[The following versions are all taken from a careful study of Simonides by John Sterling. The essay appeared in the Westminster Review for 1838.]

FROM THE EPINICIAN ODE FOR SCOPAS›

A

MAN can hardly good in truth become,

With hands, feet, mind, all square, without a flaw.

Nor suits my thought the word of Pittacus,

Though he was sage, that to be virtuous

Is hard. This fits a god alone.

A man must needs to evil fall,
When by hopeless chance o'erthrown.
Whoso does well, him good we call,
And bad if bad his lot be known;
Those by the gods beloved are best of all.
Enough for me in sooth

Is one not wholly wrong,

Nor all perverse, but skilled in useful truth,—
A healthy soul and strong:
He has no blame from me,

Who love not blame;

For countless those who foolish be,
And fair are all things free from shame.
That therefore which can ne'er be found
I seek not, nor desire with empty thought,—
A man all blameless, on this wide-spread ground,
'Mid all who cull its fruitage vainly sought.
If found, ye too this prize of mine
Shall know: meanwhile all those I love
And praise, who do no wrong by will malign;
For to necessity must yield the gods above.

INSCRIPTION FOR AN ALTAR DEDICATED TO ARTEMIS

HE Sons of Athens here at sea subdued

THE

In fight all Asia's many-voiced brood;

And when the Medes had fallen, they built up this

Their trophy due to maiden Artemis.

EPITAPH FOR THOSE WHO FELL AT THERMOPYLÆ

F THOSE who at Thermopyla were slain,

Glorious the doom, and beautiful the lot:

Their tomb an altar; men from tears refrain

To honor them, and praise, but mourn them not.
Such sepulchre, nor drear decay

Nor all-destroying time shall waste; this right have they.
Within their grave the home-bred glory

Of Greece was laid; this witness gives
Leonidas the Spartan, in whose story
A wreath of famous virtue ever lives.

T

TIME IS FLEETING

NO ONE dread gulf all things in common tend:
There loftiest virtues, amplest riches, end.

Long are we dying; reckoned up from birth,
Few years, and evil those, are ours on earth.

Of men the strength is small, the hopes are vain,
And pain in life's brief space is heaped on pain;
And death inevitable hangs in air,

Of which alike the good and evil share.

'Mid mortal beings naught for ever stays:
And thus with beauteous love the Chian says,
"The race of man departs like forest leaves; "
Though seldom he who hears the truth receives.

For hope, not far from each, in every heart-
Of men full-grown, or those unripe- will start:
And still while blooms the lovely flower of youth,
The empty mind delights to dream untruth;
Expects nor age nor death, and bold and strong
Thinks not that sickness e'er can work it wrong.

Ah fools! deluded thus, untaught to scan

How swiftly pass the life and youth of man:

This knowing, thou, while still thou hast the power Indulge thy soul, and taste the blissful hour.

VIRTUE COY AND HARD TO WIN

ND 'tis said

AND

That Virtue, dwelling high on pathless rocks, A holy goddess, loves the holy place; And never there is seen by eyes of those Whom painful labor has not tried within, And borne them up to manhood's citadel.

A

EPITAPHS

POOR man, not a Croesus, here lies dead,
And small the sepulchre befitting me:
Gorgippus I, who knew no marriage-bed
Before I wedded pale Persephone.

THOU liest, O Clisthenes, in foreign earth,

Whom wandering o'er the Euxine destiny found: Thou couldst not reach thy happy place of birth, Nor seest the waves that gird thy Chios round.

YOUNG Gorgo dying to her mother said,
While clinging on her bosom wept the maid,
"Beside my father stay thou here, and bear
A happier daughter for thine age to care."

AH! SORE disease, to men why enviest thou

Their prime of years before they join the dead?—

His life from fair Timarchus snatching now,

Before the youth his maiden bride could wed.

