and spend a few thoughtful moments at the tombs of such poets as Tennyson or Browning, for there, at all events, there would be no disappointment.

F. MAX MULLER.

From The Nineteenth Century. THE CRETAN QUESTION. Who knows if this Cretan crisis, which has burst out at the most untoward season, just when the powers were about at last to take in hand, after such procrastination, the work of reform at Constantinople, may not be, nevertheless, a blessing in disguise? Undoubtedly it is a just reward for the incredible supineness with which diplomacy has let time fly after the settlement of the 25th of August, 1896. There is, besides, a broader Nemesis taking vengeance on that pusillanimous policy which dares only to deal piecemeal with the Eastern problem, and which, anxious to make the task more easy by balancing and shuffling and trimming, has not taken to heart the lesson of the Hydra of Lerna and of her innumerable heads only to be cut down at a blow.

However, if the powers understand this last teaching of events, if they are firmly resolved at once to maintain the beneficent, necessary agreement between themselves which is just now the only bulwark of peace, and to take time by the forelock in order to give Crete the measure of self-government to which it is entitled, and which would more than satisfy the immediate aspirations of its citizens, I, for one, shall see in this emergency, at one moment so threatening for the tranquillity of the world, a providential interference in a most complicated business. Let us keep or resume our coolheadedness. The problem is certainly not insoluble. The powers have, by instinct and unpremeditatedly, put their finger on the true means of solution. To act unanimously; to forbid to the Porte the sending of troops; to oc

cupy the coast towns; to call upon Greece to let Europe take the island in charge such were the successive or simultaneous steps taken by the Western Cabinets. Perhaps they ought to have been a little quicker, and to have peacefully, but resolutely, cut off the way from Greek intermeddling by blockading the ports of the kingdom. Their policy is perfectly consonant with the best traditions of our century. They have a right to ask the public not to deliver itself up wholly to hysterics, but to try to judge a great complex situation, not with its nerves only, but with its reason and conscience, and in relation to the whole duty of civilized nations.

Nobody is more convinced than I am of the greatness and of the legitimacy of the future of Hellenism. I see in it the heir-apparent to a great part of the succession of the Sick Man. I am happy to think a time will come when these fair lands of eastern Europe and western Asia, now blighted by the despotism or anarchy of the Ottoman system, will once more prosper under the enlightened and liberal government of the offspring of Solon and Perikles. What is more, I am perfectly disposed to admit, not only the justice of the hope and dreams of Hellenes, of that Great Idea which their statesmen and simple citizens so passionately entertain, but the perfect right of an enfranchised nation to go to the assistance of enslaved and suffering brethren and to strike a blow for their salvation. The memories of the War of Independence, of the heroic achievements of Canaris, Botzari, and their fellows, of Missolonghi and Chios, of the Philhellenism of our fathers, of Byron and Chateaubriand, of the romanticism and of the Orientales, are not so very far from us, that we can wholly shake them off. Only let us try to look facts in the face and not to be taken in by catchwords and phrases and mere humbug.

Is it or is it not certain that, Crete once occupied by the marines of the European navies, the powers will never give it back to the tender mercies

At the present moment it is impossible not to understand that it is the fate, not only of Crete, not only of Greece, not even only of the whole East, but of Europe and of the peace of the world, which trembles in the balance. A mistake, a false step, a wrong-headed leap in the dark would be perfectly sufficient to precipitate on the head of our devoted generation the dreadful war mankind fears, tries to prevent, and has prepared against for twenty-five years. Everybody waits for the coming spring as for the time of the inevitable crisis.

Once more, according to a celebrated saying, everybody is on tiptoe expecting something unexpected. Macedonia is by universal consent the most probable arena of the great fray. The immense danger of a Greco-Turkish conflict is not so much on sea, where the fleets of Europe are probably able to hinder or to stop hostile meetings, but on the Thessalo-Macedonian frontier, where the vanguards of the two armies have been long since facing each other, and waiting only for the word of command. The powers would be strangely below the right use of their opportunities if they did not try, in making the freedom of Crete a trump in their hand, to get Greece tied not only to inaction in the Egean Sea, but to peace on the northern frontier.

