LOWER RACES OF MEN.

 THE following interesting lecture was delivered, in September last, by Sir John Lubbock, Bart, M. P., F.R.S., at Liverpool :—
The lecturer said his object was not to describe arms or implements, houses or boats, food or dress of savages, but rather to illustrate the mental condition and ideas of the lower races of men,—a subject of great interest to the philosopher, and also of immense practical importance to an empire like ours, extending to every quarter of the globe, and containing races of men in every stage of civilisation. As regarded their habits and the material conditions of life, savages differed greatly, but as regarded ideas and customs, we found very remarkable similarities even in the most distinct races and the most distant regions. He proposed to call more particular attention to the social or family relations and the religious ideas of the lower races. It would be a mistake to regard our ideas of relationship founded upon marriage as common to them. The position of woman among the lower savages was melancholy in the extreme, and precluded all those tender and sacred feelings to which so much of our happiness was due. Again, the religion of savages was, in some respects, the very opposite of ours. The whole mental condition of the savage was indeed so dissimilar from ours that it was often difficult for us to follow what was passing in his mind, or understand his motives. "What," said a negro once to Burton, "am I to starve while my sister has children whom she can sell?" Moreover the difficulty of understanding what was passing in their minds was much enhanced by the differences of language. When Labillaidiere inquired of the Friendly Islanders what was their word for 1,000,000, they thought the question absurd ; and when he asked them for 100,000,000 they gave him "laounoua," which meant nonsense ; while for higher numbers they gave in joke certain coarse expressions which he had gravely recorded in his annals. Dampier, too, once killed an Australian savage from misunderstanding the word "pooh," "pooh," (puff, puff) which is the name that savages, like children, apply to guns. Kissing was unknown to the Australians, New Zealanders, Papuans, West African negroes, and Esquimaux. The Polynesians and Malays always sat down when speaking to a superior, and in some parts of Central Africa it was respectful to turn the back. Captain Cook asserted that the inhabitants of Mallicole showed their admiration by hissing ; among the Esquimaux a person's nose was pulled as a compliment ; and a Chinaman put on his hat where we should take it off. But, notwithstanding the contradictory accounts of the character and mental condition of savages, by comparing the accounts of travellers, the sources of error could be eliminated, and a remarkable similarity was developed between very different races. Two instances were given. Every Englishman who had not studied other races would be surprised to hear that on the birth of a baby the father and not the mother was put to bed and nursed. Yet, though so ludicrous, this custom prevailed very widely. Father Dobritzhoffer mentions it as occurring amongst the Abipones of South America, and other travellers mention a similar custom in Greenland, Kamtschatka, parts of China and Borneo, the North of Spain, Corsica, and the South of France. A custom so ancient and widely distributed must have its origin in some idea which satisfied the savage mind. The idea that a person imbibed the characteristics of an animal of which he had eaten was very widely distributed. The Malays at Singapore used to give a large price for the flesh of the tiger, not because they liked it, but because they believed that the man who ate tigers would become as wise and powerful as that animal. The Dyabs of Borneo avoided deer for fear of being made timid ; the Caribs would not eat pig or tortoise, lest they should have small eyes ; the New Zealanders, after baptism, used to make an infant swallow pebbles, to give it a hard and unpitying heart, and after a battle they cooked and ate their bravest and wisest foes, expecting to secure a share of their wisdom and courage. Savages had a dread of portraits. The better the likeness the worse, they think, for the sitter, for so much life could not be put into the copy except at the expense of the original. But writing appeared to the savage even more mysterious than drawing, and the belief in its mystery had led to its being used in many parts of the world as a medicine. The Central Africans, for instance, who were a religious people according to their lights, when any one was ill wrote a text out of the Koran on a board, washed it off, and made the patient drink it. The lecturer having next touched the subject of ornaments, of which savages were passionately fond, came to the question of laws, observing that it was a great mistake to suppose that the savage enjoyed an amount of personal freedom greater than that of individuals belonging to civilised communities. The savage was nowhere free. All over the world his life was regulated by a complicated set of rules and customs as forcible as laws, of quaint prohibitions, and unjust privileges, the prohibitions generally applying to the women and the privileges to the men. Marriage and relationship was the next branch of the lecture. All our ideas of relationship were founded on marriage and on the family. Amongst savages the relationship to the clan almost superseded that to the family. Women were treated like slaves, or almost like domestic animals. Thus in Australia little real affection existed between husband and wife, and young men valued a wife principally for her services as a slave. Many instances were recorded amongst the lower races, where marriage might be said to be unknown, and where children must be regarded as related by tribal rather than family connections. Thus even in our own language, words which now indicate relationship had, originally, no such signification, the word daughter, for instance, meaning literally, "milk maid," and thus dating back to a time when our ancestors did not recognise the "family" as it now existed. In the Sandwich Islands, uncleship, auntship, consulship were ignored and we had only

Grandparents, Children and

Parents, Grandchildren.

