leaves its subject, in many cases, either unqualified or disqualified for a true and noble career. we were asked to detine an American scholar, we should be puzzled to give a portraiture with any distinct and definite features. England, Scotland, and Germany have their characteristic scholarship; but we, national to excess in some things, have nothing to show here that embodies our peculiar traits. We have tried foreign grafts, but the sap of the new tree in these western lands was found too much for the budded stock. Transcendentalists proposed to illuminate some of our cities, but moonshine and gas took the business out of their hands. We raised a furor in behalf of the French language, and newspapers say that we have not a diplomatist abroad who can converse in it. All kinds of eclecticism have we labored to domesticate, but our success is confined to imported sheep and Durham cattle. Our folly, we hope, has culminated in this particular, and we ought now to be prepared, by the failure of ambitious experiments on impossibilities, to form a sensible ideal of what American scholarship ought to be. And what should it be? A scholarship suitable to the threefold sovereignty of intellectual, social, political rule; a scholarship in which science, art, and literature shall be subordinate to manhood because of the position, scope, and bearing of manhood in our country; a scholarship without cloistered monkishness or bookish deadness; a scholarship that should welcome every valuable thought from abroad, and convert it into personal growth instead, as the case generally stands, of succumbing to its sway, and being ourselves transformed into exotics; a scholarship that should cultivate sentiment and impulse as well as reason, and not crush out instinct by the pressure of routine and formalism. Sobriety of judgment, free from frozen stiffness; accuracy without morbid pedantry; boldness chastened by humility, and independence restrained by charity; cordiality without slavish fawning; energy, and not recklessness; fertility without a crop of tares mixed with the genuine grain; the present in harmony with the past, and the future as a product of both, souls as well as brains; worldly adaptations without worldly corruptions; religion preserved from degrading superstitions on the one hand, and from the evils of excessive sectarianism on the other-these are the qualities that ought to distinguish our scholarship because of their relation to the liberated mind, bounding heart, and manifold opportunities of our country. Compare our cultivated intellect with this standard. Take our best educated men; the majority of them are scholars, mere scholars, chained down to college-chairs, or, if in the world, dwelling apart from their fellows, and lost to the active service of their countrymen. They are known by their books; but what a defective, halfsouled scholarship is that which, amidst the restless, sweeping, heaving tides of this century, is only seen and felt in the waif that floats upon their waters! Look at another class. They are fresh, earnest, hearty thinkers, abounding with large ideas, and gifted with commanding utterance. Three-fourths of them are ultraists. They breathe out fire. Their images leap from volcanoes, and they fight with sword-flames. These men exert influence. You can trace that influence in much of the speaking and the writing of the day. Carlyle has taken possession of some of them bodily. They are panting for a heroic age-convulsed with a passion for crusades. Others, not quite so sturWe have no type of American scholarship. If dy, try to feed on their pabulum, and get, for their It is a common frailty to expect too much of men and their systems. The cant of the day is extravagant and ridiculous in its claims, ignoring difficulties it ought to allow for, and magnifying the machinery of means out of all just and true proportions. Granting all this, we have a right to demand that education shall, at least, start the germs of development, and, as a general rule, train its subject so that he shall have both the ability and the disposition to train himself in subsequent life. But how many retire from our institutions of learning fitted in any high sense to do this work? We can count men by scores, within the circle of our own acquaintance, who have come away from college with a positive distaste for all study; men without any love for books, having no sort of affinity with cultivated society-all but boorish in every thing that marks the refined and elegant gentleman. Others, rising a few grades above these, are utterly insensible to the intellectual and moral incitements of the time, and drift with the age in passive obedience to the momentum of its current. Selecting the best class of these so-called educated men, few go into the world alive to the serious claims of the day on thinking minds and fervently in unison with the heart of Providence. With too many the vain Diploma is the last chapter of their mental biography; "finis," mournful "finis," might be stamped on the parchment; or, indeed, the whole thing might be regarded as a classical inscription on sepulchred brains. Various improvements might be introduced into the machinery of popular education. Text-books, especially, might be made something more than dull collections of facts and principles-wire-bound skeletons of science. The knowledge contained in them might be more than knowledge if vitality were infused into