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Yet I should be very sorry, for my part, to entertain too simple and too robust an optimism. The Eastern question is always with us, and I do not see-though I devoutly pray for it -now it is to be peacefully solved. It seems to me that we are in most strange and parlous state. There was a time when the Eastern problem was simply the perpetual threat of a barbarous and conquering race against Christendom. A second phasis opened when the Turk, no longer too strong, became suddenly too weak, and offered a too tempting prey to the rival covetousnesses of his neighbors. Europe then exhausted itself in trying, at first to put the Sick Man on his feet again, then to prepare for his dissolution and to arrange for his succession.

Perhaps we may recognize a third period when the physicians themselves are nearly as badly off as their patient, and dare not have recourse to surgical operations because they fear for themselves the rebound of those heroic remedies. To-day it seems verily as if the morbid fancy of Edgar Poe had anticipated the present state of things in the East. In one of the most gruesome of his stories, "The Case of Mr. Valdemar," the American poet paints a dreadful experience. A dying man has been put to sleep by magnetism. He remains for whole weeks in this kind of trance between death and life. Suddenly the experimenter is minded to recall him to his normal waking condition. "For what occurred, it is impossible that any human being could have been prepared. As I rapidly made the passes among ejaculations of 'Dead! Dead!' absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once crumbled, absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before the whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome of detestable putrescence." Di meliora piis! Let us hope we may be good Europeans without experiencing such dreadful consequences of our own diplomacy!

FRANCIS DE PRESSENSE.

From The Cornhill Magazine. TWO CENTURIES OF NATIONAL MONU

MENTS.

There are many schemes in the air at the present time with regard to the enlargement of Westminster Abbey, for it is well known that before long every available corner will have been filled up, and that soon it will be impossible to admit another monument, far less a grave. But until one of these plans takes solid shape the general public is disposed to enjoy the view of the Chapter House, with its beautiful flying buttresses, which has been lately

The first impulse of the cultivated person, who loves art and understands something of the principles of architecture, is to sweep away all the unsightly monuments which disfigure the Abbey walls, quite regardless of the historical side of the question. Until recently the impossibility of carrying out this idea was patent enough, for there is no national storehouse where these outcasts could be housed. But since the annexe to the Abbey has been discussed as a probability a solution has been proposed in the removal of these masses of masonry to the new chapel.

Amongst the memorials of the dead to be thus displaced, some would not only include the obscurer persons, but also the statues of statesmen, such as the incongruous figure of Peel addressing the house in a Roman toga, or that of the younger Pitt above the west door. If these went, the large monument to Chatham must certainly be dislodged from the north transept, and the equally cumbrous one to Henry Fox, Lord Holland, which is often called the Prison-house of Death, from the northwest tower. With these would naturally go a multitude of statues, busts, and large tablets, of other statesmen; of poets whose poems have long been left unread, even where their names survive in literature; of philanthropists; of soldiers and sailors. In fact, were the scheme once actually adopted, it would be difficult to know where to stop.

The idea is attractive enough at first sight, but the result is apparent to all who now the Abbey well, while it is not likely to strike the casual observer. For in many, if not in most, places the old wall-arcading has long been defaced to make room for those very monuments which are now an eyesore to us, and were they removed nothing but a blank, and often unsightly, space would be found behind them.

I do not suppose that those who desire to make a clean sweep of the artistic failures here have ever considered the question in detail. If they have, it

they propose merely to repair the old wall, or to replace the ancient wallarcading by a modern copy. Supposing the restoration to be feasible, there are other things to be taken into consideration, the chief being the historical point of view-not only the history of individuals, but the history of art. The tendency of each century, often of each generation, is to condemn the taste of the one before it, and therefore to desire the destruction of the works most admired by their forefathers. Thus, in the eighteenth century the classic ideal was all the rage, and the great architect, Sir Christopher Wren, who superintended the necessary repairs of the Abbey fabric, had no sympathy with Gothic architecture. So, instead of restoring the thirteenth and fourteenth century work exactly as he found it, he ruthlessly destroyed the remains, and put in his own ideas. The north façade, for instance, which has since been restored back to the thirteenth-century architecture under Mr. Pearson, was re-faced after Wren's plans in a pseudo-classical style; and the pepper-box western towers were added by one of Wren's followers, in accordance with the deceased master's designs.

