one generation to another. They are like the corner figures on some of the old Grecian temples, with half the face on one side and half on the other, so that the statues appear from each side as if cleft down the centre into two separate figures, although at a proper distance and angle their unity is fully seen. Such bisections in human opinion are very easily made, but not so easily undone. The labour of one generation is sometimes insufficient to overcome the shallow, incomplete, and, if the term be pardonable, profilar method of looking at any difficulty or complete question by a preceding one. Indeed, the history of these cleft problems forms more than one half of the history of the revolutions in human opinion. Culture and trade are a pair of these fallacious incompatibles. The conception of their contrariety sprung up no one can tell when, and has developed itself no one precisely knows how. No single mind has made it, but it has been one of those tragic ideas which, like the germs of the Grecian myths, from once being true, for evermore tend to become false, although exercising in their progress a marvellous fascination over imaginative minds, and bewildering many into extravagant vagaries in the attempt to show their veracity, sublimity, and naturalness. The truth of one age is frequently the fallacy of the next, and the aphorism holds true in the present instance. Culture was once only possible for a class or a caste, but is so no longer, and in its ceasing to be so, the groundwork of the conception slips away like a shelf of sand, and nothing but the reverence naturally felt for the ideas and associations of the past could now consecrate the antithesis for an hour. It is not enough, however, to have shattered the groundwork by any reference, overt or implied, to the levelling tendencies of the printing press, the free library, or the mechanics' institute. There is still other solid battle to be had, for fallacies fight prone, and are longer lived than cats or crows. It will be admitted, historically, that learning has ceased to be the especial privilege or prerogative of a caste, except as the learned spontaneously divide off into one by the force of association and from the necessities of social and intellectual intercourse; but it has been and will be maintained, that the mere removal of all that constituted the clerkly order formerly, does not remove all that makes the larger one of trade at the present time, and that the elements of the latter present a much more difficult obstacle now the former is broken up, than the former, when intact, ever presented to the latter. In this form the fallacy seems potent and indestructible, but a closer examination of it reveals that it is only an apparent change change of position, and that a supposed incompatibility, unmodified by time, is what is seriously maintained. This incompatibility, we hope to show, does not exist. This has, first of all, to be shown historically. The circumstances which walled up culture from trade and trade from culture were accidental and not essential. It was neither in learning nor in trade that there lay any strong original germ of disunity, but in those circumstances which were peculiar to each in what we are pleased to term the dark ages of European literary history. The further we penetrate through this modern ignarok into preceding ages and nations, the more clearly does this appear. Manuscripts and books made learning expensive and hard to be secured, but before their accumulation and importance, there were the glorious ages of oral teaching and colossal memories. Priests, were the earliest teachers, and from their position more learned than others could be, but only in a special way. In the patriarchal ages, it was the shepherd who was wisest in the lore of the stars and most learned in the mysteries of the herbs. He was also a musician, a poet, and a philosopher. In the earlier centuries of city life, the craftsmen were wiser than the idlers, if there were any; and even when an ecclesiastical polity like the Hebrews' was fully organized, laymen were not rendered ignorant by it of all that lay without the boundaries of a religious teaching and priesthood. The early traders were travellers, sharp men with quick faculties, ready wit, and marvellous penetration. They worked harder than we moderns are generally inclined to give them credit for having worked, and perhaps later, and there was so much cunning of hand, brain, and eye required to cope with the rude forces of nature, that one can even imagine them to have been more manly and intelligent than more secluded and leaf-learned scholars. Nor were they merely practical men who knew good harbours, markets, and grain-fields, but speculators also, bringing home fresh information, wonderful visions of other territories and races, and mingling fact and inference together in such a curious manner as to communicate vigorous mental impulsions wherever they were met and questioned. It is worth something to have seen and talked with a great traveller now, but nothing to what it must have been then. The Phoenicians were the greatest traders, navigators, and practical men we meet with in the history of the ancient world, and they were by no means destitute of culture. The invention of letters and arithmetic is generally ascribed to them by competent authorities, and they made considerable progress in mechanical and astronomical knowledge. Shipbuilding, if not invented, was, at any rate, vastly improved by them, and it is extremely probable that only the obscurities of their language and the vicissitudes of their national existence have prevented the discovery of important literary remains. The Greeks, next in importance, afford us the most original example that can be selected to illustrate our subject. No one would venture to deny the magnitude of the debt the world owes them for their poetry, history, and philosophy; but it is held convenient to forget that they also were traders in the most eminent degree, and known as such through the whole of the then civilized world. Culture and trade were certainly not antagonistic then, however much they have seemed to become so since. Phemius, the schoolmaster of Homer, was paid for his music and grammar by handfuls of wool; the fame of his pupil was carried into other countries by the traders who came for commerce or shelter to the roads of Smyrna; and Homer himself, with a fortune gained in the same way as his master's, was able to pay for his many years' wanderings in the vessel of Mentes, whereby the volume of the universe was opened to him, and the idea of his immortal epic gradually grew from its floating formlessness into distinctness and life. It was