Brothers and sisters

Here the child was related to the group, not specially related to its father or mother, so that every child was regarded as having several fathers and several mothers. The condition of the lowest races was that, not of individual marriage as existing amongst us, but of communal marriage. But, even under the latter system, where a man had captured a beautiful girl whom he wished to keep to himself, a form of individual marriage would rise up by the side of the communal marriage. This theory explained the extraordinary subjection of the woman in marriage ; it explained the widely-distributed custom of "exogamy," which forbade marriage within the tribe ; the necessity of expiation for the infringement of tribal rights by the appropriation to one man of what belonged to the whole tribe, and, lastly, the remarkable prevalence of the form of capture in marriage. Among the rudest races capture was far more than a form, and it was customary for men to steal women by force from other tribes. The lecturer then gave a number of instances to shew how widely the custom of marriage by capture prevailed among the lower races of men, and that traces of it lingered even amongst those higher in the scale of civilisation. In Australia the ardent lover stole on the object of his affections, knocked her down with a club, and dragged her off in triumph. Amongst the Kalmucks of Central Asia a girl was put on a horse and rode off at full speed. The lover started in pursuit, and, if he caught her, she became his wife—if not, the match was broken off. No Kalmuck girl, it was believed, was caught against her will. Amongst the Ahitas of the Philippine Islands a girl was sent into the woods, and had to be found and brought back by her lover before sunset, else he must abandon all claim to her. M. Bardel mentioned that amongst the Indians of Chili, after a man had agreed with the parents upon the price of a girl, he either really or in feint surprised her and carried her off to the woods for a few days. In Europe we find just the same thing ; the Romans had a similar custom and traces of it occurred in Greek history. As communities become larger and more civilised, the actual capture became inconvenient, and indeed impossible. Gradually, therefore it sunk more and more into a mere form. The second stage in the development of the idea of family consisted in the recognition of relationship to the mother, the to the father being still overlooked. The multiplicity of wives in countries where polygamy was frequent, and the appropriation of wives by the stronger chiefs or kings, would in either condition weaken the tie between father and child. Hence probably the curious fact that in many parts of the world a man's property descended in the female and not in the male line. As civilisation progressed, and as family life became more developed, the affection between father and child would become stronger, and, as property become more important, men would wish their goods to descend to their own children, who would themselves obviously desire to inherit their fathers property. And so, passing from one extreme to another, the relation on the paternal side was recognised, and that to the mother neglected. Thus it would be seen that at first the feeling of clanship prevailed rather than that of family, and that children were regarded as related to the tribe rather than to their parents ; that, secondly, they were considered to be related to the mother, but not to the father ; thirdly, to the father, but not to the mother ; lastly, and lastly only as among ourselves, to both father and mother. We saw, therefore, that the ideas of relationship, founded on marriage, have only gradually been acquired, and thus civilisation had raised the position of woman, making her a helpmate instead of a slave, had purified and softened all the conditions of social life. The higher position of woman was one of the points in which we saw most clearly the enormous advantage of civilisation over barbarism. With regard to religion it had been usual to class the lower religions into Fetichism, defined as the worship of material substances ; Sabaeism, that of the heavenly bodies, the sun, moon, and stars ; and Heroism, or the deification of men after death. But these were not really natural systems. There was no real difference between the worship of the sun and that of a rock or a lake. The true classification of religion should rest not on the mere object worshipped, but on the nature and character ascribed to the Deity. It was a much disputed question whether the lowest races had any religion or not. However this might be, it was clear that the religion of the lower savages was in many respects the very opposite of that of most advanced races. Their deities were evil, not good, they required bloody sacrifices ; they were mortal, not immortal, and were approached by dances rather than by prayers. The ideas of religion among the lower races were intimately associated with, if, indeed, they had not originated from the condition of man during sleep, and especially from dreams. Sleep and death had always been regarded as nearly related to one another. Thus, Somnus and Mors, the gods of sleep and death, were both fabled to have been the children of Nox, the goddess of night. So, also, the savage would naturally look on death as a kind of sleep, and would expect and hope to see his friend awake from the one as he had often done from the other. Hence, probably, one reason for the great importance ascribed to the treatment of the body after death. The savage considered the events in his dreams as real as those which happened when he was awake, and, hence, he naturally felt that he had a spirit which could quit the body, if not when it liked at least under certain circumstances. The lecturer cited examples from various countries in proof of his arguments, and also to show how low and degraded was the savage conception of the Divine nature. Gradually, however, as the human mind expanded, it became capable of higher and higher realisations. The lecturer then entered into a more detailed description of the religions of some savage races, beginning with the lowest, which might be called Animism, and which was exemplified in the native Australians, in the belief in ghosts or spirits, or at any rate of evil beings who were not men. The Fetichism of the negro was a step in advance, because the influence of religion was much raised in importance. Nevertheless, Fetichism might be regarded as an anti-religion, for the negro believed that by means of the Fetich he could coerce and control the Deity. Fetichism, indeed, was mere witchcraft. A Fetich differed essentially from an idol, for the one tended to raise man to the contemplation of the Deity, and the other to bring the Deity within the control of man. The next stage might be called Totemism. In this stage everything was deified—stones, rivers, lakes, mountains, the heavenly bodies, even plants and animals. Up to a certain stage the deities were mortal, not creators, no importance was attached to true prayers ; virtue was not rewarded, nor vice punished ; there were no temples, no priests, no idols. From this point differences of circumstances and government materially influenced the forms of religious belief. Natives of cold climates regarded the sun as beneficent, those of the tropics an evil ; hunting races worshipped the moon, agriculturalists the sun ; in free communities thought was free, while despots sought to strengthen themselves by the support of spiritual terrors, and hence favoured a religion of sacrifices and priests, rather than of prayer and meditation. Lastly, the character of the race impressed itself on the religion. Poetry exercised on immense influence, as was the case with the Greeks and Romans. Where the material elements of civilisation developed themselves without any corresponding increase of knowledge there was developed a religion of terror, which became a terrible scourge to humanity. Gradually an increased acquaintance with the laws of nature enlightened the mind of man. From a believer in ghosts he became gradually to recognise the existence of a soul, and at length uniting this belief with that of a beneficent and just Being, he connected morality with religion—a step the importance of which it was scarcely possible to estimate.

