=The Hellenes.=—Fresh bodies of Pelasgians continued to arrive from Asia Minor, until all Greece was populated with a thrifty race of husbandmen and shepherds. Upon this primitive Pelasgian stock was afterward engrafted a branch called Hellenic, identical with it in origin, but forced to a higher state of development in the garden of Asiatic culture, and ready to burst into blossom on the soil of Greece. The new-comers were the Helle’nes, a people of greater vigor, physical and intellectual. Mingling with their Pelasgian kinsmen in the Grecian peninsula, they formed a new nation, endowed with fresh life; and the Pelasgic dialect, modified and energized by their more cultivated tongue, was converted into GREEK. The Greeks had a popular proverb, _do nothing too much_, which they applied in writing as in acting. Pruning away too great exuberance and repressing the Oriental tendency to exaggerate, they reduced everything to the standard of a rigid but elegant correctness. More artistic than the Hindoos, less luxuriant in imagination but with a chaster and severer taste, they established a literature richly furnished in every department, whose influence can be traced in the works of genius that stand out in every age and country. As Professor Jebb says, “the thoughts of the great Greek thinkers have been bearing fruit in the world ever since they were first uttered.” (_See Dr. Curtius’s “History of Greece.”_) Thus in Greece, Aryan energy, freed from the trammels of Oriental despotism, seems first to have found its true development. The facilities which this country enjoyed for intercourse with Egypt and Phœnicia, enabled it to draw from the learning of one, to copy the enterprise and adopt the inventions of the other. This accounts for its having been the seat of the earliest European civilization. At a later period, we find the Hellenes separated into three great families—the Æolians, occupying generally the north of Greece; the Ionians, distributed over the central portions; and the Dorians, settled in the south (the Peloponnesus, _island of Pelops_). Connected with these three divisions were as many dialects—Æolic, Ionic, and Doric Greek—of which, Ionic was the softest and most polished. This Ionic, refined and perfected, became what is known as Attic Greek; it was the language of Athens in the golden age of her art and poetry, and for centuries was understood by the educated classes throughout a great part of the civilized world. These Hellenic dialects were also spoken on the islands of the Ægean and the coast of Asia Minor; for the tide of emigration set back again toward the Asiatic shores, and Æolians, Ionians, and Dorians, returned in great colonies to the neighborhood of their early home.