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nation of all Greece before Lycurgus, but from his time enjoyed good laws and shot up and flourished, it is evident we must attribute to him some change which gave to their institutions, whether heroic or Dorian, an efficacy which they did not previously possess. His senate and agora did not differ much from the Homeric council of chiefs and popular assembly, except by the definiteness of their numbers and forms of proceeding. The ephors, whether instituted by him or at a later period, appear to have been designed to protect the people against the kings, whom they ultimately controlled, so as to render their authority, except in war, almost nominal. There is nothing in these institutions which could alone have raised Sparta to prosperity or preserved her so long from change. The true causes of her ascendancy and the permanence of her state must be found in the peculiarities of her education and the division of property. What relates to the former subject is well known-the weeding out of all the weaker plants from the nursery-bed of the state-the flogging at the shrine of the Orthian goddess-the black broth-the license to steal and the punishment for being detected the public meal the incessant military drill-the sacrifice of all domestic affections and personal independence to the exacted duties of the citizen. We pass them over, therefore, to notice Mr. Grote's views of the state of landed property created by the institutions of Lycurgus. To conceive how this began and how it was kept up is one of the most perplexing problems in Spartan history, and no one has probably been quite satisfied with the solution which, in default of a better, he has been compelled to adopt.

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The statement on this subject commonly given in books is, that Lycurgus, finding a pernicious inequality of landed possessions prevailing, re-divided the whole Spartan district into 9000 equal lots, and the rest of Laconia into 30,000, each citizen having thus what would produce such an amount of the means of subsistence, that neither wealth nor pauperism should be known. This account is rendered suspicious by the circumstance, that in all historical times decided inequalities of property existed at Sparta. If this ground of doubt stood alone, it might be said that the tendency to accumulation was too strong to be controlled by law, and that the rhetra of Lycurgus, like the Servian and Solonian constitutions, had hardly been given when they began to be infringed. But a greater difficulty is, that we find no mention of such a measure in any of the authors who lived while the Spartan government existed; neither in Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon nor Aristotle. The force of a negative argument is not great, when applied to any one of these; but their unanimous silence amounts to a strong presumption of ignorance, especially as Aristotle (Pol. II. 4) expressly says that Phaleas of Chalcedon was the first who regulated property and recommended that the possessions of the citizens should be equal, adding the remark, that it was easy to do this on the first settlement of a country, but difficult afterwards. When Phaleas lived, as he is mentioned nowhere else, is uncertain, but long after Lycurgus, for he appears to have been not a lawgiver, but a speculative politician. Could Aristotle then have failed to mention the practical answer given by Lycurgus to the question, whether equality of possessions was feasible, if it had been the basis of his legislation? The statement which has hitherto occupied all our Grecian histories cannot be traced up higher

than to Plutarch, who, however, must have found it in some author of an older date, later than the time of Aristotle, yet earlier than that of Polybius. He (VI. 45) mentions equality of possessions as characteristic of Sparta, and wonders that the most learned historians among his predecessors should have overlooked this difference, which rendered all parallel between Crete and Lacedæmon absurd. Was it then a dream or a fiction of the author whom Plutarch and Polybius followed, that equality of landed property was an institution of Lycurgus? Mr. Grote has a most ingenious and, as far as we know, original theory to account for this belief. About the year B.C. 250, nearly a century later than Aristotle, the citizens of Sparta had become few in number, not more than 700, of whom 100 alone possessed most of the landed property; the ancient discipline had degenerated, and the ascendancy of the state in Greece was utterly lost. Such was the state of things when king Agis, a young enthusiastic patriot, conceived the design of recovering the ancient predominance of Sparta, by reviving the institutions of Lycurgus, on which their national glory was supposed to depend. He and his associates in the execution of this project endeavoured to reconstruct the old Sparta, by re-admitting the citizens who had been disfranchised by reason of their poverty, cancelling all debts, re-dividing the lands, and restoring the public mess and military training in all their strictness. He failed in his attempt. Cleomenes, his successor, however, succeeded, though foreign arms soon overthrew both him and his institutions. If we admit with Mr. Grote, that this state of feeling of Sparta gave rise to the historic fancy, adopted by Plutarch and Polybius, but unknown to Aristotle and his predecessors, of the original equality of landed property according to the law of Lycurgus, we shall have a curious proof that the mythopaic tendency belongs to other ages than the legendary. "The fancies, longings and indirect suggestions of the present, assumed the character of recollections out of the early, obscure and extinct historical past" (II. 529). If we cannot produce a case of an historical theory, gaining credit merely by its accordance with the wishes and feelings of men, exactly parallel to this, close analogies are not wanting. Sismondi, speaking of the constitutional history of France, observes, "Des hommes, non moins ingenieux qu'érudits ont, presque toujours en conscience, créé une antiquité qui s'accordât avec leurs desirs, pour invoquer ensuite les droits qu'elle avait fondés. Boulainvilliers, Dubos, Montesquieu, l'abbé de Mably ont été chercher dans l'ancienne monarchie des titres pour ce qu'ils regrettaient ou qu'ils voulaient établir."* Mr. Sharon Turner's vision of borough and county members in the Witenagemote, the claim of the inhabitants of Barnstaple to have sent burgesses to Parliament in virtue of a charter of Athelstan, may serve as similar instances from English history. Modern historians have been aware of the improbability of Plutarch's account, and have endeavoured to soften it down into a correction of the abuses of accumulation of landed property. Mr. Grote, faithful to the view he has taken of legendary history, will admit no such compromises. If Plutarch be trustworthy, follow him and make the best you can of his statement; but do not pretend to follow him and yet begin by

