trial. ”

“ Second only to Champlain among the heroes of Canadian history stands Robert Cavelier de la Salle--a man of iron if ever there was one--a man austere and cold in manner, and endowed with such indomitable pluck and perseverance as have never been surpassed in this world. He did more than any other man to extend the dominion of France in the New World. As Champlain had founded the colony of Canada and opened the way to the great lakes, so La Salle completed the discovery of the Mississippi, and added to the French possessions the vast province of Louisiana. ”

“ Through writing, most things in life, and those the most useful, are accomplished--as ballots, epistles, laws, covenants. Who can sufficiently praise the learning of letters? ... Writing alone preserves the most brilliant utterances of wise men and the oracles of gods, nay philosophy and all culture. All these things it alone hands down to all future generations. Wherefore nature should be viewed as the source of life, but the source of living well we should consider the culture derived from writing. ”

“ It was among men like these--men who were then termed emphatically 'men of religion'--that the new races saw the example of life ruled by a great and serious purpose, which yet was not one of ambition or the excitement of war; a life of deliberate and steady industry, of hard and uncomplaining labour; a life as full of activity in peace, of stout and brave work, as a warrior's was wont to be in the camp, on the march, in the battle. ”

“ And we, children of the common stock, sharers in the common heritage, as we see man, Aryan man, in the full growth of his noblest type, we may feel a thrill as we think that Kleisthenês and Periklês were, after all, men of our own blood--as we think that the institutions which grew up under their hands and the institutions under which we ourselves are living are alike branches sprung from one stock, portions of one inheritance in which Athens and England have an equal right. ”

“ The weight of the Roman Empire was scarcely felt in the balance of these opulent and powerful republics. ... The Roman Empire (I smile in transcribing the name) might soon have sunk into a province of Genoa, if the ambition of the republic had not been checked by the ruin of her freedom and naval power. A long contest of 130 years was determined by the triumph of Venice. ... Yet the spirit of commerce survived that of conquest; and the colony of Pera still awed the capital and navigated the Euxine, till it was involved by the Turks in the final servitude of Constantinople itself. ”

“ The value of such a spirit is not to be expressed in words. Anyone can discourse to you for ever about the advantages of a brave defence which you know already. But instead of listening to him I would have you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until you become filled with the love of her; and when you are impressed by the spectacle of her glory reflect that this empire has been acquired by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it ”

“ Having established this principle, the four leaders called upon all classes of teachers to work with them, and professors who had devoted their life to the promotion of superior instruction brought their experience and their powers of organization to bear upon schools for all classes, from the richest to the poorest. ... But to reform and to reconstruct a system of instruction is not a small task. It is not easy to change at once the old methods, to give a new spirit to the masters, to teach those who think that what had been sufficient for them need not be altered and is sufficient forever. ”