nguages of antiquity, but also the most cultivated
of modern times, is an enduring monument of the patient industry of the
Athenians.[37] Language is unquestionably the highest creation of
reason, and in the language of a nation we can see reflected as in a
mirror the amount of culture to which it has attained. The rare balance
of the imagination and the reasoning powers, in which the perfection of
the human intellect is regarded as consisting, the exact correspondence
between the thought and the expression, "the free music of prosaic
numbers in the most diversified forms of style," the calmness, and
perspicuity, and order, even in the stormiest moments of inspiration,
revealed in every department of Greek literature, were not a mere happy
stroke of chance, but a product of unwearied effort--and effort too
which was directed by the criteria which reason supplied. The plastic
art of Greece, which after the lapse of ages still stands forth in
unrivalled beauty, so that, in presence of the eternal models it
created, the modern artist feels the painful lack of progress was not a
spontaneous outburst of genius, but the result of intense application
and unwearied discipline. The achievements of the philosophic spirit,
the ethical and political systems of the Academy, the Lyceum, the Stoa,
and the Garden, the anticipations, scattered here and there like
prophetic hints, of some of the profoundest discoveries of "inductive
science" in more modern days,--all these are an enduring protest against
the strange misrepresentations of Plutarch.

[Footnote 34: These are still characteristics of the Greeks. "They are
an exceedingly temperate people; drunkenness is a vice remarkably rare
amongst them; their food also is spare and simple; even the richest are
content with a dish of vegetables for each meal, and the poor with a
handful of olives or a piece of salt fish.... All other pleasures are
indulged with similar propriety; their passions are moderate, and
insanity is almost unknown amongst them."--_Encyc. Brit._, art.
"Greece."]

[Footnote 35: Niebuhr's Lectures, vol. i. p. 101.]

[Footnote 36: Eukaireo corresponds exactly to the Latin _vacare_, "to be
at leisure."]

[Footnote 37: Frederick Jacobs, on "Study of Classic Antiquity," p. 57.]

In Athens there existed a providential collocation of the most favorable
conditions in which humanity can be placed for securing its highest
natural development. Athenian civilization is the s