it. But it is the living teacher that needs a broader adaptation to the work. By him is the student to be awakened and disciplined. Diagrams, illustrative experiments, books, are far inferior to him in their relations to mental culture. Every student should be taught to feel that real education begins where acquisition ends, and in this higher development, opening so vast a field for the intense exercise of all his more sympathetic and inspiring faculties, the teacher ought to rise to the dignity of his position. Too much of our learning is for this reason a cold, inert thing. Had we men like Davy, Chalmers, Wilson, who could combine exactness with impulsive energy-who could be scientific in statement, in argument, in detail, and yet carry the fervor of a glowing soul into all their efforts who could collect ample materials for the exposition of a great topic but think them of little worth until they had been fused into a living mass-what an office of power and glory this might be made! Teaching is a ministry. It is the pulpit of the natural, social world; and though destitute of the sanctity, the divine impressiveness of the Sabbath pulpit, yet, next to that, it is entitled to reverence. Such a sentiment ought to animate the hearts of those who fill this vocation; such a sentiment ought to be cherished in society toward them: and thus, set apart by the homage of public opinion to this hallowed work, and consecrating to it their talents and enthusiasm, they would soon find their generous ardor and fruitful genius reappearing in their pupils. as his poetic mind necessarily associated sound with their soft-flowing intricacies of streaming light, that "they sing together?" Sir Thomas Browne asks what song the sirens sang; but many a man knows every night what was the hymn of the morning stars; and perhaps his children, who slept while he watched, know it also, without knowing what it is, when they see his face at morning. The old astronomers covered the heavens with strange, arbitrary constellations. Have you never strained your eyes at the sky to distinguish Berenice, the Great Bear, the Waterbearer? Misled by familiar names upon a field so mighty, we used to puzzle over Bootes, looking fondly into space for a starry pair of boots-spelled by science with a superfluous e. pains, a cramp-colic in their non-digesting skulls. | see and feel as he saw and felt who said of them, All this is humiliating enough. It is a shame on our cultivated intellect that so much of it is found either in the one extreme of indifference or in the other extreme of over-excitement. Yet this is, to a great extent, the state of the case. The middle ground between these extremes is occupied by a decreasing number of men, who are too often sneered at and despised. What a commentary on our cultivation is read in these facts! Now, it must strike every thoughtful mind that what we urgently need is the solution of this problem, viz.: Can we have, in the United States, earnestness without extravagance, imagination without wild romance, talent in full strength, and genius in vigorous might, without vehemence and rashness? This is the pressing problem for our education to solve. Depend upon it the tables are turned, and our dangers now lie in the excessively stimulated intellect of the land-not in its ignorant and uneducated population. The fanaticism of ideas, what-tering to a thousand tastes in a thousand ways, ever its aims and objects may be, whether disguised under cover of trade, politics, or religion, must be checked. It is that sort of fanaticism to which we are peculiarly exposed. We have outgrown the vulgar ebullitions that so often demor- But if there be denizens of the stars-and if there alized other generations, but let it not be forgotten are mountains in the moon, why not people?—and that we have our own besetting sins. Advancing if there be governments, and honorable gentlemen, civilization has brought its perils; and never, and learned friends, and furious debates, and bloody more than now, have men needed the serene faith wars, is it not better not to know it? is it not bet. that restrains reason within its just limits, mod-ter to have them still the images of purity and se erates zeal, destroys arrogance, presumption, vio-renity? not to know that there may be sick headlence, and humbles our whole nature into perfect aches in Jupiter, and that Mars is convulsed with subserviency to the Sovereign Will that rules the worse than Central American troubles, and that world. Mercury is salivated for the yellow fever, wafted from the highest peak of the Staten Island, for which our planet is responsible? W Editor's Easy Chair. The boots we never saw; but wearily walking homeward now, after spreading our solid Table, filling our Drawer with piquant trifles, and minis we glance sympathetically upward at Cassiopeia's An Easy Chair of a maundering disposition may be pardoned for wondering whether the respect of the citizens of Georgium Sidus for this planet of ours would be much increased if they knew our history. If you look at the most familiar landscape through your legs, you get a new and extraordinary effect. Might it not be a spiritual looking through our legs, if we could see our own life as it would seem to us if taking place upon another planet? Doubtless a man's personal habits would ADDLING home upon our four legs in a still, starry night, and watching some single star, it is not hard to believe