a man's talents as a
_debater_--still he employed his pen upon real and upon existing
questions of public policy; and did not, as so many generations of
chamber rhetoricians continued to do in Greece, confine his powers to
imaginary cases of political difficulty, or (what were tantamount to
imaginary) cases fetched up from the long-past era of King Priam, or
the still earlier era of the Seven Chiefs warring against the
Seven-gated Thebes of Boeotia, or the half-fabulous era of the
Argonauts. Isocrates was a man of sense--a patriot in a temperate
way--and with something of a feeling for Greece generally, not merely
a champion of Athens. His heart was given to politics: and, in an age
when heavy clouds were gathering over the independence and the civil
grandeur of his country, he had a disinterested anxiety for drawing
off the lightning of the approaching storms by pacific counsels.
Compared, therefore, with the common mercenary orators of the Athenian
forum--who made a regular trade of promoting mischief, by inflaming
the pride, jealousy, vengeance, or the martial instincts of a 'fierce
democracy,' and, generally speaking, with no views, high or low, sound
or unsound, that looked beyond the momentary profit to themselves from
thus pandering to the thoughtless nationality of a most sensitive
people--Isocrates is entitled to our respect. His writings have also a
separate value, as memorials of political transactions from which the
historian has gathered many useful hints; and, perhaps, to a diligent
search, they might yield more. But, considered as an orator--if that
title can be, with any propriety, allowed to one who declaimed only in
his closet--one who, in relation to public affairs, was what, in
England, when speaking of practical jurisprudence, we call a Chamber
Counsel--Isocrates is languid, and with little of anything
characteristic in his manner to justify a separate consideration. It
is remarkable that he, beyond all other rhetoricians of that era,
cultivated the _rhythmus_ of his periods. And to this object he
sacrificed not only an enormity of time, but, I have no doubt, in many
cases, the freedom and natural movement of the thoughts. My reason,
however, for noticing this peculiarity in Isocrates, is by way of
fixing the attention upon the superiority, even artificial ornaments,
of downright practical business and the realities of political strife,
over the torpid atmosphere of a study or a school. Cicero, long