"The fictions constituting the epic poetry of Homer, Virgil, and their imitators, so far from being consonant with the taste and sense of modern readers, are, on the contrary, often annoying, from the absence of all moral or poetical justice."--"The gods who preside in this scenic exhibition are tainted with every vice which has since degraded their supposed subordinates of the human race. Cruelty, revenge, deceit, hatred, unrelenting rancor, and unbridled lust, are the qualities which call for approval in a generation professing to feel and practise virtues of an opposite nature. An exterminating war is undertaken for the sake of a vacillating adulteress, and its heroes quarrel implacably about the possession of their female slaves. Ulysses, on his return home, winds up the 'Odyssey' by a wholesale slaughter of his disorganized subjects, hangs up a dozen censurable females in a row, and puts Melanthius to a lingering death by gradual mutilation."--"In their social relations, the Greeks were licentious and exquisitely depraved. In their domestic habits, they were primitive, destitute, and uncleanly."--DR. JACOB BIGELOW. These words represent the re-action of Christian morality against the abuses of classical study, to which I allude in my text. But let the classics be taught properly, and morality will have no complaint to make. We cannot understand the history of the world, without an intelligent investigation of its beginnings; but we should be carefully protected against assuming, as reasonable and proper, either the habits and opinions or the sarcasms of an extinct experience. FOOTNOTES: [7] Manners and Customs of Greece, vol. i. p. 337. [8] Memoirs of S.M. Fuller, vol. i. p. 337. [9] I have sustained this assertion in two articles on Hypatia, published in "Historical Sketches," 1855. III. THE MEANING OF THE LIVES THAT HAVE MODIFIED PUBLIC OPINION. "Speak! or I go no further. I need a goal, an aim. I cannot toil, _Because the steps are here_; in their ascent, Tell me THE END, or I sit still and weep." _Naturliche Tochter._ We have considered the controlling influence exercised by consolidated public opinion concerning women. We have asked from what sources this opinion was derived. We have now to consider some individual lives which have set it at defiance, and in that way done something towards its reconstruction.