... work, below which all was constant and stable. . . . From that pettiness which often accompanies a sensitive temperament he was absolutely free. . . . Not only as author, but as man, Stephen was equable. Not placid, not always suave, he was equable, constant, magnanimous, though the sheath of some nerves-never a very thick sheath-had been worn away by hard work and many sorrows. . . . He was a man with unusually strong and steady affections. I have sometimes thought there was emotion enough in him to equip two or three first-class sentimentalists. . . . I should say of him as he said of Thackeray: 'His writings seem to show that he valued tenderness, sympathy, and purity of nature as none but a man of exceptional kindness of heart knows how to value them.' ... As age and infirmity came upon him, his character seemed to mellow. Instead of becoming more crusty under afflictions, as is the case with ignoble souls, he became, without losing any particle of moral or intellectual force, softer and gentler, and, when death was at hand, calmer and more resigned. He knew well that the end was near. What I think,' he wrote to Mr. Maitland, is that I am come to the last zigzag; every step will be "down-hill "'; and, with an unforgettable expression on his face, he used the same phrase in conversation with another friend. 'The last zigzag '-what a world of meaning and association is there! The hill of life, up which one laboriously and slowly toils, down which one slides with such ominous ease, was all but crossed. And what memories of happy Alpine days must the phrase have stirred in his mind! The misty dawn, the clearing peaks flushed by the rising sun, the long and steady toil, upwards and upwards; the repose at the top, the welcome repast, the still more welcome pipe under a cloudless blue-black sky; then the descent, the thrilling glissade, the toilsome moraine, the grass-slopes with their chalets and tinkling herds, the pine-woods exhaling their delicious odours in the warmth of the evening sun, the long stony path winding ever down until the last zigzag is reached, and below, as the shades deepen towards night, the final resting-place comes into view. Like his friend Henry Sidgwick, who had gone that same way but shortly before, he showed neither hurry nor reluctance to depart, but calmly waited for the end. Greatly as I had admired Stephen [says his biographer] I did not know how admirable he was until he was under sentence of death. . . . He was aware that the time was short; there was grave reason to fear that he would suffer great pain. But he faced the future not only gallantly, but good-humouredly. Not only did he 'scribble' away at his Ford Lectures, his Early Impressions, and his Hobbes, but his one great desire seemed to be that he should not be troublesome to others. As his bodily strength ebbed apace his faults vanished. The dross was consumed, the gold shone; there was no impatience or restiveness; the clear, strong intellect and the affectionate heart were tranquil; and the humour, the good-humour, played round men and books, and life and death. G. W. PROTHERO. THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY A LITERARY organ of high repute observed the other day, perhaps ironically, that everyone knew the story of Madame du Deffand and Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse, because everyone had read Lady Rose's Daughter. Whether the expressed major and the understood minor be true; whether the conclusion follows from them, or whether there lurks in them the fallacy of the excluded middle, are questions which I am absolutely and equally incapable of answering. But it would be rash indeed to affirm that everyone knew the Greek Anthology because everyone had read the volume of Professor Mackail. Mr. Mackail's selection is judicious. His introduction, like everything that he writes on classical subjects, is perfect, and his book is a literary treasure for the general reader. The Greek Anthology, however, is, as Lord Coke said of the law of England, a very particular thing. It is the greatest literary curiosity of the ancient world. It is also a bridge connecting the classical with the middle age. It contains more than five thousand poems, all short, but varying in merit from the highest to the lowest degree. Some, like the epitaph of Simonides upon those who fell at Thermopylæ, are among the highest achievements of human art, whose austere simplicity scarcely seems to be art at all. Some are mere doggerel, preserved by the accident of time, which has robbed us of almost everything written by Sappho and of everything written