You see that I have carefully abstained in what I have said from making invidious comparisons between Oxford and the sister university; nor have I spoken of the universities of the north, with which I am but little acquainted, but which I should imagine to hold an intermediate place between the English and the German system. On the whole, it appears to me that the function of education, comprising theology, philosophy, science, and belles lettres, is to impress upon the mind images of Beauty and Truth, and to enable the mind which has received these impressions to act in like manner through life. If education cannot make a man’s actions truthful and beautiful, he remains to the end a savage, or rather, I should say, the scion of a vulgar civilisation, even if he knows all the poets by heart, or can discourse with the acumen of an Erasmus or a Crichton. That Beauty and Truth are one and the same in that perfect sunlight which our eyes cannot see, and from which all lesser lights proceed, few will deny. But here on earth they may be considered as in a measure apart, and as exciting, each for good in its way, separate influences on the moral life of man. Men incline to one or the other light according to their natural bent or the bias of their education. It seems to me that if a distinction is to be made between our universities, the tendency of Oxford studies is to look at Truth through Beauty, while that of Cambridge studies is to look at Beauty through Truth. It is therefore that I have laid so much stress on the capabilities of Oxford as a school of Art. I confess that I am anxious to gain a closer insight into the nature and life of your German universities. Probably they are with us but imperfectly and unfairly understood. If it be true that the Bursch preserves, under his outwardly rough exterior, any remains of that antique chivalry of thought which is so fast dying out in this country, he preserves a treasure which is of inestimable value, and which ought to be secured to him at any price. At the same time, I think you will allow that our system has certain superiorities of its own, which deserve at least careful study, if not active imitation. We, at least, are successful in affixing an ineffaceable stamp to the character of the great majority, while you seem only to succeed in permanently impressing the nature of a few, and impressing only a limited part of that nature. May you live and lecture many years, Herr Professor; and may your brimming Rhine flow on for ever, free and German as of yore; and may the vine-blight spare the clusters that yield that molten gold which, unlike the morbid production of Australia and California, brings nothing but innocent joy to the soul of your Fatherland. Vale! and believe me,
Your loving friend,
Tlepolemus.
THE ANCIENT COINS OF GREECE.[[5]]
Father Hardouin, a learned French Jesuit of the seventeenth century, lived to the venerable age of eighty-three years, and died, as he had lived, in the full persuasion that the only authentic monuments which we possess of classical antiquity are comprised in coins, a few Greek and Latin inscriptions, with the Georgics of Virgil, the Satires and Epistles of Horace, and the writings of Pliny and Cicero. Out of these materials he held that certain ingenious “falsarii,” in the thirteenth century, whom he styles the “architects of annals,” compiled those multifarious productions of poetry and prose which we have been accustomed to regard as a most precious legacy bequeathed to us by ancient Greece and Rome. This fact we mention to our readers, not with any view to shake them in their old and orthodox convictions upon the subject, but simply to show them what a vast amount of matériel this learned Father had discovered in the study of ancient numismatics. A coin indubitably presents, within the smallest compass, the fullest view of ancient times that we possess. Though silent, it is always waiting to communicate knowledge; though small, it is always ready to teach great things. “Inest sua gratia parvis,” is the motto of the Cabinet. It would be difficult, indeed, to say what department of ancient lore—whether in mythology, or economics, or politics, or chronology, or geography—may not be elucidated and explained by the study of coins. A series of coins are, in fact, a series of illustrative engravings, of contemporaneous date with the literary works of Greece and Rome, and of the noblest school of art. We may realise much of what we read by turning to designs executed by artists who lived in those very countries, and at that very period. The lordly oak is uprooted by the tempest, the lowly willow is spared. While the temples of the gods and their concomitant myriads of statues have been reduced to unintelligible fragments, those coins which formed the medium of ordinary traffic—the tetrobolus, the soldier’s daily pay—the drachma, that of the mariner—and the tetradrachmon, which, by virtue of the archaic visage of Pallas, with her rigid smile, passed current among merchants of every state and province,—these have remained safe in their hiding-places under the soil, and may be found in nearly the same condition in which the Greeks handled them more than two thousand years ago.
Cities have been built with the express intent of perpetuating the glory of a founder, and after all the founder’s intent is achieved, not by the enduring testimony of edifices and streets of marble, but by that of its coins. Thus the Emperor Augustus thought to immortalise the fame of his victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, by erecting a city on the shores of the Ambracian Gulf, which city he called by the appropriate name of Nicopolis. It was supplied with the usual complement of public edifices; a gymnasium and a stadium were built in a sacred grove in the suburb; another sanctuary stood on the sacred hill of Apollo, which surmounted the city. It was admitted by the Emperor’s desire into the Amphictyonic council, and was made a Roman colony. Sacred games were instituted, accompanied by a sacrifice and a festival, equal in dignity to the four great games of Greece. Coins of the city were struck: and in commemoration of a favourable omen which had presented itself on the morning of the day of battle, a group of bronze statues, representing an ass and his driver,[[6]] were placed, among other dedications, in the temple of Apollo Actius.
Such were the forward-looking expedients of the conqueror to perpetuate his fame;—and what has been the result?
“Look, where the second Cæsar’s trophies rose,
Now,—like the hands that made them, withering.”[[7]]
A long succession of ruined edifices, in one part converted into a sheep-pen. In fact, before four centuries had elapsed, a contemporaneous author tells us that the town of Nicopolis had fallen into lamentable decay. The palaces of the nobles were rent; the aqueducts crushed; everything was smothered with dust and rubbish.—The bronze statues of Eutyches and Nicon, after being removed first to Rome, and then to adorn the Hippodrome at Constantinople, were at last melted down by the barbarous Latins on their capture of the city in A.D. 1204. All is gone of Nicopolis except the coins. The coins may be seen in the cabinet of the numismatist, by time as yet uninjured; and we find upon one of them the head of Augustus himself with the description of Κτίστης or founder, and the appropriate figure of Victory holding a garland in her extended right hand.