tinople and the adjoining provinces was adjudged to the eldest; Constantius obtained the government of Thrace and the East; while Italy, Africa, and the western Illyriccum were resigned to Constans, the youngest of the royal youths. Three years after this arrangement of the sovereignty, the issue of a war between the senior and junior princes, transferred to the latter the dominions of his brother, and for the space of ten years, Constans remained the undisputed master of the largest portion of the Roman empire. At the end of that period a conspiracy of the guards deprived Constans of his diadem and life, and the vacant purple was assumed by Magnentius, their perfidious but intrepid chief. The new emperor was distinguished by many brilliant qualities; but the people, who detested the oppression, cruelty, and prodigality of the house of Constantine, were alienated from the cause of Magnentius by his severe and suspicious temper. Constantius refused to acknowledge for his colleague a sovereign whose superior genius might have overwhelmed the feebleness of the legitimate monarch. By arts, which wisdom and courage would equally despise, many brave chiefs were detached from the standard of the western emperor, and in the field of Mursa, the fatal defection of his Frank auxiliaries revealed the secret practices of the cowardly Constantius. The result of that great battle compelled Magnentius to transport beyond the Alps his hopes and throne. A second and desperate engagement near Mount Seleucus terminated in a second defeat. His spirit was still unsubdued, but his declining fortunes were undermined by his own imprudence, the intrigues of his adversary, and the treachery of his servants. With such allies, the son of Constantine prevailed against the emperor of the West; and Magnentius, disdaining to seek the clemency of a man whose hands were stained with the blood of his own kinsmen, withdrew from the unequal conflict by a voluntary death.

We may pass over the reign of Constantius-a reign of weakness and disgrace-to that of Julian, in which the splendour of the monarch was eclipsed by the greatness of the man. In his youth, that heroic prince had visited the schools of Athens, and conversed in free and social terms with the successors of Plato and Aristotle. An elegant writer of our own times has observed, that the study of the classics indisposes a youthful and vivacious understanding to the doctrines of the purest of religions; in the patron of

christianity, Julian beheld the assassin of his race; and the impressions of education were confirmed by those of duty and wounded affection. The nephew of Constantine was fascinated by the animating charms of a generous superstition, and his secret devotion to the ancient worship was inflamed by the partial light in which he contemplated the effects of the gospel. While he preserved his allegiance to Constantius, he evinced an outward respect towards the forms of the christian faith, but in the hour of prayer, his adoration was directed to Jove and Minerva, who cheered the slumbers of their votary with the frequent assurance of their divine protection. Abjuring their fidelity to a weak and effeminate tyrant, the legions of Gaul invested their victorious leader with the purple, and a declaration, in which he invoked, upon his cause, the favourable regards of the " IMMORTAL Gods," was the first public act of the Emperor Julian. His brief but brilliant reign was hailed with unfeigned rapture by the sages and philosophers of Athens; and the Pagans rejoiced that the Roman sceptre was again wielded by the hands of a Polytheist.

In the disgraceful reigns of Honorius and Arcadius, Greece was again invaded by the Goths, under Alaric. Zosimus, a Pagan historian, relates that the barbarians, in their approach to Athens, were awed by the form of Minerva, and the shade of Achilles, who took their station on the ramparts, and warned the rude invaders of the guilt and imprudence of assaulting a city protected by their supernatural auspices. In the times of independence and glory, such an interposition would have been rejected by the martial spirit of a free and enlightened people; while a spark of manly courage. warmed the bosom of Greece, her safety and honour depended on the virtue and valour of her sons: an age of heroism is adverse to the birth and propagation of miracles, and the celestial defence of Athens is a fiction disgraceful to the spirit and character of her citizens. Unresistedly traversing the plains of Macedonia and Thessaly, the Gothic king soon arrived at the narrow and renowned pass of Thermopyla; and the hasty retreat of the Roman general, whose duty it was to preserve Greece by the easy defence of those celebrated straits, proved how much less difficult it was for the subjects of Arcadius to praise than to imitate the examples of ancient valour. The Goths poured into Greece; Phocis and Boeotia experienced the first effects of their fury,

but Alaric, who was impatient to occupy Athens and her port, refused to interrupt his progress by the siege of Thebes. He condescended to accept a treaty presented to him by the Athenian magistrate, by which the city was secured from plunder, by the voluntary surrender of its wealth. But the Attic territory was ruined by the fierceness of barbarian hostility; and Athens herself, after the visit of the Goths, is said to have resembled the bleeding and empty skin of a slaughtered victim." Corinth, Argos, and Sparta, fell before the sword of Alaric; the build ings were destroyed, and the statues, the paintings, the vases, the monuments of prosperity, and elegance, and genius, were consumed in the fires which were kindled by design or accident. Slavery was the lot of the larger portion of the inhabitants, and the milder destiny of death was the reward of those who had the courage to meet and encounter their savage enemies.