that some starry Easy Chair is stamping home and watching our native planet in turn. And reflecting upon the immense and incessant human commotion which makes up our diurnal history, it is curious to imagine how sparkling and calm our planet looks to that skyey Chair, and how unruffled it seems as it dips forward into the abysses of space. So much confu-be corrected if he lived constantly before a mirror. sion, such wild uproar, earthquakes of nature and of human passion, the whole surface of the planet agitated, and such deep, beautiful repose to the eye and mind of that wandering and belated Easy Chair in Saturn or placid Vesta! Or isn't he belated when we are? Is he only hurrying down from breakfast as we are sauntering home to supper? Or have stars no society upon their surfaces-no cities, mountains, rivers-no Romes, New Yorks, Pekins, Communipaws-no Homers, Shakspeares, Ajax Telamons, General Walkers? Are they all sparkle, and no substance? Are they no worlds at all, but only whirligigs of fire? motes of a world-vastness in space flashing in the sun? Perhaps so; they are so cold, so distant. There are people whose manners are like a firmament of stars-overpowering, glittering, dark, and cold. There are philosophies like the stars-exact and dimly-guiding. Suppose that the Honorable Anybody should see himself in little Pallas-for the alliteration's sake we might say, suppose that Palmerston should see himself in Pallas-would it not be very much as if, to continue the alliteration, he saw himself in Punch? Punch, the newspaper, we mean, and not the beverage. Or, on the other hand, does a fox enjoy being a fox? Does Colonel Titus enjoy being Colonel Titus? Would it be only our self-conceit multiplied by two? It is clear such thoughts are incompatible with any theory of music of the spheres. We are not likely to think of our poor political planet taking any part in the universal harmony. It is the other stars that sing, not ours. Ours groans, or weeps, or shouts, or throws up its hat. Yet if it does so, the song of the others is its soothing balm. The poet says, and it is true of stars, though it was said of their Maker, "I smiled to think God's sweetness flowed around our incompleteness, Walking home in the sweet May night, watching them wink, and tremble, and throb, yet, in all their seeming motion so blended in radiance, so different in splendor, may not an old Easy Chair How they lap the hot earth in cool,. dewy silence! : VOL. XV.-No. 85.-I Round our restlessness his rest." "Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain! Clearness divine! The How they hang over, unattainable, unextinguish- | My Lord Mayor toasts her Majesty's Ministers, able-preachers, and poets, and symbols: as full of and congratulates the country upon so stanch, wisdom as of beauty: a great truth, a noble man, conservative, and liberal a government. a lovely woman, are all stars in our imaginations. Lord Bedmaker-in-ordinary replies, and toasts my As we moved homeward, pausing in the soft Lord Mayor, congratulating the city upon his wise May night, the music of another English poet, and equitable rule. The Right Honorable Ben Matthew Arnold, whose poems are lately repub- Nevis toasts the Foreign Ministers, and congratulished in Boston, seemed to ring and swell through lates the world upon the universal peace so ably the transparent darkness: maintained. Mr. Washington Jefferson Franklin returns thanks for his brethren of the diplomatic body, and congratulates his happy America and the hospitable England, whose honored and proud guest he is [cheers], upon having a common language [cheers], a common Shakspeare, and a common Milton [vehement applause], and an uncommon fondness for each other, as evinced in the harmonious and millennial exchange of Southdowns and canvas-backs [tumultuous and long-continued cheering, during which Mr. Washington Jefferson Franklin resumes his seat]. M. le Marquis de Crapeau, the representative of the august monarch late of Leicester Square, now of the Tuileries, rises, and, amidst applause, remarks that he is trés heureux de dire deeto à his friend Monsieur Burke. Ye heavens! whose pure dark regions have no sign Who, though so noble, share in the world's toil, A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain Who have longed deeply once, and longed in vain; A world above man's head, to let him see Is left to each man still." Pleasant people and pleasant dinners! Whoever has been at them, and partaken of the turtle and the nameless luxuries, and, sipping his port, has listened to the speeches, has also probably thought that if the kind of public benefactor represented at that dinner was entitled to such an ovation, other kinds of benefactors were not less THE most ordinary testimony of respect to a modern hero is a dinner. There is a bit of sly satire in it, if we chose to think of it, like the charming charity balls, where you dance, and flirt, and enjoy, and the money which does not pay for your own amusement buys bread and coals for melan-worthy of the same honor. choly widows. A public dinner is not quite the same, because it is not a charity at all, but an offering of homage and respect; and experience shows how much more genial and gracious men are when they have eaten than when they are hungry. But, probably, also, we are glad to excuse the selfishness that craves a good dinner, by emphasizing the fact that the occasion of the dinner is respect for