I ' HOR^E HELLENICS. RORM HELLENICS: (Essays ant ©iscussions ON SOME IMPORTANT POINTS OF REEK PHILOLOGY AND ANTIQUITY i BY JOHN STUART BLACKIE, F.R.S.E., FELLOW OF THE SOCIETY FOR ARCHAEOLOGICAL CORRESPONDENCE, ROME J HONORARY MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE SPREAD OF GREEK LETTERS, ATHENS AND OF THE GREEK PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY, CONSTANTINOPLE J PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. ILontron: MACMILLAN & CO. f/ 1874. ~£6 Avo Kaipovs 7roiov rod Aeyetv, rj 7repl wv oicrOa (radios, rj nepl wv dvajKaiov ei7reiv. ev tovtois yap /xovots 6 Aoyos rrjs arianrfjs KpetTTOov, kv 8e tols aXXots OLfxetvov criyav rj Xeyeuv. — IsoCRATES. fc TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE WILLIAM EWAET GLADSTONE, M.P., STATESMAN, ORATOR, AND SCHOLAR, ^ht^t $%qz$ nxz Jl-ebtrateb BY THE AUTHOR. University, Edinburgh, May 1, 1874. CONTENTS. ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER, ..... 1 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF .ESCHYLUS, ... 60 ON THE PHILOLOGICAL GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF THE NEO-HELLENIC DIALECT OF THE GREEK TONGUE, . Ill ON THE SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY, . 167 ON THE SOPHISTS OF THE FIFTH CENTURY B.C., . . 197 ON ONOMATOPOEIA IN LANGUAGE, . . . .217 ON THE SPARTAN CONSTITUTION AND THE AGRARIAN LAWS OF LYCURGUS, ....... 235 ON THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY, . . . .255 REMARKS ON ENGLISH HEXAMETERS, . . . .278 ON THE POPULAR POETRY OF MODERN GREECE, . . 297 ON THE PLACE AND POWER OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE, . 320 PREFACE. The present volume consists of Essays and Discussions on some points of Greek philology and antiquity which appeared to me to have been unduly subordinated, or altogether neglected, by British scholars, or unwisely handled by men of acknowledged talent and reputation. Originally published in the Transactions of learned Socie- ties and Philological Reviews, they laboured under the double disadvantage of being with difficulty consulted and with facility ignored. As they are the product of hard reading and hard thinking, and raise some questions worthy of being seriously grappled with by English scholars, the author, whose professional position forces him to desire that truth should be stated and error com- bated on as open a field as possible, hopes that their present collected publication in a form adapted for a wider circle of readers will not be attributed to any undue amount of self-esteem. There are some other papers on similar or cognate subjects, which, for various reasons, I have excluded from b x PREFACE. the present collection ; but, as they contain matter that might reward a glance from persons interested in the subjects which they discuss, it may be useful to give an index to them here. They are as follows : — 1. On English and German Scholarship. — Foreign Quarterly Eeview, January 1839. 2. On Greek Metres.— Ibid., April 1839. 3. On Euripides and his Dramatic Art. — Hid., January 1840. 4. On the Ehythmical Declamation of the Ancients. — Classical Museum, vol. i. 1844. 5. On the Teaching of Languages. — Foreign Quarterly Eeview, April 1845. 6. On the Character, Condition, and Prospects of the Greek People. — Westminster Eeview, October 1854. 7. The Philosophy of Plato. — Edinburgh Essays. Edinburgh : Black, 1856. 8. Plato and Christianity. — North British Eeview, November 1861. A lecture on the classical affinities of the Gaelic lan- guage, published some years ago and now out of print, which met with a very favourable reception from compe- tent judges, I have not reprinted here, partly because I hope soon to be able to carry on my studies of Gaelic philology to more worthy conclusions ; partly because I have some reason to believe that Professor Geddes of Aberdeen, the Rev. Alexander Cameron of Kenton, and PREFACE. xi other labourers in this much neglected field, will set their hands so seriously and stoutly to the work that any further excursions on my part into a domain not specially mine may be rendered unnecessary. Two other remarks it seems proper to make. If any person shall be surprised that, in the paper on Homeric theology, I have made no allusion to the genial labours of Mr. Gladstone in this same field, the answer is ready, that my Essay on this subject was completed and published several years before the Homeric Studies appeared; and besides, my Essay is so much an affair of pure induction from a collection of Homeric pas- sages, placed in detail before the reader, that a com- parison of concordant or conflicting opinions did not fall naturally within its scope. At the same time I may say that, so far as my memory serves me, there is no im- portant point in the Homeric theology, as deduced by me, from which Mr. Gladstone will feel himself called on to dissent. How far it has been my misfortune to differ from him in regard to certain of his mythological specu- lations, the discourse on that subject will sufficiently indicate. The other remark I have to make is, that, so far as my antagonism to certain philological and mytho- logical speculations of my distinguished friend, Professor Max Mtiller, is concerned, I have seen nothing either xii PREFACE. from his pen or from that of any other person, that in the slightest degree moves me to any qualification of what I have distinctly stated on these points ; and as for Mr. Grote, highly as I value the apology for the Athe- nian democracy, which is the characteristic feature of his great work, it has always appeared to me that there are some matters in the intellectual history of the Hellenic people with which the unpoetical character of his mind, and the negative philosophy which he professed, rendered him incompetent to deal. ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER TLavret; re 6ecov ^areouacv avOpcoiroi, T) Y the theology of Homer, as distinguished from his -*-^ mythology, I understand those grand general principles with regard to the nature of the gods, and their relation to men, which are common to all the individual gods that compose the many-faced system of Greek polytheism. The special character of the separate gods, their functions and actions, have nothing to do with the present inquiry ; as little the ceremonial details of worship with which the gods are honoured : for these belong manifestly to the practical religion, not to the doctrinal theology, of the ancient Greeks. The theology of the Homeric poems is not the theology of an individual, but of an age ; and this altogether irre- spective of the Wolfian theory, which, in a style so cha- racteristically German, with one sublimely sweeping nega- tion removed at once the personal existence of the supposed poet, and the actual coherence of the existing poem. The principal value of Wolfs theory in the eye of many genu- ine lovers of poetry, is that, while it robbed us of the poet Homer and his swarms of fair fancies, it restored to us the Greek people, and their rich garden of heroic tradition, watered by fountains of purely national feeling, and fresh- ened by the breath of a healthy popular opinion, which, 2 ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. precisely because it can be ascribed to no particular person, must be taken as the exponent of the common national existence. To have achieved this revolution of critical sentiment with regard to the Homeric poems ; to have set before the eyes of Europe, the world-wide distance between the poetry of a Shelley or a Coleridge writing to express their own opinions, and the songs of a race of wandering minstrels singing to give a new echo to the venerable voices of a common tradition ; this were enough for the great Berlin philologer to have done, without attempting to establish those strange paradoxes, repug- nant alike to the instincts of a sound aesthetical and of a healthy historical criticism, which have made his name so famous. The fact is, that the peculiar dogmas of Wolf, denying the personality of the poet, and the unity of the poems, have nothing whatever to do with that other grand result of his criticism to which we have alluded, — the clear statement of the distinction between the sung poetry of popular tradition, and the written poetry of in- dividual authorship. Not because there was no Homer, are the Homeric poems so generically distinct from the modern productions of a Dante, a Milton, and a Goethe ; but because Homer lived in an age when the poet, or rather the singer, had, and from his position could have, no other object in singing than to reflect the popular tra- dition of which his mind was the mirror. As certainly as a party newspaper or review of the present day represents the sentiments of the party of which it is the organ, so certainly did a Demodocus, or a Phemius, a Homer, or a Cinsethus, the public singers at the public banquets, of a singing, not a printing age,— represent the sentiments of the parties, that is, the people in general, for whose enter- tainment they exercised their art. 'Tis the very condi- ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 3 tion, indeed, of all popular writing in the large sense, that it must serve the people before it masters them ; that while entertainment is its direct, and instruction only its indirect object, it must above all things avoid coming rudely into conflict with public feeling and public prejudice On any subject, especially on so tender a subject as re- ligion ; nay, that it must rather, by the very necessity of its position, give up the polemic attitude altogether in reference to public error and vice, and be content, along with many glorious truths, to give immortal currency to any sort of puerile and perverse fancy that may be inter- woven with the motley texture of popular thought. A poet even in modern times, when the great public contains every possible variety of small publics, can ill afford to be a preacher ; and if he carries his preaching against the vices of the age beyond a certain length, he changes his genus, and becomes, like Coleridge, a metaphysician, or, like Thomas Carlyle, a prophet. But in the Homeric days, corresponding as they do so exactly to our mediaeval times, when the imaginations of all parties reposed quietly on the bosom of a common faith, to suppose, as Herodotus in a well-known passage (n. 53), does, that the popular minstrel had it in his power to describe for the first time the functions of the gods, and to assign them appropriate names, were to betray a complete misconception both of the nature of popular poetry in general, and of the special char- acter of the popular poetry of the Greeks, as we find it in the pages of the Iliad and Odyssey, So far as the mere secu- lar materials of his songs are concerned, Homer, we have the best reason to believe, received much more than he gave ; l but in the current theology and religious senti- 1 Compare the history of the growth revealed by the labours of Jacob Grimm, of the famous mediseval Epos "of Key- Foreign Quarterly Review, No. xxxiv. nard the Fox," as it has been gradually Art. 3. 