Professor Huxley made some remarks suggested by the lecture.

From facts and circumstances within his own personal knowledge and observation he confirmed what had been said by Sir J. Lubbock respecting the intensity and eminently practical character of the beliefs of savage races. He said he had had the opportunity of seeing the lowest forms of life amongst the Australians, and no words could be too strong to express the degradation and brutality—not altogether unmixed with better qualities—in which those people lived. He thought perhaps one of the most comforting conclusions to be drawn from the subject was that a similar state of degradation and misery—whatever might have been the primitive condition of mankind —was one to which every nation could be historically traced. How was it that the human race, in so many diverse conditions, had escaped from this primitive misery, and raised itself to the degree of morality and religion in which we found it ? Assuredly, by a natural process of elevation ; by a process of learning the laws of nature, under whatever name those laws might be discussed, and learning to obey them. He was probably the only man there who had seen the savages of whom Sir John Lubbock spoke, but he was not the only man there who had seen savages and knew them well. Whilst walking through this great town of Liverpool he had seen many savages, and as degraded savages as the Australians—nay, worse In the primitive savage there remained a certain manliness derived from continual contact and struggle with nature, which was absent in these degraded specimens of humanity. He believed the great political question of the future was whether the misery which dogged the footsteps of modern civilisation should be allowed to exist—whether there should be in the heart of the most polished nations of the present day, and which plumed themselves most on being Christian, this savagery, of which such abundant examples could be seen in our streets ? It was because working men were brought into contact with that great fact, struggling with it, feeling that it must be put down somehow, that their minds were occupied with trades unionism, socialism, or what not, after which they were striving. He did not say whether they were right or wrong, but he profoundly sympathised with this endeavour to put down the savagery of the world, and if one could conceive the right way of doing it, he could think of no nobler work than uniting with them in that object. Let him urge upon them that in this matter history did not lie, and that if they were to succeed in this great aspiration of theirs, they could only have one course respecting it, and that was to learn the laws of nature and do their best to obey them. If to that end their efforts were directed wisely and well he could not doubt that they would eventually be crowned with success.

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), Tuesday 27 December 1870, page 3

LEIGHTON ON RENAISSANCE ART

On two former occasions Sir Frederick Leighton had taken a survey of the evolution of art in Egypt, in Assyria, and in Greece, and of its development in Etruria and in Rome. Italy is again the land to which he calls attention, but it is now the Italy which, rose out of the ashes of the empire of the Caesars. It was in that peninsula that the torpor of the Dark Ages was first shaken off, and the dawn appeared of a wider and more free intellectual life. Sir Frederick Leighton seeks to trace the relations between art and this great movement. But the field is so wide that the president is constrained to limit his remarks to Tuscan art, in criticising Tuscan art to confine his attention to what was as characteristically the expression of the genius of Italy as sculpture had been of the genius of Greece—viz., painting, In such a survey it is impossible not to take account of the human material on which this intellectual evolution worked. The fifth century saw the collapse of Imperial Rome, and from the fall of the Empire of the West wave after wave of foreign hosts rolled over the face of Italy. The complexion of the Italian race was more or less modified, and this racial revolution could not be without effect on the future of Italian art. But no revolution of race could com pare as a formative influence with the great spiritual revolution which so completely severs the ancient and modern worlds—the triumph of the Christian faith. Nowhere is the antagonism between Paganism and Christianity more conspicuous than in art. The spirit of Greek religion was " a joyous and an exulting spirit, full of the pulse of life, shunning the thought of death, little concerned with the pale Beyond." It worshipped material beauty of form, regarding a god as simply a man of ideal physical perfection. To this Christianity opposed an entirely contrary view. The faith of the Christian, tried by all sorts of persecutions, had taught its follower to look beyond the grave for his home of rest and happiness, to regard the present as but a temporary scene of trial and preparation, and to regard the physical body as an enemy at constant war with the soul in its struggles and aspirations. Hence it exalted a spirit of asceticism which did not fall to impress itself on the beginnings of Christian art. The gods were banished from Olympus, and all the fairy mythology from the studio. Bodily perfection was no longer the mirror of the perfect human spirit. The depravity of the flesh was henceforth to be preached by gaunt ungainliness of form. But in time a truer balance and a clearer insight were restored. The spirit of antiquity was to be recalled, but not to undisputed possession of the field. The leaven of Christianity had worked too long and too powerfully to surrender art entirely to the unleavened spirit of antiquity. The great intellectual movement known as the Renaissance was due mainly to two currents of force. The intellectual revolt against scholastic theology, and that ascetic spirit which saw in the flesh the counterpart of the devil and the field for all his works, was one force. The rekindled consciousness among the Italians of their past historic greatness was another. The dignity of man was restored, and the intellectual treasures of the past were brought to the surface once more. Art received an impulse to study man and to study nature. The life of the Italian republics tended to individual development, and hence the study of the individual forced itself upon the artist. The scientific spirit which the Renaissance had breathed life into and fostered, took possession of the arts, and the mechanism, structure, and anatomy of the human form were keenly studied. The revival of classical learning co-operated also in creating a love and admiration for nature, and landscape and natural scenery entered into the region of art. In this development the religious and didactic phase grew fainter and fainter, but never wholly disappeared. The graver spirit of the Christian religion was not without its influence on the youth of Raphael, while it found expression in the sonnets of Michael Angelo. It is in Lionardo and Raphael that we see the Renaissance fully developed, though in distinct forms. The scientific spirit asserted itself in the one, in the other we see the absorption of what was best in the classic spirit. But on Michael Angelo, as an artist, the old world had no hold or influence. He remains the highest type of a mediaeval artist, yet one who, without the Renaissance, could not have been. He was the spiritual son of Dante—a Tuscan, a Christian, an immortal artist. When we turn from art to literature it is impossible to abstain from contrasting the difference in the influence of the Renaissance. The seeds of mischief which it contained were ultimately to germinate in the field of literature. The worship of classicism led to a loosening of Christian belief and a disintegration of moral nature. Even a Machiavelli can complain—" We have become void of religion and are bad." The profession of the humanists, as they were called, became a synonym for corruption, and contact with them a taint. But the Renaissance never tended to the ethic degradation of art. Whatever was highest and purest in the Tuscan people found a faithful image and expression in Tuscan art. Sir Frederick Leighton's closing words are an appeal which may fitly be applied to students of literature as well as to students of art—" Let it be our care that one speaking at some future time of this our English art may say a like thing with equal truth."

