but which crushed last. consequences blasted the life of Alcibiades, and ultimately involved a wider ruin than his own. But for this, he him at might have defied his numerous enemies to shake that ascendancy which his towering genius had obtained; but this intolerable deed just supplied them with that basis of attack which they desired. He could out-argue and outmanœuvre the cleverest of his clever countrymen; crush the stubborn Spartan valour by a yet more immovable resolution; and circumvent the wily Persian with an astuteness greater than his own;--but he ridiculed a puerile superstition, and he fell. In the natural order, such genius, such fascination as his were irresistible; but there is a supernatural order also, which equally with the natural pervades the world, the laws of which he ignorantly despised, until they crushed him. What makes the case more singular is the fact that the Athenians were anything but a strait-laced or Pharisaical people. Aristophanes could with impunity turn the Olympic gods into ridicule before the assembled people, and even introduce them as low and comic personages on the stage. But they felt that Aristophanes was laughing with them, while Alcibiades was laughing at them; and this made all the difference. Heathen worshippers have often been known to abuse and even belabour their idols, when they imagined them to have turned an uncivilly deaf ear to their petitions, while yet their belief in the reality and power of their deities remained unshaken. So the Athenians could enjoy the scenic representation of Dionysus as a sort of pot-bellied, cowardly Falstaff; yet the next Dionysia would not be the less reverently and solemnly celebrated. But an act which seemed to imply a deliberate rejection of their religion, they could not forgive. Nor is their tenacity on this head uninstructive. For their religion, corrupted and corrupting though it was,-and especially the mystic portions of it, which Müller supposes to have been, in part at least, relics of the ancient simpler worship of the Pelasgians, contained a tradition and a trace, however absurd and mutilated, of the primeval revelation of the Divine law to man: on it depended, in great measure, the organization and interdependence of parts of their social fabric;-with it were bound up the sanctity of marriage and the sanction of covenants;—and it was a true and sound instinct which urged them to preserve religion from attack, although in any particular instance their mode of vindication may be open to the gravest censure. Religion then marred the mighty projects of Alcibiades, as it has marred so many other promising schemes;-it is an element in human affairs which may be pure or may be corrupt; but in either case he who contemns it reckons without his host. The English civilians, for instance, who thought to ignore it altogether, and govern India on the principles of the "Philosophie Positive", have terribly expiated their error;-again, the Americans, who seemed to have so thoroughly succeeded in hunting religion out of the highways into the byways of life, and relegating it to the domain of the private, the voluntary, and the speculative, now behold a religious war of the most odious and humiliating kind on the point of breaking out within their territory; and Mormonism teaches the American Universalist, as Polytheism taught the sceptical Alcibiades, that there is an error somewhere in those generalizations, which treat of man as amenable solely to physical laws, and that as the common air is needed for the bodily existence of the individual, so religious faith is necessary to the moral existence of a nation. tive To one other topic we will, in conclusion, briefly ad- 2. His revert. This is, the typical character of Alcibiades, as a re- presentapresentative of "the genius and the moral frame" of the tortypical chaAthenian people. In the history of every great people racter, we meet with remarkable individuals, who exhibit in a combined and concentrated form those qualities which are recognized as peculiarly characteristic of their countrymen in the mass;-thus Leonidas was the ideal Spartan; the Duke of Wellington was often said (though of Irish birth) to represent remarkably well the national character of England; and Napoleon, who was partly French, partly Italian, is said by Mr. Carlyle to have been the typical Italian in his earlier, the typical Frenchman in his later career. But Alcibiades represents Athens with an exactness which not one of the above instances can parallel. Take, by way of illustration, the celebrated sketch of the illustraAthenian character in the funeral oration of Pericles. ted by Observe what prominence is given in this sketch to to the the intellectual and aesthetic superiority of the Athe- sketch of nians over the neighbouring nations, and how, the the Atheobject of the orator being of course to paint every-racter in thing in the fairest light, this superiority, leading as the Fuit did to energetic and well-directed action, is described neral 2 Lectures on Hero-worship. reference nian cha Oration. as compensating, and even more than compensating, for any moral deficiencies that might be attributed to them. And indeed if genius without virtue could preserve an empire, the Athenian hegemony might have endured to this day; for no people, as a people, ever equalled them in intellectual endowments. But in a God-made world this cannot be, and hence the moral delinquencies of the Athenians became the cause of their downfall. Now Alcibiades presents this peculiar type of character most remarkably. Let us take the several features one by one as Pericles enumerates them. First (ch. 37) we are told that the Athenians were not strait-laced nor over censorious, e.g., like the Spartans. This freedom of manners we see developed in Alcibiades to the pitch of licence. The "observance of the laws" next attributed to the people, does not certainly suit the individual, except in that large sense in which (compare Thuc., vii. 89) he threw himself heartily and sincerely into the political forms which he found existing, because his keen discernment taught him that Athens could not be great under any