himself (to use his own expression) with books; or to that of Atticus, where this true Roman gentleman sat under his bust of Aristotle, perusing the works of his literary friends? Or would you choose that of Pliny the Younger, at his Laurentine villa, through whose windows the wintry sun streamed during its whole daily circuit; where he lay listening to the murmurs and the roar of the sea, or poring over those volumes which he took down from a closet empanelled in the wall, and were-as he most wittily saidbooks not to be read, but to be re-read? We might visit that of Silius Italicus, crowded with statues and busts, eminent among which, is that of his idol, Virgil. If we select the library of any man of wealth, we shall find elegant book-cases distributed around the room; exquisite statues, busts and pictures, lining the walls; the doors of the cases inlaid with glass, and the ceiling glistening with the same material. The shelves are of cedar and ebony, filled to the very top of the wall with volumes. A library is selected by the Roman Dives without regard to the merits of books, but with an evident partiality for gorgeous bindings, glaring ti tles, and a multitude of volumes-an absurd fancy not altogether Roman. The library and the bath-room stand on a level, as necessary ornaments to a splendid dwelling. Books are bought for the same purpose as Corinthian vases and Greek pictures; to be the furniture of a supper-room for the evening party in Rome is given in the library. Seneca, in rebuking this folly, grows so extravagant as to declare that it would take a life-time to read the titles of the books in some of these collections. He asks the reason of this profusion, and shrewdly adds: A multitude of books oppresses and does not instruct the reader; it is better to devote yourself to a few books than to ramble through many. He could tolerate the literary avarice of a bookish virtuoso, but disdained the desecration of the works of genius to be the machinery of foppery. He says: I would of course pardon this profusion, if it sprung from an excessive passion for study, but these books are the toys of exquisitism; and the works of men, whom their genius has made sacred, are accumulated, like their busts, for the sake of display and to grace our walls. If you have kindly followed me thus far, curious reader, in my desultory saunterings among the paper shops, book-stores and libraries of old Rome, perhaps I cannot bid you au revoir" with a better word of parting, than by reminding you of a beautiful superstition, which exists here in this pagan city. It is founded on almost Christian sentiments, which I trust you are too profound to despise, though you stand within the walls of a city, wherein Trajan was but lately deliberating concerning the best method of "punishing" the followers of Christ. It is passing strange that such a superstition should be so strongly set forth by Plautus, a dashing delineator of common life, who revels in the satire, humor, and broad caricature of the stage. But he has alluded to it in the prologue of his plans, entitled "The Cable." The speaker in Arcturus, who is explaining his own prerogative and that of the other watchers of the nightly sky. He mentions a "book of remembrance," kept by Jupiter on high, in which the evil acts of meu are recorded, and the other book, containing a register of human virtues. But let us listen to Arcturus. My paraphrase will not exaggerate to the least degree the moral sentiment of the original. We are Jove's sentinels; thus, every even, To learn whom riches curse and whom they bless; Observing those, whose claims on falsehood built Jove has ANOTHER RECORD, clear and fair: Let not the wicked fancy that their stain To seek forgiveness, answering to his prayer. A life of pious thought and honest deed. Hold fast the good; unwavering in your choice: PROF. FELTON'S AGAMEMNON OF ESCHYLUS, WITH ENGLISH NOTES. It is no dishonor to sculpture to say of it, that even in its perfection it is defective as the art of expression. The defect is but negative, and in this regard it resembles all other departments in high art. The difference is only in degree. It may strive to express passion-it will be passion petrified; or music, it must be frozen music; it may struggle to be eloquent-it can only be the eloquence of silence-eloquence in repose. In the drama, expression is carried to a higher point. Language being the vehicle or the drapery of thought, is a much more direct, transparent and elastic medium for the exhibition of subtle high-wrought poetic passion. But when this language is the flexible, the musical, the nervous Greek, and in the plastic hand of the great master of tragic art, what else could we have expected, under appropriate circumstances, than an "Attic tragedy of the stateliest and most regal arguments." Such have we received. Such Prof. Felton has introduced to American students, in this great master-piece of the "Grecian Shakspeare" as he finely and justly styles it. "Sculpture," says Cowper, "gives bond in stone and ever-during brass, to guard and immortalize her trust." But where now is the brazen statue, the Minerva Polias of Phidias? where his Olympian Jupiter? where above all, that most magnificent Chryselephantine, one of the "immortal maid," the protecting goddess of the Parthenon? When Lord Elgin brought to London, from the ruins of the Acropolis those splendid fragments, the scholars and artists of the civilized world were in an ecstasy of joy. How ardently every intelligent admirer wished they could have looked upon those works, as they came breathing from the cunning right hand of the master! How they desired to see those things which Pericles saw! If such were the torso, what must the full stature of the perfect man have been? But this Tragedy has descended to us through twenty-three centuries unmutilated, while temples have crumbled, and dynasties perished forever. And yet how slight a notice does its editor receive, either from private sources or from his government, compared with what Lord Elgin received from both. The one furnished his countrymen with the legs and arms of men, the bodies of centaurs, horses' heads and torsos of Cecrops and Hercules. Had he procured for them an entire Apollo, a Laocoon or a Niobe, greater would have been their joy and his fame. But in the Agamemnon we have no cold, corroded and