 The South Australian Advertiser 25 January 1888,

ATHENS, OR INTELLECT WITHOUT RELIGION.

The inaugural lecture in connection with the newly-formed Young Men's Societies' Union was given by the Lord Bishop of Adelaide.

In the desire of contributing what little support he could to the objects sketched out he had chosen the subject of Athens and its intellectual greatness, intending to illustrate the products of its genius still extant and more especially the fruits of its various schools of philosophy— the failure of intellect when destitute of religious truth to produce either moral excellence or social happiness. He had assumed that the mutual improvement contemplated by the members of the Union was closely allied with evangelical principles and Christian life. If so, it would be auxiliary to the pulpit and promotive of virtue. This would be no arena like the market-place of Athens, where the Epicurean or the disputer of this world would strive to encounter the discipline of the Cross.
 From the time of Anaxagoras— the contemporary and friend of Pericles— Athens became gradually the University of the Pagan world. Ceasing, after the exhausting struggle of the Peleponnesian war, to be of leading political importance in Greece, Athens became the theatre in which its great intellects employed themselves in forensic oratory and philosophic enquiry. Demosthenes for a time indeed thundered in the Assembly against the encroachments of Philip of Macedon, but those philippics were effectually silenced in the rout of Chaeronea, when the orator himself was amongst the earliest fugitives. Less suited by its situation than its neighbour Corinth for the transactions of commerce, Athens, nevertheless, made itself the intellectual emporium of the world by the beauty of its monuments, the glory of its history. Its literary treasuries, its schools of philosophy, its historians, poets, orators, philosophers, unrivalled in their several spheres, attracted foreigners to sojourn among its groves and temples. From the day when the princely Pisistratus caused the Homeric poems to be collected, and would now be said edited, down to the fourth century of the Christian era, literature, philosophy, poetry, taste, wit, the fine arts took up their abode, and were as much the peculiar possession of that limited section of the Greek race as Divine truth, sacred poetry, and prophetic wisdom were the inheritance of the Hebrew nation. Lacedæmon. Arcadia, Archaia Bœotia, Thessaly, and Macedonia were rustic and uneducated compared with the polished Athens.
Thither, too, in after time flocked the Roman youth to complete their education before entering upon public life in the Imperial City. Cicero, in his "Treatise on Moral Duties," dedicated to his son Marcus, informs us that the latter had there completed a year of study under Cratippus, at that time the most celebrated Professor of Platonic Philosophy, and he bore this striking testimony to the truth which he (the lecturer) proposed to illustrate— "Who," he exclaimed, "can presume to call himself a philosopher that does not inculcate precepts of moral duty? Yet there are some schools of philosophy which, by the views they propound of good and evil, effectually root up all idea of duty. He who so defines man's chief good as make it wholly unconnected with virtue, measuring good solely by the standard of advantage and not worthiness, if consistent, he himself cannot cultivate friendship, or justice, or liberality. One who holds pain to be the greatest evil, or pleasure the supreme good, how can he be either brave or temperate?" Such was the witness borne by the great Roman orator and statesman against the doctrine of Epicurus, whose schools, together with its rival philosophies— the Stoic, the Peripatetic, and Academic— attracted to Athens students from all cities of the Roman Empire.
In this sanctuary, then, of the Muses there was no lack of metaphysical enquiry, no absence of moral philosophy, no stint of intellectual activity. But this very prodigality of intellectual wealth, compared with the general character of the Athenian people, strikingly illustrated the proposition he had set before them, namely, the absence of spiritual truth, which was, the reflex of the mind of God. No intellect how ever vast, no genius however subtle, could discover and promulgate a moral law decisive on the great questions of human life capable of perfecting individual character or securing social happiness.
When the maritime power of Athens and its colonial empire succumbed to the combined forces of Continental Greece and of the colonies she had alienated, the Athenian mind, in the absence of political excitement partook itself to new channels— Philosophy and Forensic Oratory, Socrates being the founder of one, Isocrates of the other. From the memoirs of Xenophon and some dialogues of Plato, together with the defences composed by each of those writers to vindicate the fair fame of their beloved master, they were enabled to form a distinct idea of that great and good Gentile moralist.
