ESSAYS ON ANCIENT LITERATURE AND ART. WITH THE BIOGRAPHY AND CORRESPONDENCE OF EMINENT PHILOLOGISTS. BY BARNAS SEARS, PRESIDENT OF NEWTON THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION. B. B. EDWARDS, PROFESSOR IN ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY. C. C. FELTON, PROFESSOR IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY. BOSTON: GOULD, KENDALL AND LINCOLN, 59 WASHINGTON STREET. 1843. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1843, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts. WM. S. DAMRELL, PRINTER, INTRODUCTION. IN the United States, the question of classical education has often been discussed, and its utility sometimes vehemently denied. In the meantime, the study of the Greek and Roman authors, and the taste for ancient art, have been making constant progress, both in schools and colleges. Many of the choicest works of the classical writers have been carefully and learnedly edited by American scholars. Professor Woolsey's selection of the Attic Tragedies has been welcomed with applause, both at home and abroad; and his recent edition of the Gorgias of Plato is the best edition of that admirable dialogue, for practical use, that has ever yet appeared. Other works, prepared on similar principles, have been published from time to time; and, at present, the classical course, in several of our colleges, instead of being limited to a volume or two of extracts, embraces a series of entire works in all the leading departments of ancient literature. The mode of studying antiquity has also been materially changed and improved within a few years. History, the arts, the domestic life, the private and public usages, the mythology, and the education of the ancients, have been carefully investigated, and their scattered lights concentrated upon the literary remains of antiquity. Thus classical scholarship in America is beginning to breathe the same spirit which animates it in the old world; it is beginning to be something higher and better than the dry study of words and grammatical forms; it is becoming a liberal and elegant pursuit; a comprehensive appreciation of the greatest works in history, poetry, and the arts, that the genius of man has ever produced. Amidst the din of practical interests, the rivalries of commerce, and the great enterprises of the age, classical studies are gaining ground in public estimation. It must always be so with the advance of civilization. We must, however, confess with shame, that in American legislative assemblies, where we naturally look to find the highest courtesy of manners and the graces of literature, little proof of advancing culture, of any kind, is given. Scenes of brutality, to the disgrace and sorrow of the nation, are often enacted in the Congress of the United States, that seem to show that the night of barbarism is settling over the land. Many of the speeches delivered there, exhibit a coarseness and vulgarity of sentiment, a disregard or ignorance of the proprieties of speech, an utter insensibility to the elegances of letters, and to the humanizing influences of the arts, which must be bitterly deplored. When a work of art was lately received in Washington, a work on which the great American sculptor had lavished all the resources of his genius, and spent several years in the flower of his life, - it was assailed by an honorable member, in a strain of ribaldry, which a gentleman cannot even quote. But the prospects of American education and refinement are more encouraging, if we turn from public to private life. It is a much more common thing for young men to continue their classical studies beyond the time of the college education, than |