themselves high enough,) but by the general consent of the rest of the
world. Do not the most improved and civilized of modern states still take
them as their instructors and guides in every species of literature--in
philosophy, history, oratory, poetry, architecture, and sculpture? And
those too, who have attained superiority over the world, in arms, yield
a voluntary subjection to the Greeks in the arts. The cause of their
former excellence and their present inferiority, is no doubt to be found
in their former freedom and their present slavery, and in the loss of
that emulation which seems indispensable to natural greatness."

"Nay," replied he, "I am very far from denying the influence of moral
causes on national character. The history of every country affords
abundant evidence of it. I mean only to say, that though it does much,
it does not do every thing. It seems more reasonable to impute the changes
in national character to the mutable habits and institutions of man,
than to nature, which is always the same. But if we look a little nearer,
we may perhaps perceive, that amidst all those mutations in the character
of nations, there are still some features that are common to the same
people at all times, and which it would therefore be reasonable to
impute to the great unvarying laws of nature. Thus it requires no
extraordinary acuteness of observation, no strained hypothesis, to
perceive a close resemblance between the Germans or the Britons of
antiquity and their modern descendants, after the lapse of eighteen
centuries, and an entire revolution in government, religion, language,
and laws. And travellers still perceive among the inhabitants of modern
Greece, deteriorated and debased as they are by political servitude,
many of those qualities which distinguished their predecessors: the
same natural acuteness--the same sensibility to pleasure--the same
pliancy of mind and elasticity of body--the same aptitude for the arts
of imitation--and the same striking physiognomy. That bright, serene