* Hist. des Fr., Introd. p. vii., ed. de Bruxelles.

+ Hallam, M.A., III. 46.

calling in question, that which is of its very essence, the absolute equality of the lots. For ourselves, we are glad to escape from the perplexities of the common story, and see no improbability in Mr. Grote's explanation of its origin.

It may be anticipated from Mr. Grote's known political opinions, that he shews himself no admirer of a system so exclusive and conservative as the Spartan. Dr. Arnold, we believe, was the first who pointed out its true character, and shewed that instead of being devised to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, it was intended to uphold the tyrannical predominance of a small minority, of a different race from the people at large, by the perfection of gymnastic training and military discipline. It is not to be denied that some heroic qualities were called forth by the Spartan education, and made conspicuous by that exaltation of the ruling race, to which the welfare of the community was sacrificed. Leonidas and his three hundred, when they died at Thermopylæ, "obedient to the commands of the Lacedæmonians," purchased for their country a glory which has long outlived their monument. This single instance of patriotic devotion has shed such a brilliancy around the Spartan character, that till lately no eye has been drawn to the dark shades of the picture,-the arrogance engendered by the consciousness of superiority, the cruelty by which it was preserved, the sacrifice of every thing that softens, refines and elevates mankind, to the hard, passive, mechanical excellencies of the well-drilled soldier. Müller, in his boundless admiration for his favourite Dorians, has endeavoured to varnish over again some spots from which the false colouring had been rubbed off, but Mr. Grote's more impartial hand has undone his work. Spartan legislation and discipline will henceforth stand in history more as a warning than as an example an example of what an education conducted by the state may accomplish, when every influence is directed to impress on the youthful mind the principles and habits which the legislator desiresa warning of the consequences of endeavouring to perpetuate for centuries a character adapted only to a single age and place. Providence itself set a brand of reprobation on the Spartan institutions, as at variance with its own beneficent laws of social progress and comprehension. The numbers of the pampered oligarchy gradually and regularly dwindled away; their institutions were found unequal to the vicissi tudes and emergencies of a prolonged political existence. The site of Sparta is not marked by a single remain of art, nor her place in history by a single service to humanity, beyond the part which she bore in repelling Asiatic barbarism from the shores of Greece.

The volumes which Mr. Grote has now published will probably be the least popular of the whole work. Much of them, we think, might have been more advantageously published as Disquisitions on Grecian Legendary History, and there is a good deal of repetition of the same arguments and statements respecting the nature of mythes and their relation to history, produced no doubt by the earnestness of Mr. Grote's convictions and his knowledge of the deep root which false opinions have struck among us. Few persons will be inclined to read some hundred pages, of which they are impressively warned not to believe a word. In his desire to avoid the common error of deducing special history from mythic legend, he resolutely ignores every thing

respecting the ante-hellenic inhabitants of Hellas. Now we think that the belief of the Hellenes, that their own country was once possessed through its whole extent by a people called Pelasgi,* attested historically by Herodotus and mythically by a multitude of traditions in which tribes are traced to a Pelasgus, deserves much more weight than he has given it, and that we can even fix on some characters by which this ante-hellenic people were distinguished from their successors. But when did a man contend zealously for a new and important principle without carrying it to an extreme? Mr. Grote's path will be much more smooth in his succeeding volumes, of which we are glad to see that the third, perhaps the fourth, may be expected in the ensuing winter. K.

DREAMS.

