To and the most unbridled libertinism is worship? And how has it disappeared? Did Epicurus reason down its madness? Or did the dreams of Plato spiritualise away its grossness? the eternal infamy of those philosophers, they made common cause with it, lent it their advocacy and flung over it their shield. But too late came their help. Its hidden recesses were already profaned. Its mighty pillars were visibly shaken. And soon the dread and awe, which had held the human mind so long enslaved, were indignantly renounced. A new cause of fear, a new form of hostility, arose. A light had pierced and scared it. A power was moving over the minds of men which smote it to the ground. It had withstood time,―political shock,—all mortal chance and change,—it could not resist Christianity! This brings with it no secrets but its wonders of love. It is the Revelation of the Mystery, and would make all men see what is its Fellowship. Every artifice of iniquity, imposture, superstition, shrunk from the eye of this blessed Religion. Hers was the triumph of this overthrow. It was her unassisted victory. She did more. She achieved, for the first time, human happiness. Every other attempt to retrieve the condition of our world, and the destiny of our race, had been disconcerted. Jurisprudence, philosophy, art, civilization, all had failed. Their experiments lay in ruins. She met them retiring, flying, from the struggle. She advanced the more confident and assured. She lifted up her meek but sublime standard. And still she is the living power of all truth and goodness. Still she builds for virtue its only foundations, and for peace its only safeguards. Government cannot boast so solid a pillar, and patriotism cannot imbibe so pure a motive. She lives in light, She walks in love,-Knowledge is her herald, and Benevolence fills her train ! • Τελευτησαντες δε δη, υπόπτεροι και ελαφροι γεγονότες, των τριων παλαισμάτων των ως αληθώς Ολυμπιακων εν νενικηκασιν : ου μείζον αγαθον ούτε σωφροσυνη ανθρωπική ούτε θεια μανια δυνατη πυρίσαι ανθρωπω.” PLATO.-Phædrus. 6 "Hanc sententiam significare videtur Laconis illa vox, qui, cum Rhodius Diagoras, Olympionices nobilis, uno die duos suos filios victores Olympiæ vidisset, accessit ad senem, et gratulatus, Morere, Diagora,' inquit, non enim in cœlum adscensurus es.' Magna hæc et nimium fortasse Græci putant, vel tum potius putabant, isque, qui hoc Diagoræ dixit, permagnum existimans, tres Olympionicas una e domo prodire, cunctari illum diutius in vita, fortunæ objectum, inutile putabat ipsi." CICERO. Tusc: Quæs: lib. 1., sec. 46. "The garlands wither on your brow, Then boast no more your mighty deeds; Upon Death's purple altar now, See, where the victor-victim bleeds: Your heads must come To the cold tomb, Only the actions of the just Smell sweet, and blossom in their dust." SHIRLEY.-Contention of Ajax and Ulysses. ON THE OLYMPIC GAMES. CHOSEN to pronounce the funeral panegyric over those whom Athens had lost in her first campaign of the Peloponnesian war, and whom she honoured to be inurned with hearsed pomp and cypress bier in the Public Sepulchre which, covered with military device and patriotic heraldry, gloomed in her fairest suburb,-Pericles thus spoke, "I deem it sufficient for men who have tested their courage in action, by action to be honoured for it."* By this eulogy he appears not only to denote the propriety of such elegiac honours as were then rendered,—the procession, the torches, the trailing spears, the drooping standards, the solemn bringing home of the slain, the sumptuous though empty car which represented them who could not be found among those that had fallen on the battle-field or wave, the piercing laments of the female kindred, to whom the nearest place was conceded that they might look within that mausoleum and mark its piles of the illustrious dead,—the sentiment conveyed a meaning that had acquired an early hold, and maintained a long possession, of the ancient world. It may thus be stated. It is most natural to mourn for those torn from us by the grave. It is not custom, but the unbiassed heart, which impels this grief. But how strange is it that amidst scenes so melancholy, and corresponding moods so pensive, rude boisterous riot should prevail! The sigh, the tear, are only decent: the matted hair, the rent garment, the lacerated flesh, might be excused. There is something significant in all these tributes to the departed! It is, however, impossible