others. He was no doctrinaire or political fanatic, like our Mazzinians of the present day; and although he thought aristocracy a sounder principle of government in theory than democracy, he did not consider that a sufficient reason for revolutionizing a state of things which had prescription in its favour. Next (ch. 38) we are told that the Athenians "relieved the toil of their spirits by the refined enjoyments of art, by games and festivals, and by the elegance and taste which embellished their private life". So Alcibiades was a great patron of art, and himself a skilled musician,-a great winner on the turf (as we should say), for three of his chariots carried away prizes at Olympia in the same year,and a rival of the very Persians, as we have seen, in the luxury and splendour of his private establishments. Again we are told (ch. 39) that "genius and natural high spirit supplied the place for the Athenians, in times of danger and trial, of that ascetical training practised by Sparta"; that they were "brave not by rule but by temper and disposition". These words precisely explain the extraordinary success of Alcibiades in all his military operations. His genius was more than a match for the Spartan tactics and training. Again (ch. 41) the quality of "graceful and happy versatility" is mentioned as an Athenian characteristic. How remarkably it appertained to our hero we have already noticed. Pushing enter prise and expansive daring" are next mentioned; qualities on which the whole career of Alcibiades is one continued comment. Lastly, the circumstance of being the object of very general hatred, mentioned by Pericles in his speech during the plague (II. 64), as the inevitable concomitant condition of the greatness, ambition, and ceaseless activity of Athens, was conspicuously the case, and for the same reasons, with Alcibiades. "His enemies" are continually mentioned in connection with his name by Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch; the two latter of whom state, that even after the vote for his recall had passed the assembly, he could scarcely visit Athens with safety on account of the number and rancour of his private enemies. THOMAS ARNOLD. ART. III.—On a Uniform System of Weights, Measures, CALO and Coins for all Nations. portant ALCULATIONS connected with money, weights, Simpliciand measures make up a great part of the active busi-cityness of life; and by far the most extensive application of the in busiscience of numbers is that made in our daily transactions of ness calbuying and selling. Few who are engaged in such calcu- culations. lations will be prepared to state that, considered as arithmetical exercises, they are accompanied with any peculiar intellectual pleasure. The astronomer, who labours over an apparently inextricable mass of numbers, usually feels some interest in a task which even in its progress unfolds relations of symmetry in the arrangements of the material universe; yet he would gladly welcome new processes of computation, which, without impairing the accuracy of his results, would diminish the labour necessary for their evolution. It is, therefore, extremely natural that persons engaged in the ordinary calculations of every-day business should, in like manner, be willing to adopt methods for lessening the time and labour devoted to their computations. In order to arrive at sound conclusions on this question, it is first indispensable to consider the means employed in all kinds of calculations. Mankind have been so long and so universally accus- Mode of tomed to count by tens, that the decimal system of nume- counting univer- ration has become associated in our minds with the groundsally work of all numerical computations. But this might adopted have been otherwise, and if man had been created with by mankind should be employed with re to all countable four or six fingers on each hand, instead of five, we should most probably now employ either eight or twelve as the modulus of our numerical system. Much might be said as to the advantages attending the employment of either of these numbers as a numerical modulus, but such remarks would be wholly speculative at the present day, and would probably never possess the slightest practical utility. The calculations of trade have reference either to objects capable of being directly and separately counted, such as pieces of money, or of being counted by comparison with ference other objects, such as most of the solids and all the liquids that are commercial commodities. Such substances must generally be weighed or measured before they can become things. subjects for computation. In order to effect these processes in such a way as to attach definite notions to our results, we refer all weights and measures to certain fixed standards. Had we only one coin, one weight, and one measure, as we have only one UNIT in arithmetic, much practical inconvenience would result; and accordingly civilized nations have been long accustomed to employ a great variety of coins, weights, and measures. Every single member of each of these classes has usually some fixed numerical relation with the other individuals of its class; but, as the fundamental standards employed by different nations have been generally different, so have been the relations among their groups of coins, weights, and measures. Yet as these relations necessarily form what constitutes the subject matter of ordinary computations, it follows that they should harmonize as closely as possible with the numerical system employed in such computations. If, therefore, we count numbers, considered as abstract representations of countable things, by tens, we should also count the real things themselves in the same way, whether they happen to be coins, weights, or measures. In other words, having adopted a decimal system of arithmetic as a pure science, a decimal system of counting objects to which it is applied will be the easiest and most natural. Had we a duodecimal or any other system of arithmetic, a corresponding system of counting coins, weights, and measures would be the simplest; but with our actual system of computation, calculations referring to objects whose rela |