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Conchs of Ruby: A Gift of Love. By T. H. | applied to them, produces a very fair music. Mr. CHIVERS, M.D. New-York: Spalding & Shep

ard.

The publication of this book is one of those extraordinary things which men will sometimes do, and for the doing of which no mortal man can give anything approaching to a reason. It would make a fitting dessert for a heavy dinner of" America Discovered." One verse par example:

"By her side Cherubic Asta,

With white limbs like alabaster,

Plays along Heaven's emerald pasture-
Ganymede of joy below-
While her saintly soul sings Pæans
In the Amaranthine ons

Of high Heaven with her dear Fleance
Of the days of long ago."

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Mr. Putnam is one of those laborious men whose aid is so needful to the scholar and the student. The Dictionary of Dates is an admirable book of reference, and in chronology is faultless. The tables are well arranged, presenting at a glance the remarkable cotemporary events of each period or year. The paper and print are exquisite, and the work is not less remarkable as a specimen of American art, than for the singular minuteness and industry of the editor. A library without it is wanting in a prime necessity.

History and Geography of the Middle Ages, for Colleges and Schools. Chiefly from the French. By GEORGE W. GREENE. D. Appleton & Co. This book seems to be an admirably arranged manual of mediaval history for the purposes intended. Indeed, to all it will serve as a safe guide through the dark labyrinth of the period of which it treats. The experience of the learned editor has enabled him to make a contribution to school literature much needed.

Memories of the Past. By MARCUS T. CARPENTER. New-York: Baker & Scribner.

A volume of poems very prettily issued. The nellifluous voice of woman, we find, if properly

Carpenter we know not, but every one must begin by being unknown. He joinch verse to verse with some case, and we wish him good health, and better employment.

American Education, its Principles and Elements. By EDWARD D. MANSFIELD. New-York: A. T. Barnes & Co.

The subject and purpose of this book should commend it to universal attention. A system of education truly adapted to this country, politically and morally, is the great desideratum. All contributions to a thorough discussion of the subject should be eagerly welcomed and universally considered.

Richard Edney, and the Governor's Family. Rus-urban Tale, simple and popular, yet cultured and noble, of morals, sentiment and life, practically treated, and pleasantly illustrated. Containing also hints on being good and doing good. By the Author of Margaret," and Philo." Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co.

We have only been able to take a cursory look through this volume; but from what we see we are sure we may strongly recommend its perusal. Although, as the title page (which we give above) would suggest, we may expect some imitation of Dickens's style,-and this will be obvious to the reader in the first chapter,-yet it is not without its originality and much graphic power. There is also obvious throughout the book, an earnest purpose of good, a high appreciation of religion, and a strong good sense in its inculcation.

The Diosma: A Perennial. By Miss II. F. GOULD. Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co.

This is a collection of poems in which the genius of the fair authoress in the production, and her taste in the selection, of pure and graceful poetry, have been happily combined to make It is as pleasant a gift-book as could be selected. a volume worthy of a place on every lady's table.

The Sportsman's Vade Mecum. By "DINKS." Edited by Frank Forrester. New-York: Stringer & Townsend.

A small volume of some eighty pages, containing much useful information of the canine race in few words, and also a few hints of sporting generally. It is beautifully got up.

The Artists' Chromatic Hand Book, being a Practical Treatise on Pigments, &c., &c. By JOHN P. RIDNER. New-York: G. P. Putnam.

A book apparently of value to the young artist, but so entirely practical that we can only judge of its merits by the favorable opinions of practical men.

THE

AMERICAN WHIG REVIEW.

No. LXXIV.

FOR FEBRUARY, 1851.

"THE WORLD'S FAIR."

A.D. 1851. THE FIRST OLYMPIAD OF CANT.

FLIGHT I

IN Elis, among the sacred olive groves on | gods without decency; men without intelthe Peneus' banks, the ancient Greeks were accustomed to celebrate the grand epochs of ante-Christian civilization. They had found the world overwhelmed in barbaric night, subject to despotisms and ideas to which we have since assigned the name of Asiatic; they had found men willingly subservient to the uncontrolled authority of individuals, willingly abandoning their manhood and their ideas of justice to a superstitious belief in Fate, in the impossibility of anything but the present, and in the mere animal conservatism which has since become a creed in subservient churches, and ill-begotten men, that that is right which exists. They found, moreover, rude stones piled heap on heap without order and without beauty, set aside for the habitation of the tyrant, and the sacrifice to the tyrant's god. They found blocks of wood and rock roughly cut or worn with attrition, and worshipped as semblances of divinity. They found in democracy, servitude; in government, tyranny; in political socialities, universal centralization; in social order, unlimited power, and illimitable abasement; infanticide practised as a religious duty; polygamy coveted as a moral order; buildings without architecture;