To have formed the mind of Plato and the character of Xenophon— the general, statesman, and historian —was no small praise. But still nobler must have been the mind and character which gave birth to the Academic Peripatetic and Stoical Philosophies. On the other hand, Alcibiades as well as Critias, both representatives of Greek talent without principle, were the pupils of the most licentious, skilful, and unscrupulous of Democrats; the other, the greatest and most cruel of Oligarchs. It would be hard, indeed, to make teachers responsible for the conduct of their pupils as Xenophon justly argued, and the latter plainly showed that the tenor of Socrates' discussions with both those pupils was to restrain and improve them. He would have deterred Alcibiades from that reckless unprincipled ambition which proved his ruin, and Critias from those sensual propensities which hardened and brutalized the heart. The personal beauty of Alcibiades, however, early led him into the pursuits of vice; his high birth and connections, his talents and wealth, his popularity with the young aristocracy, estranging him from Socrates. He eventually became that ambitious and unscrupulous statesmen, whose career might well point a moral as well as adorn a tale. Critias, during the tyranny of the Thirty at Athens, established a reign of terror not exceeded in the French Revolution.
There was lacking, however, in the mind of Socrates that simple earnestness which gave authority to moral teaching, and an overweening integrity which led him to treat with affected indifference the issue of his trial, and his judges with supercilious disdain. Professing, in fact, to be instructed and guided by a familiar spirit he was amenable to the law while arrogating to himself a divinely-inspired intelligence, of which he could afford no palpable evidence. His pretensions, therefore, to this supernatural gift, together with the transcendental character of his disquisitions and ironical logic failed to leave a strong impression of his moral truthfulness on the Athenian mind. Its old republican earnestness had passed away. To hear some new thing rather than know and do the truth became the Attic taste.
That compound of cleverness and rascality of the Greek adventurer was the final result of political disorganization, decaying liberty, demoralized society, and highly cultivated intelligence, whether at Rome under the Emperors, or yet later in Constantinople under the Empire; the finest gifts of mental power granted to any race of men passed into the service of political corruption, or spent itself on the subtleties of heretical speculation. The annals of history told them that the Athenian people in the short space of little more than a century— from 450 to 330 B.C.— and numbering scarcely more than 30,000 citizens, became the greatest poets, historians, orators, philosophers, mathematicians, statesmen, generals, sculptors, painters, and architects which the world had seen, as if it had the purpose of Divine Providence to show to what a height the intellect of man might reach ; and at the same time pointed the moral that spiritual wisdom could nowhere else be found, save in the fear of the living God, and among those only to whom He would reveal Himself.
The peculiar subtlety of the Greek intellect was still revelling in the Attic schools of philosophy, when Paul of Tarsus, one of the hated race and unknown phraseology, entered alone and friendless in the intellectual capital of the world. But what a moral wilderness— a spiritual desert did he find there! The masses were wholly given up to idolatry, the idle sojourners intent upon nothing but gossip and the last new thing; the more educated minds floating upon a sea of uncertainty, finding no haven of truth, dogmatic and authoritative on the rival and antagonistic schools of Stoic or Epicurean philosophy, the groves of the Academy, or the pedestrian lectures of the Stagyrite ; glimpses of truth shining out of the polished diction of Plato, or practical precepts delivered by the didactic Aristotle, or the unreal dogmatism of the Stoic abstraction, which served to amuse the mind rather than influence the heart and conduct. But where no firm grasp of truth could be taken, no one could take hold of spiritual life.
Philosophy was powerless to arrest the progress of national corruption and social decay, and the last age of Athenian intelligence was seen in the utterly vitiated Greek being of the age of Juvenal, who in his Third Satire thus described the Greek who pushed his fortunes in Rome:—

" Of fluent tongue and never-blushing face.
A Protean tribe, one knows not what to call.
That shifts to every form, and shines in all :
Grammarian, painter, augur, rhetorician,
Geometer, cook, conjuror, and physician.
All arts his own, the hungry Greekling counts.
And bid him mount the skies, the skies he mounts.
You smile. Was't a barbarian then that flew ?
No; 'twas a Greek, 'twas an Athenian too!
Bear with their state who will, but I disdain
All converse with the proud, the upstart train—
Wretches who, stowed in some dark lighter's womb
With rotten figs, were lately borne to Rome,
Yet now above me sit before me sign—
Their friendship and their faith preferred to mine.
But no! the Greek applauds, with winning grace,
His patron's folly and his Gorgon face ;
Admires his voice, that grates upon the ear
Like the shrill scream of wanton chanticleer.
We, too, can flutter, but they alone
Gain credit they who make all parts their own.
No longer now the favourites of the stage
Boast their exclusive power to charm the age.
The happy art with them a nation shares,
Greece is a theatre where all are players,
For, lo ! their patron smiles—they burst with mirth;
He weeps—they droop, the saddest souls on earth."