THE dreams of Pharaoh changed the history of the Jewish people; Sabaco withdrew from Egypt in obedience to a dream; Astyages exposed his grandson, and ultimately overturned his own empire, through terror of a dream. The dream of Xerxes decided the invasion of Greece, and remotely the fate of Persia; the dream of Calpurnia, in a less philosophical age, would have prevented the assassination of Cæsar. That a man should permit the incoherent suggestions of sleep to guide his actions, and even to set aside the combinations of sagacity, appears hardly consistent with the attribute of reason. Yet it has a natural cause. The mind often reproduces in dreams the results of the meditations of the day, and presents them with a scenic vividness which impresses them more strongly than mere meditation. This connection, however, is not perceived, when the laws which regulate our trains of thought have not been studied: it is because the dream springs up within the mind itself, that it carries more authority than the deductions of reason. Detached from all impressions of the world of sense, the mind is more fitted for receiving communications from the world of spirit, and the convictions thus stamped upon it appear to proceed from a divine hand. It is on the same principle that words casually spoken, or taken out of their real connection, have been supposed to carry a supernatural import, and the Gods to speak through the mouths of those whose faculties are suspended by a trance or a fit, or even impaired by fatuity. We are prone also to notice the exception, more than the rule, of our experience, and hence one remarkable coincidence between a supposed prognostic and the event procures credit for such a mode of judging of the future, which many failures cannot destroy.-Rev. John Kenrick's Essay on Primaval History, pp. 157, 158.

* When Mr. Grote says, II. 356, that there is no ascertained mention of a people called Græci in any author earlier than the Aristotelian treatise on Meteorology, he has probably overlooked the following passage, quoted from Hesiod by Joannes Lydus de Mensibus, p. 12, ed. Röther.

Κούρη δ ̓ ἐν μεγάροισιν ἀγαιου Δευκαλίωνος

Πανδώρη Διὶ πατρὶ, θεῶν σημάντορι πάντων

Μιχθεῖς ἐν φιλότητι, τέκε Γραικὸν μενεχάρμην.

This, though it does not assert, assumes the existence of a people called гpaskoi, how early we will not say, but surely before the time of Aristotle.

DOCTRINE OF DEVELOPMENT.*

CONSIDERING the simple and unsystematized form in which Christianity was taught by its great Author, and in which it was promulgated by his apostles, it was inevitable, in the exercise of human capacities and from the influence of human institutions, that the annunciation of divine truth would lead to certain conclusions, and the practice of Christian worship and instruction would take new forms. These conclusions, when legitimate, the logical result of the first simple axioms of the holy and gifted Master and his disciples, and these forms, from whatever source they were derived, when they were as consistent as our imperfect nature will allow with the truly spiritual character of Christian worship, are to be regarded as developments of the Christian religion. If they are perversions of the words and sense of the sacred Scriptures, the only authentic documents which we have of the history of our religion,-if they give to forms the vitality and efficacy of principles, and attach to ceremonies the importance which belongs alone to truth and sincerity, they are not developments, but corruptions, entirely and diametrically opposed to that sublime science which clearly lays down the fundamental principles, that they who "continue in my word are my (i. e. Christ's) disciples," (John viii. 31,) and they are the "true worshipers who worship the Father in spirit and in truth"-" for God is a Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." (John iv. 23, 24.)

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Mr. John Henry Newman, fully aware that neither the Anglican Church, of which he was till recently a member, nor the Roman Catholic Church, of which he has become a proselyte, bear any but a faint resemblance to the Primitive Church, in which the spirit of Christ and his apostles ruled unawed and uninfluenced by "the powers that be," has published "An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.” The points which are most remarkable in this essay are his recantation in the prefixed " Advertisement," his application of general principles of reasoning to defend all the doctrines and practices of the Roman Church, and his dissatisfaction with, and ultimate abandonment of, the English Church, of which he has for the greater part of his life been an able, learned, and no doubt conscientious member. He had in numerous publications described the Church of Rome in passages of which we will present a few to our readers. "If we are indeed to believe the professions of Rome, and make advances towards her, as of a sister or a mother Church, which in theory she is, we shall find too late that we are in the arms of a pitiless and unnatural relative, who will but triumph in the arts which have inveigled us within her reach."-" No; dismissing the dreams which the romance of early Church history, and the high doctrines of Catholicism, will raise in the inexperienced mind, let us be sure that she is our enemy, and will do us a mischief when she can."-"We must deal with her as we would with a friend who is visited by derangement; for in truth she is a Church beside herself; abounding in noble gifts and rightful titles, but unable to use them religiously; crafty, obstinate, wilful, malicious, cruel, unnatural, as

An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. By John Henry Newman. Second Edition. James Toovey, 192, Piccadilly.

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