VOL. VII. NO. II. NEW SERIES.

lect; women without beauty; nations without arts; language without literature; belief without reason; gutturals without harmony; vocal noises without music; marble quarries without a statue; landscape beauty without a painter; and an untamed, rude, voiceless, senseless world fit only for the habitation of the moaning demons who flit along the Stygian morass. Of these they built up Greece-eternal Greece, the nurse of all that has lived even to our day in beauty, the mother of all that is good in man, or grand in genius. By their hands the tyrants were hurled down, with the rude Asiatic altars, and the ruder Asiatic idols; and instead there sprang into vitality and memorable grandeur, a democracy unsurpassed for refinement and the qualities of manhood, for art, and grace, and intellect, and genius; a philosophy which, in later times, a Church seeking the dominion of the world dovetailed into its creed; sculpture so exquisitely entrancing that the very artist has died of love before the charms created by his genius; music so moving that the fable vainly imagined rocks to follow its sweet sounds, and opposing demons to be lulled to rest by its gently undulating cadences; paintings so

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grand that even monsters stood in affright as an edge of tried steel, intent only on before the limner's semblance of a woman's proving that Greece was greatest on earth, head in anger; epic poems so true, so Sparta in Greece, and he in his own resounding, so sublime, that they first gave Sparta; the urbane Athenian, martial in gods, then heroes, then victories, then gait, yet with the easy, unassuming bearing immortality, to the hearers; love songs of the citizen of that capital where god-like so captivating that they enchained con- statues in every street awoke the admiration querors; and staves of the Anacreontic feast of the artist and the eloquent anger of the so seductive, that they furnished, even to the puritanical barbarian-he comes, too, with enjoyment of the most sensual, the tenets of the polish of the Acropolis, and the learning a philosophic school. To celebrate these of the schools, yet so supreme in manly grand triumphs of Hellenic genius over the beauty, that Corinthian dames may flaunt wilderness of earth and the vacuity of their charms beside him in vain, or sculptors thought, to renew new contests in the arts, fruitlessly essay to liken the transparent and develop still further the genius by which marble of Pentelicus to the plastic symthey were effected, the civilized world assem- metry and fairness of his form; and, yet bled in the Elean Olive Groves. Thither again, skilled to combat with the Boeotian in at the stated time came all the men of the throwing of the quoit, with the Spartan Achaia, all the children of the Classic moth-in the gauntlet fence, or with the tragedian, er; uninvited save by the national will; or the orator of his native Athenæ, in essays unprotected save by the Olympian Jove; unaided save by that devotion to science, that love of art, which had dictated their triumphs and insured to them immortality. No public meetings to subscribe oboli to furnish food by the way; no reinforcement of police to protect the traveller; no public ships to carry him or his: the people of Greece, free and brave, fit to protect themselves from outrage, and scorning public help or private charity, were to be seen wending their way at the full moon of every fifth year to the little spot of sacred ground, where was to be inaugurated another era of Hellenic triumph. The Boeotian, rude of tongue and ruder of frame, brought thither by the hand children, who were one day to immortalize the glory of their country, and of the games they came to see; to contest on that ground for the olive crown of manly power or genius, or among the great men of the earth for imperishable renown, under And so the games began. Poets such as the names of Pindar, Epaminondas, Hesiod Pindar sang, historians such as Herodotus and and Plutarch. Thither, too, came the Plutarch recorded, statuaries such as Phidias Arcadian, his thoughts set to sweetest music, and Praxiteles rendered into speaking marwith which to charm the love of some fair ble, the vicissitudes of the contest, and the Ionian, or make audible to the ear of the glory of the victor. And to him who was vulgar the exquisite harmony of his life; the so supremely favored by the witnessing Spartan, in his gait the exemplar of a trained gods with bravery and strength of frame, or soldier, whose nursery was the gymnasium, nobility of genius, as to gain that simple and college the phalanx, splendid in figure crown of valueless olive leaves, a national and form, despising the men so mean as to triumph was awarded. The Hellenic people require to know how to read, (a practice led him, in an ovation befitting a conqueror, to which he had heard deformed and weak from state to state to his native city, and persons had recourse in their personal decrep-the citizens, hearing from without the paans itude;) his manners quick, sharp and dry which signalled the advent of their chain

