Cooped up within the walls of a single town, and brought into daily collision throughout all the departments of municipal administration, these factions hated each other with a ferocity which very seldom, for long together, confined itself to words and looks. Mutual suspicions, mutual injuries, mutual treacheries soon brought about such a state of feeling that men began to believe in the necessity of mutual butchery. Then came riots in the public places, midnight assassinations of the leading demagogues, arson, chance-medley, and every manifestation of rancour and anarchy. Moderate politicians went to the wall, and were lucky if they did not go to the gallows. Men paid to their party-club the allegiance which they refused to their common country, and did not hesitate to call in the aid of the foreign sword, or the servile torch and bludgeon. When matters were at this pass a civil war was the inevitable issue. The battle would be fought out among the warehouses, the temples, and the wharves of the unhappy city. Victory would at length place the beaten faction beneath the feet of its vindictive rival. Then would follow proscriptions, confiscations, the execution of scores, and the banishment of hundreds. Bad men would take advantage of the general licence to wreak their personal vengeance, and glut their private cupidity. Debtors cancelled their bonds in the blood of the holders; lovers laid information against their successful rivals; actors retaliated on the critics who had hissed them off the stage; and philosophers turned the tables upon some unfortunate logician who had refuted their pet syllogism. If any one expects that this account is over-coloured, let him turn to the fourth book of Thucydides, and read what took place in lovely Corfu, on a day in the late autumn, near three-and-twenty centuries back in the depths of time. After the island had been distracted by internal war for the space of many months, it came to pass, by fair means or foul, that the relics of the oligarchy, some three hundred in number, fell into the hands of their opponents; "who," says

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got a cut or stab at him as he passed "by. And sixty had been so disposed "of before those in the building were "aware of what was going on: (for they "imagined that their companions were "being simply conducted to another place of confinement). But at last some one let them into the secret, and "then the poor fellows began to call upon the Athenian admiral, and bade "him kill them, if it seemed good to "him; but they positively refused to "leave the building, and swore that no one should enter from the outside as long as they had power to prevent it. "And then the populace gave up the "idea of forcing the doors, and clam"bered on to the roof, tore open the "ceiling, and pelted the people below "with the tiles; while others got bows, "and shot down through the aperture. "And the men inside kept off the "missiles as best they might; but soon they found reason to give themselves up for lost, and one after another they "made away with their lives. Some picked up the arrows and thrust them "into their throats; while others "twisted themselves halters with strips "torn from their clothes, or with the cords "of some beds which happened to have "been left about. And far into the "night (for the sun went down upon "the melancholy scene) they continued.

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possibility of party violence. Half a century has not elapsed since, on the ground where the Free Trade Hall now stands, the county yeomanry slew fourteen of the Manchester Reformers. Barely eighteen months ago the carpenters drove the navvies into the mud of the Belfast docks, as far as men could wade short of stifling, and then fired at leisure upon their helpless foes. At Cheltenham, last July, a highflying gentleman took with him to the booths and hustings a loaded revolver, which during the day he could invent no excuse for using; so, as a last chance, just before turning in for the night at his own door, he shot dead a poor Radical who was consoling himself for the defeat of his party by singing "The Bonnets of Yellow." But in a country which counts its inhabitants by tens of millions, the very size of the community is a sure protection against any serious excesses. However fierce and eager may be the factions in a particular borough or city, the force of external public opinion, and the overwhelming strength of the central government, will speedily check all dangerous manifestations of political passions. Where Hellenic democrats would have called in the Athenian fleet to assist them in getting the better of their adversaries; where Hellenic aristocrats would have welcomed an invasion of Spartans or an insurrection of serfs, we content ourselves with writing for a few dozen of the county police, or a troop of hussars from the neighbouring assize-town. And so our civic strife is waged, not with daggers and clubs, and firebrands and fragments of broken pottery, but with the more pacific artillery of addresses, and handbills, and polling-cards, and here and there a rotten potato, and here and there a questionable egg, or a casual dead cat ;-the supply of which singular commodity invariably meets the demand created by a contested election with such precision as to afford a notable example of the fundamental doctrine in our creed of political economy.

