Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/79

Rh Ptolemy Lagus, Mr. Kingsley knew how to interest thenceforth in the human actuality of that Egyptian despot, by talking to them of Soter's face and practical genius:—a face of the loftiest and most Jove-like type of Greek beauty; not without a "possibility" about it, as about most old Greek faces, of boundless cunning, and a lofty irony and Goethe-like contemptuousness about the mouth;—and the genius of one, who saw clearly what was needed in those strange times, and went straight to the thing which he saw. "But Ptolemy's political genius went beyond such merely material and Warburtonian care for the conservation of body and goods of his subjects," as he displayed in his system of administration so sagaciously adapted to the peculiar caste-society, and the religious prejudices of Egypt—substituting law and order, and reviving commerce, for the wretched misrule and slavery of the conquering Persian dynasty. Ptolemy provided for the due sustenance, or rather renewal and development, of the religious sentiment—introducing new gods, that were soon to become the fashionable deities of the Roman world; and he provided for the intellectual wants of his country, gathering round him the wise men of Greece, in the belief that mind had been all along the secret of Greek power, when brought into collision with barbarian brute force, and intent on fortifying his throne, and glorifying his realm, with the splendid establishment of a true aristocracy of intellect. "So he begins. Aristotle is gone: but in Aristotle's place Philetas the sweet singer of Cos, and Zenodotus the grammarian of Ephesus, shall educate his favourite son, and he will have a literary court, and a literary age. Demetrius Phalereus, the Admirable Crichton of his time, the last of Attic orators, statesman, philosopher, poet, warrior, and each of them in the most graceful, insinuating, courtly way, migrates to Alexandria, after having bad the three hundred and sixty statues, which the Athenians had too hastily erected to his honour, as hastily pulled down again." A library is instituted, and a Mouseion, or Temple of the Muses, is right royally endowed, and in all things the presiding genius of Aristotle is to be worshipped.

A Quarterly Reviewer—Mr. Sewell, we "guess"—has drawn a parallel, which he considers close and curious, between the Alexandrian Court of this epoch and the Court of Prussia under Frederic II. Both Ptolemy and Old Fritz were, he remarks, military princes; both estranged from