by Anacreon. The modern anthologies to which we are accustomed are themselves selections from Greek literature in general, such as Mr. St. John Thackeray's and the late Mr. Justice Wright's. The real Greek Anthology is anything rather than exclusive, a treasure-house of things new and old, good and bad, from the dawn of the Renaissance back to the twilight of the Western world. Mr. Mackail's book, good as it is, gives a false impression of harmony and regularity to what is essentially discordant and irregular. These centuries of epigrams are divided into sections according to their subjects. Otherwise there is no thread, and the two quarto volumes of the Palatine Anthology are a confused jumble of the ages. That, indeed, is a large part of their fascination. One can hardly say, with Ion in Euripides, that no shepherd chooses to feed his flocks there, and that no scythe has passed upon it. Mowers have been there, and even gleaners; and yet, like the Roman Forum, it only becomes more interesting and picturesque with each attempt that is made upon it. It would still be curious, entertaining, even beautiful, if Mr. Mackail's favourites. were taken out of it. An immense majority of these epigrams, all of which we need take any account, are composed in that elegiac metre which Ovid and Propertius learnt from Mimnermus and Tyrtæus. Coleridge has imitated it in a not altogether satisfactory couplet. Clough tried experiments with it in Amours de Voyage. But it cannot really be written in English; we have no spondees. That eminent publicist, Hugo Grotius, an industrious man if ever there was one, took upon himself the stupendous task of translating the whole Anthology into Latin elegiacs. It was a labour of love, though he shrank from reproducing all the amatory poems. His quantities, however, were not always sure, and he falls as far short of Petrarch in versification as of Wellesley, Munro, or Jebb. Mr. Mackail's prose, with its dignified simplicity and delicate lightness of touch, gives as correct an idea as any modern language could give of what these epigrams are. The word 'epigram' is the precise Greek equivalent of the Latin word 'inscription,' and the current English use of epigrammatic' is as wildly perverse as 'phænomenal' for 'extraordinary,' or 'Platonic for unreal. Metre and brevity are the common qualities of these little poems, which are often picturesque, still more often melodious, sometimes passionate, occasionally improper, seldom pithy or sententious. Many of the earliest epigrams, being sepulchral or memorial, answer to their names, and among these are a few flawless examples of majestic pathos, such as the simple couplet of an unknown author, which Mr. Mackail renders 'Looking on the monument of a dead boy, Clectes, son of Menesæchmus, pity him who was so beautiful and died.' The most famous specimen of the sepulchral epigram is the two verses of Simonides on the three hundred of Thermopyla, which almost made a poet of Cicero. They are too plain, and too sublime, not to be quoted: 6 Ω ξειν', ἄγγειλον Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε Stranger, tell the men of Lacedæmon that we lie here in obedience to their commands.' In another couplet, not less perfect, though less familiar, the same great poet varies the theme, saying that these men girt their native land with immortal renown as they shrouded themselves in the dark cloud of death.' 'But though they died,' he adds, 'they are In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column, not dead, for valour glorifies them, and brings them up from hell.' Once more, as if unable to leave the subject while any view of it was unseized, Simonides writes: 'If to die nobly is the better part of valour, on us of all men has fortune bestowed it; for in our zeal to clothe Greece with freedom we lie decked with praise that grows not old.' The victory of Cimon drew also a tribute from Simonides which he knew would last: These men of old laid down their glorious young lives by the Eurymedon, fighting with the van of the Persian bowmen. Spearmen they were, and soldiers of the line, and sailors on fleet ships. The best monument they left of their valour is their death.' The Planudean Appendix to the Palatine Anthology, taken from the collection made by Maximus Planudes in the fourteenth century, contains one of the best epitaphs written even by Simonides, the occasion being the Athenian raid upon Euboea of which Herodotus speaks: 'We were slain under the peaks of Dirphys, and a public tomb is raised in our honour hard by the Euripus, a thing not unmerited, for we threw away the flower