a public benefactor. Public benefactors certainly are of many kinds. Mr. Reynolds, if he has really made a contract to clean the streets, and will really keep them clean, is the greatest benefactor to the city of New York. He is, probably, not a rich man, and therefore can not afford to give the city cleanliness; but he does the next best thing-he offers to afford it more cheaply than any body else. Mr. Reynolds has a much more substantial claim to a public dinner than many men to whom it is offered. An architect, too, in this metropolis of architectural abominations, is a fit recipient of the public banquet. Whoever gives the eye a graceful form confers a peculiar benefit. Most of our buildings insult our common sense. A Greek temple for a bank! a cathedral in lath and plaster! we all know better than that. But how few of us build even as well as we know. Let the architect who understands the elements of his art-we do not demand Palladio, Vitruvius, or Inigo Jones-be immediately invited to a public dinner. So the people of Edinburgh seem recently to have thought; and while our old friend of the Newcomes, Mr. Thackeray, was making a tour in Scotland, delivering his lectures, and amassing goodly sums of money-by George! they invited him to a banquet, and he came, and they all ate, and drank, and spoke quite as pleasantly and usefully as if they had been members of her Majesty's Government or the most worshipful Gogs and Magogs in the world. The lectures on the Georges, which Thackeray delivered in this country, and which were thought to be inferior performances to his discourses upon the humorists, have been immensely successful in England. In London they became almost an institution, like Albert Smith's Mont Blanc. In the great Surrey Music Hall, where the expansive Spurgeon performed his sermons before thousands of hearers, in little suburban rooms, to every class of English society, Thackeray has delivered his hearty, honest criticisms of those latter kings; has condemned the First George, pitied the Third, and derided the Fourth. The people of England have listened and applauded. The papers of England have admired, criticised, and denounced. The old story has been wearily told again-how he is a grinning surgeon, how his spectacles are of green glass and see only livid colors in the landscape and society. His loyalty, of course, has been impeached; and disloyalty is the word which, to the full-blooded British mind, carries more of shame than any other. But if architects and cleaners of cities are public benefactors, how much more so are artists and au- So in Edinburgh they gave him a dinner. My thors! And if merchants entertaining politicians Lord Neaves presided, and toasting Thackeray, have so sparkling a festival that it is worth record-praised his works, his humor, his philosophy; a ing, how truly festive would a purely literary and artistic dinner be! The Mansion House dinners in London must be extremely droll; dinners to which Gog and Magog invite the Lion and the UniDown they go, and swim in turtle-soup. corn. reverend guest claimed him as an ally in the great work of the day, as Charlotte Bronte had long ago done; and Thackeray replied. His speech was a model of dinner-speeches-hearty, simple, and racy. He did not deny that he was on trial for his loyalty; but he said he could not call George the Fourth any thing but a bad man, and claimed to belong to the great middle-class of industry and intelligence. Later in the evening he toasted the artists in a strain of capital humor, and full of witty allusions to the great election in which the kingdom was then engaged. It was a delightful dinner to read about, in the midst of the usual dreary official details; the dinners to politicians being as drearily official as any thing else. But this dinner meant something. It was much more significant than any Chartist demonstration, than any Clontarf gathering, or monster procession to welcome Mr. John Frost home to England. The industry and intelligence of England and of Scotland expressed themselves in this meeting by the mouth of Thackeray, as they do privately in the influence which practically paralyzes the high Tory party in that country. The revolution of two centuries ago goes on. The great mass of the people of England are gradually brought within the range of popular sympathy and springs of action. Think of the reception of that very George the Fourth in that very Edinburgh! Think who it was that wanted to keep the glass out of which that "first gentleman in Europe" had drunk! And then imagine a successor of that man, in his literary vocation, saying of that "gentleman," with hearty appreciation and applause, that he lived a bad life. The loyal Britons are sturdier than we. No literary man in America would be cheered at a dinner if he spoke of some of our republican idols with the same plainness of speech which Thackeray used in describing a royal idol. We fly into a frenzy if some foreigner says we spit too much; which is only a palpably unpleasant truth. And if any native should dare to hint that the late lamented Boanerges was incontinent and intemperate, we should howl with rage, and predict, in despair, the end of the world when such evil was spoken of dignities. Fortunately, it is truth and not a lie that saves nations. If any man is disposed to sadness, and thinks that the game of this world is about played out and nothing more is to be hoped for, let him