of more intellectual strength. Thither, too, came the Messenian, the effeminate Corinthian, the scattered sons of Greece from the far-off isles of the Egean, the semi-civilized Asiatic from the continent memorable by the fall of Ilium; all in truth who loved Hellas, admired her genius, or gloried in her triumphs, the rich and the poor, the judges, the legislators, the diskos players, the boxers, the wrestlers, the statesmen, the logicians, the sophists, the orators, the poets, whether of stone, of marble, or of music, collecting together through roads lined with hospitality, through scenery unsurpassed in grandeur and rest, from every quarter of the world whither the name or the glory of the Olympic games had gone,-came there to worship the Olympian Jove, to mix with Grecian brothers in friendly converse, and to record one other eternal epoch in Hellenic genius.

pion, smashed down the virgin walls which | descended, the one to the squad in the would never have yielded to a ruder inva- guard-room, the other to the brawlers of the sion, that the man who so immortalized their tavern. Tragedians are no longer rewarded city might march in triumph over them- with the olive and immortality, but with selves. His name was enrolled in the ranks publishers' payment by the line and starof highest civic honor; his statue graced the vation in a garret. Historians no longer sacred grove of Jupiter in Elis, a monument endeavor to give to present ages the genial of his triumph on the spot where he pictures of the past, but estimate their writ triumphed; his glory became the theme of ings by the yard, are paid by any who odes more grand than rolling seas; the wish their grandfather alluded to, and read loveliest maidens strewed his way with by none. Happy civilization! Statues no smiles and flowers; and the old and the more entrance the artist, but are gambled young, the learned and the illiterate of all for by merchants of hogs, and hucksters of Hellas counted thereafter from the day when cheeses, in an Art Union. Paintings are no Chorobus the Baotian obtained the crown of longer rendered to save fair Andromedas the boxers in the Olympic games, or from from monsters of iniquity, but-such is the the day when an untried poet, named advanced state of our arts-are very seductive Sophocles, was awarded the honors of vic- to boarding-school misses in an exhibition tory, to the astonishment and chagrin of gallery. Hellas is indeed no more! Euripides, the hitherto unmatched Athe

nian.

Such was the "World's Fair" of the Classic days. The physical and the imaginative, the strong and the beautiful, the great in man, and the sublime in nature, went hand in hand, giving to the organism of the grand the idealism of the fanciful, lighting up barbaric clay with that Promethean fire which still casts its light from age to age, widening in effect and lessening in intensity even to our day, like the light flung from a distant beacon on the eternal sea. By such means, Greece acquired for herself victories like Marathon, like Salamis, like Thermopyla, watchwords to our day, and beyond our day to the eternal night, of all that is august in liberty and noble in man-stores of learning, eloquence and beauty, poems as exquisitely chiselled as a statue, histories as perfect as a drama, and a name which, even some two thousand years after her conquest by Rome, obtained from a shop-keeping and monarch-ridden Europe, (though accompanied with a Frankish King,) a nationality sacred alike from the Turk on the one hand, and the Scythian on the other. Small return for the Asiatic doom out of which she raised the European world, for the arts, and the philosophy, and the temples of music made monumental, and the lessons in heroic deed and intellectual victory, she bequeathed to the world which overthrew her greatness, but could not efface it! But alas! the Hellenic ideal is no more. The prowess of manhood in the battle-field, the victories of the athlete in the arena, have

Yet if we cannot recreate the genius which animated, or restore to the modern world the splendor of the art which adorned the solemnities of the Achaian, we can at least appreciate their effects in history, and apply the paraphernalia which accompanied them to uses, in our peculiar way, possibly more valuable to ourselves. The triumphs and the sacrifices of Greece; the worship of the Israelite around the Ark of the Covenant; that grander worship of later days which inspired men with courage to die in thankfulness and prayer, rent by the fangs and jaws of wild beasts, are equally obsolete, equally unsuited and unsuitable to our more rational, more liberal, and more refined times. We no longer rear men to die for their faith, even in dens of tigers, but to tremble at the sufferings of a chicken.* Our gods are no longer Greek gods, no longer the Idea Omnipotent raised up by the Nazarene Republican for the liberation of Israel. Beauty, wit, power of sinew, power of genius have long since ceased to enthrall the sympathies, or direct the ambition of mankind; have become as

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*The progress of Humanitarianism is singularly remarkable. We read the other day in the New York Tribune a letter from some lamentable individual calling on the editor of that journal to rouse public opinion" against the frightful prac tice of killing chickens on New-Year's Day by shooting them. Coleridge wrote once" A Sonnet to a Young Ass" and the next thing we expect to hear is the formation of a National Central Conven

tion to put down the ferocious practice, common to masons, of torturing bricks by beating their faces off.