4 ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. ment, we have not the slightest authority for supposing that he invented anything at all. Amid the various wealth of curious and not always coherent religious tradition, he might indeed select this and reject that, as more or less suited for his immediate purpose ; he might give prominence to one aspect of his country's, theology while he threw another into the shade ; he might even adorn and beautify to some extent what was rude, and here and there lend a fixity to what was vague ; * but whatsoever in the popular creed was already stable, his airy music had no power to shake ; whatsoever in the vulgar tradition had received fixed and rigid features, his plastic touch had no power to soften. Nay, we are rather certain, that as in the geolo- gical formations of later birth, boulders of strange granite will sometimes appear, so there are incorporated into the body of the Homeric theology, fragments of an older and more crude Pelasgic creed, that assort ill with the higher organism of the poet's own faith, and the faith of the age to which he belonged ; while it seems equally certain, that with the large receptive capacity so characteristic of great imaginative minds, he had hung up in his mythological gallery not a few pictures, to whose original significance — whether physical or moral — he in common with the heroes of his melody had lost the key. 2 We may there- fore attempt an articulate statement of the principal heads of Homeric theology, with the most complete conviction 1 I believe, for instance, that the "Kr-q 2 To the former class may belong of II. xix. 91, and ix. 501, so distinctly the strange-sounding myth of Briareus an allegorical personage (Nagelsbach, zEgeon delivering Jove from the chains p. 67), may have been a creation of the imposed on him by the other gods (77. poet's fancy (acting, however, in unison I. 399, on which see Welcker's Anhang with the whole tendency of the Greek Trllogie, p. 147) ; to the latter, the de- religion), which afterwards becoming scription of the connubial embrace of stereotyped, received a prominent indi- Zeus and Hera (II. xiv. 346), on which viduality among the persons of the celes- see Miiller. tial aristocracy from the tragedians. ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 5 that we are giving the religious faith of an age and of a people, not the private speculations of a person. One good use to be made of this consideration is, that we shall start on our inquiry in no wise expecting a metaphysical precision, or a philosophical consistency in all points. Even formal confessions of faith, drawn up by subtle systematic theologians, are often far from preserv- ing a rigid consistency through all their articles, much more the floating variety of an imaginative creed without a Bible, like that of the ancient Greeks. Popular poets like Homer assert the fundamental moral and religious instincts of human nature, without attempting to prove them where the foundation may appear weak, or to recon- cile them where they may sound contradictory ; and the profoundest philosophers have generally contented them- selves with doing the same thing, only in a more elaborate and ambitious style. In setting forth the theological views of the Homeric writings, attempts have been made by some writers to draw a broad line of distinction between the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is alleged that the religious conceptions of the former are as inferior to those of the latter, as its poetic glow is more intense, its flight of winged words more rapid, and its pictures more vivid ; and it is con- ceived that this difference, or rather contrast, is so great as, along with other considerations, to justify the conclu- sion, that these two immortal works were the productions neither of one author, nor of the same age. 1 But the 1 This is the conclusion of Benjamin that are entertained respecting the gods. Constant, and of Dr. Ihne, in an other- In the Iliad the men are better than the wise admirable paper in Dr. Smith's gods : in the Odyssey, it is the reverse. Biographical Dictionary (London 1844), In the latter poem, no mortal dares to Art. Homer. "A great and essential dif- resist, much less to attack and wound ference, which pervades the whole of the a god ; Olympus does not resound with two poems, is observable in the notions everlasting quarrels. Athene consults ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. minute comparison which I have made of all the passages in both poems that have any bearing on religion leads me most certainly to the conclusion that such a notion is untenable. I shall, on the other hand, I flatter myself, be able to prove distinctly, that there is no prominent and characteristic feature of Hellenic theology in the one poem which does not appear in the other ; and that, though some traits of a crude creed are put forward with more glaring offensiveness in the Iliad than in the Odyssey, these natu- rally arose from the nature of the subjects treated, and from the dominancy of its own particular idea over the humbly the will of Zeus, and forbears offending Poseidon, her uncle, for the sake of a mortal man. Whenever a god inflicts punishment or bestows protec- tion in the Odyssey, it is for some moral desert, not as in the Iliad, through mere caprice, without any consideration of the good or bad qualities of the indivi- dual. In the Iliad Zeus sends a dream to deceive Agamemnon ; Athene, after a geueral consultation of the gods, prompts Pandarus to his treachery; Paris, the violator of the sacred laws of hospitality, is never upbraided with his crime by the gods ; whereas, in the Odyssey, they appear as the awful avengers of those who do not respect the laws of the hospitable Zeus. The gods of the Iliad live on Mount Olym- pus ; those of the Odyssey are farther removed from the earth ; they inhabit the wide heaven. There is nothing which obliges us to think of the Mount Olympus. In the Iliad, the gods are visible to every one, except when they surround themselves with a cloud. In the Odyssey, they are usually invisible, unless they take the shape of men. In short, as Benjamin Constant has well observed (de la Relig. in.), there is more mythology in the Iliad, and more reli- gion in the Odyssey." After writing the remarks in the text, I lighted on the following admirable observations in Nagelsbach, p. 103:— "In the Odyssey there is no strife among the Olympic gods; for the principal divine personages that take interest in the action, Zeus and Athena, are united, (Od. xxiv. 472) ; and Hera has nothing to do with the plot, so that Poseidon alone stands on the opposite side. In the Iliad, again, the struggle on earth is only the counterpart of the struggle in heaven. The celestial personages, who are independent and free to choose their own part, come thus into a itate of mutual hate and hostility ; and this gives the gods of the Iliad, in appear- ance, a different character from those of the Odyssey. For all the evil passions, which war raises in human breasts, must in consequence of this hostile attitude be stirred in the bosom of the gods, to whose essential nature, holi- ness in no sense belongs." The author therefore agrees with me, in represent- ing the theological system of the Odys.- sey and the Iliad, as different only in appearance (scheinbar). The italics be- long to the author, showing distinctly that he placed great weight on the word, and is not to be understood for a moment as favouring the views of Benjamin Constant and Dr. Ihne. ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 7 general tone and character of each poem. As a song of war and battle among mortal men, the Iliad could not but exhibit the sympathizing gods as animated by all those violent and more or less undignified passions, without which war in any shape, and especially in an age of war- riors, cannot be conceived to exist ; while, in the Odyssey, a narrative of domestic fortunes, and an example of severe retribution exercised on the guilty violators of social laws in times of peace, it could not but be that the poet should cause the motley confusion of inferior Olympic personages to recede before the awful presence of Jove the avenger, and his wise daughter Athena. 1 These preliminary observations may be necessary to anticipate misconception in the minds of some, whose par- ticular line of study may not have familiarized them with investigations of this kind. Without further preface, I now proceed to state the theological system of Homer as compactly as I may be able in a series of propositions. Proposition i. — The gods are a race of beings exter- nally of human form and appearance, but in quality and energy superior to mortal men, enjoying an existence supremely blissful in its nature (peia faovres, II. vi. 138), 1 " In the Odyssey," says Archdeacon the adventures of the far-wandering Williams (Homeros, App.,) "thereseems Ulysses, as he himself intimates in the to have been embodied the Homeric invocation. That he was able to inter- creed concerning the social and political weave this story of marvellous adven- duties of man, and the certain punish- tures with a grand exhibition of retri- ment which is sooner or later to over- butive justice on the part of Jove take the impenitent violators of the shows at once to what order of poets moral law." Of the justice of this re- he belonged ; proves that he was one mark there can be no doubt ; only it of those who so incorporate light enter- must always be borne in mind that, tainment with serious instruction, that though this creed is most certainly em- it is hard to say, whether it be their bodied in the poem, the exposition of it main object to help the trifling to sea- was not the only, perhaps not the main, son a ^istless hour, or the serious to object of the bard in composing his solve a moral problem, poem. His simple object was to sing 8 ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. and controlled by no superior power ; the wide welkin is their habitation, and Mount Olympus in Thessaly, their home. That which most peculiarly distinguishes them from human beings is their immortality (fid/capes Oeol alev iovres, Od. v. 7) ; by which, however, is meant, not that they have always existed, but that when once they begin to exist, they may not in anywise cease to exist. Though begotten like men, and holding their power by right of succession from more ancient celestial dynasties no longer acknowledged, they are not subject to death or mutation ; and their dominion, once established, can never pass away. In stating this proposition, I have followed Nagels- bach 1 in specifying immortality as that attribute by which the divine nature, according to the Homeric conception, is most distinguished from the human. For though, as we shall see afterwards, the attribute of power compara- tively infinite belonging to the highest gods stands in a no less striking contrast to the weakness of mortals, than their eternal blessedness to our ephemeral and sorrow- chequered existence, yet this extraordinary degree of power is by no means possessed by all the gods, and some of the inferior tribes of them are not a tall remarkably endowed in this way : immortality, however, of soul and body, without the necessity of that sorrowful change which we call death, characterizes all the superhuman race, from Zeus to Calypso, and forms the most prominent quality that distinguishes them from mortal men. In most other respects they are human enough in their passions, their purposes, and their actions ; and indeed it is this humanity which makes them not only take such an ardent interest in all human affairs, but even leads them to seek that con- 1 Homerische Theologie, Niirenberg, 1840, p. 38. ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 9 nexion with mortal women, from which one of the greatest blessings of earth, a race of heroes and demi-gods, is pro- duced. With regard to their origin, Homer is not at all curious, practical piety, not metaphysical theology, being his province ; he only indicates in the line (II. xrv. 201), ^fliceavov re Oecov yeveo-tv kclL firjTepa Trj6vv, that they are all descended from the two sea-powers, Ocean and Tethys, as from a common father and mother. He also intimates with sufficient clearness, that they did not arrive at the height of power where they now stand without passing through previous struggles and convul- sions of a very serious kind (the struggle with Kronos and the Titans, II. xiv. 204, vni. 479) ; but, once established, he has no idea (such as that with which Prometheus feeds his pride in JEschylus) that they can ever be overthrown, any more than a Christian has that the world can ever revert from Christianity to Judaism. In reference to their habitation, though they are generally styled in the Odyssey ovpavbv evpvv e^oz/re? (a style, however, occurring also in the Iliad, xxi. 267), there is not the least foundation for Dr. Ihne's remark, that this designation furnishes one ground of distinction between the theo- logy of the Odyssey and that of the Iliad, as if that of the former were of a more spiritual and refined nature ; for a Mount Olympus is distinctly described in Od. I. 102, ftrj Be tear ovKv puiroio fcaprjvoov al'^acra, in the very language of the Iliad (iv. 74, xxu. 187), be- sides Od. v. 50, vi. 42, and other places where Olympus is mentioned (and okv/nria Bco/juara, xxiii. 167), without the slightest reason to suppose that anything else can be meant than the Mount Olympus of the Iliad. Proposition ii. — The gods are the supreme rulers of 10 ON THE THEOLOGY VF HOMER: the world, the dispensers of good and evil to men, and the directors of their fates. A habitual piety, characterized by the special refer- ence of all events in life, whether prosperous or ad- verse, to the divine providence, is not less characteristic of the writings of Homer than of the Old Testament Scriptures ; and, indeed, this is one of the many remarkable and extremely interesting points of resem- blance, that strike the most superficial reader in works otherwise so dissimilar in their tone, and opposite in their tendency. "Nothing," says Nagelsbach (p. 53), "is fur- ther from the Homeric man than to look upon himself as isolated and separated from the gods, or to look on the divine government as a dead system of laws and rules once for all implanted into the nature of things. The relation of men to the gods is rather to be looked on as an uninterrupted living intercourse/' And accordingly, we find that whatsoever a man is and enjoys is constantly and instinctively attributed by Homer to the gods, as if it could not be otherwise ; birth, marriage, and death (Od. iv. 7, 12, xvi. 211); health (v. 397), and strength (II. I. 178) ; good and bad weather (Od. iv. 351) ; luxuries (vn. 132) ; good sport in hunting (ix. 158) ; and even a good jest and a hearty laugh (xviii. 37). In the same way every sort of bad luck is immediately referred to the wrath of a god ; as when a marksman misses his aim (II. v. 191, viii. 311), or when a fleet runner slips his foot, even where the direct cause of the fall may be quite evident (xxiii. 782). The Homeric man is always more deeply impressed with the first and originating than with the second and mediating cause of things. The old Hel- lenic voyager knows that he has been driven out of his course by the east or other unfavourable wind; but the ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 11 Zeus or Poseidon who caused the wind to blow is the grand object of his attention, — and so of everything else. In consistency with this view, all persons who enjoy great prosperity, that is, on whom the gods shower many gifts, are said to be dear, and very dear (fiaXa /Xot, Od. vi. 203) to the gods : while misfortunes are a manifest evidence of the celestial disfavour (iv. 755, II. VI. 200); and in the same way, if a person is distinguished by any natural gift, as Helen by beauty, he is said to be dear to the god or goddess from whom, as from a divine perennial fountain, this gift flows. As to phraseology, 6eol, 6eos, 0eo? ™?, and Balpcov, seem to be used indiscriminately by the poet, when talking of the divine source of all the good that men enjoy, or the evil that they suffer ; often, also, the par- ticular deity is named through whose instrumentahty, as standing in a peculiar relation to this or that human being, the blessing is dispensed. In this way Athena appears everywhere as the presiding deity of the Odyssey. She sends sleep to Penelope (i. 364), speeds the departure of Telemachus (n. 382, 420), and is with the hero in all the critical turns of the perilous and bloody catastrophe. Proposition hi. — This providence, or supreme con- trol of all human things by the gods, is not confined merely to the circumstances of the external world by which human happiness or misery is affected, but reaches also all the thoughts, purposes, and passions of men ; which thoughts, purposes, and passions, accordingly, the evil and the good indifferently, are looked upon as the direct effect of an immediate divine agency ; specially, however, all great and glorious thoughts, and impulses leading to actions of extraordinary energy and excellence, come from a god ; and these actions themselves, though 1-2 ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. achieved visibly by mere human agency, are ovk avev dew, not without the instigation, assistance, and directing control of the gods. It is remarked by some theologian, — I forget by whom, — that among all the objections made by the heathen philo- sophers to the doctrines of the Gospel, no exception was ever taken to the doctrine of divine influence, or the opera- tion of the Holy Ghost on the human mind. This doctrine, which has been looked upon in modern times by Arminians, Pelagians, and others, with a sort of jealousy, could not excite any suspicion, or appear even in the light of a novelty, in an age when all the higher minds in the moral world were initiated into the philosophy of Plato or Zeno, 1 and when the great Catholic Bible of popular religious tradition, viz., Homer, recognised the doctrine of direct spiritual action of the divine mind on the human as one of its most familiar truths. That a man's genius and inclina- tions are all divinely implanted is a truth sufficiently obvious, and which, stated as an abstract proposition, few men now-a-days will deny ; but the difference between our time and the Homeric in this matter lies not so much in any abstract doctrine as in the comparative frequency of a correspondent phraseology in his language, and its un- frequency in ours. Thus, for instance, when Ulysses (Od. XIV. 227) says : — avrap ejioi ra pecrl Ofjtcev aWos yap t aXkoicnv avr\p eTTLTepireraL epyow, he uses in the first line a distinctly marked Homeric 1 No doubt there was a something of isolate man from the divine mind, on self-containedness in the Stoic, which which he depends, may be seen from did not so readily suit devout connec- the arguments put into the mouth of tion with the divine mind, as the high Balbus by Cicero, in the second book aspirations of the Platonist ; but how de Natura Deorum. far the Stoics were from wishing to ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 13 phraseology, while the second line contains only what any of us in our common talk might say any day, and what in fact we do say every day. " Those things are dear to me which a god fut into my heart " — this style refers the likings and dislikings of the human heart directly to a divine influence ; while the other proposition, " one man delights in one thing, another in another,'' merely as- serts a human fact without giving any hint of its divine causation. Now, the habitual assertion of this divine causation in all the more notable movements of the human mind is one of the grand prominent features of that atmosphere of religion (or religiosity, as some may prefer to say) which gives such a peculiar colour to the Homeric epos. In the language of an obsolete criticism (perhaps not yet altogether obsolete in certain quarters), the Olympian personages are termed the " machinery " of the poem ; if this word, however, is to be used, it is much more near the truth to say that, in Homer's view, the mortal men are everywhere the mere machinery of the great drama of existence of which the gods are the real actors. The constant occurrence in the Homeric page, with reference to human purposes, of such phrases as evl 6v/ia> ftaWeiv (Od. I. 200), eV2 (f>peai 6fJKe (v. 427), vdrjfjLa irolr^cre (XIV. 273), Oeov v7rodr]/ioavvrjcrtv (XVI. 233), and eviirvevae (jypeal Salficov (XIX. 138), shows how familiar to the old Hellenic mind was that famous senti- ment afterwards expressed by Cicero : — " Nemo vir mag- nus sine aliquo qfflatu divino unquamfuit ; " and not only so, but a sentiment far more extensive than this, viz., that a man can in fact think nothing worth thinking, except by virtue of a direct divine impulse or inspiration. This is a method of viewing things to which the somewhat mechanical English mind (since the days of Cromwell at !4f ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER: least) has shown a great aversion ; } but how far it is from being contrary to a high Christian philosophy, the single text, Luke xn. 12, may suffice to show. But Homer, in his views of divine influence, is far from stop- ping where the language of a pious Puritan of the six- teenth century, or a fervid evangelical of the present day, mutatis mutandis, would readily go along with him. He, in fact, goes so far as to attribute foolish, and even vicious actions, to an impulse proceeding from above, to such an extent as seemingly to destroy altogether the idea of human responsibility. When, for instance, a man thought- lessly (dpaSe(os, Od. xiv. 481) goes out without his cloak on a frosty night, so that he is in danger of dying, or at least catching severe rheumatism from cold, he exclaims quite naturally, irapa /J fadfe Balpcov, a god deceived me that I did this thing. This is a very peculiar phraseology, and sounds to a modern ear very strange, from an author whose general tone, as we have said, is sufficiently devout. And in like manner, instead of exclaiming, as a modern Englishman would, what a fool am II Telemachus, when reviewing his conduct, says, truly Zeus hath made me a fool! (Od. xxi. 102.) Nor is this all: Antinous, when blaming Penelope for wilful obstinacy and evil cunning, instead of confining the blame to her, which would have pointed more keenly his