This poetry was most intimately interwoven with the whole public life of the Greeks--the public spectacles, games, and popular festivals were so many theatres for poetry: nay music and the gymnastic exercises were the ground-work, and formed almost the whole scope, of a high, polite, and liberal education among the Greeks. Both were so in a very wide, comprehensive and significant sense of the term. The gymnastic struggles, the peculiar object of the public games, and where the human frame attained a beautiful form and expansion by every species of exercise--the gymnastic struggles had a very close connection with, and may be said to have formed the basis for, the imitative arts, especially sculpture, which, without that habitual contemplation of the most exquisite forms afforded by these games, could never have acquired so bold, free, and animated a representation of the human body. Music, or the art of the Muses, included not only the art of melody, but the poetry of song. Still the plan of Grecian education and refinement was ever of too narrow and too exclusive a character; and when, at a later period, rhetoric came to form one of its elements, the Greeks considered it (what indeed it never should be considered) as a sort of gymnastic exercise for the intellect, a species of public spectacle, where eloquence, little solicitous about the truth, only sought to display its art or address in the combat. And in the same way philosophy, when the Greeks attained a knowledge of it, came to be regarded, according to the narrow and exclusive principles of their system of education, as nothing more than a species of intellectual melody, the internal harmony of thought and mind--the music of the soul; till later, by means of the sophists and popular sycophants that deluded their age, it sunk into the all-destructive abyss of false rhetoric, which was the death of true science and genuine art, and which, in the shape of logic and metaphysics, had as injurious an influence on the schools as a false political eloquence had on the state and on public life. That principle of harmony which formed the leading tenet of the primitive philosophy of Greece before the introduction of sophistry, was not an ignoble,--it was even a beautiful, idea, although it might be far from solving the high problems and questions of philosophy, or satisfying the deeper enquiries of the human mind.