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e clue to
the popular report as to his deficiency in the military virtues of
antiquity. "Who," says he "will be there to sympathize with him? Not
they who have been trained with him in the same gymnasium? No, by
Olympian Jove! for, in his youth, instead of hunting the wild boar and
addicting himself to exercises which give strength and activity to the
body, he was studying the arts that were one day to make him the
scourge of the rich." Those exercises were, in the system of the
Greeks, . . . considered as absolutely indispensable to a liberal
education. That of Demosthenes was certainly neglected by his
guardians, and the probability is that the effeminacy with which he
was reproached meant nothing more than that he had not frequented in
youth the palestra and the gymnasium, and that his bodily training had
been sacrificed to his intellectual.

That he possessed moral courage of the most sublime order is passed
all question; but his nerves were weak. If the tradition that is come
down to us in regard to his natural defects as an orator is not a
gross exaggeration, he had enough to occupy him for years in the
correction of them. But what an idea does it suggest to us of the
mighty will, the indomitable spirit, the decided and unchangeable
vocation, that, in spite of so many impediments, his genius fulfilled
its destiny, and attained at last to the supremacy at which it aimed
from the first! His was that deep love of ideal beauty, that
passionate pursuit of eloquence in the abstract, that insatiable
thirst after perfection in art for its own sake, without which no man
ever produced a masterpiece of genius. Plutarch, in his usual graphic
style, places him before us as if he were an acquaintance,--aloof from
the world; immersed in the study of his high calling, with his brow
never unbent from care and thought; severely abstemious in the midst
of dissoluteness and debauchery; a water-drinker among Greeks; like
that other Agonistes, elected and ordained to struggle, to suffer, and
to perish for a people unworthy of him:--

 "His mighty champion, strong above compare,
 Whose drink was only from the liquid brook."

Let any one who has considered the state of manners at Athens just at
the moment of his appearance upon the stage of public life, imagine
what an impression such a phenomenon must have made upon a people so
lost in profligacy and sensuality of all sorts. What wonder that the
unprincipled though gifted Demades, the very personification of the
witty and reckless libertinism of the age, should deride and scoff at
this strange man, living as nobody else lived, thinking as nobody else
thought; a prophet, crying from his solitude of great troubles at
hand; the apostle of the past; the preacher of an impossible
restoration; the witness to his contemporaries that their degeneracy
was incorrigible and their doom hopeless; and that another seal in the
book was broken, and a new era of calamity and downfall opened in the
history of nations.

We have said that the character of Demosthenes might be divined from
his eloquence; and so the character of his eloquence was a mere
emanation of his own. It was the life and soul of the man, the
patriot, the statesman. "Its highest attribute of all," says
Dionysius, "is the spirit of life--+to pneuma+--that pervades it."

A DUKE'S OPINIONS OF VIRGINIA, NORTH AND SOUTH CAROLINA, AND GEORGIA.

[_From a Review of "Travels of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar" in 1825-6._]

In his journey through Virginia, our traveller visited Mr. Jefferson,
with whom, however, he does not appear to have been as much struck as
he had been with the late Mr. Adams. The Natural Bridge he pronounces
"one of the greatest wonders of nature he ever beheld," albeit he had
seen "Vesuvius and the Phlegrean Fields, the Giant's Causeway in
Ireland, the Island of Staffa, and the Falls of Niagara." "Finally"
(to use a favorite mode of expression of his own), he is amazed at the
profusion of militia titles in Virginia, which almost persuaded him
that he was at the headquarters of a grand army, and at the
aristocratic notions of some of the gentlemen in the same state, who
make no secret of their taste for primogeniture laws and hereditary
nobility.

He passed through North Carolina too rapidly to do anything like
justice to the many remarkable things which that respectable state
has to boast of. Accordingly, his observations are principally
confined to the inns where he stopped, the roads over which he
travelled, and the mere exterior of the towns and villages which the
stage-coach traverses in its route. He is of opinion, from what he saw
in that region, that "it would be a good speculation to establish a
glass manufactory in a country, where there is such a want of glass,
and a superabundance of pine-trees and sand." It had almost escaped
us, that he here for the first time made the acquaintance of a "great
many large vultures, called buzzards, the shooting of which is
prohibited, as they feed upon carrion, and contribute in this manner
to the salubrity of the country." This "parlous wild-fowl" has the
honor to attract the attention of his Highness again in Charleston,
where he informs us that its life is, in like manner, protected by
law, and where it is called from its resemblance to another bird, the
turkey-buzzard. . . . In Columbia, he became acquainted with most of
the distinguished inhabitants, of whose very kind attentions to him he
speaks in high terms. The following good-natured hint too may not be
altogether useless: "At Professor Henry's a very agreeable society
assembled at dinner. At that party I observed a singular manner which
is practiced; the ladies sit down by themselves at one of the corners
of the table. But I broke the old custom, and glided between them; and
no one's appetite was injured thereby." . . . .

Nothing . . . can be a stronger exemplification of the difficulties
under which a stranger labors, in his efforts to acquire a knowledge
of a country new to him, than the perpetual mistakes which our
distinguished traveller commits in his brief notices of Georgia. . . .
Even the complexion of the people of Georgia displeased him, and,
coming from a Court where French was not only the fashionable but the
common language of social intercourse, he considers the education of
women neglected, because they are not taught that language in
situations where they might never have occasion to use it.

MIRABEAU BUONAPARTE LAMAR.

~1798=1859.~

MIRABEAU BUONAPARTE LAMAR, second president of the Republic of Texas,
was born in Louisville, Georgia. In 1835 he emigrated to Texas and
took part in the struggle for independence against Mexico, being
major-general in the army. He was successively Attorney-General in the
cabinet of President Houston, Secretary of War, Vice-president, and in
1838 President of the Republic, the second of the four presidents that
Texas had before it became a State in the Union.

In 1857-8 he was United States minister to Central America.

WORKS.

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