ment he died during the very next year, at the advanced
age of eighty.

We have only to regret that we are deprived of the means of following
more in detail his noble and exemplary character. He represents the best
tendencies of his age, combined with much that is personally excellent:
the improved ethical sensibility; the thirst for enlarged knowledge and
observation, not less potent in old age than in youth; the conception of
regularized popular institutions, departing sensibly from the type and
spirit of the governments around him, and calculated to found a new
character in the Athenian people; a genuine and reflecting sympathy with
the mass of the poor, anxious not merely to rescue them from the
oppressions of the rich, but also to create in them habits of
self-relying industry; lastly, during his temporary possession of a
power altogether arbitrary, not merely an absence of all selfish
ambition, but a rare discretion in seizing the mean between conflicting
exigencies. In reading his poems we must always recollect that what now
appears commonplace was once new, so that to his comparatively
unlettered age the social pictures which he draws were still fresh, and
his exhortations calculated to live in the memory. The poems composed
on moral subjects generally inculcate a spirit of gentleness toward
others and moderation in personal objects. They represent the gods as
irresistible, retributive, favoring the good and punishing the bad,
though sometimes very tardily. But his compositions on special and
present occasions are usually conceived in a more vigorous spirit;
denouncing the oppressions of the rich at one time, and the timid
submission to Pisistratus at another--and expressing in emphatic
language his own proud consciousness of having stood forward as champion
of the mass of the people. Of his early poems hardly anything is
preserved. The few lines remaining seem to manifest a jovial temperament
which we may well conceive to have been overlaid by such political
difficulties as he had to encounter--difficulties arising successively
out of the Megarian war, the Cylonian sacrilege, the public despondency
healed by Epimenides, and the task of arbiter between a rapacious
oligarchy and a suffering people. In one of his elegies addressed to
Mimnermus, he marked out the sixtieth year as the longest desirable
period of life, in preference to the eightieth year, which that poet had
expressed a wish to attain. But his own li