Hellenic warfare, whether foreign or domestic, might have lost something of

its barbarity, if Hellenic society had been more generally pervaded by the milder tendencies of female influence. But, unfortunately, the free married women held a most degraded and insignificant position, while education and accomplishments were confined entirely to ladies of quite another description. Those world-renowned dames of Corinth, Athens, and Miletus, who, like Aspasia, possessed the talents which qualified them, in fashionable parlance, to hold a salon, belonged to a class which has long ceased to exercise any ostensible sway over modern politics, though it might with advantage engage somewhat less the attention of modern journalism. There

is no such sure sign of a low condition of social morality, as when women of vicious lives monopolise, or even share, the esteem and the authority which of right belong to the virtuous and respectable of their sex. Thus, Hindoo gentlemen, disgusted by the frivolous and illiterate gossip of their zenanas, are too often driven to seek intellectual sympathy in the company of clever and cultivated nautch-girls; and a wholesome symptom for the future of Oriental civilization is, that the more wealthy and intelligent Bengalees are applying themselves vigorously to the question of native female education, with the view of elevating the ladies of their households from dolls into reasonable companions.

The Spartan girls were brought up amidst the manifold hardships and the severe discipline enjoined by their national law-giver, whose object it was that in courage and bodily strength the woman should be to the man as the lioness to the lion. And so it came about that in Lacedæmon the softer-or rather the less rugged-sex, was treated with a consideration that had very little in common with our notion of chivalry; and which resembled not so much the feelings of the Earl of Surrey towards the fair Geraldine as the respect with which poor Tom Sayers may be supposed to have regarded Nat Langham or the Benicia Boy. With this single exception, the Hellenic matrons were in

credibly debased, in morals, habits, and understanding. I blush-across a score of intervening centuries I blush-to have uttered words so inconsistent with the gallantry which Englishmen profess; but this single sentence may surely be forgiven when we recollect that, year after year, an Attic audience witnessed with glee and approbation their wives. and daughters exposed to public derision and contempt. Three of the wittiest among the extravaganzas of Aristophanes are devoted to the faults and follies of his countrywomen, whom he was never weary of representing as drunken, lazy, gluttonous, silly, sly, ineffably coarse in ideas and in conversation. And hard as the comedians were on them, the ladies did not come off much better in the other branches of literature. The two most eminent philosophers of Greece both came to the conclusion that the whole duty of woman was to obey her husband. The popular tragic writer was of opinion that it would be an excellent thing for mankind if babies could be born without the intervention of a mother; and the mass of his compatriots showed pretty clearly the relative estimation wherein they held the sexes, by speaking instinctively, not of "wife and children," but of "children and wife." The mistress of a family neither dined out with her husband, nor was present at the table when he entertained his guests. An Athenian would have egregiously failed to appreciate the force of our stock quotations and proverbs on the subject of woman. He did not feel the difficulty of pleasing her in his hours of ease, because he was absolutely indifferent as to whether she was pleased or not; and he refused to endorse even that hackneyed saying which roused the indignation and satire of Sydney Smith, that "the true theatre "for a woman is the sick-chamber."

