It must yet be confessed, notwithstanding all we have said, that there ever was a great scarcity of learned men in Carthage, since it hardly furnished three or four writers of reputation in upwards of seven hundred years. Although the Carthaginians held a correspondence with Greece and the most civilized nations, yet this did not excite them to borrow their learning, as being foreign to their views of trade and commerce. Eloquence, poetry, history, seem to have been little known among them. A Carthaginian philosopher was considered as a sort of prodigy by the learned. What then would an astronomer or a geometrician have been thought? I know not in what esteem physic, which is so highly useful to life, was held at Carthage; or jurisprudence, so necessary to society. As works of wit were generally had in so much disregard, the education of youth must necessarily have been very imperfect and unpolished. In Carthage, the study and knowledge of youth were for the most part confined to writing, arithmetic, book-keeping, and the buying and selling goods; in a word, to whatever related to traffic. But polite learning, history, and philosophy, were in little repute among them. These were, in later years, even prohibited by the laws, which expressly forbade any Carthaginian to learn the Greek tongue, lest it might qualify them for carrying on a dangerous correspondence with the enemy, either by letter or word of mouth.(559) Now what could be expected from such a cast of mind? Accordingly there was never seen among them that elegance of behaviour, that ease and complacency of manners, and those sentiments of virtue, which are generally the fruits of a liberal education in all civilized nations. The small number of great men which this nation has produced, must therefore have owed their merit to the felicity of their genius, to the singularity of their talents, and a long experience, without any great assistance from cultivation and instruction. Hence it was, that the merit of the greatest men of Carthage was sullied by great failings, low vices, and cruel passions; and it is rare to meet with any conspicuous virtue among them without some blemish; with any virtue of a noble, generous, and amiable kind, and supported by enlightened and steady principles, such as is every where found among the Greeks and Romans. The reader will perceive that I here speak only of the heathen virtues, and agreeably to the idea which the Pagans entertained of them. I meet with as few monuments of their skill in arts of a less noble and necessary kind, as painting and sculpture. I find, indeed, that they had plundered the conquered nations of a great many works in both these kinds; but it does not appear that they themselves had produced many.