It was impossible to contrast without a sigh the manly patriots who fought at Marathon and Salamis, or the robust virtuous Aristides, with the degenerate race who to the Roman satirists seemed great only in every species of villainy. If they went back still further in the social history of the Greek nation, what a contrast did the chaste Penelope offer to the Aspasia of Pericles, or Thais of Alexander! Nothing indeed was more striking in the national life of Athens than the rapid growth of intellectual genius, and the no less rapid decay of private and public morals. One century sufficed to perfect the one and to complete the other; yet during that same century philosophy —turning itself from the investigation of nature to the study of morals— produced the varied schools which made goodness the great ends of human existence. From the moral teaching of Socrates emanated the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic systems, culminating in the Academy, with the spiritualism of Plato.
Epicurus, on the other hand, basing his philosophy on atomic materialism, and making pleasurable sensation of soul and body the happiness of man, necessarily gravitated towards a low morality, ending in "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." At Athens corruption kept pace with mental cultivation.
 Was England to dread a like decline in moral virtue? Athens was without religion, and England is the shrine of Evangelical Christianity—the land of the Bible, of freedom. The salt then lost its savour; Athens enjoyed no antiseptic. The contrast would be more evident if they took Socrates as the moral teacher of Athens, and Paul as the informing spirit of English religion.
In conclusion he offered a high tribute of respect for the unimpeachable character of Socrates through life, and his fortitude in death when hastened by the self-administered cup of hemlock. He contrasted his career and the nature of his teachings with those of St. Paul, and referred to the effect produced in them by the difference in the belief which influenced them.

South Australian Register 8 October 1869, 

ANCIENT ART.

The sixth of the course of lectures on ancient art, by Mr Stephen Thompson,  . .  . He went on to show that the creations of Greek and Roman art are co-extensive with all provinces of the ancient life and mind. There is no phase in Greece, or in the civilisation which Rome borrowed from Greece, which is not illustrated and illumined thereby. Nothing that the ancient Greek or, following him, the ancient Roman, did, or thought, or suffered, or desired, which has not found an embodiment in art—in the practical work of man's hands—as well as in their literature, and thus constantly brought home the beautiful stories of the ancient writers. The key to the Greek genius and religion was known by that ugly word "anthropomorphism"— that spirit which considered all things, whether the external aspects of the world, the forces of nature, or of the human spirit, under human lineaments, conceiving of everything that it is possible to conceive of at all in the likeness of a human being. The lecturer next surveyed the range and extent of the conceptions thus represented, personified—it might almost be said incarnated, for they became as real human beings under the creative touch of ancient art, whether in sculpture, painting, or the subordinate arts. To what of the Egyptian mythology they appropriated they added more poetic and beautiful forms. To the great celestial deities they added less awful ones—demigods, heroes, personifications of the virtues and the vices, times and seasons, and peopled all nature, the airs, the woods and waters, mountains and cities, with invisible beings, supposing that every object in creation, from the sun and sea to the smallest fountain and stream, was under the guardian care of some tutelar deity, and these beings thus became subjects which they embodied in some or other forms of art. This art-inspiring system of belief in some aspects is not separated by any wide gulf from the beautiful conception of Milton :—
 

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen both when we wake and when we sleep." 

