Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/80

68 their national church; both drew to their capital a crowd of literary foreigners from a country far advanced in intellect and infidelity. "Voltaire, D'Alembert, Helvetius, Maupertuis, and Wolf, were modern copies of Theodorus, Hegesias, Menedemus, Straton, and Colotes." And we are reminded of the same literary rivalry between the king and the scholars; the same petits soupers; the same envyings and quarrellings; the same comprehensive liberality in matters of religion. As Frederic patronised Wolf with one hand, and the Jesuits with the other, making his own infidelity a middle term, so did Ptolemy pay his orisons to Isis and Venus, under the intermediate abstraction of Serapis. And to the Academy, founded by Frederic, corresponds the Museum founded by Ptolemy. Great and sedulous was his Egyptian majesty's care for, and interest in, the well-being and working of his collegiate and educational institutes. Mr. Kingsley's verdict on their working is, that in Physics the product was next to nothing, in Art nothing, and in Metaphysics less than nothing. Among the literary and scientific Notables of Alexandria, he devotes a few words to Euclid, whose genius he considers a complete type of the general tendency of the Greek mind, deductive, rather than inductive; of unrivalled subtlety in obtaining results from principles, and results again from them, ad infinitum, but deficient in the sturdy moral patience of the Baconian ideal and the British actual, necessary to a due examination of facts;—to Eratosthenes, immortalised by the one mite he contributed to science, and not by the profuse dissertations he indited on Ethics, Chronology, and Dramatic Criticism;—to Hipparchus, in whom "astronomic science seemed to awaken suddenly to a true inductive method, and after him to fall into its old slumber for 300 years," a method which enabled him and his successors to calculate and predict the changes of the heavens, in spite of their clumsy instruments, with almost as much accuracy as we do now;—to Callimachus, that encyclopædic favourite of Philadelphus, and founder of Alexandrian literature;—and to the Lycophrons and Philetases, bardlings and poetasters, some of whom, however, were the models of Propertius and Ovid and Rome's most ambitious lyrists. One natural strain"—we quote one of the lecturer's pleasantest bits of criticism—"is heard amid all this artificial jingle; that of Theocritus. It is not altogether Alexandrian. Its sweetest notes were learnt amid the chesnut groves and orchards, the volcanic glens and sunny pastures of Sicily: but the intercourse between the courts of Hiero and the Ptolemies seems to have been continual. … The real value of Theocritus lies in his powers of landscape-painting. One can well conceive the delight which his idyls must have given to those dusty Alexandrians, pent up for ever between sea and sand-hills, drinking the tank-water, and never hearing the sound of a running stream,—whirling, too, for ever, in all the bustle and intrigue of a commercial and literary city. Refreshing indeed, it must have been to them to hear of those simple joys and simple sorrows of the Sicilian shepherd, in a land where toil was but exercise, and mere existence was enjoyment. To them, and to us also. I believe Theocritus