reproach, does not hesitate to 1 Some, however, of our most prac- have made any observations of things tical writers, have not hesitated to will deny ; that they are certain dis- assert a belief in presentiments and coveries of an invisible converse and a warnings divinely impressed on the world of spirits, we cannot doubt ; and souL Thus De Foe, in Robinson if the tendency of them seems to be Crusoe, writes, — "Let no man despise to warn us of danger, why should we the secret hints and notices of danger not suppose they are from some friendly which sometimes are given him, when agent (whether supreme, or inferior and he may think there is no possibility subordinate, is not the question), and of its being real. That such hints and they are given for our good ?" notices are given us, I believe few that QN THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 15 name the gods as the true authors of her so reprehensible conduct (ovrwa qI vovv ev 6a\jJi(ov [Mev apuepcre, BlBov B rjBelav aoiBr]V. Hence the striking difference in the Jewish and Greek methods of expression with reference to the common phenomena of disease. The Jew said of a woman bent with weakness, and unable to look up with the common privilege of humanity to the skies, that she was bound by Satan (Luke xiii. 11, 16) ; the Greek, of one pining under a protracted and painful illness, that he was plied by a hateful god {arvyepos Be ol e%pae Balpicov, Od. V. 396), or simply that one cannot escape a disease sent from mighty Jove (ix. 411). Nor is the arvyepos in the passage just quoted, or the kclkos in another (x. 64), applied to BalfMov, indicative in any sense of a special cacodcemon, or spirit essentially evil, like the unclean spirits of the New Testament, such as the later theology of Greece might acknowledge ; these designations in Homer are only de- scriptive expletives, which, for all theological purposes, had as well been omitted. The only semblance, indeed, of a real devil in Homer is that v Att) already mentioned (II. xix. 91), on whom Agamemnon so unceremoniously throws the blame of his untoward quarrel with the swift- footed son of Thetis ; but even of her, and in the time of the tragedians, the Greeks never speak as of the source of evil, but only as a source. In Homer, however, she is an allegory, scarcely less transparent than the Harpies or the Krjpes, where we find the polytheistic fancy of the early Greeks in the very act of impersonating and in- carnating the gods of a future generation ; 1 and in the very passage where so much is made of her in the shape 1 " In Krjp, and some other such. sons ; for never in these cases is the words, we catch fancy engaged in the image completely finished, and clad work of shaping forth ill-understood, with the full personality of a perfect incalculable effects, into separate per- god." — Nitzsch, on Odyss. in. 236. 20 ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. of a distinct person, the infatuation, which is said to have been the result of her evil inspiration, is ascribed in the common phraseology of the Homeric men to Jove, — ml fiev (j>peva? efeWo Zeis (xix. 137). The old minstrel who first worked out this divine personage from the common state of mind, or result of a state of mind denominated arrj, which any of the gods might produce (Od. iv. 261 ; II. ix. 18), was in the fair way, had the popular creed allowed him, to have worked out a Hellenic Trinity akin to that of the Hindus, with Ate for its Siva ; but he made not the most distant approach to the Christian idea of the devil. The bard of the Iliad, had he written the gospel history, might have said that Ate put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot to betray Christ (John xiii. 2) ; but he might have said with equal, or rather greater readiness, that Jove or any of the gods had deprived him of his senses, and driven him to do this act. In the Christian theology, God is essentially opposed to the Devil ; in Homeric language, Jove and Ate are convertible terms. Proposition vi. — Zeus is the supreme ruler both of gods and men, and stands to the former exactly in the same relation that an absolute monarch does to the aris- tocracy of which he is the head. His will is the grand originating centre of all great movements in the physical and moral world; and besides the peculiar functions which he exercises as god of the upper air, he has a general superintendence over the conduct of all the other gods, and over all the thoughts, purposes, and actions of men. He is in an especial manner the friend and protector of those who have none to help them, and the enforcer of all the great rights and duties by which the framework of ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 21 society is knit together. He is the rewarder of those who do well, and the punisher of those who do evil. The supremacy of Jove, as stated in this proposition, is the strong key-stone of the polytheistic arch in Homer, without which, indeed, polytheism in heaven, like a pure democracy on earth, would be sure to start asunder, and rush blindly into absolute chaos and dissolution. It in- troduces in fact, to an extent greater than is generally imagined, for many practical uses, the monotheistic prin- ciple into polytheism. The right of the son of Kronos to this high position is founded, by Homer, on the single fact of his superior strength, just as the right of Agamem- non to be king of men stands upon no other foundation, so far as one can see, than that he is the strongest among the strong (II. i. 281). The most notable passage in which this doctrine is stated is that famous appeal made to the assembled deities by the celestial autocrat himself in the beginning of Iliad viii., where he tells them plainly, that if they were to suspend a golden chain from heaven, and endeavour to pull the Father down, they would not succeed with all their united endeavours ; while, on the other hand, if he were to fix the one end of the chain round a crag of Olympus, he would hold, all the gods dangling in vacancy at the other end, with earth and sea to boot ! — toggov eyco irept t et/M decov, irepi t elfjb avOpwircov. This is a homely, and to us an infantile simile ; but it ex- presses significantly enough the central celestial fact, to which, as a pole-star, all the conflicting and divergent materials of both the epics are made finally to point. In the Odyssey the jealous wrath of Poseidon against the tempest-tost hero is at length forced to yield to the con- 22 ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. summated counsels of the supreme Father, and his like- minded daughter (Odys. xxiv. 477). In the Iliad the Aibs 8' ereXelero fiov\rj, with which the song is commenced, rides over the whole action with a dominancy, only the more triumphant that it meets with constant and com- bined opposition from the strongest of the other Olympian powers, specially Poseidon the brother, Hera the spouse, and Athena the unmothered daughter of the great Olym- pian ; but the more that these inferior deities fret and chafe against the divine decrees of the Thunderer, with the more unshaken serenity does the high administrator of war to men (ra^i^ irdxifioio, II. iv. 84) sit on his throne apart (II. I, 499), and over the murmurs of hostile gods, and the heaps of dead and dying men, measure with his thought the march of his high purpose till it be fulfilled (II. xi. 80). All the passages in the Iliad that seem to indicate anything contrary to this practical supremacy of Jove's high will in heaven and in earth, when accurately ex- amined, throw their weight into the opposite scale. Of all the gods, Poseidon is that one who, with the fairest show of reason, might have asserted his right to control the obnoxious decrees of the Olympian ; but the "liberty, equality, and fraternity " of which he boasts in one famous passage (II. xv. 185), like its human counterpart in modern French democracy, is found to exist only in theory ; when the hour comes for action, he is as ready as Diomede, or any mortal man, to say, ovk av eycoy eOeXoi/ni Ad Kpovlcovi fxa^eaOai rjfieas tov$ aWovs, eireir] ttoXv eprep6<; ecrriv. 11. VIII. 210. With which compare xv. 211. In viii. 440, where he acts as equerry to Jove, his inferiority is yet more markedly shown. As little can be made out of the famous myth of ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 23 Briareus JEgeon (II. I. 396) against the absolute supremacy of the Father. Here, also, the three most important mem- bers of the celestial assembly, Hera, Poseidon, and Pallas, are leagued against Jove, and wish to bind him. But he is delivered from this formidable conspiracy, says the myth, by the sea-goddess Thetis, and the hundred-armed strong man of the floods (see Welcker, p. 4, above), and de facto, he still remains supreme. In a similar strain, we are told that the stout Thracian Lycurgus so frightened Dionysos, that he was obliged to take refuge in the sea, and in the bosom of the same Thetis (II. vi. 135) ; but with all this display of momentary weakness, the divine power of the wine-god over men waxed strong, and an unblissful end was his who dared to strive with immortals. These monstrous myths, bearing as they do some analogy to the portentous figments of the Hindus (see the Curse of Kehama), were in all probability invented by the licen- tious imagination of rude religionists for the express pur- pose of magnifying the power of the gods, by showing that though they could be humbled and even persecuted for a season, they must certainly triumph in the end. Besides that, such rich collections of popular tradition as are incorporated into the Homeric poems cannot pos- sibly be expected to be homogeneous in all details. The comprehensive genius of the arch-minstrel whom we call Homer, has doubtless taken into his caldron some strange materials which he could not, or cared not to fuse. Homer was not professionally a theologian, but a poet ; and if in some parts of his works he has admitted tales of the gods not altogether consistent with the more exalted character of his general theology, he has only erred, as the most pious poets will err, when more intent on sport for the moment than on edification, i : L. ... 