’A REMARKABLE LITERARY DISCOVERY—OUR FELLOW-CITIZENS ABROAD—ANOTHER RUSTIC POET—CHICAGO CLAIMS HIM. It may be in the recollection of some of our readers that a few years ago a small party of American tourists, consisting of Curtis H. Mack, who was one of our most distinguished major-generals in the rebellion, and is now serving on the Indian frontier; his niece, Miss Hettie F. Doig, a very talented lady and contributor to several of our best periodicals; and John Grimsby Patterson, editor of the Baltimore _Evening News_, were travelling in Europe, when they had the good fortune to discover an Irish poet, Patrick Milligan, who had long languished in obscurity, no doubt the victim of British jealousy as well as of misrule. Major-General Mack interested himself in this poor man, and, in conjunction with William B. Stevens, of Cleveland, Ohio, had him brought over to this country, where they were eventually successful in obtaining for him a postmastership in New Petersburg, Conn., leaving him to devote such time as he pleased to the service of the tuneful nine. Mr. Milligan’s Doric reed has not piped to us much of late years; but we must all remember the stirring verses which he wrote on the occasion of Colonel George W. Will’s nomination for Governor of Connecticut. It has now been reserved for another party of American travellers, still better known to us than the above, for they are no other than our esteemed fellow-citizen, Mr. Josiah Hodson and his brilliant and accomplished daughter, Miss Caroline Hodson, to make a similar discovery in the Highlands of Scotland; and in view of such recurring instances, we may well ask whether there be not in the mental alertness of our newer civilisation a capacity for the detection and recognition of intellectual merit which exists not among the deadening influences of an older and exhausted civilisation. It has sometimes been charged against this country that we do not excel in arts and letters; that we are in a measure careless of them; that political problems and material interests occupy our mind. The present writer, at least, is in no hurry to repel that charge, odious as it may seem to some. We, as Americans, should remember that the Athenian Republic, with which our western Republic has nothing to fear in the way of comparison, when it boasted its most lavish display of artistic and literary culture, was no less conspicuous for its moral degeneracy and political corruption. It was in the age of Pericles and of Phidias, of Socrates and Sophocles, of Euripides and Aristophanes and Thucydides, that Athens showed herself most profligate; private licence was unbridled; justice was bought and sold; generals incited to war that they might fill their pockets out of the public purse; and all this spectacle in striking contrast with the manly virtues of the rude and unlettered kingdom of Sparta, whose envoys were laughed at because they had not the trick of Athenian oratory and casuistry.