The difference between the habitual tone of the old Greeks towards what was beautiful in nature was contrasted with the modern ideas, in which the idea of divinity is apt to get separated from the life of nature; approaching these visible things, as with a theory that they are dead, governed by physical laws, and so forth. To the Greek the fountain always sang and the flowers rejoiced, and his fellowship and sympathy were always for the spirit in the stream, not for the stream, always for the dryad in the wood, not for the wood, and upon this they founded those beautiful myths, such as Silenus keeping the shepherds spell-bound till twilight with his cosmic song; Proteus uttering his unwilling oracles upon the solitary shore; Clymene singing of love in the caverned water world, amid the rivers' roaring flow; Old Silvanus, and the sister nymphs, and countless others, which still cast a spell over every imaginative mind. The embodiments in art first passed in review were those of the twelve great Olympian gods, who by the time Greece was Greece, and Greek civilisation was at all developed, divided amongst them the whole empire of the Greek imagination. Originally the sole idea embodied in any god was the physical one, but by degrees, moral, intellectual, and political ideas became associated with them. Zeus, the sovereign father of all the gods, in whom it is probable the physical sky was first personified, the thunderbolt he holds in one hand being the symbol of sudden destruction, overwhelming powers of the sky, and his familiar attendant, the eagle—symbol of things that swoop down suddenly on the earth from above—and his characteristic features as stamped by Pheidias, combining majesty and nobleness, and all the attributes befitting the father of gods and men, was first enlarged upon. Next to Zeus, Poseidon, the god of the sea, was a representation favourable to art, as suggesting his own types and his own accompaniments, being generally represented in violent action, the best period of Greek art developing this idea very characteristically. Then came Vulcan, then Mars, and his attributes as god of war, generally represented together with Aphrodite. Hermes, the youth among the gods, and the messenger of Jupiter, was always easily recognisable by the Caduceus and the winged feet. His later development in art, ascribed to the Attic school, after the Peloponnesian war, was indicated; and then Apollo, the favourite subject of the great artists of Greece, the highest conception of ideal male beauty being expressed in his representations. From these gods, after brief notice, the lecturer passed on to the consideration of the six Olympian goddesses from a less familiar and more interesting point of view. There was a tendency, it was observed, to regard the Greek myths as only a chaos of confused fancies, yet it often took very little pains to disentangle them at least sufficiently to seize their main thread. There is little doubt, and this idea is shared by some most acute critics and commentators, that these six deities in their simplest aspect were but so many types of ideal womanhood. Woman's whole earthly career may be considered as depicted when we portray the girl, the maiden, the lover, the wife, the mother, and the housekeeper or queen of home. These are represented— giving both the Greek and Roman names— by Artemis or Diana, Athena or Minerva, Aphrodite or Venus, Hera or Juno, and Hestia or Vesta. First comes the epoch of free girlhood, symbolised by Artemis, the Roman Diana. She represents early youth, and all young things find in her their protector. She became, as we see by her representations in art, the goddess of hunters, and learns of her brother Phoebus to be a hunter herself. Her type of character is perfectly marked. She stands for the nymph-like period of existence. (A copy of the large bronze head of this goddess purchased a few years ago by the trustees of the British Museum for the large sum of £10,000 was here exhibited and described at length.)  After girlhood comes the maturity of virgin womanhood. This is symbolised in Pallas Athene. She is the riper Artemis, passing beyond her early nymph-like years, and reaching the highest consummation that woman can attain alone, and so fascinating is this moment of serene self-poise that the virgin Athene ranks in some respects at the head of all the goddesses. Beside her Artemis is undeveloped, while all the rest have passed out of themselves, and share the responsibilities of love and home. No compliment ever paid to woman was so high as that paid by the Greeks when incarnating the highest wisdom in this maiden's form, and making this attribute only increase her virtue and her charms. Hence at Athens—the Greece of Greece—she is reverenced above all deities. She had not only her statue carved in ivory and gold by Pheidias in the Parthenon, but standing on the Acropolis is a colossal bronze statue 60ft. high, visible far out at sea, so that the sailor's first glimpse of Athens was the glittering of the sun's rays on her spear and helmet. The cast of the Minerva Giustiniani in the sculpture galleries of the Museum was supposed to be a copy—or at least represents the type of this celebrated work. Two exquisite copies of antique gems of Athene were also exhibited in illustration of this subject—a very favourite one in Greek art. The ideal of Athene was perfected by Pheidias, and, as in these gems, the expression is always grave and sweet, and known from all others by the length of the hair, hence the Greek oath, "by the tresses of Athene." In descriptions, she alone is blue-eyed, to signify she dwells above all clouds, while even Aphrodite, the auburn-haired in the Iliad, has large black eyes. The pure forehead, the long and finely-shaped nose, the hair artlessly shaded back across the brow, and flowing down upon the neck, are all in accord with this wonderfully ideal creation. Her attributes were then described, one or more of these emblems being always found depicted in Greek art, although the Greek Athena was afterwards transformed in Rome to a prosaic Minerva. But Athene's maiden meditation is simply one stage in woman's life, not its completion; a career that seeks completion pauses not here. Then comes the reign of Aphrodite the Beautiful. She represents the passion which is the basis of purity. Accordingly married love is sacred to Aphrodite as the virgin condition. No animal sacrifices are offered to her, but only wreaths of flowers, and the month of April, when the earth stirs again into life, is her sacred time. But love legitimately reaches its conclusion in marriage; and after Aphrodite comes Hera, the Roman Juno, the wife of Zeus, and the type and protector of marriage. Her type in art is perfectly marked. Winckelmann says it is impossible to mistake a head of Hera. Athena commands like a princess, Hera like a queen. But woman's career is still incomplete; she must also be a mother. Then comes the maternal deity of Greece— Demeter, the Roman Ceres. Her very name signifies mother, or mother earth. She became the mother of Persephone or Proserpine, and all her existence is consecrated in this motherhood. She is glorified through suffering by the deprivation of her daughter, and Grote well names her the Mater Dolorosa of Greece. She is always represented in art as more maternal than Hera, and the enveloping draperies are all in keeping with her attributes. Besides these five embodiments of woman as girl, maiden, lover, wife, and mother, there must be finally one which completes them all. Hestia or Vesta, the sister of Zeus, not his wife like Hera, represents woman as queen of home. No separate temple is needed, for every hearth is her home. Every in-door oath in Greece is sworn by her, and as the city itself is but an extended family, so the city has also its sacred hearth where the public fire is kept burning, and where the fugitive is safe. If a colony goes forth, the emigrants take coals from the public hearth of the town they leave, for Hestia's fire must never go out. Her representations in art Were described, and the type and attributes under which she was depicted. So well did this series of divinities cover all the functions of womanly life that none could fail in finding her tutelary goddess in some shrine or temple. An imaginative Greek girl had not an epoch in her life that was not ennobled. Every act of her existence was glorified. Passing from the great Olympian gods to the lesser powers, their name is almost legion. They bewilder almost as much as they enchant our imagination. There is no power of nature, and there is no power of the human mind or heart, which is not personified in this way. For example, the powers of wine, of all fertile inspiriting products of the soil, which were personified in Bacchus and his numerous group of satyrs, fauns, and mænads. Bacchus, though not one of the greater gods was worshipped in certain regions of Greece—in Arcadia. In the decorative sculpture of the Temple of Apollo there were figures of Bacchus, and we have many representations of the type created by the later Attic school. 380 B.C. Bacchanalian subjects are commonly found in all minor forms of art, such as wall-painting, vase-painting, and especially the relief sculpture of the late Roman school, of which there are many examples in the Vatican—sarcophagi, and other kindred works. These powers of Bacchus bring us to the consideration of other nature powers, such as rivers for example. The great division among rivers was this. A river that ran straight into the sea was in all cases thought of as a son of Poseidon ; always a male god, sometimes a compound of man and bull, to typify the energy, the force and rush, the stream and power, of a river. The Greek imagination, however, as it became more refined, typified rivers by men of various character and type —that is, the large rivers ; but all the small rivers and mountain streams which run into the large rivers are always women—female nymphs. This was illustrated in the case of the River Hissus, close to Athens. Next came the winds—the wind figures being appropriately draped according to the quarter they represented, Boreas being always warmly draped, to show he came from the north.

