be jostled by the
gay crowd at the Olympic games. It was indeed a golden age, when all
that was beautiful in nature was reverently and assiduously nurtured,
and all that was noble and natural in art was magnificently encouraged;
an age in which refinement and nobility were not accidents, but
necessities; when politics had reached the high grade of an art, and
oratory attained a beauty and power beyond which no Pitt, Canning, or
Brougham has ever yet aspired; an age when the gifted Aspasia held her
splendid court, and Alcibiades and Socrates were proud to sit at the
Milesian's feet; when Pericles, who 'well deserved the lofty title of
Olympian,' lived and ruled: the golden age when Socrates thought and
taught, bearing in its bosom the guilty day when Socrates died.

Not less faithful portraitures of the influences that formed them are
the histories of Livy, of Sallust, and of Tacitus. They wrote in a
language that had been sublimated into electric clouds by the warm and
splendid diffuseness of Cicero, and reduced to a granite-like strength
by the cold and exquisite simplicity of Terence. The amiable fustian,
the Falstaffian bombast of Lucan and Ovid's brilliant imagination, all
stamp their indelible seal upon the vivid coloring of Livy, the somewhat
affected severity of Sallust, and the elegant morality of Tacitus. The
banner of the monarchy flaunts across every page of these writers. They
even bear the impress of an architecture whose splendor and strength did
not atone for its disregard of the old Hellenic lines and rules. They
bear the same relation to Thucydides and Herodotus that a pillar of the
Roman Ionic order, with its angularly turned volutes and arbitrary
perpendicularity of outline, does to its graceful Greek mother, with her
primitive and expressive scrolls, and the slightly convex profile of her
shaft. In more modern times, a black-letter, quaint sentence of
Froissart or Monstrelet is like a knight in full armor, bristling with
quaint, beautiful devices, golden dragons inlaid on Milan cuirasses,
golden vines on broad Venetian blades, apes on the hilts of
grooved-bladed, firm stilettoes, or the illuminated margins of old
metrical romances. The pages of Strada are darkened by the stormy
passions of a battling age, crossed with the lurid light of Moorish
tragedies; an _ay de mi Alhama_ moans under his pride and bigotry.
Torquemadas grind each sentence into dullness and inquisitorial
harmlessness, yet now and t