24 ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. One circumstance which more than any other tends to show how much of the monotheistic element was practically inwoven with heathenism, is the habitual reference to Zeus when there is no special call for mentioning his name more than that of any other deity. The passages are innumerable, where Jove, as the ordinary administrator of the world, is said to send sorrow or sadness, blessing or bane, when the polytheistic phraseology Oeol would have been equally ap- propriate (Od. in. 132; iv. 34, 208). He indeed it was whom the pious heathen was taught by the Homeric poetry habitually to look up to, as the dispenser of all the bounties of Providence on which the existence and the happiness of man depends. Zevs $' avros vefiei o\fiov OXu/jlttios avOpanroiaiv 'J£a6\o7<; tJSc Kdfcolcrtv, biTco? eOekrjaiv ' ifcdi\el Be e /irjTLeTa Zevs. — II. II. 197. And king-killing to the Homeric chiefs was no light busi- ness (Od. xvi. 401), any more than to the Puritans who sat in earnest and prayerful judgment over the ill-starred Charles. We may observe further, in respect to the moral functions of Zeus, that it is his high prerogative to visit with retribution unrighteous deeds of whatsoever 26 ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. description ; he is the avenging Jove, and the giver of just recompence to all who have been unrighteously treated either in their persons or property (Odys: i. .379 ; 77. in. 321). He is, moreover, specially invoked to sanc- tion the obligation of an oath (Od. xix. 303 ; II. in. 276); he protects with special care the houseless wanderer, and penceless mendicant (Od. vi. 207), and with the signifi- cant surname of Ik€ttjo-co<; keeps an open ear for the cries of the friendless suppliant. He protects the rights of hospitality under the hallowed title of EeW? (Od. xiv. 283), and his altar lends a sacredness to the domestic hearth (xxn. 335). Whatsoever, in short, either in the shape of stern law or of mild equity, renders man an object of interest and of love to man, comes from Jove. He is God in a sense that belongs to no other deity. Without him men would be wild beasts, life an uninterrupted war, and Olympus a sublime bedlam. Proposition vii. — Though the absolute power of Jove is not to be questioned by any of the gods, and all oppo- sition to his supreme will vain, yet in the general course of his divine government, a large liberty of action is allowed to all the members of the celestial aristocracy, who have each his separate rights, with which, except on great occasions, and for high providential purposes, Jove will not willingly interfere ; and thus an individual god may often be found involved in a course of action opposed 4b the will of Jove, and persevering for a long time in this course of opposition, till in the fulness of the destined years (irepufKofievcov Ivlclvtwv, Od. I. 16), he submits him- self to the will of Jove, and the general council of the gods. A notable example of this we have in the conduct of ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 27 Poseidon throughout the Odyssey (i. 19, and many other places), which of itself is sufficient to show the fallacy of Dr. Ihne's remark, that in the Odyssey "Olympus does not resound with everlasting quarrels." This circum- stance, that there is less of brawl and bickering in the Olympic assembly of the Odyssey, is, as we have observed, purely accidental, and resulting from the nature of the subject ; for Poseidon, the most important member of the celestial senate next to Zeus, is as active and unabated in his hostility in the one poem as in the other. A division of the celestial counsels is, in fact, the natural, and un- avoidable result of a polytheistic system of divine govern- ment, and the supreme ruler will be more or less thwarted in carrying out his views, just as on earth most monarchies which are nominally absolute, are in practice limited by the aristocracy of whatever nature, hereditary or bureau- cratic, that encircles the throne ; and in this matter of government, as in all other points except immortality, the Homeric heaven is only the highest power of the Homeric earth. If our nice modern sense of propriety is startled by the rude language which Achilles casts in the teeth of the king of men (II. I. 225), we cannot expect to find speech much more courteous in the mouth even of the wise Athena, when she stands in a hostile relation to her father Jove (//. vm. 360) ; and if Jupiter's one daughter Ate (like the homunculus in the second part of Faust 1 ), turns her pernicious activity against the mighty father that bore her (7Z. xix. 95), it is only because, in heroic and feudal times, such ungracious things are sometimes done on earth, and because man has, in all ages, been fond of being governed by gods, created as much as may 1 " Am Ende hangen wir doch ab Von Creaturen die wir maehten." 28 ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. be in his own likeness. Liberty of thought and feeling, speech and action, belongs as essentially to the gods in heaven, as to men on earth ; and it is only when this liberty is carried so far as to threaten the dissolution of the firm framework of things, that the omnipotent will of Zeus interferes to prevent fatal collisions, and to restore a necessary peace. We are not, therefore, to be surprised at the great length of tether allowed to Poseidon (II xiii. 10, xiv. 510), when Jove is absent among the milk- fed just men of Thrace ; nay, it is plain that the theore- tical omnipotence of Zeus is sometimes practically limited by the decidedly expressed dissent of the other gods, as, for instance, in the matter of Sarpedon (II. xvi. 440), and in the often repeated threat, ep$* arap ov roc 7rdvrevyoc ye (i.e. Zevs) ttjv Treirpcofjievriv, and though it be quite true that the idea of fiotpa, like that of v Att] and Kr\p, is in some places impersonated (II. xix. 87 ; xx. 128 ; Od. vn. 197), I can see no proof that the poet looked upon this Alaa, the spinner of fatal threads, as any more substantial person than " Att] ; much less can I see the slightest reason to exalt her above those very supreme rulers, of whose functions she is only a cloudy and half-developed incarnation. I say half- developed, because, as above remarked, there is a great difference in Homer between the full-grown gods, clad with all the dignity of a person, and such personages as v Arrj, Molpa, and the Harpies, who, like the Egyptian frogs mentioned by Diodorus, if gods at all, have not yet ac- quired strength enough to shake themselves free from the slime out of which their physiognomy has to be shaped. Altogether, Homer is a poet of too sunny a complexion to deal much in the dark idea of a remorseless Fate ; and if, on a sad occasion (Il< vi. 487), Hector comforts ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 33 Andromache by saying, that no one can take away his life virep alcrav, and that no one can escape his fioipa, this man- ner of speaking is not Turkish any more than it is Calvin- istic ; it is only human. Such a thought occurs to all men under certain circumstances. That no man can escape death when his day is come {II. xn. 326) is what any man may say as well as Sarpedon. But though I cannot allow that anything like a regular doctrine of Fate superior to Jove is taught by Homer, it is not to be denied that there are expressions and situ- ations in his poems from which the Hellenic mind, if so inclined, might easily develop such a doctrine as we stated above (p, 19) that the tragedians had shaped out from the idea of Ate. And there is nothing more obvious than the necessity of thought which led the Greeks to work out this idea of Fate to the stature which we find it has attained in that passage of Herodotus, and in the tragedians. For, to the thoughtful mind, in reference to many things that daily happen in this world, the divine power being first postulated as unbounded, the question will always arise, — if the divine power could have made the world otherwise, ivhy did it not do so? This question the Homeric men, if they had no tradition of the doctrine of Moses, that the world lies under a curse for the sin of the first man, and if they did not believe, as they certainly did not, in a devil, could only answer by saying, that things are ivhat they are, and as they are, by some inherent necessity of nature, and not even a god could make them otherwise than they are made. That some dim idea of this kind may have hovered before Homer's mind is extremely probable, though he certainly has not worked it up into any definite system which his reader can lay hold of. Homer, as the event proved, had 34 ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMEB. said enough to feed the metaphysico-imaginative wit of his countrymen, and had dropt the seed out of which a regular personal Molpa or " Ava^tct] might grow; and, if there were theological sects in ancient Greece inclined to wrangle about the comparative powers of Molpa and Zeu?, as even our theologians draw swords about liberty and ne- cessity, both parties, with that ingenuity of which religious sects are seldom void, would readily find in the Homeric bible texts sufficiently pliable to their several opinions. 1 Proposition x. — The gods know all things. This proposition, however, like that respecting the divine omnipotence, must not be pressed curiously, but under- stood with reference to the uses of the divine know- ledge in the moral government of the world. The practical omniscience of the Homeric gods is implied in their general control and superintendence of human affairs, which, without such an attribute, could not possibly be exercised in the grand style which is characteristic of Homer ; the special doctrine, however, Oeol Be re iravra lo~aaiv (Od. IV. 379), was as familiar to the Greek ear as the Oeol Be re wavra Bvvavrai already quoted, and this quality of superhuman knowledge not limited by the vulgar barriers of space and time, though 1 N'agelsbach, after reviewing the hold together the articulated organism passages which seem to speak for the in- of the celestial society; and the pro- dependent functions of the Moipa,with a duct of this desire is the Moipa, a power more serious and favourable eye than I made superior to the gods; another essay have been able to do in the text, con- of the human mind to satisfy its innate eludes thus : — • ' The will which rules longing for a monotheistic view of the the Olympian commonwealth is not so universe,^ p. 127. I cannot see that absolute as that every existing might Homer had anything so very definite necessarily retreats before it. For the in view when he talks of the Molpa. It human mind is formed with an irrepres- appears to me that he never conceived sible desire to give a head to the multi- of it distinctly as anything indepen- form congregation of the gods, to pro- dent of the will of the gods, vide a principle of unity, which shall ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 35 it belongs to all the partakers of an immortal nature, is, with peculiar emphasis, applied to the elemental god, Helios, 09 iravr £opa Kal ttclvt eiraKoveu {Od. XII. 323), and to Zeus, the moral governor of the world (xv. 523). It is not to be expected, however, that the sense-bound poet of an early stage of civilisation should be able, on all occasions, to preserve in fact the consistency of this high ideal of the celestial intellect, which he lays down theo- retically. On the contrary, as Nagelsbach well observes, the spectacle of a self-constituted but continually self-baffled ideal of supersensuous perfection, is that which the Homeric gods (and I may add, the theological doctrines of nations much more highly cultivated) present. Examples are frequent; but II. xviii. 