Then there are figures, male or female, for every grove, every spring, every mountain, every valley, every natural division under which the mind can think of the influences of nature. And, passing from personifications of nature to personifications of the human spirit, we find human lineaments, more or less appropriate, invented for every spiritual or intellectual abstraction that it is possible to think of. The Muses was one which occurs on innumerable works of art Victory was one of several personifications to which the Greeks nearly always gave wings, as they did to other things which are fleeting and fugitive, which come suddenly and go away suddenly Victory is of that kind, and  the type of Victory is thus winged. The first great statue of Victory, belonging to the great central period of Greek art, has only been unearthed during the last few years at the excavations of Olympia by the Germans It was set on a lofty pedestal, and is a beautiful figure, in the act of swooping down from a rock, the winged motion and the way in which the drapery is made to flow hack from the figure, like waves from the prow of a ship, being rendered with inimitable grace and spirit Other winged figures were Eros or Love, generally represented in later Greek art as a winged boy. Death was also represented as winged. In Greek art, sleep and death are almost indistinguishable, they are both of them winged youths, and sometimes, though not always, carry an inverted torch, but it is only when the genius carries a sword that we are sure it is really death. This was illustrated by the figures on the drum of a column from the temple of Diana at Ephesus excavated by Mr. Wood, and copied in a large autotype from the museum of the Public Library.

Besides these, there are a thousand other simple and obvious abstractions of the mind, such as Peace and Plenty—Plenty, as the offspring of Peace, being represented in Greek art as a mother holding on her arm a child bearing a cornucopia. Then there was that wholly different class— the legendary heroes Hercules, Theseus, and Meleagar, are great and familiar examples, typefying all the beneficent operations of the early purging and purifying the world from noxious forces. Hercules was the stalwart purifying hero who went about purging all Greece of evils and mischiefs The large cast of Hercules and Omphale in the Museum galleries was referred to in connexion with these exploits. Theseus was more particularly the hero of Athens, as Hercules was of universal Greece, and Meleagar was the huntsman among heroes, and was generally represented in connexion with his victory over the Calydonian boar. Passing finally from all these personification and conceptions, natural or legendary, there was the delineations of real life, and even with these it was impossible to establish any very sharp division between what is imaginary and what is real in Greek art, because they seldom depicted real scenes without putting in as actors in those real scenes some one or other of these legendary creations. Eros is present in every marriage scene, and Victory is at hand to interview in every contest Then came the large class of portrait figures and busts, though these belonged chiefly to later periods, during and after Alexander, portraiture in Greek art being always to a great extent ideal. In Roman times every one sought to be thus glorified. A large and very beautiful class of works in Greek art with which we have only lately become extensively acquainted are representation, of death. At Athens—says Professor Colvin, in one of his Slade lectures, after a recent visit —go along an excavated street, and either side of the street is lined with sculptures in relief. All are funeral monuments, and bear the name of the persons in whose honour they are set up. In almost all cases death is represented in the quietest, most reserved, and tranquil natural way possible, by some scene of ordinary farewell. For instance, a man takes care of his dog, which jumps up and fawns upon him as he goes away ; or a lady sits in her chair, and her   servants bring her some ribbon or veil, which she would put on to go out for a walk. Elsewhere a mother pats a child under the chin, or lays her arm on the hand of another woman who comes to her, gestures of parting always expressed with the most perfect reserve and delicacy, goodbyes of every day, that symbolised to the Greek mind the last solemn good-bye of all. No two of these monuments are ever quite alike, says Professor Colvin, there is infinite refinement in all of them that belong to the good time, and they show with what gentle and collected thoughts the ancient Greek was ready to leave the world which was so full of glory to him, and bid farewell to that life which he spent in the worship, and almost in the companionship, of his gods—of those glad and strong and divine existences, himself only one degree less divine, glad, and strong than they. This concluded, it was observed, a by no means exhaustive survey of the subjects of Greek art, and it could not be better done than in the words of a distinguished American litterateur—"That wonderful old mythology is gone ; that great race shed it lightly as leaves in autumn and went its way. These names of Hera, and Aphrodite, and Athena, are but autumn leaves, caught in our hands to show the red tints that still linger on their surface; they have lasted long, but who knows how soon they will be faded and forgotten? Yet not till the world is rich enough to have a race more ideal than the Greeks will there be another harvest of anything so beautiful to the imagination."

 Argus August 1883, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article8554339