Great men were they of olden time; men with far-reaching and strong, grasping minds—men, too, of discrimination in what they gathered—“teach them selection, not collection,” was the word—and they prepared for us of this distant age monuments to excite admiration and insure awe; monuments which, while they exhibit what man is capable of doing, seem, by the perfection of their form and the adaptation of their parts, to check all spirit of imitation; monuments which denote all variety of mental exercise and all the adaptation of physical powers. It is not alone the chisel of Phidias working out the marble in a thousand forms, more beautiful than the human pattern—it is not alone the pencil of Zeuxis that fixed on canvas the flitting beauties of the field and grove—it is not alone the vast machinery that piled stone upon stone to finish the pyramids. Mind speaking to mind has uttered its powers, and has claimed of the present, wonder for the past; History and Poetry have embalmed the actions of the great, or expressed the devotion of the good, and assured us of the lofty resolves and great deeds of men of other years. The beauty of the ancient mind, however, is to be detected by the uses and adaptation of ordinary incidents—bending them to moral instruction by making them illustrative of some principle—patriotism, religion, social duty and domestic relations, or some deeply hidden power, which sudden emotion, strong impulse, or unexpected dilemma, is to call into action. Take the following, which is some where extant. We give only the statement of the asserted fact. We have no copy of the narrative.