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ESSAY
ON THE LITERATURE, THE ARTS, AND THE MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS.
A Fragment.
The period which intervened between the birth
of Pericles and the death of Aristotle, is undoubtedly,
whether considered in itself, or with
reference to the effects which it has produced upon
the subsequent destinies of civilised man, the most
memorable in the history of the world. What was the
combination of moral and political circumstances which
produced so unparalleled a progress during that period
in literature and the arts;—why that progress, so rapid
and so sustained, so soon received a check, and became
retrograde,—are problems left to the wonder and conjecture
of posterity. The wrecks and fragments of those
subtle and profound minds, like the ruins of a fine statue,
obscurely suggest to us the grandeur and perfection of
the whole. Their very language—a type of the understandings
of which it was the creation and the image—in
variety, in simplicity, in flexibility, and in copiousness,
excels every other language of the western world. Their
sculptures are such as we, in our presumption, assume to
be the models of ideal truth and beauty, and to which