The approach of Stilicho compelled Alaric to recall his scattered troops, and prepare to encounter an adversary long accustomed to vanquish the barbarians. By the skilful manœuvres of the mastergeneral of the West, the Gothic king was forced to retreat to mount Pholoe, in the territory of Elis, where he was surrounded by the arms of Stilicho. The siege of the camp was immediately formed; the river that supplied the Goths with water was turned into another channel; their provisions were quickly exhausted; and the line of circumvallation, with which they had been surrounded by the vigilance of the Romans, seemed to prevent their flight, and defy their despair. But the confidence of Stilicho robbed him of a prize apparently in his grasp; the escape of Alaric and his host seemed impossible, and the victorious general willingly accepted the invitations of the grateful Greeks, to honour with his presence, the games and festivals of the rescued province. His departure was the signal to the camp, of license and insubordination. Abandoning their lines, his soldiers roamed over the open country, and their riotous behaviour convinced the inhabitants that the visits of their allies were not less oppressive than the inroads of their enemies. Alaric seized the favourable moment-surprised the indolence of the besieger-broke through their entrenchments-conducted his troops to Rhium, a march of thirty miles in a dangerous and difficult country; transported to the opposite coast his army, his captives, and his spoils; and the news that the barba

rians were in complete possession of Epirus, was the first intelligence received by the Roman general of the masterly retreat of the Gothic king.

In the reign of Leo the shores of Greece were ravaged by the fleets of Genseric; but Procopius, who relates this fact, does not inform us of the fate experienced by Athens or Sparta in the Vandalic invasion. Subsequently, the walls of Athens were repaired by Justinian, and the Isthmus of Corinth was fortified by the same monarch with a chain of strong and lofty towers. Such works seem worthy of a great and liberal monarch, and while they serve to prove the weakness of the Roman empire, those structures, the defence of the people against the incursions of the barbarians, reflect a purer lustre on the name of Justinian, than the useless and costly edifices with which he exhausted the riches of the state.

From the Persian wars, to the commencement of the sixth century, philosophy and the arts had fixed their favourite abode at Athens. In the first and brightest age of Athenian eloquence and learning, the distinguished individuals who dispensed instruction to the youth of the city, neither received nor required from their pupils any pecuniary reward: in a more advanced period, the professors, no longer solely consisting of the wealthy and noble citizens, expected from each of their disciples a sum proportionate to their reputed knowledge and wisdom: and if Isocrates, by his public lections, realized an annual income of three thousand pounds sterling, the modern teachers of youth may indignantly compare with the parsimony of their own age, the liberality of ancient times.

Under the Roman emperors, the business of education was entrusted to persons who received from the exchequer salaries, which increased or diminished, according to the character of the reigning prince. The baleful operation of a despotic government upon literature, and the humiliating state to which it reduces the human mind, is strikingly displayed by the contrast afforded by the works of Sozomen, Agathias, and the compositions of Zenophon,Thucydides, and Aristotle. Yet the scholastic establishments of Athens were still the most favoured shrines of learning; and the tradition of their ancient glories excited the hereditary veneration of the people. They were suppressed by the same monarch whose avarice suffered the consulship to expire; and the countrymen of Brutus and Plato, who had so long and tamely endured the

scourge of despotism, pronounced upon the name of Justinian the curse of freedom and genius.

In the ninth century, the Peloponesus was overrun by the Sclavonians; successful at first, they were subsequently compelled to take refuge in the southern extremity of the Peninsula; they established themselves in the mountains of Laconia, the defiles of his gates are impassable by regular troops, and the wild fiberty of the Mainotes, their descendants, forms an animated oasis in the surrounding desert of slavery. Nearly three hundred years after the Sclavonic invasion Greece was attacked by Robert of Sicily, who transported to Palermo a considerable number of the manufacturers of silks and fine linen.

This was in the period of the Crusades; the Greek empire was daily declining in extent and vigour: the attention of the emperors was confined to their wars with the Moslems; and Greece, unable to protect herself, floated from usurper to usurp er, till the stronger arms of the Catalans imposed a more permanent dynasty. Of a principality which surpassed the kingdom of Agamemnon, and included Bootia, Argolis, Attica, Corinth, Delphi, and part of Thessaly, Athens, fortified and embellished with new buildings, was constituted the capital; the settlement of a martial people was respected by the kings of Europe; and Greece began to respire under the softened sway of the western strangers, when the fall of Constantinople transferred the sceptre of the Cæsars to the hands of a Turkish barbarian; the torrent of invasion rolled with irresistible force over the plains and cities of Greece, and the Peloponesus, the Catalan dynasty was swept away, and in the middle of the 15th century, the empire of Mahomet the Second was acknowledged in regions once possessed and illumined by the noblest, bravest, and brightest of

mankind.

MESSRS. EDItors,

The following testimony on the subject of the power of fascination in serpents, contained in a letter from a medical friend, may not be uninteresting to

your readers.

t

Yours, &e.