thus to interpret and justify keen contests of muscular quickness and strength around the pyre and the tomb. Yet these were not of one age or country. True it is, that we Thucyd: lib. ii. are often reminded of them by the classic poets. But Homer would never have described the jousts which Achilles claimed for the memory and repose of Patroclus,-nor Virgil the gymnastic rites which neas offered to the shade of Anchises at Drepanum on the anniversary of his funeral, had they done violence to the sentiments or usages of the peoples for whom they wrote. Their art and taste would have precluded such a license. Low down as the æra of Alexander the Great, we find the existence of the custom. The dying conqueror alluding to it, and foreboding the quarrels that flowed from the strife to be his successor, said, "I anticipate a bloody competition at my funeral games." He emulated the more cruel part of these observances by sacrificing innumerable victims to the Manes of Hephæstion, as the Phthian chief had immolated the Trojans on the pile of his friend. The magnificence of his own obsequies required a preparation of two years; and we learn from the grief of his mother Olympias that he should so long remain unburied, how general was the conviction that the peace of the soul depended upon the fact of early and befitting sepulture. The phrase employed concerning Polydorus,—“ animamque sepulcro condimus,"*-we compose his soul in the grave,-carries the idea to the extreme importance of these offices. It is related of Socrates+ that, when President of the people, he refused his sanction to the sentence which condemned the nine captains to death for neglecting to pay the funeral rites to the dead, after the naval engagement at the Arginusian islands, only because it was impossible from the storm. merely was the troubled spirit of the uninterred supposed to wander a hundred years on the banks of Styx,-—but it was imagined that vengeance was dear and due to the warrior still. Therefore, after the most sanguinary engagements, not a difficulty was felt in allowing a truce for each party to carry off its dead. How perfect are the pleadings of Priam for the body of Hector, Exlwg xilas axnins-and Achilles yields, and withal grants the supplicated twelve days for the mourning and the burial rites. It is only on the poetic conceit that he has become + Mem. Xen: lib. i. Eneid: lib. iii. Not a bird of song,-free as the air, and deathless as the elements,that Horace can resist his nature, though he rather betrays its instincts, when he deprecates, "Absint inani funere næniæ, Luctusque turpes, et querimoniæ : Compesce clamorem, ac sepulchri And then, too, often a savage immolation took place of the captives to the spectral host which, it was believed, still hovered round the scene. In the Ajax of Sophocles, the Atridæ refuse his body burial, until Teucrus and Ulysses overrule their relentless hate. We revolt at the sacrifice of the four youthful captives to the ghost of Pallas, the son of Evander,†-for which the poet is obliged to apologise, but which, if not very common, would never have been introduced at all, and least of all ascribed to his hero. Indeed, the farther we descend, the more appalling is the spectacle. The Roman gladiators seem to have their origin in this cruel institution. They were at first entirely compelled to their mutual butchery. Their name, bustiarii, marks that their frightful occupation was related to the burning pile of the dead. This tribute was not only presented at the more solemn funerals, the Indictiva,-but when wretches at last took up the mercenary business of this slaughter, even private persons exhibited them for the honour of their deceased friends. It became a universal opinion that the disembodied spirit was gratified by a libation of blood. Horace, in his third Satire of the second book, says, that if the heirs of Staberius had not engraved the sum he left them on his tomb, they were condemned to engage a hundred pairs of gladiators for the pleasure of the people,—an association which, it is equally clear, is of a mortuary character. In the Lex Tullia, made by Cicero when Consul, it is ordained that no one should exhibit shows of gladiators for two years before he stood candidate for office, unless it was devolved upon him by the Testament of a friend: a further proof how prolonged was the original design of these shows. The same orator, in his ninth Philippic, pleading for |