contemplate the Queen of England dissolving Parliament to go to the country upon a question of peace or war; and in the midst of the debate, let him hear what an English novelist says in Scotland about lords and classes, and the gracious George the Fourth. LAST year we narrowly escaped the yellow fever, confining it, or thanking God that it was confined, to the shores of the Bay, especially upon the Long Island side. What is to be done this year? Having made every arrangement for generating it in the city, if it is not kindly brought to us from abroad, what are we going to do when it is fully developed? Last year there was so great an outcry raised against the absurdity of a Quarantine on a pleasure island, under the very nostrils of the city, that the project of its removal, so long agitated, was busily pushed along, and a new Legislature granted a commission to remove the Quarantine. If you know the distribution of the Bay, you know that the natural and proper place for the Quarantine is Sandy Hook. It has been discussed to pieces in the newspapers; and here is a pretty little story about it, affectionately dedicated to all pretty little boys and girls: Once there was a pretty little boy, named New Jersey, who lived in the meadows between two rivers; and he had a neighbor, a great big boy, named New York, who lived on the other side of one of the rivers which bounded the home of New Jersey. Now New Jersey was rather sandy of complexion, and flat, but he had the kindest, most generous, and most gracious humor in all the world, and was continually trying to find out how he could help his neighbors, particularly the great big New York. Thus when New York wanted to go and see his Uncle Samuel, who lived in Washington, the affectionate little New Jersey took him up in his arms and carried him from river to river, and said: "Now you shall pay me for my time and trouble -for I am not very rich—but no more.' And the big New York was so pleased that he said: "You dear little thing, I shall call you pet names, and you shall be my darling Camden and Amboy." Once it happened that there was a dreadful yellow monster which threatened to devour New York. It came swimming into the water in which New York was accustomed to wash his feet, and began to nibble at them, so that the big boy grew pale with pain and terror. Then the affectionate little neighbor came running across the river, and said: "How can I help you?" New York pressed his Camden and Amboy to his heart, and replied: "Dear New Jersey, if you will sell me a piece of ground on which I can stand and shoot the yellow monster before he gets so near to me, I shall love you more and more all the days of my life, and my children after me will bless your name. The little piece of ground is not so near your farm that I shall trample any thing by standing upon it. You need not fear." "Stop, stop!" said little New Jersey, "I see it all. If the yellow monster eats you, he will devour me also; and if you have the ground, you are strong, and can keep him away. Don't pay me, for it is my safety that is concerned as much as yours; take the sandy patch, and guard us both from this dreadful dragon." So the big boy, New York, stood upon the little piece of ground and shot the yellow monster, and saved his own life and the life of his neighbor, New Jersey; and they lived kindly together all their days, and New Jersey called New York his dear Manhattan, and New York called New Jersey a good Camden and Amboy to the end of time. Now, children, how naughty and silly it would have been for that little New Jersey to have refused to give the piece of ground to that big New York, and caused them both to be eaten up by that dreadful yellow monster! And we hope all good little boys and girls will do as New Jersey did, and love their neighbors like dear little Camdens and Amboys. TODDLE is uncertain where to go this summer; he leans upon the arm of our Chair, and says he is tired to death of all the usual places, and of meeting the same dreadful people driving and staring, and dancing and smirking. It must be that Toddle has the dyspepsia, for he speaks lightly of dining with the Tillietudlems. But a Tillietudlem dinner is no light thing, for all that. It requires all our four legs to hold us up under one of them; and Toddle is affected when he talks in that flip-luxury! how many hundreds of delicate women I pant manner about them. 66 Suppose now" says Toddle, with a fearful yawn, although it is only eleven o'clock in the morning" suppose I go to Saratoga. Well, I shall put up at the United States, and look about to see who is there. I shall go in to dinner, and sit among the men who have last arrived. Those horrid waiters will tramp in like an army, and crush any conversation I may attempt, and ruin my dinner with their abominable flourishes of pewter dish-covers. I shall drink a solitary bottle of Champagne, and try to look as if I thought nobody was looking at me, which always makes a man look as if he thought every body was. Then I shall light a cigar and tip up a chair, and listen to that eternal band. The wagons will come next, and I shall watch women in the most bewitchingly absurd dresses for dust and driving; and nincompoops who sit up high like ramrods, and say nothing while they drive. The ladies will scrutinize the dresses and looks of the other ladies, and the nincompoops will compare each other's horses and wagons. They will come home and say they