it is of his vast design, it fulfils his purpose and possesses the character which he claimed for it. It is a great treasure-house of documents upon the civilization of the nineteenth century which no student of the history of our age can afford to neglect. The chief note of that civilization, as Heine has pointed out in the passage which I have cited from him, is the absence from it of faith; and if there is any lesson more emphatically taught than another by the history of man it is this, that faith of some sort, be it religious, political, or philosophical, is as necessary to his moral being as air to his physical frame—a faith shared by others, and forming a spiritual atmosphere. It was the work of the eighteenth century to dry up the sources of faith alike in its divine and human expressions. As the greatest genius who adorned English public life during that period pointed out in 1791, "nothing is more certain than that our manners and civilization, and all the good things which are connected with our manners and civilization in this European world of ours," had "depended so far upon two principles, and indeed were the result of both combined-the spirit of religion and the spirit of a gentleman." The French Revolution, the inevitable result of Bourbon Cæsarism and the sensualistic philosophy-which were the manifestations in different spheres of the great Renaissance idea of materialism -was the outward visible sign of the overthrow of both those principles. "Now," as Burke exclaimed, rising to "something of prophetic strain," as he looked upon the events of that memorable year,-" Now all is to be changed. All the decent drapery of life is to be torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it, to dignify it in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculously absurd and antiquated fashion. . . . . It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice lost half its evil by losing all its grossness. The age of chivalry is gone: that of sophists, economists, and calculators has succeeded." It was in such an age, and among the ruins of the old order, that Napoleon arose to proclaim, amid the roar of his victorious cannon, the new gospel that force was the measure of truth, success the test of right, and personal interest the great law of action. The teaching was greedily drunk in by the generation into which Balzac was born. In his time the materialistic philosophy had passed from the domain of abstraction into that of fact. And we have the outcome of it in the civilization which found in him "its most original, most appropriate, and most penetrating historian."* W. S. LILLY. * "M. de Balzac fut bien un peintre de mœurs de ce temps-ci, et il en est peut-être le plus original, le plus approprié, et le plus pénétrant."-St. Beure: Causeries du Lundi, vol ii. p. 417. So George Sand: "Balzac, mâitre sans égal en l'art de peindre la société moderne et l'humanité actuelle."-Hist. de ma Vie, 4e, partie; c. 28. CONTEMPORARY BOOKS. N° I.-CLASSICAL LITERATURE. (Under the Direction of the Rev. Prebendary J. DAVIES, M.A.) O phase of Greek Literature is more characteristic or interesting than its drama whether tragic or comic, and therefore recent editions of Greek plays claim foremost mention in a survey of current classical literature. Some time since we drew attention to Lord Carnarvon's admirable version of Eschylus's masterpiece, "The Agamemnon;" and before us lies at this moment a well-executed, and within its scope and limits thoroughly equipped, edition of his almost as famous drama, "The Persa" (The Pers of Aschylus, Edited, with Introduction, Notes, and a Plan, by A. O. Prickard, M. A., Fellow and Tutor of New College, Oxford. London: Macmillan and Co, 1879). The earliest of the great dramatist's extant plays, it is also, with the exception of "The Seven against Thebes," the most historic and pictorial, centred as to its plot in the stormy struggle between liberty and despotism at Salamis, and based upon scenes in which the poet himself was an actor. And not unmeetly, it should seem, does this play appeal to the heed of classical students in its careful editing, judicious prefatory matter, and ably compiled historical introduction, by a ripe and good scholar, at a period when the military brothers of many of our graduates and undergraduates are, after the lapse of so many centuries, engaged in warfare with the barbarian tribes of the gorgeous East, and proving once more the destined superiority of free and disciplined forces to the cloud-like myriads of an Asiatic despotism. Of Xerxes' armament and naval as well as military preparation Mr. Prickard has done well to give careful and tolerably minute preliminary detail, before launching his readers in the action of the drama, full as it is no less of the alike "epic" and dramatic narrative of Salamis than of the skilfully depicted anxieties of the Persian elders at home for the absent king and army, and the prostration of the defeated and bumiliated tyrant, whose passionate lamentations are in marked contrast with the less selfish utterances of the ghost of Darius and the dignified character and tone of the Queen-mother and Regent Atossa. Particular notice is due, in Mr. Prickard's introduction, to the poet's indirect