trade that made Athens famous before her learning made her immortal. Trade thus preceded her greatness, helped as much as anything to make it, and was all along contemporaneous with it, until, as the healthy interplay was lost, learning became at once the source of her magnificence and a great cause of her decline. Industry was, as it is still, according to Miss Bremer, one of the national virtues. Idleness, that is tradelessness, was punished by the laws of Solon, and, indeed, presented such a singular contrast to the Spartan notion, which held it to be a proof of rank, that a disciple of Lycurgus being in Athens when there was a trial for this offence, said, cynically, they punished the man for being a gentleman. According to a second Solonian law, whoever reproached either a man or a woman with carrying on business in the Agora (being, perhaps, as we should say, a huckster) was liable to a penalty. A third law decreed that whoever had not been instructed in a trade, or caused to be so instructed by his parents, was not under the necessity, otherwise rigorously enforced, of supporting them in their declining life. Commerce and culture went hand in hand. "Their early philosophers,' says Bulwer Lytton, 'not being exempted from other employments, were not mere dreamers of the closet and the cell. They were active, practical, stirring men of the world. They were politicians and moralists as well as philosophers. The practical pervaded the ideal, and was, in fact, the the salt that preserved it from decay. Thus legislation and science sprang simultaneously into life, and the age of Solon is the age of Thales.'* It was even so in later times, and with other men. Eschylus, the first tragedian of the old world, was a private soldier, and Socrates, its noblest teacher, was a statuary. All the youth and population of Athens blended trade and poetry, philosophy and science, in a manner which may seem inexplicable to us, but is none the less true on that account. And we would refer all those profound ideologists, home and foreign, who are always raving against literary, artistic, and scientific dilletantism, to the most flourishing periods of Athenian history when it was brought to its perfection; when the man who built your house, made your clothes, or sold you various articles of domestic use, was as likely to know as much about the poetry of Homer as yourself, and could, perhaps, thanks to the Theoricon, criticise a theatrical performance better, and possibly initiate your clever son into some of the recondite mysteries of the chorus and the choragy. It was only as the one grew into excessive disproportion to the other that the youth of Greece and the men of Greece became mere babblers and newsmongers. In the end, as Bulwer Lytton says, 'Genius itself became a disease, and poetry assisted towards the euthanasia of the Athenians;'+ but only as the latter broke away from common life, and the former, from having lost the checks and counterbalances of trade, leaped out into a feeble, rootless, and feverish existence. The Jews of the same era as the more flourishing Grecian one, had a proverb to the effect that a man who did not teach his son a trade taught him to steal, and a regulation based upon it as a fact which was beyond all question. There is, moreover, a singular significance in the circumstance that during his residence in Corinth, the idlest and most puerile city of the time, the great Apostle of the Gentiles, who showed himself able to cope in learning with the sects of Greece, fell back upon his original occupation of tentmaking whilst he was still discoursing, or reasoning as we have it in old version, in the synagogue every Sabbath, and persuading both Jews and Greeks. It also deserves mention here, as one of the most cheering aspects in the present stage and future progress of modern Greece, that trade and culture exhibit somewhat of their ancient and happy interpenetration. The Greeks work, as Miss Bremer says, 'from a natural impulse for activity.' Even the glory of Athens is modestly reappearing. 'Athens *Athens; its Rise and Fall.' Vol. i., pp. 299, 300. 1837. is now,' the same writer observes, by means of her school and academies, becoming, as formerly, an attractive centralpoint for all Greeks, even beyond free Greece. Poor boys of good families will often take service as apprentices, or even as servants, in Athens, merely to have the opportunity of attending its schools at the same time.'* 6 Omitting the Romans as holding commerce in ill-disguised contempt, and as either carrying forward or confusing what the Greeks did for humanity, in showing that culture and trade, by their reaction on each other, completed the individual and national life, we come to the Arabians, whose position, in some respects unique, continually reminds us of that of Greece, although it is by no means so well known. It is well, as we have done before, to take the testimony of one who was certainly guiltless of endeavouring to make out a case or an argument. Masters of a great portion of the East,' says M. Sismondi, of the country of the Magi and the Chaldeans, whence the first light of knowledge had shone over the world; of the fertile Egypt, the store-house of human science; of Asia Minor, that smiling land where poetry, and taste, and the fine arts had their birth; and of the burning plains of Africa, the country of impetuous eloquence and subtle intellect; the Arabians seemed to unite in themselves the advantages of all the nations which they had thus subjugated. * * With all the delights which human industry quickened by boundless riches can procure, with all that can flatter the senses and attach the heart to life, the Arabians attempted to mingle the pleasures of the intellect, the cultivation of the arts and sciences, and all that is most excellent in human knowledge the gratification of the mind and the imagination. In this new career their conquests were not less rapid than they had been in the field, nor was the empire which they founded less extended. With a celerity equally surprising, it rose to as gigantic a height. It rested, however, on a foundation no less insecure, and it was quite as transitory in its duration.'+ It is also to be remembered here, as effects of this double activity, that many learned authorities have claimed for the Arabs the invention and extensive manufacture of paper, the discovery of gunpowder, the invention of the mariner's compass, and a system of numerals that has completely changed the character of the mathematical and astronomical sciences. The number of Arabic inventions, Greece and the Greeks.' Vol. i., p. 11. 'Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe.' Vol. i. (Bohn), pp. 48, 49. of |