Greece, declamation was regarded as the principal step to honour and
advancement in public life. The greatest men practised it, and as they
held action to be the criterion of oratory, made the best actors their
models; nor was this a groundless opinion adopted by a few or
superficial men; for Demosthenes having remarked with some asperity that
the worst orators were heard in the rostrum in preference to him, the
celebrated actor SATYRUS, in order to show him how much grace, dignity,
and action add to the celebrity of a public man, repeated to him several
passages from Sophocles and Euripides, which so delighted and astonished
Demosthenes that he always afterwards formed his elocution and action on
the models of the most celebrated actors.

Having brought the history of the stage to the end of the Greek theatre,
this chapter cannot be better concluded than with an extract from an
admirable work lately published on the subject in England, to which this
history is indebted for some of its materials.

"It remains now only to say, that from the parodies of the ancient
writers, begun by Aristophanes, and awkwardly imitated by his
contemporaries and successors, sprung mimes, farces, and the grossest
buffoonery; and though the Grecian theatre still kept up an appearance
of greatness, and there was often some brilliancy beamed across the
heterogeneous mass which obscured truth and nature, to which the people
were no longer sensible; yet the grandeur and magnificence of public
exhibitions decreased; till, at length the fate of the stage too truly
foretold the fate of the empire. So certain it is that where the arts
are redundant they introduce luxury, and sap the foundation of a
state."

BIOGRAPHY.

For those readers who love biography, the editors of The Mirror have
selected one of the most interesting memoirs to be found in the rich
treasury of British literature. As a simple, yet animated picture of
natural genius, forcing its way through the impediments which waylay
early poverty, and breaking forth like the sun in meridian splendor
after a morning of tempest, clouds, and darkness, it will be a fit
companion for that of Hodgkinson. As a piece of composition, it is
perhaps the very finest specimen to be found in any language of the
unaffected, unadorned modest style that becomes a biographer, and
particularly a writer of his own life.

This memoir first appeared prefixed to that author's translation of
Juvenal.