insatiable
thirst after perfection in art for its own sake, without which no man
ever produced a masterpiece of genius. Plutarch, in his usual graphic
style, places him before us as if he were an acquaintance,--aloof from
the world; immersed in the study of his high calling, with his brow
never unbent from care and thought; severely abstemious in the midst
of dissoluteness and debauchery; a water-drinker among Greeks; like
that other Agonistes, elected and ordained to struggle, to suffer, and
to perish for a people unworthy of him:--

"His mighty champion, strong above compare,
Whose drink was only from the liquid brook."

Let any one who has considered the state of manners at Athens just at
the moment of his appearance upon the stage of public life, imagine
what an impression such a phenomenon must have made upon a people so
lost in profligacy and sensuality of all sorts. What wonder that the
unprincipled though gifted Demades, the very personification of the
witty and reckless libertinism of the age, should deride and scoff at
this strange man, living as nobody else lived, thinking as nobody else
thought; a prophet, crying from his solitude of great troubles at
hand; the apostle of the past; the preacher of an impossible
restoration; the witness to his contemporaries that their degeneracy
was incorrigible and their doom hopeless; and that another seal in the
book was broken, and a new era of calamity and downfall opened in the
history of nations.

We have said that the character of Demosthenes might be divined from
his eloquence; and so the character of his eloquence was a mere
emanation of his own. It was the life and soul of the man, the
patriot, the statesman. "Its highest attribute of all," says
Dionysius, "is the spirit of life--+to pneuma+--that pervades it."

A DUKE'S OPINIONS OF VIRGINIA, NORTH AND SOUTH CAROLINA, AND GEORGIA.

[_From a Review of "Travels of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar" in 1825-6._]

In his journey through Virginia, our traveller visited Mr. Jefferson,
with whom, however, he does not appear to have been as much struck as
he had been with the late Mr. Adams. The Natural Bridge he pronounces
"one of the greatest wonders of nature he ever beheld," albeit he had
seen "Vesuvius and the Phlegrean Fields, the Giant's Causeway in
Ireland, the Island of Staffa, and the Falls of Niagara." "Finally"
(to use a favorite mode of expression of his own), he is amazed at the
profusion of militia t