not whether we take the particular generation contemporary with Pericles or with President Lincoln (his modern redivivus); each stands illustrious as the last reach upward of the towering civilizations that respectively pushed them to this eminence; the highest point is in each case reached, and all that remains is to make this sublime elevation tenable for the race universally, so that, instead of the pyramidal mountain, we shall have the widely extended plateau.

Here we will anticipate a question which the reader, we imagine, is already about to put.  He will readily admit that Greece, in her palmiest era, politically, grasped, in form and conception at least, the highest ideal of rational liberty; but why, he will ask, was not this divine boon made universally available?  Why was it not extended to Persia, and to the Asiatic hosts that for security hid themselves in the folds of her garments? why not to the dwellers on the Nile?  Why was it that it was not even retained by Greece herself?  The truth is, that no sooner was the golden fleece in the hands of the adventurers that had sought it so zealously than it was rent by their discords.  Elements of barbarism had run uncurbed alongside of intellectual and artistic refinements.  Mingled with high-minded heroes were a set of treacherous Iscariots.  But why, it will naturally be asked, had there not been hitherto some outbreak of these discordant elements?  That question is easily answered, if we consider that up to this time there had existed certain external elements, which, by arousing incessantly the patriotic feelings of all Greece against hostilities from without, had administered an opiate to the Cerberus of domestic strife.  The terrible storm was maturing its thunderbolts treacherously and in subterranean chambers; but its mutterings were effectually silenced by the more audible thunderings that burst across the Aegean from the Persian throne.  Treachery was lulled to sleep, while the nobler sentiment which united Greece against Asiatic despotism was perpetually stung into activity in the popular heart, and inspired the utterances of eloquence.  Thus it might not have been, if Greece had first come within hail of Persia through the ordinary commerce of peace; since, in that case, after receiving from the latter her treacherous gifts, her voluptuous effeminacies, she would easily have fallen into the vast net-work that already trammelled all Asia, and would then, through her own entanglement, include the whole world.  But it was not in peace that they met.  The first question put to Hellas by her Oriental neighbor was in effect this:—­Are you willing, without going to the trouble of subjecting the matter to the test of actual conflict, to consider yourself as having been whipped?  This, it must be confessed, was a shivering introduction to the world for Greece,—­something like a Lacedaemonian baptism,—­but it stood her in good stead.  Like the dip in the Styx,