next day, at the festival on Mount Lyceum, of beholding a whole people as
happy as this sequestered family. Converse so delightful might have
charmed away the night without the aid of sleep, had they not been
invited to repose by the mild light of the moon shining through the
window, the murmuring wind in the leaves of the poplars, and the distant
noise of the Achelous, which falls roaring from the summit of Mount
Lyceum."

The young patrician wits of Athens doubtless laughed over Plato's ideal
republic. Campanella's "City of the Sun" was looked upon, no doubt, as
the distempered vision of a crazy state prisoner. Bacon's college, in
his "New Atlantis," moved the risibles of fat-witted Oxford. More's
"Utopia," as we know, gave to our language a new word, expressive of the
vagaries and dreams of fanatics and lunatics. The merciless wits,
clerical and profane, of the court of Charles II. regarded Harrington's
romance as a perfect godsend to their vocation of ridicule. The gay
dames and carpet knights of Versailles made themselves merry with the
prose pastoral of St. Pierre; and the poor old enthusiast went down to
his grave without finding an auditory for his lectures upon natural
society.

The world had its laugh over these romances. When unable to refute their
theories, it could sneer at the authors, and answer them to the
satisfaction of the generation in which they lived, at least by a general
charge of lunacy. Some of their notions were no doubt as absurd as those
of the astronomer in "Rasselas", who tells Imlac that he has for five
years possessed the regulation of the weather, and has got the secret of
making to the different nations an equal and impartial dividend of rain
and sunshine. But truth, even when ushered into the world through the
medium of a dull romance and in connection with a vast progeny of errors,