Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE II. THE LATER LITERATURE OF THE GREEKS THEIR SOPHISTS AND PIZILO. SOPHERS THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. In my first lecture I endeavoured, by a rapid sketch, to recall to your recollection the brilliant spectacle of Greek genius, as it flourished for a few years in all its power and pre-eminence. I must now set before you the darker side of the picture, and proceed to contemplate the effects of thai principle of decay, whose operation is destined to follow so closely and so certainly, after every period distinguished by the greatness of its inventions, and the beauties of its productions?and which here also, when manners had become impure, and governments corrupted, by means of a false and deceitful sophistry, succeeded in accomplishing the utter ruin of art and genius among the Greeks. The first great writer who sets before us a view of this decline and corruption of Greece, as manifested in the incidents of her political history, is Thucydides. By the loftiness of his style, and the depth of his reflections, this author has secured to himself a place among the very first writers of Greece. His history is the masterpiece of energetic representation, ?such was the judgment of all antiquity concerning it, and on that account it was commonly said to be, not indeed a poetical, but a historical drama. And, truly, well might the history of that great civil war, which occasioned the decline, and ended in the ruin of his once flourishing', happy, and powerful country, appear to the historian himself as possessing all the life and interest of a fearful tragedy. The events which he has recorded are indeed invested, to our eyes, with an interest yet more mighty: for to them we can now trace consequences which in his time could not have been apparent?in them we perceive tli-e cause..