heart-saddening fragment. We have passion in high and swelling relief; all the concealed purposes and evanescent emotions of the soul delineated with more vivid and impressive power, than "by the sweet mystery of lines and colors," and a music in its progress and its pauses that makes every chord of the heart to vibrate. A critical analysis would disclose to us more fully, not only the fine proportions and perfect consistence of the whole, but the matchless beauty of some of its minor pictures, which seem rather to have crystalized into one than been inwoven even by the hand of genius. The different characters also are sustained throughout with great distinctness. There is the most agreeable diversity in unity, and yet the highest artistic unity in multeity. Were their names not given, we should never confound the language of any one character with that of any other. The words of Cassandra and of the Chorus, are as easily distinguished as Spring and Autumn. In the terrible consistency of Clytemnestra's character, we have all that is ferocious, daring, and bloody in Jezebel, and the steady desperate decision of Lady Macbeth, with a far reaching purpose, and a remorselessness that would utterly appal the murderers of Naboth and Duncan. We breathe more freely when we reflect at the close of the tragedy, that it is fiction not fact. Our love of the sex, or of the race, makes us glad that the heroine is not a daughter of Eve, but a creation of Eschylus. This superhumanizing, if we may be allowed the word, is one of the prominent characteristics of this poet. "It seems," says Schlegel, as if it required an effort in him, to condescend to paint mere men to us." Everything is bold, stately, sublime. He seems to be familiar alone with gods and Titans. The grand and the gloomy are his element. Sens, mountains, thunderings, and earthquakes, heroes and the heroic, were the materials out of which his spirit builded up these lofty and imperishable structures. We can scarcely conceive of "the meanest flower that blows," giving to him "thoughts that did often lie too deep for tears," or that he ever bowed down his ear to hear the "still sad music of humanity." Had he lived in our day, Dante rather than Wordsworth would have been his favorite. He would have been found more frequently in the studio of Michael Angelo than in that of Raphael; yet would he not have loved the Madonna less, but the Moses more. "Had he lived in our day?" ay does he not live? Is it not life-the life for which he toiled in that olden time-to be read and studied and admired in regions, and by men never approached in the wanderings of Ulysses, and never conceived by the fertile imagination of him who has sung these wanderings, "in notes almost divine." "Non omnis moriar" is a conviction which every truly great mind has, whether it will or no. Seventy generations .have lived and died since this noble tragedy won for its author the applause and the laurels of the accomplished Athenians; and still we find it eliciting the intelligent homage of the first scholars in other lands, as well as in the Athens of America. How strange it would sound, to hear of an edition of "The Hamlet of Shakspeare with Greek notes, by, Professor of English Literature in the Academy of Athens;" or to observe its students reading Macbeth on the banks of the Ilyssus! We wish very much that Prof. Felton, or his honored coadjutor in this revival of Greek classic literature, President Woolsey, would give us the remainder of this splendid Trilogy. Gladly and speedily, we have no doubt, it would be done were it demanded, and remunerated as it should be, by the scholars and universities of our country. But smooth things and soft things and sweet things, in the department of Beautiful Letters, are the aliments of many of the graduates, as well as undergraduates, of our best colleges. Upon these they grow large and lusty. Tacitus would bring leanness into their bones, and Eschylus would kill them. We would most humbly and seriously suggest, whether reason and analogy do not render it very probable, that God will punish such a prostitution of intellect. The question cannot be, which study is most pleasing or most popular, any more than these should be the standard in morals or in medicine. Neither the perfume of a rose, nor the air of an Eolian will harden a man's sinews or purify his blood. Poetry is a gift of heaven, and "a thing of beauty is a joy forever;" but whom have they ever carried to the stake and sustained there? or who, for their sakes, when his right eye has offended, has plucked it out and cast it from him. And yet, intellect, whose high prerogative it is to trace out the marchings of the planets and the track of the lightning, to constitute and govern states, and to study the nature of God and of man, and their manifold correlations, must be fed on the most polite literature, transcendental cosmetics, gilded philosophy and satin sermons. Now we do not wish to be understood as asserting that the study of Greek tragedy is the only or the chief remedy for such mental emasculation. We do affirm, however, that it is a remedy-a sure remedy. But then it must be the STUDY of Greek Tragely; not the wearisome and incessant manipulation of a lexicon, nor the slavish consultation of the most literal version; but the deep, critical, loving intuition of its every word and line and scene and act. It must be also the study of it as Tragedy, not as dialogue or narrative or epic. It must be studied PSYCHOLOGICALLY or in its separate characters; DRAMATICALLY, or the characters in their various relations and consequent interaction, and ARTISTICALLY, as a whole, in its proportions, its consistency and its unity; in a word, the philosophy of Tragedy, and the specific idea which has given birth and form to each particular Tragedy. Such study of this Trilogy alone, the Agamemnon, the Chaphoroi and the Eumenides, would richly remunerate any professional man in the land, by imparting accuracy and strength and perspicuity to his thoughts, and grace, freshness and power to every product of his pen. We are well pleased with the notes generally, with the exception that Prof. F. so seldom gives us his own, or a decided opinion upon many difficult passages. THE FOX AND THE FISH. A FABLE. Freely imitated from the German of Mendelsohn, BY WILLIAM FALCONER. A Fox roamed by a fountain's side, |