but history tells us that the Persian cavalry found it far too rugged a place to charge upon. Neither had Hellas any fat, broad extent of soil on which maize, rice, and corn may grow, to feed millions in a supine content, and predispose them to be the instruments of some powerful despotism, kingly or priestly. The climate of Greece was varied by the inequalities of its surface and the nearness of the sea; and the inhabitants became a pastoral, agricultural, and commercial people. The soil brought forth, in reward of care and labor, corn, and wine, and oil, and vegetation of great beauty and grandeur. The climate was marked by those vicissitudes which the experience of the world proves to be most favorable to the condition of man, and the highest development of his powers. It had none of the inland and enervating characteristics of Middle Asia or Egypt. The Greek was obliged to wrestle with Nature for her blessings. Thence rose, in time, the illustrious polities, the immortal mythologies, and white theories of her fields and streams—all that memorable splendor of intellect and war which has had nothing comparable to it in antiquity. The geography of Greece forbade that deadly centralization which has so disastrously weighed upon most other civilizations. Nature divided the Hellenic land into states—fashioned the Greek group of peoples on the federal principle. The results were that the distinct races and families of men set about taking care of their own destinies—began to make their municipal arrangements, and lift up their ideas to the great argument of self-government. Each nationality was small enough to be within the ken and influence of all its citizens. Every man in the state—slaves excepted—had an intimate personal interest in its welfare—the people were all politicians or soldiers, and could be statesmen—if necessary. Their minds were thus nursed in independence—educated in the true school of civil liberty; and, even in monarchies as well as republics, the power, intelligence, and influence of the people, constituted the life and vigor of the state. The warlike and religious games of Greece perfected the strength and symmetry of the human body. Its climate and soil were eminently calculated to produce happy results on the minds of men so organized and educated; and the national character became reflected in the graceful arts and superstitions of the people. In the East and Egypt, the vague idea of some supreme divinity, which hovered over all nations from the beginning, and never seems to have been absent from the world, was degraded by the degraded souls of the people. Their notions of supernal things were monstrous, grotesque, and inhuman—gathered evidently from their experience of kings and crocodiles. To express them the slavish race accepted the shapes of birds and beasts—winged bulls, cows, cats, hawks, alligators, and so forth. How different the cheerful and eminently human mythologies of