That such were the habitual feelings of this most gallant and generous-minded people appears even from the admission of their bitterest enemies. “They,” observe, in Thucydides, the Corinthian ambassadors, when urging Sparta into the Peloponnesian war,—"they push victory to the utmost, and are least of all men dejected by defeat; exposing their bodies for their country as if they had no interest in them, yet applying their minds in the public service as if that and their private interest were one. Disappointment of a proposed acquisition they consider as a loss of what already belonged to them; success in any pursuit they esteem only as a step towards farther advantages; and, defeated in any attempt, they turn immediately to some new project by which to make themselves amends: insomuch, that, through their celerity in executing whatever they propose, they seem to have the peculiar faculty of at the same time hoping and possessing. Thus they continue ever amid labours and dangers, enjoying nothing through sedulity to acquire; esteeming that only a time of festival in which they are prosecuting their projects; and holding rest as a greater evil than the most laborious business. To sum up their character, it may be truly said, that they were born neither to enjoy quiet themselves, nor to suffer others to enjoy it."[2] Footnote 2: Mitford, History of Greece, iii. 53. The feeling that what they fought for was their own, which accounts for the heroism of Hellenic armies, likewise led, particularly at Athens, to the beautifying and adorning of the city, and the perfection of public taste. The people saw among them no palaces devoted to the private luxuries of a despotic court, where persons maintained at the public expense learn to look with contempt on the honest hands that support them. There, whatever was magnificent belonged to the people at large, no private individuals, during the best ages of the commonwealth, presuming, how great soever might be their talents or their influence, to arrogate to themselves more than can be due to individuals, or to enshrine their perishable bodies in buildings suited only to the worship of God. Yet, in genuine grandeur, no monarch, with the wealth of half a world at the disposal of his caprice, ever rivalled the Athenian people. True taste, the genuine sense of the beautiful and the sublime, will, while the world endures, refuse to be the subject of a tyrant, or to inhabit the same city with him; because no patronage, pensions, or lavish expenditure, can create in one state of society what belongs to another; and pure taste being nothing more than the cultivated popular feeling spontaneously expanding, can nowhere exist but in a free state. A prince may, doubtless, know what pleases him; but the people only can tell what pleases the people, which nothing certainly will unless it be produced expressly for them, without the slightest reference to any other person.