treatment of his subject by laying its scene at Susa, not in Greece, and to the pertinence of this editor's comparison with it of Shakespeare's "Henry the Fifth" in more points than one. "The Persa" is meant to commemorate a glorious victory, while affording scope for national exultation and patriotic spirit, with a spice of enjoyment in the contrasted picture of Athenian and Persian institutions. It has always seemed to us that no play of schylus apart from the Orestean Trilogy has such claims to worthy reproduction in English metres; and it is some praise of Mr. Prickard's edition that its accuracy, sympathetic editing, and thorough explanation of dif ficulties, textual, interpretational, historical, and strictly dramatic, go far to facilitate the task of a coming translator. To such an one the outline of the divisions of the play in Introd. xxv.-vi., enforced in the minuter analysis of the text in the notes, would be most valuable. To us one of the finest passages is in the first choral ode, where the Persian councillors sing the glories of the host that has of Euripides, the almost double length of the latter, is equally noticeable in comparison with "The Persa." And yet no one can begrudge the length of so strikingly picturesque and chivalric a drama, ever and deservedly popular in the Greek theatre and schools. As Mr. Paley truly remarks, in his introduction to the play in its present edition, "its varied action, chivalrous descriptions, and double messenger's narrative first of the general fight between the contending armies, secondly (v. 1356) of the duel between the brothers and the suicide of Jocasta, give a sustained interest to a piece which extends to nearly twice the length of the corresponding Eschylean drama," (p. 5). Those who essay this play under Mr. Paley's guidance as editor cannot fail to be struck with his eminent fairness in weighing the judgments on it of modern critics, or to agree with him that, in spite of the undue prominence of the episode of blind old Edipus introduced on the stage, and the bare allusion to Menæceus's self-immolation, in spite too of the "padding" (or aparèŋpóμara) of which the author of the Greek argument speaks with disparagement, the "Phoenissa" is full of fine passages and striking scenic effects. As Mr. Paley reminds his readers, the chief points for notice in the consideration of this play are (1) the twofold plot, one action consisting in the events up to the brothers' mutual slaughter, the other in Jocasta's death, Creon's edict, and the banishment of Edipus; as to which sequel to the earlier action Mr. Paley suspects that it may have been an after-work of Lophon; and (2) the coincidences and correspondences between this play and the "Antigone" of Sophocles, orstill more, the "Seven against Thebes" of Eschylus. To our mind the finest scene of the play is the episode of the "Pædagogus" accompanying Antigone to the roof or upper floor of the palace to view the Argive host, and the description recalling the rexooxonia in Il. iii., and a well-remembered chapter, where Rowena describes the assault of Front de Bouf's castle to the Templar, in "Ivanhoe." One or two moot points are all that we can notice as regards Mr. Paley's commentary, the general character of which is its usual eminent helpfulness and sound criticism. Thus, in vv. 86-87 χρὴ, εἰ σοφὸς πέφυκας, οὐκ ἐαν βροτὸν τὸν αὐτὸν ἀεὶ δυστυχῆ καθεστάναι the use of ouk av, for the expected μn éâv, is explained by taking the two words as equivalent to koλvew, or où, as following xp by a kind of attraction. The sense is explained as, "you ought to object to the continued prosperity of any one man." In v. 94, where the attendant surmises that the exposure of his princess to the sight of the vulgar throng may result in what follows: καμοὶ μεν ἔλθη φαῦλος, ὡς δούλῳ, ψόγος Paley thinks paûλos póyos means "blame which matters little to a slave;" but the context seems rather to confirm the scholiast's suspicion of a kind of aposiopesis, or suppressed antithesis, e.g., "lest there arise blame, for me, as a slave, slight matter, but for you, a princess, grave" (sc. μéyas or μáκpos). In vv. 114-16, the reading of Mr. Paley is probably soundest, viz., ἆρα πύλαις κλήθρων χαλκόδετ' εμβολ εν κ.τ.λ. Are the brass-bound bars for fastening the gates fitted in the stonework of the walls raised by Amphion? For the description of Capaneus in 181, "calculating the distance of the ascent to the towers, by counting the courses on the wall both from top to bottom, and the reverse." Paley appositely compares an almost exact parallel from Thucyd. iii. 20. In 187-90, ὃς δορὶ Θηβαίας Μυκηνηίσιν Λερναία τε δώσειν τριαίνῳ, the difficult sense is cleared by allowing Paley's proposal of understanding some ellipse of a verb of boasting on which δώσειν may depend, or of reading with Dindorf δώσει for δώσιω, which is simpler, but less probable on that account. In the first strophe of the Chorus Túpiov oldua K.T.A. there is much probability in the reading of King and G. Hermann, viz., KaTeváσoŋ for Kaтeváσoŋv, the old reading at v. 205-7, so that the sense becomes "where he (Phoebus) has his home under the snow-beaten peaks of Parnassus," instead of" where I was made to dwell," a sense which would be inappropriate where the event