Witness the conduct of Socrates in

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the supreme hour of his noble life. When his friends entered the prison, in the morning whereon he had been appointed to die, they found him just out of his bath, and his wife seated by him, with a child on her lap. "And then," to quote the narrative left us by one of their number, as soon as she caught sight of us she broke out into the "exclamations which women use on "such occasions, as, 'O Socrates, this is "the last time these gentlemen will ever talk to you, or you to them again.' And he motioned to Crito, " and said,' Crito, my friend, see that some one takes this poor thing home." "So Crito's people led her off bursting "with grief; and Socrates, sitting up "on the bed, bent his leg towards him, "and rubbed it with his hand, and said "What a singular thing, my dear "dear friends, is that which men name """Pleasure!" What a wonderful rela"tion it bears towards the sensation "which is apparently its opposite !'" And so he went his way out of the world, conversing on matters of far deeper import, in the judgment of those present, than the love or the despair of a woman. Compare with this strange scene the tenderness and reverence of the dying Russell for that sweet saint who sat by his side under the judgment-seat and in the dungeon. Think on the debt we all have incurred to the devotion of mother and sister ;- -on that which we owe, or yet may owe, to a sweeter affection still; and, as public meetings frequently close with a vote of thanks to the ladies, so let us conclude this evening by passing in our hearts a resolution acknowledging that much of British worth, and most of British refinement, is due to the universal prevalence in British society of that gentler element, the absence of which was the most fatal drawback to the perfection of life in the cities of Old Greece.

XI. OF A ROCK LIMPET.

I AM sitting on the rocks at the mouth of a little harbour on the North Devon coast. A soft west wind sweeps in from the sea, tempering the autumnal heats. For hot enough it is, without doubt, inland, if we may judge from the shimmering waves of vapour which rise from the hills behind me. A languid, listless day. The sea scarcely takes the trouble to break upon the shore, but, rising in long low swells far out from land, swirls lazily round the outlying rocks at the harbour's mouth, and creeps in to its rest in the bay in soft overlapping folds. The fishing-vessels in the offing scarcely seem to move, and loom ghostly like phantom ships in the mist which girdles the horizon. The sea gulls flap lazily along round the headland, and drop gladly down into the bay that they may sleep, lulled to rest by the rise and falling of the oily swell. The sky- But I am lapsing into an error which I am apt to reprobate in others, trying to describe with words that which only the painter's art can render.

Diffusive word-painting, it seems to me, is becoming far too much the fashion with writers of the present day. It is as great a mistake for the penman to try and describe a scene in many words as it is for the painter to attempt to represent continuous action upon canvas. Every art has its limits. The Seven Ages of Shakespeare are no fit subject for the painter's pencil. They will not make a picture. And it is an error equally foolish to heap epithet upon epithet, and to fill page after page with descriptions which, after all, place no distinctive scene before the reader's eye. A word or two will do it, if it is to be done at all. Milton has done it with a single epithet; as for example, "over some wide-watered shore, swinging slow with sullen roar." Tennyson

has done it in "the level waste, the rounding grey." Could whole pages of description have told as much as the curiosa felicitas of one single word? For the fault of diffusive word-painting is the fault of a picture out of focus. Take a large gallery painting, and confine the spectator to as much as he can see of it by travelling up and down in front of the canvas on a copyist's platform, and what real notions of that picture will he carry away with him? He has seen it all indeed, bit by bit; but he has never taken it in as a whole. And so it is with the reader of a description which runs over a page or two of print. It is out of focus to his mind's eye, and he cannot realize it.

Breaking off then in my attempt at description, I will only say that it is the sort of day-few and far between, are they not?-which makes one feel satisfied with bare existence, content to have life on its own terms; to live in the present wholly, with no light borrowed from past or future. And this not because of blue sky, or heaving sea, or purple cliffs melting into the haze far away. No, the charm is in the breeze; so pure an air, so sweet a balm, that it actually seems to heal the spirit, while it laps the body and bathes it in Elysium.

Looking out, then, dreamily over the sea (for one does not think or meditate, but rather dream, on such a day as this) I seem to wonder vaguely of what colour the ocean is, and how it shall be painted; for I have brought my sketch-book with me. But, after long pondering, I give the problem up as insoluble. The sea cannot be painted at all. The rendering of it, by even the best artists, is wholly conventional, as all rendering of motion must be; a symbol, expressive, perhaps, but still no less a symbol. A horse trotting, a bird in the air, a wave breaking on the shore-we have certain symbols for these things current amongst us,