to the enchanting sounds of poetry and music, that were animated with the same spirit,-the Greeks, victorious and free, saw, and felt, and breathed nothing but the intoxication of glory and immortality." "Hence flourish'd Greece, and hence a race of men, As Gods by conscious future times adored; How admirably does the elegant writer, from whom I have just quoted, express the peculiar effect of a popular constitution, in giving animation to the efforts of the orator;—and if oratory were all, which rendered a people happy, and not rather those equal laws, and that calm security, which render oratory almost useless, how enviable would be that state of manners which he pictures! "In the ancient republics," he observes, eloquence made a part of the constitution. It was it which enacted and abolished laws, which ordered war, which caused armies to march, which led on the citizens to the fields of battle, and consecrated their ashes, when they perished in the combat. It was it which from the tribune kept watch against tyrants, and brought from afar to the ears of the citizens the sound of the chains which were menacing them. In republics, eloquence was a sort of spectacle. Whole days were spent by the people, in listening to their orators,-as if the necessity of feeling some emotion were an appetite of their very nature. The republican orator, therefore, was not a mere measurer of words, for the amusement of a circle, or a small society. He was a man, to whom Nature had given an inevitable empire. He was the defender of a nation,-its sovereign,-its master. It was he, who made the enemies of his country tremble. Philip, who could not subdue Greece as long as Demosthenes breathed,-Philip, who at Cheronea had conquered an army of Athenians, but who had not conquered Athens, whilst Demosthenes was one of its citizens that this Demosthenes, so terrible to him, might be given up, offered a city in exchange. He gave twenty thousand of his subjects, to purchase such an enemy." "Oratori clamore plausuque opus est, et velut quodam theatro; qualia quotidie antiquis oratoribus contingebant; cum tot pariter ac tam nobiliter forum coartarint; cum clientelæ quoque, et tribus, et municiporum legationes, ac partes Italiæ, periclitantibus assisterent; cum, in plerisque judiciis crederet populus Romanus, sua interesse, quod judicaretur." • Thomson's Liberty, Part II. v. 175-179. In situations like these, who can doubt of the powerful influence, which the concurrence of so many vivid perceptions and emotions, must have had, in directing the associations, and in a great measure, the whole intellectual and moral character of the young minds that witnessed and partook of this general enthusiasm?—an enthusiasm that never can be felt in those happier constitutions, in which the fortunes of individuals, and the tranquillity and the very existence of a state, are not left to the caprice of momentary passion. "Nec tanti Reipublice Gracchorum eloquentia fuit, ut pateretur et leges." Of the influence of association on the moral character of man, the whole history of our race, when we compare the vices and virtues of ages and nations with each other, is but one continued though varied display. We speak of the prevailing manners and dispositions, not merely of savage and civilized life in their extremes, but of progressive stages of barbarism and civilization, with terms of distinction, almost as clear and definite, as when we speak of the changes which youth and age produce in the same individual; not that we believe men in these different stages of society to be born with different natural propensities, which expand themselves into the diversities afterwards observed, but because there appears to us to be a sufficient source of all these diversities in the circumstances in which man is placed-in the elementary ideas and feelings which opposite states of society afford, for those intimate, and perhaps indissoluble complexities of thought and passion, that are begun in infancy, and continually multiplied in the progress of life. To bring together, in one spectacle, the inhabitants of the wild, of the rude village, and of the populous city, would be to present so many living monuments of the dominion of that principle which has been the subject of our investigation. When we descend, from the diversities of national character, to the details of private life, we find the elements of the power which produced those great results. It has been said, that the example, which it is most easy to follow, is that of happiness; and the happiness, which is constantly before us, is that to which our early wishes may be expected to turn. We readily acquire, therefore, the desires and passions of those who surround us from our birth; because we consider that as happiness, which they consider as happiness. There may be vice in this indeed, and vice, which in other circumstances, we should readily have perceived; but it is the vice of those who have relieved our earliest wants, and whose caresses and soothings, long before we were able to make any nice discriminations, have produced that feeling of love, which commends to us every thing, that forms a part of the unanalysed remembrance of our parents and friends. Even in more advanced life, it is not easy to love a guilty person, and to feel the same abhorrence of guilt; though vice and virtue have been previously distinguished in our thought with accuracy:—and therefore, in periods of savage or dissolute manners, and at an age, when the ideas of virtue and vice are obscure, and no analysis has yet been made of complex emotions, it is not wonderful that the child, whose parents are, perhaps, his only objects of love, should resemble them still more in disposition than in counte nance. "Here vice begins then: At the gate of life,- One home-bred colour."