useful in diffusing a knowledge of antiquities; but, without censuring the
error of the dress in which it is exhibited, it betrays more good-will to
do justice to the Greeks, than ability to enter deeply into their spirit.
In this respect the work is in many points superficial, and even
disfigured with modern views. It is not the travels of a young Scythian,
but of an old Parisian.

The superior excellence of the Greeks in the fine arts, as I have already
said, is the most universally acknowledged. An enthusiasm for their
literature is in a great measure confined to the English and Germans,
among whom also the study of the Grecian language is the most zealously
prosecuted. It is singular that the French critics of all others, they who
so zealously acknowledge the remains of the theoretical writings of the
ancients on literature, Aristotle, Horace, Quinctilian, &c., as infallible
standards of taste, should yet distinguish themselves by the contemptuous
and irreverent manner in which they speak of their poetical compositions,
and especially of their dramatic literature. Look, for instance, into a
book very much read,--La Harpe's _Cours de Litterature_. It contains
many acute remarks on the French Theatre; but whoever should think to
learn the Greeks from it must be very ill advised: the author was as
deficient in a solid knowledge of their literature as in a sense for
appreciating it. Voltaire, also, often speaks most unwarrantably on this
subject: he elevates or lowers them at the suggestions of his caprice, or
according to the purpose of the moment to produce such or such an effect
on the mind of the public. I remember too to have read a cursory critique
of Metastasio's on the Greek tragedians, in which he treats them like so
many school-boys. Racine is much more modest, and cannot be in any manner
charged with this sort of presumption: even because he was the best
acquainted of all of them with the Greeks. It is easy to see into the
motives of these hostile critics. Their national and personal vanity has