JEAN CHARLES SIMONDE DE SISMONDI

(1773-1842)

BY HUMPHREY J. DESMOND

HEN the Edict of Nantes was revoked, the Simonde family, who were of the Huguenot faith, migrated from Dauphiné in France to Geneva, where they became citizens of the higher class. Here Jean Charles Leonard Simonde was born, May 9th, 1773. Noticing at the beginning of his literary career the similarity of his family arms with those of the noble Tuscan house of Sismondi, he adopted the name of Sismondi, - reverting, as he believed, to the original family name. Sismondi's intellectual tastes came from his mother, a woman of superior mind and energy. Though the family were in good circumstances, his father served for a time as the village pastor of Bossex. The family mansion was at Châtelaine near Geneva; and here and in the schools of the republican city the future historian received his education.

SISMONDI

The period of his young manhood fell in troublous times. His father, trusting in the financial skill of Necker, had lost all his investments with the collapse of the Swiss banker. Young Sismondi cheerfully accepted the irksome duties of clerk in a Lyons counting-house. Then the French Revolution drove him back to Geneva; and revolutionary ideas invading Switzerland, the family fled to England in 1793. But Sismondi's mother pined for the home and the society of happier days; and in the face of revolutionary dangers they returned to Geneva. Here a tragedy at Châtelaine, the family mansion,- the killing by Jacobin soldiers of a friend to whom they had given shelter.,-led them to seek securer refuge in Italy; and they sold Châtelaine and settled down on a small estate at Pescia, near Lucca. For two years Sismondi lived, labored, and studied on his pleasant Italian farm. Though a man of moderate views and a lover of liberty, he could not escape the turmoil of the times. On four occasions he was imprisoned as a suspect:

now by the French, who thought him an aristocrat, and now by the Italians, who thought him a Frenchman. In 1800 he returned to Geneva, which thereafter was his permanent home. Here he became the intimate friend of Madame de Staël, by whom he was greatly influenced; and he found himself at home in the circle of distinguished people surrounding this brilliant woman. With her he visited Italy in 1805, on the famous journey out of which she gave the world 'Corinne.' At Geneva he became Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce for the department of Leman; and always taking a keen interest in the political affairs of his native city, he served for many years in its Legislative Council. One of the episodes of his life was an interview with Napoleon after the latter's return from Elba in 1815. Sismondi espoused the cause of the Emperor, and published a series of articles in the Moniteur in support of the counter-revolution.

After Waterloo he visited his mother on the Tuscan farm which

she had continued to occupy. Here he met Miss Allen, an English lady, sister-in-law of Sir James Mackintosh. Subsequently, in April 1819, he married her; and this union, though made late in life (he was then forty-six), and not blessed with children, appears to have been a happy one. He made his home at Chênes, a country-house near Geneva. His mother, who had exercised a great influence over him through all his manhood years, died in 1821. He found solace now in the assiduous historical labors he had undertaken, and which absorbed him almost up to the day of his death, June 25th, 1842.

The collected writings of Sismondi comprise sixty volumes, and touch upon a wide variety of subjects. His earliest work, on the 'Agriculture of Tuscany' (Geneva, 1801), was the result of his experiences on his Pescia farm.

During his sojourn in England he acquired the English language; and the influence of his acquaintance with the writings of Adam Smith is apparent in a work on 'Commercial Wealth' which he published at Geneva in 1803. Later on he completely changed his economic opinions, as was evident in an article on 'Political Economy' which he contributed in 1817 to the Edinburgh Encyclopædia. Subsequently, in 1819, his 'New Views of Political Economy' was published in three volumes; and in 1836 he published his 'Studies in Social Science,' two volumes of which are entirely devoted to political economy.

It is however as a historian that Sismondi made his first and last

ing impression in literature. His History of the Italian Republics,' in sixteen volumes, appeared between the years 1803 and 1819; and that work being finished, he then turned to his still bulkier task, the "History of the French,' which occupied his time from 1818 to the year of his death in 1842, and of which twenty-nine volumes were