* It would, indeed, be too much to say, that the virtues of their offspring are comprehended in the virtues of the parents, as the embryo blossom in the seed from which it is to spring; but at least, it may be truly said, that the parental virtues are not more a source of happiness to the child, than they are a source of moral inspiration; and that the most heroic benevolence of him, to whose glory every voice is joining in homage, may often be nothing more than the development of that humbler virtue, which smiled upon his infancy,-and which listens to the praise with a joy that is altogether unconscious of the merit which it might claim. When the passion of ambition begins to operate, the principle which we are considering acquires more than double energy. Each individual is then governed, not merely by his own associations, but by the whole associations of the individuals surrounding him, that seem to be transferred, as it were to his breast. He seeks distinction,-and he seeks that species of distinction which is to make him honourable in their eyes. He is guided, therefore, by views of good, which have been the gradual growth, in the nation, of circumstances, that might perhaps never have affected him personally, and he acts, accordingly, not as he would have acted, but as it is the fashion of the time to act. To be informed of the circumstances which, among the leading orders of society, are reckoned glo • leasures of Imagination, Second Form of the Poem, B. II. v. 445, 454, rious or disgraceful, would be to know, with almost accurate foresight, the national character of the generation that is merely rising into life; if it were not for those occasional sudden revolutions of manners, produced by the shock of great political events, or the energies of some extraordinary mind ;. though, even then, the associating principle, in changing its direction, is far from losing any part of its efficacy. More than half of the excessive austerity of manners, in the time of Cromwell, was produced by the same passion, which, after the restoration of Charles, produced perhaps an equal proportion of the dissipation and general profligacy of that licentious and disgraceful reign. A very few words of ridicule, if they have become fashionable, may render virtue more than a man of ordinary timidity can venture to profess or practice; and the evil which hypocrisy has done in the world, has not arisen so much from the destruction which it has produced of the appearances of morality, as from the opportunity which it has afforded to the profligate of fixing that name on the real sanctity of virtue and religion, and of thus terrifying the inconsiderate into a display of vices which otherwise they would have hated, and blushed to embrace. What irresistible effect, in the rejection of opinions, has been produced by the terms of contempt that have been affixed to them, sometimes from accidental circumstances, and still more frequently from intentional malice, and which have continued, ever after, to associate with the opinions an ignominy which did not belong to them! The most powerful of all persecution has often been not the axe and the faggot, but the mere invention of a name. To this sort of persecution all our passions lend themselves readily, because, though we may be quite unable to understand the distinctions which have given rise to opposite names, and though often there may be no real distinction beyond the name itself, we are all capable of understanding, that a name which does not include our own sect or party, implies an opposition to us, of some kind or other; and we have all vanity enough to feel such a difference of sentiment, though it may be on subjects which neither we nor our opponents comprehend,-to be an implied accusation of error, and therefore an insult to the dignity of our own opinion. In the history of ecclesiastical and civil affairs, what crowds of heretics and political partizans do we find whom the change of a few letters of the alphabet would have converted into friends, or have reversed their animosities; and many Homoousians, and Homoiousians, and Tories and Whigs, have reciprocally hated each other, who, but for the invention of the names, would never have known that they differed! It would be but a small evil, if the vices of the great were confined to that splendid circle which they fill. But how difficult is it for those who are dazzled with that splendour, and who associate it with every thing which it surrounds, to think that the vices of the great are vices. "The broad corruptive plague Breathes from the city to the farthest hut, "The obscure citizen," says Masillon, "in imitating the licentiousness of the great, thinks that he stamps on his passions the seal of dignity and nobility; and thus vanity alone is sufficient to perpetuate disorder, which, of itself, would soon have passed away in weariness and disgust. Those who live far from you," says that eloquent prelate, addressing the great, "those who live in the remotest provinces, preserve at least some remains of their ancient simplicity. They live in happy ignorance of the greater number of those abuses which your example has converted into laws. But the nearer the country approaches you, the more does morality suffer; innocence grows less pure, excesses more common; and the mere knowledge of your manners and usages, is thus the chief crime of which the people can be guilty." The Stoics, who were sufficiently aware of the influence of this principle on our moral character, seem, if I rightly understand many parts of their works, particularly those of Marcus Aurelius, to have supposed that we have the power of managing the combinations of our ideas with each other, in some measure at our will, and of thus indirectly guiding our subsequent moral preferences. It is this, I conceive, which forms that χρησις οἷα δεὶ φαυτα σιῶν, on which they found so much, for the regulation of our lives. But in whatever mode the regulation of these davracia may take place, it is evident that the sway which they exercise is one of no limited extent: "For Action treads the path In which Opinion says, he follows good, Was drawn by Fancy, lovely or deformed. Is there a man, who, at the sound of death, Sees ghastly shapes of terrors, conjured up And black before him; nought but death-bed groans And fearful prayers, and plunging from the brink Of light and being down the gloomy air An unknown depth-Alas in such a mind, |