When gods alike and mortals rose to birth, A golden race the immortals formed on earth Of many-languaged men; they lived of old, When Saturn reigned in heaven--an age of gold. Like gods they lived, with calm, untroubled mind, Free from the toil and anguish of our kind. Nor sad, decrepit age approaching nigh, Their limbs misshaped with swoln deformity. Strangers to ill, they Nature's banquet proved, Rich in earth's fruits, and of the blest beloved: They sank to death, as opiate slumber stole Soft o'er the sense, and whelmed the willing soul. Theirs was each good: the grain-exuberant soil Poured the full harvest, uncompelled by toil; The virtuous many dwelt in common, blest, And all unenvying shared what all in peace possessed. When on this race the verdant earth had lain, By Jove's high will they rose a Genii train: Earth-wandering dæmons, they their charge began, The ministers or good and guards of man: Veiled with a mantle of aerial night, O'er earth's wide space they wing their hovering flight; Dispense the fertile treasures of the ground, And bend their all-observant glance around; To mark the deed unjust, the just approve, Their kingly office, delegate from Jove. ELTON'S _Translation_. The farther we search into antiquity, the more we see how modern nations have by turns explored these now almost abandoned mines. The Greeks, who so long passed for inventors, imitated Egypt, which had copied from the Chaldæans, who owed almost everything to the Indians. The doctrine of the guardian angels, so well sung by Hesiod, was afterwards sophisticated in the schools: it was all that they were capable of doing. Every man had his good and his evil genius, as each one had his particular star-- _Est genius natale comes qui temper at astrum._ Socrates, we know, had his good angel; but his bad angel must have governed him. No angel but an evil one could prompt a philosopher to run from house to house, to tell people, by question and answer, that father and mother, preceptor and pupil, were all ignorant and imbecile. A guardian angel in that event will find it very difficult to save his protege from the hemlock. We are acquainted only with the _evil angel_ of Marcus Brutus, which appeared to him before the battle of Philippi. SECTION II.