168, and xix. 112, show more vividly than any other passages how even the father of gods and men may, at times, be blinded and circumvented by the agency of his own ministers. Proposition xt. — The gods are easily offended, wrath- ful and jealous. Their hatred is the more to be dreaded in proportion as they are more powerful than mortals ; and their high resolves, when once made, are carried out with a relentless firmness, that can be appeased only by the greatest possible sacrifices on the part of the guilty or unfortunate offender. Nothing strikes the Christian reader of Homer with more astonishment, and it may be loathing, than the ex- tremely low moral character of the celestial personages who are held up to view as the objects of popular rever- ence ; and of the base feelings by which the bosoms of these high persons are continually actuated, that of a purely selfish jealousy on private grounds of quarrel, and an unrelenting spirit of personal hostility, is to a well- 36 ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. constituted moral nature the most odious. One is at times tempted, considering these things, to say of the Homeric gods generally, as Dr. Ihne says of the gods of the Iliad, that they are "worse than the men." Cer- tainly, whatever be the temper of the gods of the Iliad in this respect, that of the Odyssey is nothing better ; for what wrath can be more relentless and persecuting than that of Poseidon against Ulysses? (Od. I. 20 ; xiii. 125 ; &c), and what motive for this anger can be less noble and more a kin to the meanest humanity, than that assigned by the poet, Od. I. 69 ? Polypheme is a godless monster and a cannibal ; and because Ulysses, to save himself and his comrades from being eaten alive, deprives this em- bruted hulk of his eye-sight, he incurs the indignation of the deity, who happens to be the monster's father, to such a degree, that nothing but the lives of all his trusty com- rades can satiate the divine appetite for revenge. Nor is this a solitary case ; but it goes through the whole poetry of Homer with such a pervading inspiration, that, though living in an age when more just ideas of the divine char- acter were entertained by not a few, Virgil did not think that he could scheme out the characters of his immortal Epos, without having a Juno to perform the like part. Nor is the wrath or fierce hostility of the gods the worst feature in the divine character. The mean selfish jealousy with which Poseidon regards the commercial prosperity of the Phaoacians, is comparable to nothing so fitly as the spirit with which the members of close corporations in this country, without the slightest regard to the public good, defended their exclusive privileges before a committee of an aristocratic House of Commons. What shall we say to all this ? Only one thing can be said, that the men who could so conceive, and so picture their gods, were ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 37 themselves in a very low state of moral development. Whether Homer himself was not a little advanced in ethical insight beyond the men whose traditionary theology he received into his verse, is not easy to say ; certainly some of the most glaring instances of moral deformity in the character and actions of his divine personages may be conveniently explained on the supposition already men- tioned, that he is there giving us the crude and unas- similated elements of an old Pelasgic creed ; but this consideration will not help us very far, as the conduct of Achilles himself — a fair specimen of the popular hero of those days — is, in point of inexorability and passion, no unworthy type of the " tantcene animis ccelestibus irce " which marks the characters in the Olympian drama. If Achilles may immolate his thousands being a mortal, Poseidon, being a god, may swallow up his tens of thou- sands. We are forced, therefore — if we will have a pallia- tion for this monstrous theology — to fall back upon this proposition, that, in the Homeric conception of the gods, holiness, or moral excellence of any kind, forms no essen- tial element. Superior strength is their characteristic attri- bute, and fear rather than love the inspiration of their worshippers. The gods, in fact — except in the single case of Zeus, as moral governor — are only incarnations of the powers and forces that we see everywhere at work around us in nature ; and as such it is not to be expected that they should manifest any moral feelings whatever. The wrath of Poseidon, therefore, though represented to us by the poet as the evil passion of a being like to our evil selves, is fundamentally nothing but the violence of the ocean waves, which, at the present day, rages and roars with as little regard to any moral principle as it did in the age of Homer. The god Poseidon, as he stands in 38 ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. Homer, is a clumsy union of two incompatible characters ; an unruly elemental power, and a being formed after the image of man, and therefore properly with a moral nature ; but the poet, partly because he was himself unacquainted with a high moral type of humanity, partly because he could not shake the gods free from that merely physical character which originally was their only one, was able to produce nothing but a gigantic incongruity, to which all- the harmony of his numbers, and all the magic of Phidias' chisel, could not afterwards reconcile the growing prac- tical reason of his countrymen. Proposition xii. — The gods are capable of acting falsely, and of deceiving the expectations which they had raised in the breasts of mortals. A wise man should not trust absolutely to a god, but, on slippery occasions, exact an oath for the greater security. This proposition contains the culminating point of odious immorality in the character of the Homeric gods as depicted by Homer ; and though it is no doubt true that the most glaring instances of divine want of faith occur in the Iliad, and that for sufficient reasons already men- tioned, there are examples enough of the same principle in the other poem, to show that the author of both was either the same, or had fundamentally the same concep- tions of the divine character. In the Odyssey, Ulysses exacts an oath both of Calypso and Circe, because he could not trust them without it ; and so much accus- tomed is he to the idea of deceit on the part of the gods, that even when the benign daughter of Cadmus appears over the rush of waves to save him from a watery death, the first thing he does is to suspect that one of the gods is iveaving a ivilefor his ruin (Od. v. 356). Telemachus, ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 39 in the same way, will not believe that Ulysses is his father, but fears that some god is bewitching him — 6e\yet (Od. xvi. 195) — to his woe. In the Iliad, again, Jove sends ov\o$ Svetpo? to deceive Agamemnon, and Agamem- non is a fool (vrjirios) for believing him (n. 38). The king of men, in another place, charges the king of gods and men with an evil deceit, /cater) airdrr) (II. ix. 21), and the fair Helen, in speaking to the fairest Aphrodite, uses a word — rj-rreponreveiv (II. in. 399) — which, according to Homeric usage, is applicable only to swindlers and seducers of the lowest kind (Od. xv. 419). But worse remains. Athena, the incarnated wisdom of "the. father" — one of the most perfect characters in Hellenic theology — on two distinct occasions, perpetrates a very gross act of deceit and falsehood, from which every honourable and manly feeling revolts ; in the first place, she solicits and obtains from Zeus (the op/cios, the avenger of violated truth !) the permission to tempt Pandarus to violate the treaty solemnly sworn to by the leaders of the Trojans and the Greeks, which treaty is accordingly broken, and the daughter of Zeus is guilty of tempting a mortal man to commit an act of pure perjury, her father consenting (II. iv.). In the second place (what Hermann, in his Latin argument, calls an " atrox dolus"), by personating Deiphobus (II. xxii. 227), she draws away the unsuspect- ing Hector into that unequal conflict with the son of Peleus, in which he was to meet his sad fate. Now, with regard to these truly monster traits of divine character as. occurring in the two last passages of the Iliad, we must make the special remark, that these extraordinary acts of divine perfidy are all made in favour of the Greeks, whose poet Homer was by strong preference, as every book of the poem shows. The cases, therefore, fall within the 10 ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. extensive category of abnormal moral states caused by self-love, national vanity, and party-preference, so that, in fact, the poet merely says, in a rude unqualified way (being accustomed to plain speaking), what all parties, and especially all religious parties, in all ages, have sup- posed and acted on — that when Heaven is interested in a cause (or the church, as we say now) justice may be- come injustice, and truth and falsehood be confounded. Still it must be admitted that there is a wide moral gulf between Homer, who makes his gods do these things, and our modern religious parties, who only do them in the name of God. These, by their evil deeds, make void their own scriptures ; the countrymen of the old poet, for every diabolic deed, might plead a divine precedent in the only scripture of which they were in possession. With regard to the other less glaring instances of divine deceit, the observations made under the former head apply. In a warlike and semi-savage people, cunning and stratagem, lies and deceit of every kind, must ever — of course, within certain recognised bounds — be in high esteem; and Ulysses, no less than Achilles, will find his pattern and his patron in Heaven. It is also to be borne in mind, when con- sidering these matters, that the devout Greek habit of referring every internal change of feeling, or external change of circumstance, to direct divine agency, almost necessitated the extraordinary language which they some- times use, of their gods. As, for instance, when in an adverse position, one of the Homeric warriors exclaims — Zev irarep, rj pa vv /ecu av $>Cko"tyev§T]<; eTervgo 77. XII. 164. " father Zeus, you are fond of lies above all measure" ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 41 these impious-sounding words, when translated into modern language, merely mean, " gracious God, how have I been deceived in all this ; how have my expectations been disappointed ! " Zeus, in the view of the Homeric men, was at once the inspirer of the hopes which this man had entertained (Prop, in.) and the arranger of the external circumstances (Prop, n.) by which they had been frustrated ; therefore he says bluntly, " Jove, thou hast deceived me signally ! " instead of " God, how signally have I been deceived ! " Proposition xiii. — The gods, as the givers of all good things, are to be regarded as habitually inspired with a benevolent affection towards the human race ; and though, on certain occasions, and against particular persons, their indignation is terrible, and their vengeance not easily satis- fied, still their general character, in reference to offending mortals, is placability. The passages which I have to adduce in support of this proposition from the Homeric writings are comparatively few ; but we are not on that account to suppose that it contains a sentiment less familiar to the minds of the Greeks, than those of a less amiable character contained in the immediately preceding propositions. As those years are often the happiest in a nation's history which furnish fewest materials for the pen of the dramatic historian, so