S. AKERLY.

trine of fascination yet; and I am glad to find myself strengthened in the faith by Mr. Pintard's late report of some cases to the historical society of your city. I inferred from his review of Wilson's ornithology, that he supposed it was all an illusion; I am persuaded of the fact, and that it is optical. Now, sir, I can prove that the eye of a snake has the power of interesting a human being, by reflecting a succession of brilliant colours. Think of this, and recollect the dog's and cat's eye. Mrs. Chapman, of unquestioned veracity and good understanding, informed me a few days past, that she once witnessed this process between a mocason snake and a hen; she was called to the door by the acclamation, or squalling of the hen, and saw her standing about two feet from the head of the serpent, with the feathers of her whole body projecting forward, her neck elongated, and both creatures were in a state of fixed and exerted attention. She states that she was so much diverted with the appearance, that she ran and called one of her neighbours, and that they both deliberately witnessed the fact for some time; that she then caught the snake by its tail, and threw it to a distance, which broke the spell.

Whenever this subject has been introduced by me to the country inhabitants here, and I may say elsewhere, I think I can safely say that almost one half of the community are able to relate cases within their personal knowledge, and few seem to doubt the fact. Can all this be popular illusion? I may, however, be too sanguine as to the generality of the impression.

Please accept the assurances of regard and esteem with which I am yours, MALACHI FROST.

DR. AKERLY.

Oct. 17, 1817.

DEAR SIR, Tell our worthy friend, Mrs. C's Delphic oracle, that I do not give up the doc

for several years past, in the conversation even of polite people, frequently in writing, and occasionally in print, to perform the duties of another family, of which

form and consistence of a Science. But this is not all. It is to him that we are indebted for the introduction into medicine of the inductive method of reasoning; a discovery, the revival of which, twenty centuries after, gave to the name of lord Bacon, imperishable celebrity. It is this then that constitutes the true value of the writings of Hippocrates; that they contain the profoundest observations on the various subjects of which he treats, drawn from nature herself, at the same time that they afford us a model of the only system of reasoning that can lead to correct conclusions in any science.

The evils arising out of a departure from the principles of Hippocrates, were signally illustrated after the death of this great luminary. Instead of pursuing the path which he had traced with masterly wisdom, his successors became infected by the errors of the Aristotelian doctrines, which then began to be generally diffused. Galen, although a man of original genius and extensive erudition, became enamoured of this philosophy, and was the principal agent in applying its principles to medical investigations. result was, as might have been expected, that medicine became disgraced and obscured by the syllogisms and quibbles which constituted the boast of the Aristotelian philosophy, and instead of presenting a well digested system of truth, it exhibited a mass of the most crude and absurd speculations.

The

At the commencement of the sixteenth century a new impulse was given to the human mind, and a complete revolution effected in the empire of Science by the revival of the inductive method of reasoning. Philosophy and medicine alike felt its influence, and both commenced a brilliant career of discovery and improvement. Medicine was peculiarly favoured at this period, in enjoying the services of two of the greatest physicians that ever adorned the world-Sydenham and Boerhaave-who, by the intuitive greatness of their minds, and the extent of their learning, were eminently successful in restoring the dominion of sense and truth. Both saw at once the preeminent excellence of the writings and doctrines of Hippocrates, and accordingly devoted all their energies to restore him to the throne of the medical world.

Such is a brief sketch of the prominent revolutions that have occurred in medicine; and they serve to show us that whenever the principles of Hippocrates have predominated, the science has continued to advance and improve-and Voz. n-No. vr.

52

that in every age it has deteriorated in proportion as they were neglected or despised. It was therefore with no ordinary feelings of pleasure that we saw announced an American translation of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates. We were willing to hail it as the indication of a growing taste for the writings of the ancients, and especially of that great man, who by the unanimous consent of ages has received the title of the Father of Physic. Besides, published under the immediate patronage and direction of a respectable association of medical gentlemen in this city, not a single doubt was entertained of its being a faithful as well as elegant translation of the original. Such were the expectations with which we proceeded to examine it, and we cannot conceal the mortification which we experienced upon finding it in almost every respect the reverse of what had been anticipated. In fact, we never have seen a work of like pretension, even of much larger dimensions, which, from bẹginning to end, contains so many defects and errors as this version. To expose them all, it would require a comment upon almost every sentence, and to correct them, it would be necessary to translate the whole anew. Neither of these tasks can be expected from us. But we consider it a duty which we owe to the medical student, for whose use the translator states it to be intended,* to point out some of the numerous mistakes with which it abounds. Before we proceed to do this, we may just remark that it would have been much more creditable to Dr. Marks, if he had given to the public a translation from the Greek, instead of an interpretation of a Latin version, which, however correct it may be, can never afford any thing more than an imperfect conception of the original. That this was not done is the more to be wondered at, because the Doctor's design confessedly was to give a more correct, literal and elegant translation, than any which had yet appeared:-now we are at a loss to conceive how this could ever be accomplished, by taking a Latin version. We shall not however take any advantage of the learned Doctor, by comparing his translation with the original, but shall endeavour to show that he has as widely mistaken the meaning of the Latin version, as he has the primitive Greek. In section 1. Aphorism 3, is the following sentence; Horum igitur causâ, bonum

* Vide Title-page. + Vide Preface.