The gods of the world are changed, but still we have gods, even the god Fig; and what were gods without worship? What were the peculiar ideals to which we look for hap

probate office and in heaven, unless we paid them adoration? Nay, might not the Commercial Jupiter blight our fairest enterprises, and cleave with thunder the best arranged railway schemes, frighting the "bulls" of 'Change to madness, and burning the very hide off the "bears," if we did not appease him with lofty ceremonies, and costly hecatombs in bale and bullion? Besides, have not we of the modern world had a city for long years sacred to the Commercial Jove, whither the

utterly foreign to our rules and habits of life, and our desiderata of happiness mundane or glory celestial, as the simple republicanism, and the rules of even-handed justice dictated by the Saviour for the deliver-piness here and rewards hereafter, in the ance of Jerusalem, and the noiseless life of mediæval simplicity. The ages when manly vigor and intellectual excellence were prized as a national glory, are gone for ever. The ages when to be truth-telling, honest in word and deed, was to be all most worthy of the aspirations of manhood, are buried in the rubbish of the childish and ignorant past. "Do unto others as you would they should do unto you," and "Love one another," have long given way before the wiser and more civilized maxims, "Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest," and "Make money out of everybody." The ages when say about Marathon is, that it is one of other the noblest specimens of our race combated marshy tracts, good for rice!) And again, the clasbefore gods and men for the olive of excel- sic memories attached to the hills of Greece are lence in poetry and art, when the highest thus described: "The hills of Greece-are admiragenius was held to be the most exalted bly adapted for the vine." "The valley of Helicon," he tells us, produces good wines, but of "little conqueror, lie somewhere under the ruins of body," which are ruined for the English palate the Acropolis, and the dust of the Pantheon. from the fact of their being made precisely as the The Hellenic blood poured out under Milti- gods drank them in the clouds three thousand ades for the liberty of the world, is no longer years ago. "Cotton of good quality is grown in valuable, save as having manured a plain of Argos.... Tobacco in Boeotia, Messenia, Laconia,... but especially in the plain figs in Atcalled Marathon, and as growing thereon tica (so famous in antiquity)." The difference corn, maize and rice for the ports of the between ancient genius as illustrated by Byron, Morea, and the markets of England. The and modern British animalism, is strikingly exglories of Minerva's sacred city, the adorn-hibited by two passages. The inspired pilgrim

ments of her Acropolis, the memory of the triumphs of her courage and her genius, have all passed from this meliorated world to the school-boy's satchel; but still to men the figs of Attica bring the best prices in the London markets-

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"Age shakes Athena's tower, but spares gray Marathon." But Marathon is not spared; the age could not afford to spare Marathon. It is excruciating to witness the delight with which that barbarian from the Isle of Tin, McCulloch, dilates on the peculiar memorabilia of Greece. This person seems to us in the attitude of tasting a fig, or currants, or corn, dilating on the peculiar excel. lence of each sample, and throwing out an occa. sional reminiscence about the best suited to his palate, to the effect that it was grown in the blood of heroes. Hear the human ghoul--(Geog. Dic., Art. Greece): "Hellas is a better corn country than the Morea." Rice is cultivated in the plains of Marathon, Argos, &c., and other marshy tracts along the coasts." (All the man has to

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writes:

"Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild,
Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields;
Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,
And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields.
There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds--
The free-born wanderer of the mountain air;
Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds;
Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare.
Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair,"

And yet, with this extract before him in his book, this English taster of illustrious memories, and purveyor-general to the London market, writes, not

"Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,"

but, "The olive oil of Greece would be good, if well prepared ;" and again, on the honey-bee of Hymettus; "Honey is a highly important product; that of Attica, and especially of Mount Hymettus, is now, as of old, the best in Europe. It is transparent, and has a delicious perfume." The man looks even upon his father's soul as a product, and pokes his nose into Mount Hymettus, to test its smell, before he will accord it any fa vor. His study of Homer, and his admiration of Anacreon, are limited to his sensualities, and regulated by his tongue or his smell, just as if he were in a dram-shop, or buying cheese at his grocer's. Happy civilization!

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