have had such a delightful time, and change their dresses, and drink their tea, and then go into other dresses and begin to dance, especially if it's a hot night. At one or two o'clock the girls will go to their rooms, the men will take cobblers and cigars, and get away about three in the morning. At nine or ten they will reappear in the most extraordinary costumes, which they will wear with entire negligence, as if they never did any thing else; and after eating an egg, a chop, and some kidneys, they will make up parties to bowl and billiards. Then comes the dinner-and then all the rest. "Now, how much of this is a man to stand? I've been doing it for ten summers, and the thing doesn't improve. On the contrary, I think it gets worse and worse. And after a month of it I go to Newport, and there have it all over again upon the sea-shore. I want to know, Easy Chair," cried this silly dyspeptic, Toddle, "if fools are any less fools because they change places ?" son, It is a great pity that a young man of pretty means and engaging person-a very desirable perindeed-should so regard the chances of a summer. For one breath of that salt air-for one glance at those summer woods-for one burst of that music-how many a heart, saddening and breaking in lonely poverty, would leap and flutter with joy! It is kings who have sated their thirst, to whom drink is nauseous, who are served with Tokay in brimming golden goblets; the wretch to whom a drop of water were as dear as to those who saw Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, sees his broken tin cup dry. Toddle had scarcely left our arm, and sauntered away to his club, or to lunch at Delmonico's, when Raphael entered, and threw himself upon our other arm. "What shall I do?" said he; "where shall I turn? I will do willingly whatever I can find, if it were only to black boots or to carry bundles. My wife and child have positively nothing to eat. I have tried to hire myself to translate, to teach, to read proofs, to do up packages-any thing, any thing to earn my honest bread. I am willing, I am able; I am young, hearty, determined; but I must have something to eat to-day, and can not wait to be paid at the end of the week or month. Think of it! think of it! How the city revels in pass in Broadway who have no more idea of the positive hunger, and terror of to-morrow, that touches the hem of their flounces in passing, than the Princess of France had of the poverty that had actually nothing to put in its mouth. What am I to do?" What is he to do? If only Toddle and Raphael could make some exchange. If Raphael could give some of his heroism, experience, accomplishment, and capacity, for a few thousands of Toddle's dollars, what a fortunate and fair exchange! In this great city, full of princely wealth, and profusion, and magnificence; full of generous impulse and wise lavishness; full of men who have made their way from poverty to affluence; of wemen who grace with thoughtfulness and skill a thousand duties and cares; in a city where every thing indicates rapidity, activity, and success, to which the eyes of the hopeful and the struggling turn from every side, what dark scenes, what fearful suffering, hopelessness, despair! Toddle, you want to do something. Go and attend to that state of things. Find the families stowed away in the Avenues by the East River, in the cellars every where; bring them, if you can, out of disease, despair, and death. At least help. Interest yourself in something or somebody whe has to do with them. Kick yourself every time you dare to sigh over the insipidity of Saratoga; and if you should think to ask, "Am I my brother's keeper ?" ask yourself first, Who said that? and then decide if he shall be your patron and prototype? A CITY is really a metropolis, not according to its commercial prosperity, or the facility and extent of money-making, but according to its expenditure. A town full of traders, each of whom makes a hundred thousand dollars a year, although it should own ten thousand ships and number a million of inhabitants, is not a metropolis. A great city, as it assembles men together to work in concert for every purpose, so it should produce the best possible result of united human action. Every form of intellectual and moral culture must be carried as far as human wisdom can carry it; and it so becomes a metropolis, a central city, a mother city, gathering under its wings every kind of advantage for every kind of person. A proper respect for Art is inseparable from the idea of a metropolis. A city without pictures, without books, or noble buildings-what is it but a pile of stone and mortar? But when it fills itself with these fair fruits of human genius how ample its fame becomes, so that a small town holds a large place in history! This is especially so with Florence, which is a town of moderate extent and population, and yet which has a distinctive and beautiful reputation. Lorenzo de Medici, who has left a name so intimately linked with that of Florence, did not keep his city in history by being a successful trader-a merchant prince-but by using well the position and the profits he had acquired. Even if his aim were purely personal, he knew how to achieve it. He knew, if a man would give his name to fame, it must be by no accident, but by his will; and Lorenzo did what every truly patriotic citizen will always do-he favored the pursuits which, by embellishing life, elevate and purify the mind. |