goras became soon after so distinguished; and which tend so forcibly to place the people of his country and of his times on so mean footing of civilization. Finding that his countrymen were incapable of appreciating real merit, he had immediate recourse to extraneous aid derived from his pretended communion with the gods. At Delos he conversed with the Priestess of Apollo, and from her pretended to have received his moral precepts. In a cave of Mount Ida, in the island of Crete, he spent the prescribed period of "three times nine days" under the direction of the priests of Cybele, and became initiated in the divine rites and sacred mysteries of the Goddess. Having travelled further on, and visited several of the States of Greece, with the institutions and customs of which he made himself acquainted, he returned home. Now, surrounded with all the importance and sanctity which his intimacy with various Divinities gave him, he established a school for the second time, and succeeded. His lectures were listened to with the deepest veneration, and crowds of disciples flocked around him to imbibe learning and wisdom from his lips. Thus we find that what real merit was unable to accomplish for our philosopher, was abundantly achieved by false pretension and vile imposture; and we also discover that intellectual ability and moral worth stood in need of the base devices of hypocritical sanctity, falsehood and quackery, to sustain them. In these our times, artifices of such description would stand little chance of success, at least for any great length of time; and the more civilized the community where such practices would be attempted, the less hope would exist of their reception. It is true that deceptions of almost