was prospective. We must, however, turn to another and quite different Euripidean plot, which has its scene truly beneath the twin peaks of Parnassus, is concerned with life in holy places, with innocence and purity born of most unpromising intrigues of heathen gods with the daughters of men, and which has this year had the advantage of Mr. Paley's editing the--Ion of Euripides; a popular and patriotic tragedy of the Attic stage, turning on the wish of Apollo to advance Ion, a supposed foundling gone forth (vv. 20-125), not, however, without misgivings of disaster too soon to be realized in the Messenger's narrative of the crushing disaster at Salamis. In v. 136 Mr. Prickard hesitates apparently in the passage Περσίδες δ' ἁβροπενθεῖς ἑκάστα πόθῳ φιλάνορι τὸν αἰχμάεντα θουρον εὐνατῆρ ̓ ἀποπεμψαμένα between the better-supported reading ȧñоñеμуaμéva, and that which has some MS. authority, προπεμψαμένα. It is doubtless in favour, as he remarks, of the former reading, that dлоñéμлеσbа is used in Herodot. vi. 63, in the sense of "to divorce; but we prefer the alternative reading, because the concluding words of the passage cited would certainly savour of tautology, if ɑñoñeμḥaμéva went before in view of this sense. Where the Messenger in v. 261 announces himself a survivor returned home past hope [καὐτὸς δ' άελπτως νοστνὸον βλέπω φάος], Mr. Prickard pertinently notes that this is more dramatic treatment, than if he had represented himself as Herodotus (viii. 98) would have justified him in doing, as the last of a series of relays posted for the transit of the news. In this messenger's speech, too, he comments on the undercurrent of grim jest, where, in v. 316, Chryseus, a Persian general, is described as "dyeing his swarthy beard till it became a red one πυρσαν ξαπληθῆ δάσκιον γενειάδα, and in 319, where Bactrian Artames, who perished at Salamis, is called σkλŋpās μèr OIKOS ys, "becoming (by death) a settler in a stony land." Akin to these is the afterthought anent the admiral Tharybis, handsome man as he was, everons avηp, which tells that, despite his beauty, κεῖται θανὼν δείλαιος οὗ μάλ' εὐτυχῶς (325) "the place where he lies is none so good,” an allusion, as Prickard shows by reference to Paley, to his having failed to obtain the rites of sepulture. In a copious note on the Messenger's answer to Atossa's query anent the homeward course of the Persian armament (vv. 472-514), Mr. Prickard examines Eschylus's version beside that of Herodotus. The latter makes no mention of the disaster at the Strymon, which suggests that the dramatist drew upon his imagination, or resorted to fiction for it. He is however inclined to think that Eschylus may have had geographical information about the Strymon from Hecateus; indeed, his notice of an alternative account of Xerxes's return points to a tradition of some disaster near the Strymon, giving a shadow of basis to the story of Eschylus. Other kindred notes might be quoted to show how deeply Mr. Prickard has examined his subject, whilst he is none the less careful with the details of verbal interpretation, as where at 552 he notes a touch of scorn in the Chorus's expression of Xerxes' bad management, Bapídeσσi novriaus “in his ships at sea," where ßápis is a word meaning an Egyptian flat-bottomed boat ("a punt," we might say), and suggests risk of lives on a strange element. So when, in the invocation of Darius, he is summoned as βαλὴν ἀρχαῖος βαλὴν ἴθι, ἱκοῦ (658) the note which tells us Baλny is i.q. "King" according to Hesychius, in Persian, pertinently compares the kindred philology of Baal and Bel. And in curious circumlocutory expressions, such as (577) σκύλλονται πρὸς ἀναύδων παίδων τᾶς ἀμιάντου, he discriminates between Orientalisms, which it is not, and descriptive periphrases, such as i avbeμovsyós (612), “the bee," which it is; "the voiceless children of the undefiled" representing in plain phrase" the fish of the sea." More on this phrase may be gleaned from the note at which we are glancing, and most of the annotations are equally sound, though we suspect it is either an oversight or an exceptional inaccuracy which in v. 483 interprets οἱ μὲν ἀμφὶ κρηναῖον γάνος δίψῃ πονουντες of a portion of the Persian troops as some distrest by thirst for want of water," and not as we should explain it around or in the vicinity of the watersprings, as indeed Paley translates it in his prose version of 1864. In this sense conspire Bothe's Latin version, which gives "circa fontis laticem," and Professor Blackie's rendering, "full in the sight of water." There are, however, two opinions on the question, and Mr. Prickard's work in general entitles him to respect and heed. N 66 OT unlike in its character, as a play conversant with war's alarms, though on land and in a beleaguered city, is the Phænissa of Euripides, very recently edited, with brief notes, by F. Paley, M.A., Classical Examiner in the University of London (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell & Co. London: Whittaker & Co.; G. Bell & Sons, 1879.) Based on the tragic tale of Thebes, it might be contrasted with advantage with "The Seven against Thebes" of Eschylus and the "Antigone" of Sophocles, though one point of contrast between the corresponding Eschylean drama and the "Phoenisse" |