nes are in themselves bulwarks of power, many hosts lie in these two names. For artists, again, to range against Phidias, there is Lysippus, the sculptor, and there is Apelles, the painter. For great captains and masters of strategic art, there is Alexander himself, with a glittering cortège of general officers, well qualified to wear the crowns which they will win, and to head the dynasties which they will found. Historians there are now as in that former age. And, upon the whole, it cannot be denied that the "turn-out" is showy and imposing.

Here, reader, we would wish to put a question. Saving your presence, did you ever see what is called a dumb-bell? We have, and know it by more painful evidence than that of sight. You, therefore, O reader, if personally cognizant of dumb-bells, we shall remind, if not, we shall inform, that it is a cylindrical bar of iron, issuing at each end in a globe of the same metal, and usually it is sheathed in green baize; but perfidiously so, if that covering is meant to deny or to conceal the fact of those heartrending thumps which it inflicts upon one's too confiding fingers every third ictus. Now, reader, it is under this image of the dumb bell we couch an allegory. Those globes at each end are the two systems, or separate clusters, of Greek literature; and that cylinder which connects them is the long man that ran into each system, binding the two together. Who was that? It was Isocrates. Great we cannot call him in conscience; and, therefore, by way of compromise, we call him long, which, in one sense, he certainly was, for he lived through four and twenty Olympiads, each containing four solar years. He narrowly escaped being a hundred years old; and, though that did not carry him from centre to centre, yet, as each system might be supposed to portend a radius each way of twenty years, he had, in fact, a full personal cognizance of the two systems, remote as they were, which composed the total world of Grecian genius. It is for this quality of length that Milton honors him with a touching memorial; for Isocrates was "that old man eloquent" of Milton's sonnet, whom the battle of Charonea, “fatal to liberty, killed with report."

LESSON 55.

AMERICAN LITERATURE.—THE LAW OF COLONIES.-Transplanting a tree is often at the risk of its life. Some of the larger roots are destroyed in the removal, and innumerable rootlets are injured. With many of the parts which nourished it wanting, and with what remains impaired, the tree cannot instantly adapt itself to its strange surroundings. Before it can derive life from its new environment, the stock which it has accumulated is largely drawn upon, perhaps exhausted, and the experiment proves fatal to the tree.

The first movement of a people, taken up, however care fully, from its old home and set down in a new, must be a step backward. The sunderings of its old relations is a wrench that leaves the colony weak. The difficulties that confront it and the dangers that menace it are multiplied; while to it in its enfeebled condition each mole-hill seems and is a mountain. These difficulties and dangers are strange to it-its previous experience has not taught it how to meet and master them. Its energies, hitherto employed in continuing a life transmitted to it, must now be spent in beginning one. It must get a footing for itself in the new region, wresting or purchasing land, and subduing the same by cultivation. It must build houses, construct implements, accumulate necessities, and create and set going the manifold machinery of life, domestic, social, religious, and political. Is it any wonder that with so much more to do than it had before, and with less strength to work with, we should everywhere detect retrogression in the life of the transplanted people? Need we wonder, indeed, if their civilization does not stop short of barbarism in its decline, and they of extinc tion?

THE PLANTING OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES.-In addition to the disabilities which colonies ordinarily suffer and the diffi

culties they encounter, the American colonists experienced some that were extraordinary. They did not swarm out from the old hive because the home quarters were crowded. They left, because they had reached convictions and were striving after ideals with which the mother had no sympathy, and to which she gave no hospitality; for the world had not yet learned to tolerate what it did not approve. She subjected them to a discipline unloving and unnatural. They were made to feel that they were no longer welcome about the old hearth, and at last were driven forth into the wilderness without the loaf of bread and the bottle of water which even the bond-woman and the child Ishmael received. Not the mother's care but her oppressions planted them in America, it was afterwards confessed, and we can easily believe it.

The climate in which many of them found themselves here was inhospitable, unlike that they had left. The land was covered with dense forests, which had to be cleared before bread could be obtained; and, when subdued, the sterile soil was niggard in its returns. Human foes pressed in upon the settlements all along the coast. The Indians were a constant terror, appearing when least expected, ravaging and killing, and disappearing as silently and as mysteriously as they came. If ever the mother's heart softened, and a wish entered it to atone for her harshness, the child never knew it. But if her love did not cross the three thousand miles of water that rolled between parent and son, her authority did. She must rule the boy even in the strange land to which she had driven him. And so, while the exiles were groping here after a freedom denied them at home, a freedom like that for which the Puritans were contending before and during the Commonwealth, but broader than any one there, except perhaps Milton, understood, the mother's repressive purpose was seen and her iron hand was felt. Upon those who grew restive under the Stamp Act and the Tea Tax and the Boston Port Bill and the Restraining Acts and the Military Act she

imposed, in her Regulation, or Reconstruction, Acts, a regimen subversive of English traditions-a regimen unknown at home, or, if not unknown, one "from which British nobles and commons had long before fought out their exemption. These acts, radical and revolutionary, went to the foundations of our public system, and sought to reconstruct it from the base on a theory of parliamentary omnipotence and kingly sovereignty." It was not our fathers who were the revolutionists, it was the king and the parliament. The child was striving to uphold existing institutions, the mother was seeking to overthrow them. Such treatment it was that drove the boy, before he had come of age and his gristle had hardened into bone, into antagonism and then into open collision, by which he reached his majority, and his independence of maternal guidance was achieved.

And then came those other extraordinary difficulties encountered in organizing and carrying on a new governmenta government for constructing which the England they had left furnished few precedents, as did, indeed, every other nation of modern times or of ancient.

Those who reproach us for our scanty literature, and for our stunted growth in everything but industrial energy and material prosperity do not always take these extraordinary obstacles into account. They overlook the fact that by these much of the progress we might have made has been prevented; that not all even of the few years of our life here should be counted. We could not start out from the point which the English people, and our fathers with them, had reached, and run on side by side with them. By the ordinary obstructions of colonial life, but still more by the extraordinary impediments peculiar to ourselves, we were set back near the goal of starting, and were handicapped for the race.

THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO THE NATION.-The people modify, though they do not make, the literature. If not the thinkers, they are the soil out of which the thinkers spring;

if they do not immediately produce the literature, they nourish those who do. This relation, natural and always existing, is especially noticeable now. Less than ever before are writers a class, living apart and aloof from the rest of the nation. No healthful literature, prose or poetry, can come from those who are indifferent to others, cut off from the general movement of their generation; and none is now attempted. There is such a community of interests between those who write and those who do not, each party giving and taking, acting and acted upon, that no lines of cleavage between them can be traced. The writer is a teacher; the lessons he teaches must be such, in subject and in treatment, as his pupils will study. The topics he selects must be such as the needs of the people force upon him, and the handling must interest them. His very words must be those which have "sucked up the feeding juices secreted for them in the rich mother-earth of common folk." His highest inspiration must come from close contact with the people; he must have been drawn, in some measure, into the current of his times, must be in it and of it in order to direct it.

"In order that an organism-plant or animal-should exist at all, there must be a certain correspondence between the organism and its environment," says Professor Dowden. We do not look in vain into a nation's literature to see what the national spirit is, what the surroundings, attainments, and limitations of the people are. How, for example, the insular position of England and the self-centred and intense home life of her people color her literature! How a great war, civil or national, gives a martial cast to the thought and the style of the period! How a great popular movement in taste, in politics, in religion, voiced, if not initiated, by the literary men but speedily escaping their control it may be, gives a trend to the literature of the times, and regulates the width and depth of the current! Study carefully a great author, then, and you will read more than he is conscious of saying