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the manners and pursuits, which may form the cha-racter of any people. The body and mind have such reciprocal influence upon each other, that we often see certain peculiar powers or tendencies of the rational faculty intimately connected with certain corporeal forms. And whenever the moral, not less than the physical causes, under the influence of which any people exist, have produced any visible effect on the form and expression of the countenance, they will also be found proportionally to affect the opera-tions of the mind. The Bœotian countenance was as dull and phlegmatic as the genius of the people: and though Bœotia and Attica were in the vicinity of each other, and inhabited originally by the same race, the distinction between Bœotian and Attic with is not to be ascribed solely to national prejudice, but had a real foundation in the different character of the two people.  And the proper source of a distinc-tion so striking and important is to be sought rather in the state of society and manners in those repub-lics, than in the Bœotian air to which it has been sarcastically attributed by ancient writers. By the alteration of a few political and civil institutions, Thebes might habe become Athens, and Athens Thebes. Different epochs in society unfold differ-

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ent powers of the human mind. Poetry, eloquence, and philopsophy seldom arrive at their highest per-fection together; not because the mind of man does not at all times possess the same endowments from nature, but because, in the progress of society, new objects arise, and new combinations of ideas are formed which call into exercise different faculties of the soul.  If as just and true a picture of the personal as of the mental qualities of men at these dif-ferent epochs, could be preserved to posterity we should, probably, find as great variety in the one as in the other.*  The coarsest features, and the harshest expression of countenance, will commonly be found in the rudest states of society.  And the mental capacities of men in that condition will ever be proportionally weaker than those of nations who have made any considerable progress in the arts of civilization.†  They become feeble through want

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* Of this, the example, which I have before produced of the ancient Germans, and the present nations of Europe, affords a striking proof. 

 † The exaggerated representations which we sometimes re-ceive of the superior ingenuity of men in savage life, are usu-ally the result of inconsideration.  Savages are the subjects of eulogy for the same reason that we admire a monkey,——that is, a 

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