e full of admiration of the qualities which formed the
patriot and the hero, and have portrayed them to perfection in their
dramas; but they were ignorant of that more heavenly disposition of
mind, which

"sits a blooming bride,
By valour's arm'd and awful side."

They perceived the tendency of firm and unbending virtue to elevate the
soul above all that is earthly; but they knew not, in the sublime
language of Milton,

"That if virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her."

As a necessary consequence of this, the dramas of antiquity were
destitute of those feelings of PIETY, which form so important a part in
the most elevated characters of modern Europe. The ancients carried mere
human virtue to the very highest point; in their poetry, their
tragedies, their philosophy, they represented man resting on himself
alone in the noblest aspect. But they were ignorant of God; they had no
correct ideas of Heaven. The devotion to the divine will, the
forgetfulness of self, the reliance on Supreme protection to innocence,
the appeal to the Almighty, and the judgment of another world against
the injustice of this, which runs through the most exalted conceptions
of modern times, were to them unknown. Their ideas of the celestial
beings were entirely drawn from human models: Olympus was peopled by
gods and goddesses animated by passions, divided by jealousies,
stimulated by desires entirely akin to those which are felt in this
world. The shades below were a dark and gloomy region, the entrance to
which was placed in the jaws of Vesuvius, or the dreary expanse of the
Cimmerian Bosphorus, through which the cries of the damned in Tartarus
incessantly resounded; and where even the blessed spirits in Elysium
were continually regretting the joys and excitement of the upper world.
Dante, in his _Inferno_, has painted to the life their prevailing ideas
of futurity; the next world to them contained nothing but successive
circles of Malebolge. Homer has expressed their feeling in a line, when
he makes Achilles, in Elysium, say to Ulysses, on his descent to the
infernal regions, that he would rather command the Grecian army one day,
than dwell where he was through an infinity of ages. Compare this with
the ideas of the Crusaders in modern Europe; with the death of the
chivalric Bayard, when, mortally wounded, seated on the ground, with his
eyes fixed on the cross of his sword, he said to the victorious
Cons