It may be said that examples of this kind have little to do with the wholesale removal of monuments; but they are good illustrations of the change of taste from one century to another, and warn us of the caution which should be used with regard to any scheme for restoring the interior of the Abbey to its original state. Much has been done during the last twenty years in the way of cutting down unsightly monuments to less preposterous proportions, and so clearing the windows in the nave, many of which were formerly quite blocked up. A memorable instance is the once famous "Pancake Monument," an unsightly erection by Read, Roubiliac's pupil. "That figure of his, of Admiral Tyrrell going to heaven out of the sea, looks for all the world as if he were hanging from a gallows with a rope round his neck,”

was Nollekens's comment. Dean Stanley, however, caused this colossus to be very properly curtailed, the clouds cut away, and the grotesque figure put away in the triforium. A glaring disfigurement to the view from the choir of the north ambulatory is, unfortunately, a national monument put up by king and Parliament to the great General Wolfe, and therefore difficult to interfere with. But if only the theatrical representation of the hero's death, which is now so painfully conspicuous, could be removed, a more fitting memorial of his valor would remain in the fine bronze bas-relief, by Capizzoldi, depicting the famous ascent of the Heights of Abraham. The sculpture was Joseph Wilton's first public work, and so pleased was the dean (Zachary Pearce) with it, that, had it not been for the protest of Horace Walpole, he would actually have placed it in the Sanctuary. The beautiful tomb of Aymer de Valence was to have been destroyed to make room for it, and Pearce gave as the excuse for his proposal that he had heard the said Aymer belonged to "a very wicked set of people," the Knights Templars. Although the dean was persuaded to give up his first project, he did not stay his destroying hand, for a place was cleared for the gigantic new monument by the destruction of a finely carved fifteenth-century screen, the gift of Abbot Esteney, which divided the Chapel of St. John the Evangelist from the ambulatory. The altar-tombs of the abbot himself and Sir John Harpedon (died 1457), which formed part of the screen, were muti. lated and displaced.

We condemn, and justly condemn, the dean here; but in this, as in other flagrant instances, the dean was not alone responsible, although he had the power of defending his own church, and refusing to allow the architecture to be defaced-a veto, unfortunately, never exercised in former times. In some places, notably where the wallarcading is quite cut away and a veneer of grey marble put at the back of the memorials, as on the north side of the

nave, private individuals were allowed their own way. In other instances, as in the case of Wolfe, the nation is guilty, and her heroes are nonored by appalling acts of vandalism. For instance, to the so-called committees of taste appointed to select each national monument we owe Nollekens's immense cenotaph which commemorates those three brave captains, Bayne, Blair, and Manners, who fell (1782) in one of Rodney's victorious naval engagements with the French in the West Indies. To make room for this the font was removed to the west end. Then, again, Admiral Howe's victory off Brest (1794) is recorded on two ugly pieces of sculpture, placed here by a grateful country. The first, to Captain Montagu, which now fills up the northwest tower, is by Flaxman; the second, to Captains Harvey and Hutt, is by the younger Bacon. Originally these monuments stood side by side upon the floor of the nave, each surrounded by an iron railing; but they were so much in the way that in Dean Vincent's time (he died 1815) another national committee of taste had Montagu's removed to its present position, while that to the two captains was very much reduced in proportions and lifted to the window-ledge. The latter originally stood upon a marble pedestal, upon which was a representation of the battleships in high relief; over it hovered a large angel, holding in one hand an olive-branch, in the other the scales of justice, symbolic of the peace with honor won by Howe's genius.

About the same time another windowledge was disfigured by a national monument to Spencer Perceval, the prime minister who was shot (1812) in the Lobby of the House of Commons. The scene of the murder is actually represented, and two life-size allegorical figures stand gazing down upon it. The East India Company also is guilty of many an enormity, perpetrated in honor of their brave servants. The wall-arcading near Fox's monument, for instance, is entirely destroyed, and the window partly blocked, by an allegorical erection in memory of Major