We have one or two flute players who possibly have some idea of their surpassing merits; but they would be aghast if they found themselves recipients of such public honours as these in a modern city,—we are so civilized. Yet stay, did we not receive intelligence how that Sarasate received some such jubilee welcome on returning to his native place in Spain, not very long ago! What an old-fashioned corner of the earth that must be, where the old atmosphere remains unsmoked, and where the peasants remain and get richly browned in the sun, and dance with goatskins over their shoulders, and to them there are days of out-door life still going on, such as are by our race clean forgotten. To parallel Pindar and Midas, we should have to imagine Tennyson writing an ode to Sarasate the passionate, the great artist, the dark browed fiddler on the platform of St. James’s Hall, London! Ah! no, it will not do; the parallel would be too shaky. We can run excursion trains, and cram Albert Halls, and our people can shout themselves hoarse in Fleet Street over the three o’clock winner, and the names of Patti and Sims Reeves, and Melba, and Jean de Reszke may exhaust our refined fervour, and the grandeur of heads fitted with unseen crowns may raise a flickering illusion of glory, and the dazzling crush of ladies plated with diamonds, may exalt the senses with the pride of wealth,—but all this, the utmost of the get-up of modern effects, will pale beside that uprising of citizens, that grand acclaim in open air over the plain of Crissa to “glorious Midas!” One day I do remember,—one day fit to be named with the days of old. Stay a moment, and think what _was_ in those days. Imagine the concourse of people from all ends of the world; a small world it was then, and yet how great in men, aye, and in coming men. There, under the shadow of the great towering crag of Delphi—the centre or “navel” of the earth, as the Greek poets termed it—with the world-renowned temple glowing in lily whiteness in the blue air, there the great games were held,—duty, religion, race, patriotism, drew all men of Greek birth or parentage to witness or to share in them. Week after week, from every state and colony, from isle and creek and dented bay, the flower of Hellas gathered in national pride to swell the host of spectators at these Panegyreis, called by them “universal gatherings.” Hither came statesmen and philosophers, merchants and traders, poets and priests, and people of every degree; streaming up through gorge and defile, up through groves of pine and laurel and cypress, up to the broad, bright plain, Around the spot where trod Apollo’s foot.