of our pleasant lives, and welcomed the harsh cloud of war.' No inscriptions so entirely faultless in form and substance, in shape and thought, have been composed by any man, not even in Latin, the monumental tongue. Wordsworth was probably thinking of other and more pictorial poetry, such as the fragment of Danae and her babe, when he prayed that there might be discovered 'one precious tenderhearted scroll of pure Simonides.' But even if the fame of Simonides rested solely on his epitaphs, it would stand without rivalry or blemish. The Anthology, as we have it, was first edited by the German scholar Frederick Jacobs at the beginning of the last century. The text was revised by Brunck, chiefly known, it is to be feared, in this country from the flippant rhymes with which Porson confessed that at the house of that scholar he had been intoxicated, or from the equally frivolous avowal of Mrs. Browning that she 'much preferred Euripides to Monk, Homer to Bentley, Sophocles to Brunck.' For my part I must honestly and soberly acknowledge that I would rather read Monk's Life of Bentley twice than all Mrs. Browning's poems once; and as for Porson, he got drunk wherever he stayed. To the students who compiled, explained, and illustrated the Anthology all lovers of literature must feel the deepest gratitude. It is not by any means plain sailing over this vast illimitable sea. There are Greek epigrammatists whose style differs as much from the style of Simonides, or of Plato, or of Theocritus, as the New Testament differs from the Dialogues of Plato. There are very few advocates of compulsory Greek who, if they were examined in the Anthology, would escape the plough. I should like for instance, to try them with the medical satire of Nicarchus : Τοῦ λιθίνου Διὸς ἐχθὲς ὁ κλινικὸς ἥψατο Μάρκος· 'Marcus the doctor,' in Mr. Mackail's translation, 'called yesterday on the marble Zeus; though marble, and though Zeus, his funeral is to-day.' This is perhaps as near an approach to what we mean by an epigram as the Anthology contains. The magnificent and anonymous compliment to Praxiteles is, however, brief and pointed enough. When Aphrodite saw the great statue of herself, she asked in dismay where Praxiteles could have seen her without her clothes. But the Greek interjection pɛû, 'oh dear,' stamps this epigram as modern. The older and longer form of it, attributed to Plato, represents the goddess as simply struck by the fidelity of the likeness. I wonder that Mr. Mackail should adopt a version which confounds Venus in her glory with Eve after her fall. There are many epigrams attributed to Plato, of which Shelley has translated two, and it seems to be the better opinion that the philosopher wrote verses in his youth. Poetry he always wrote, especially when he was writing against it. That he should have composed the glorious couplet, thus Englished by Mr. Mackail, 'The Graces seeking to take a sanctuary that will not fall, found the soul of Aristophanes,' is a fact, if fact it be, full of literary and historical interest. The idea of Aristophanes as a rollicking, licentious buffoon is as false and misleading as Pope's picture of Rabelais laughing in his easy chair. Both Aristophanes and Rabelais were in deadly earnest. Their humour, apart from the animal spirits which sustain it, is often as deep as life, and as fierce as the bitterest invective. Although Aristophanes held Socrates up to ridicule as a dreamer and a quack, he shared with him, or at least with the Socrates of Plato, a dread and scorn of pure democracy as practised at Athens to which the great historian attributes the result of the Peloponnesian war. Ancient and modern democracy have really nothing in common. There was no representative Government at Athens, and Athenian society rested not so much on the rights of men as on the wrongs of slaves. It was not liberty, nor license, it was ignorance, the triumph of the unfit, captive good attending captain ill,' against which Plato directed his subtle irony, and Aristophanes his boisterous fun. Plato, who introduced Socrates and Aristophanes into the same dialogue, that wonderful phantasy called in Latinised Greek the Symposium, without a hint at any reason why they should not meet, knew that the prince of Attic drolls' was a great poet as well as a poet of nature, so faithful and true that Ruskin quotes him for the movements of clouds. On a tragic contemporary of Aristophanes, whom he never made the butt of his satire, singer of sweet Colonus, and its child,' there is a lovely epithet attributed to Simmias of Rhodes: 6 Gently, where lies our Sophocles in sleep, |