ing Prussia, ye minions of a ministry which it is false charity to call "the knowing nothing, and the doing nothing," for in very truth, however superficial your indolence may make your information, the staple of your actions is direct and unmingled evil,-ye, who by bigoted discouragement of the free Protestant religion, dealing heavy blows at that for which your fathers bled, ye who, by studied desecration of those holy offices, baptism and marriage, by oppressing the imprisoned poor, and by favouring the enlarged guilty, are convicted of high-treason against the King of Heaven, and for having abetted rebellion abroad, and fostered insurrection at home, deserve to be impeached before the too mild tribunal of your earthly sovereign,-go ye and learn how base and bitter a thing it is for rulers to be weak, selfish, reckless, and unprincipled: hear it in the plaudits of the honester republican, see it in the aid of approving infidelity, know it from the averted faces of the good, the true, the religious, the patriotic; read it in the indignation of cotemporary literature, feel it in the death of your historic fame, and in the living consciousness that all of obloquy you get, is merited.

For an end, turn we to better things, turn we from such as those to contemplate a Phocion; of whom, as most assuredly not of them, Horace might have written his splendid ode, (Justum et tenacem, &c.)

The man of purpose strong, and just intent,
Not the fierce clamour of a godless mob,

Nor demagogue's, nor despot's menacing brow,
Moves from his firm resolve, nor the loud storm
Lashing the Hadriatic into wrath,

Nor the red bolt of mighty thundering Jove:
Yea, let the mountains at his head be hurl'd
Sublime he stands amidst a shattered world!

The noble heathen, whom moral rectitude endues with the strength of a Briareus, can use the same language as the pious Psalmist, influenced by religious trust; both can exclaim, "We will not fear, though the earth be moved, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea: though the multitudes threaten in their rage, and the great ones of the earth tremble at the tempest."

PHIDIAS.

O RARE creative mind, and plastic hand,
Whose skill enshrined in one gigantic form,
Chryselephantine, rear'd in air enorme,
The viewless guardian of thy father-land

Olympian Jove, pardon to thee for this
That of the God whose chariot is the storm

Thy soul by Him untaught should deem amiss, Pardon to thee, and praise; thy labour proves

The heart's sincerity, though little light Scattered the darkness of thy moral night: Behold, it quickens! the colossus moves! Who, who would not fall down?-Start not, ye proud, Perchance your idols are as false as Jove's,

And ye more guilty than that pagan crowd.

Sculpture, in all probability, originated in a desire of giving a material form to idolatrous objects of worship. Hence we find it to be an art universally distributed; the rudest savages of the South-seas having stone images of their worshipped monsters, in the like manner as the most civilized heathens have given substance to the abstract attributes of Deity.

Even among the polished Greeks, the original form of an idol, being an unworked stone surmounted by a human head, remained in fashion with the latest Mercuries, and was transplanted into the Roman gardens under the names of Terminus, Priapus, and other variations of the "inutile lignum, Quod faber, incertus scamnum faceretne Priapum, Maluit esse Deum ;" indeed the word Hermes anciently signified an unhewn block.

That the Greeks were indebted to all-inventive Egypt for the art of sculpture, is manifest from their most ancient style, which possesses many of the characteristics peculiar to the Egyptians and their offset, Etruria. Phidias, who is known to antiquity not merely as the first of sculptors, (although this is great praise, especially when we remember that Socrates called artists the only wise men,) but also, as a

man accomplished in every branch of useful knowledge, raised the statuary of Greece at once to the highest pitch of excellency about the eighty-fourth Olympiad. Praxiteles of Magna Græcia was indeed close upon his steps, as to reputation; but he lived an hundred years after the Athenian: and with respect to the well-known group of the Niobe, some have ascribed it to the chisel of Phidias, although Pliny was in doubt only "Scopas an Praxiteles fecerit."

The works of Phidias are said to have been very numerous, and to have been as remarkable for beauty of finish as for grandeur of design: he is said by Valerius Maximus III. c. 7, to have imbibed the latter from the conceptions of Homer, which, while yet a child, he loved to embody in common clay; and by Pliny, to have been indebted for the former to his original education as a painter. Bronze was

his favourite material, and it has even been asserted that he never worked in marble: but we know, from Plutarch, in his life of Pericles, § 13, that the erection of the Parthenon was under his immediate superintendence, and we find Aristotle calling him σοφὸς λιθουργός. The great majority of the Elgin marbles, and several other fragments in the British Museum, are attributed to this great artist.

The works, however, which in his own day made the fame of Phidias, were his colossal statues of the Athenian Minerva, and Olympian Jupiter, at Elis, the former having been thirty-nine, and the latter