safety of the laws. Solon, at length, was induced to believe that his
ordinances required the sanction and repose of time, and that absence
--that moral death--would not only free himself from importunity, but
his infant institutions from the frivolous disposition of change. In
his earlier years he had repaired, by commercial pursuits, estates
that had been empoverished by the munificence of his father; and,
still cultivating the same resources, he made pretence of his vocation
to solicit permission for ail absence of ten years. He is said to
have obtained a solemn promise from the people to alter none of his
institutions during that period [223]; and thus he departed from the
city (probably B. C. 575), of whose future glories he had laid the
solid foundation. Attracted by his philosophical habits to that
solemn land, beneath whose mysteries the credulous Greeks revered the
secrets of existent wisdom, the still adventurous Athenian repaired to
the cities of the Nile, and fed the passion of speculative inquiry
from the learning of the Egyptian priests. Departing thence to
Cyprus, he assisted, as his own verses assure us, in the planning of a
new city, founded by one of the kings of that beautiful island, and
afterward invited to the court of Croesus (associated with his father
Alyattes, then living), he imparted to the Lydian, amid the splendours
of state and the adulation of slaves, that well-known lesson on the
uncertainty of human grandeur, which, according to Herodotus, Croesus
so seasonably remembered at the funeral pile. [224]

II. However prudent had appeared to Solon his absence from Athens, it
is to be lamented that he did not rather brave the hazards from which
his genius might have saved the state, than incur those which the very
removal of a master-spirit was certain to occasion. We may bind men
not to change laws, but we cannot bind the spirit and the opinion,
from which laws alone derive cogency or value. We may guard against