those attributes of the Hellenic gods are not to be re- garded as the least influential, which give occasion to the fewest startling events in the narration of a popular Epos. 1 It is in the nature of things that the wrath of gods, like 1 I scarcely think Nagelsbach has as it appears in Homer, because there sufficiently regarded this when he states is no love of the gods tomen presupposed in such strong language, that "love to from which it could arise," p. 201. God could notarise in the Hellenic mind, 42 ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMME, the wrath of men, just because it is an exception from the common order of proceedings, should give rise to critical situations, strange concatenations, and striking catastrophes, such as form the natural raw materials for an Epic poet to work up. So the divine wrath consequent on the sin of Adam supplied a theme of appropriate grandeur for Milton's lofty Muse ; so the miseries of a thirty years' war became pictorial in the hands of Schiller ; and in the same way, Poseidon dairepx^ fieveatvwv furnished Homer with a series of the most varied adventures, which he might have sought for in vain among the stores of rich bounty spread on groaning boards by the Oeoi Scott) pes hcuov (Od. viii. 325). The general benevolence of the Homeric gods, notwithstanding the special instances of wrath just mentioned, is to be inferred not so much from a special designation to that effect, as from the general tone of cheerful gratitude with which their goodness is continually acknowledged by their worshippers on all the occasions of common life. Notwithstanding the strong expressions quoted under the previous heads, no person can rise from the perusal of the Homeric poems, with an impression that there is anything stern and forbidding in the habitual aspect of the gods, or that fear was the only strong feeling in the minds of their worshippers. Though power is their principal characteristic, it is never supposed that they use that attribute maliciously, or wantonly, merely to vex mankind. On the contrary, Zeus, even when in the mid- career of his predestined course, looks down with pity on the mortals whose fate it is to suffer sharp sorrows, that the purposes of the Almighty one may be fulfilled; and the prayer of the labouring good man prevails, if not to avert the blow altogether, at least to blunt the point of the weapon which inflicts it (71 vhi. 245). That the gods, ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 4£ though not easily turned from their purposes (Od. m. 147), are yet to a certain extent, with the single exception of Hades (II. ix. 158), 7repfiopov aXye e^ovaiv. Ocl. I. 32. These words, like the inscription on Dante's Hellgate, stand a striking text before the opening scenes of the Odyssey, that the reader may be impressed with the serious lesson of moral retribution which is to be taught by the bloody catastrophe. And not only the insolent and riotous suitors, but the companions of the sea-tost hero, are represented as having suffered what they suffered in ; ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 55 consequence of their own folly. 1 This also is prominently set forth in the very opening lines of the poem — aurwv yap o-cperepycrcv arao-OaXcrjcrcv oXovto. — I. 7. No less clearly is the truth enunciated, that the gods see with observant eyes the evil deeds of men, and recom- pense them accordingly. The most distinct utterance on this subject is put by the poet into the mouth of Eumaeus, " the divine swineherd," — ov fiev a^erXia epya 0eol pbaicapes ^CXeovcnv aXXa Stfcrjv tiovgi /ecu alcrifia epy avdpcoircov Oil XIV. 83. and in another remarkable passage it is said — kclL re deoi ^etvoiaiv eoacores aXXoBawolacv iravroloL reXeOovres 67TC(TTpo)(j)(ocn iroXrjas avOp(j07TQ)V b/3ptV T6 KOI eWO/jLLrjV 6(pOp(OVT€<;. xvii. 487. and, as if to avoid all possible misconception of his mean- ing on the part of the most obtuse, the grand moral of the whole poem is again distinctly repeated before the final work of retributive slaughter (xxn. 39) ; and this work accomplished is declared by the old Laertes to be an un- deniable proof that there are gods in the vast Olympus — Zev iraTep rj pa er ecrre 6eot Kara iiatcpov' OXv/attov €l ereov fJLvqarr)pe^ draaOaXov vf3ptv encrav. XXIV. 351. With regard to the gods, to whose office the function of retribution falls, though in cases of special sin3 against particular gods the punishment naturally comes from the 1 It is well remarked by Nagelsbach, as folly (d or curses which parents, when sorely irritated, vented on their unnatural children (II. ix. 454, 567) ; but the idea seems afterwards to have been extended, so that even poor persons who are under the special protection of Zeus are said to have their 'Epiwves or avengers (Od. xvn. 475). Proposition xix. — The souls of men exist after death in the subterranean abodes of Hades, or the invisible world, but in a dim, shadowy, unsubstantial state, by no means to be looked on with envy by those who behold the sun in the upper regions, and tread with firm foot on the stable earth. A few special favourites of the gods rise above this common fate of the vulgar dead, and partake in Heaven, or hi the isles of the west, of a state of sub- stantial beatitude ; while, on the other hand, a few atrocious monsters, or men of reckless and impious charac- ter, sinning daringly in the face of the gods, are condemned ON THE THEOLOGY OF HOMER. 57 to excruciating woes in Tartarus or Hell. This terrible retribution, however, has no reference to common men, or common crimes, which are punished by the gods in the present life, the proper theatre of human fates. Among the many remarkable coincidences that a thoughtful observer might point out between the religious condition of the early Greek and that of the Hebrew mind, none is more notable than that which relates to the views entertained by both nations with regard to a future state. In a legislative capacity, of course, Moses had nothing to do with futurity ; but it is remarkable, that in many of the psalms, too many to require special quotation, the state of the dead is spoken of precisely in the same dim, comfortless way that characterizes the language of Homer. The well-known exclamation of Achilles, fir] hrj /jlol Oavarov s rod [XT] diappaiadevTas els"Aidov p.d\e?v. — v. 244-5. turn vero cuique eorum propter beneficia quibus genus humanum cumu- laverat cruciatus erant subeundi. Praeterea autem, quod per interest multum Christi perfectionem inter, et Promethei non perfectam natu- ram, hoc etiam magnum inter eos discrimen esse apparet, quod ille a Deo patre ad opus in terra patrandum legatus sit consentiente eodem perfecit, Prometheus, invito deorum patre et irato, generi humano multis modis benefecit, ejusque jussu poena est affectus. In quo dis- crimine si internam rei Christianae praestantiam in comparationem non vocamus, sed solum spectamus utriusque et voluntatem et auda- ciam, non possumus Graeci quam de generis humani sospitatore sibi conformaverant sententiam Christiana quanquam minus sanctam piamque, tamen audaciorem esse non judicare. Nam quod Prometheo propter tw <£>L\avdpa)7rov rpoirov, et Sia ttjv Xlav (j>iX6rrjTa fipor&v a Jove timenda erant, ea non erant Christo, cui cruciatus illi in coelis reduci a patre amantissimo resarciebantur. Ille deos laesit, ut HOMINES BEARETj HIC HOMINES BEAVIT, UT SUAE DEIQUE PATRIS OBSECUNDARET VOLUNTATI." To the same purpose, though in a different connexion, a recent English translator : — " Prometheus himself is the personification of Divine love, willing, for the sake of man, to suffer to the utmost what divine justice could inflict or require." 1 In the same direction, though not so far and so decidedly, do the well-known observations of A. W. Schlegel point ; from which, as translated by Black, and adopted by Captain Medwyn, we extract the following: — " The chained Prometheus is the representation of constancy under suffering, and that the never-ending suffering of a god. Though the scene exhibits the principal person exiled to a naked rock on the shore of the encircling ocean, this drama still embraces the world, the Olym- pus of the gods, and the earth of mortals, all scarcely yet reposing in a secure state above the dread abyss of the dark Titanian powers. This idea of a self-devoting divinity has been mysteriously inculcated 1 S wayne's Introduction, p. 12. ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF uESOHYLUS. 71 in many religions, as a confused foreboding of the true. Here, how- ever, it appears in a most alarming contrast with the consolations of revelation. For Prometheus does not suffer in an understanding with the powers by whom the world is governed, but he atones for his dis- obedience, and that disobedience consists in nothing but the attempt to give perfection to the human race. He is thus an image of human nature itself, endowed with a miserable foresight, and bound down to a narrow existence without an ally, and with nothiBg to oppose to the combined and inexorable powers of nature but an unshaken will, and the consciousness of elevated claims." But the most remarkable, and in every way the most interesting, parallel drawn between the mythical tortures of Caucasus and the real agonies of Calvary, is that drawn by our countryman Shelley, who, in his supra-mundane poem of the " Prometheus Unbound/' introduces a chorus of Furies, endeavouring to terrify the dauntless Titan into submission, by conjuring up the phantasmal representation of the good and the great in all ages who had suffered for the advancement of humanity, but, according to the inter- pretation of the chorus, had suffered, and could not but have suffered, in vain. Hoav striking are the following lines, in which Christ appears as a preacher of righteous- ness, but a righteousness so super-excellent, that in the hands of abusive mortality, the antidote is changed into a poison ! — " Like a jewel of gold in a swine's snout," so is a good thing in the hands of a bad user. " One came forth of gentle worth, Smiling on the sanguine Earth : His words outlived him, like swift poison Withering up truth, peace, and pity. Look where round the wide horizon Many a million-peopled city Vomits smoke in the bright air. Mark that outcry of despair ! 'Tis his mild and gentle ghost Wailing for the faith he kindled." 72 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF JESCHYLUS. And again — Fury. " Behold an emblem : those who do endure Deep wrongs for man, and scorn and chains, but heap Thousandfold torment on themselves and him. Prometheus. Kemit the anguish of that lighted stare ; Close those wan lips; let that thorn-wounded brow Stream not with blood; it mingles with thy tears ! Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and death, So thy sick throes shade not that crucifix, So those pale fingers play not with thy gore. horrible ! thy name I will not speak ; It hath become a curse. I see, I see The wise, the mild, the lofty, and the just, Whom thy slaves hate for being like to thee, Hunted by foulest lies from their heart's home," etc. etc. But of this enough : we have now seen as the first grand element in the interpretation of the JEschylean drama, what general impression it has made on the intellects of the present age, who, being touched with a living poetical sympathy, were the most likely to be free from those perverse subtilties and unsound refinements which are so often wont to perplex the judgment of the learned. But the poets also, and the poetical translators, have their peculiar professional fallacies, " their idols of the tribe," as Bacon phrases it. What love and sympathy with a grand idea can understand and appreciate they will appreciate ; but they are a wayward and a wanton and a licentious race, and oftentimes are themselves the father of the child, which they seem but to adopt ; the brand which they flourish is taken piously from the altar of the god, but the fire with which it is kindled is not seldom their own. One must therefore look, not suspiciously ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF jESCHYLUS. 73 indeed, but narrowly, into their handling of ancient myths ; ready to find in the general case a true reflec- tion of foreign imagery, but not surprised if here and there we are deceived by a home-grown delusion. To guard ourselves, therefore, against their one-sidedness, in the present inquiry we shall now make a shnilar review of the opinions of the learned ; and in doing so we shall do ourselves the pleasure to recall and to present promi- nently, as one of the last legacies of the scholarship of the past century to the present, the opinion of Schiitz : not because we think that opinion of much value as a result, but because it connects itself most naturally with the views already given, and will serve as a most useful stimulant to thought in the contrast which it presents to some more recent views which we shall have immediate occasion to bring under review. " Cum primum poeta animuni ad scribendam hane tragoediam appulit, id potissimum egisse nobis videtur, ut Atheniensibus acerri- mum tyrannidis odium inspiraret, verumque libertatis, qua turn maxime fruebantur, amorem tanti mali metu in eorum animis excitaret con- firmaretque. Quo consilio Jovem deorum novum regem seu tyrannum impotentem finxit, omnia pro arbitrio agentem, jura sibi data negantem, omnia suae majestati arrogantem, inexorabilem, asperum, et in amicos quoque bene de se meritos, propterea quod suspectos omnes habeat, ingratum atque crudelem. " In Prometheo vero spectatoribus utilissimum hominis vere popu- laris exemplar proposuit, quern, ut ait Horatius, nee vultus instantis tyranni, nee civium ardor prava jubentium mente solida quatiat ; qui propter generis humani caritatem praepotentis tyranni odium suscipere nullus dubitaverit, susceptum autem excelsa animi magnitudine ac robore sustineat. Itaque illius humanitas cum Jovis crudelitate, illius cupiditas cum hujus bene de omnibus merendi studio, illius effrenata ferocia cum hujus moderatione et fortitudine praeclare comparatur. " Jupiter universum hominum genus extinguere voluit : Prome- theus omnium mortalium vitae ac felicitatis auctor, parens, deus exstitit. Prometheus Jovis ad regnum obtinendum adjutor fuerat ; Jupiter Pro- 74 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF JESCHYLUS. metheum, immemor beneficii, nee ullam ob causam, nisi quod eum ob nimiam humani generis caritatem suspectum haberet, indignis modis vexat, acerbissimisque poenis affligit. Jupiter in summo dignitatis et imperii fastigio constitutus omnia libertatis jura diis eripuerat, aequita- tem ac justitiam negligebat, sanctissimas antiquissimasque leges pedi- bus conculcabat ; Prometheus ne summa quidem miseria sic induratur, ut ingenitum humanitatis sensum ex animo amittat; non irascitur hominibus, quorum propter amorem tanta se calamitate oppressum videt, non exuit pristinam miseris succurrendi voluntatem ; et quam- quam se immensis malorum fluctibus mersum videt, idem tamen se quam plurimos malorum socios optare candide negat. Jovem ne summa quidem potentia a timore liberat, id quod baud obscuro indicio prodit, cum vaticinio Promethei perterritus Mercurium ad eum ablegat, omni- busque minis ac terroribus, pertinacissimum quo ille nuptias Jovi periculosas premebat, silentium vincere atque expugnare cupit ; Pro- metlieum vero, quamvis omnibus artubus deligatum et constrictum, non Ohori sollicitudo benevolentiae plena, non Oceani mitiora remedia suadentis arnica consilia, non Ius miseris furoribus vagisque cursibus unius Jovis ob noxam agitatae horrores, non saevae Mercurii commina- tiones, non denique aeris marisque tumultus, non coeli terraeque ruinae molliunt ac frangunt. Ecce justum ilium ac tenacem propositi virum ! Ecce virum fortem cum mala fortuna compositum ! " This view of Schiitz, which substantially agrees with that of Byron and Shelley, may stand also for the opinion of a great German Hellenist, whose leading sympathies seem rather to go with the philologists of the last century than with those of the present ; — we mean Godfrey Hermann. This writer, in his dissertation on the Prometheus Unbound, 1 while he has expended his strength on many debated polemical points of lesser moment, has, with regard to the main idea of the drama, contented himself with repeat- ing Schutz's view in the single sentence, that the ancient tragic poet wished to please and to instruct, " non per enigmata abstrusae cujusdam sapientiae, sed 'per viva con- stanticie, fortitudinis, animi magnitudinis exempla" Thus 1 Opusc. iv. 253. ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF jESCHYLUS. 75 far, therefore, the academical men, and the imaginative men, seem to be at one ; only, as is fitting, the former give themselves a less various scope, and confine them- selves within a more narrow range. They take the indi- vidual instance as it is presented in the individual play, and content themselves with admiring the heroic repre- sentation of virtuous fortitude ; the comprehensive glance of the poet sees in the fate of the individual the type of the whole, in the torture of the son of lapetus the destiny of the sons of Adam. Unquestionably the prominence given by iEschylus to the merits of his hero, as the inventor of the useful arts (v. 436-506), must force us to admit the general idea of human progress, as no less essential than that of fortitude to the iEschylean conception of the myth ; and it is with pleasure, therefore, that we find in Bellmann, a man of learning and speculation, 1 who launches largely out with all the cumbrous equipments of German erudition, into the wide region over which the winged Muse of Shelley delighted to wander ; and in the striv- ings and sufferings of the mythic Titan sees clearly adum- brated the " historia generis humani qualis omni tempore obtineret" (p. 59), The men of learning, therefore, with Bellmann to supply the deficiencies of Schutz and Hermann, so far as we hitherto see, give their cordial support to the view of the Promethean legend generated in the greatest poetical minds of modern times. All agree in conceiving the iEschylean Prometheus as an ideal, either of moral perfection and human progress generally, " summa quam mente animoque complectaris jperfectio" (Bellmann, p. 44), or of the special virtues of disinterested generosity and 1 We concur, however, heartily with bares Buck." — The author is one of Schoemann's pithy characteristic of the those writers who would have been much 313 pages " de ternione — tin schwer les- more intelligible in his mother tongue. 76 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF JESCHYLUS. manly fortitude. And there can be little doubt, further, that this view of the matter is not the opinion of Her- mann's party in Germany only, or of the Byronic school of poetry in England ; it is in a most wide and compre- hensive sense the general opinion. Ninety-nine hundreds of all the thousands of European youths who have read the Prometheus, in school or college, since the days ol Erasmus and Melanchthon until now, never formed any other opinion. There is therefore a presumption estab- lished in its favour, to which, if we are not strangely pledged to our own conceits, we are bound to pay no idle respect. If we dissent from such a weight of old estab- lished authority and precedent, we are bound, in lawyer's phrase, to show strong cause ; we must come, like Niebuhr, with a club in our hand that will become stronger the more blows it deals. Let us proceed, therefore, to inquire what the grounds are of the new views, which have within the present century, and mostly within the last few years (spe- cially by Welcker, Klausen, Lasaulx, and Schoemann), 1 been propounded on this subject. In commencing this inquiry, the first question is, What gave occasion to these views ? Was it the mere restless spirit of German speculation, ever eager for a new cobweb ? or did they spring from the natural and legi- timate source of new speculation — from any felt insuffi- ciency in the received theory — from any secret, but not the less formidable, difficulty which the current hypothesis left unexplained ? If this question be fairly asked, fair- ness will also answer, that the new theories, whether true or false, were anything but uncalled for. There is, in fact, 1 Welshes closely reasoned and tho- when it had arrived at the point from rough work was unfortunately inter- which iEschylus started. We have read rupted by the death of the writer, just it, however, with much profit. ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF ^ESCHYLUS. 77 a great stumbling-block and offence in the received expla- nation, which has been felt not oftener, only because those who are inclined or forced to feel it are, from the nature of the case, necessarily few. So long as a man looks at a noble range of mountains merely as a prospect, the most barren rocks may be the most beautiful ; but when he walks up to them, and sits down to dwell among them, other considerations force themselves very seriously on his attention. An Englishman reads the Prometheus Bound as a play, and is delighted, carried away, and possessed by the idea of self-sustaining virtue that seems incarnated in the principal character ; it never enters his mind to inquire how an Athenian, beholding this sacred opera (for such the Greek tragedy was), represented at the feast of Dionysus as an act of religious worship, was religiously moved by the exhibition. If, according to the view of all the authors hitherto quoted, Prometheus appears as the most op- pressed of martyrs, and Zeus as the most unjust of tyrants, the question arises, how an Athenian audience, an audi- ence proverbially remarkable for SeuriScu/jLovta (Act. Apost. xvii. 22), at a solemn religious festival on the public stage, could tolerate such a representation ? This is a grave difficulty certainly; and it is a difficulty which the received theory of the Prometheus either altogether overlooks, or in a way not very satisfactory endeavours to obviate. The majority of general readers, little concerned to maintain the honour of Jove, have, in all probability, never proposed to themselves the question. A certain school of theolo- gians also may have been well satisfied to have it believed, that the refined audience of the most highly cultivated city of the ancient world could be content to sit quietly on the seats of the public theatre, and hear their supreme deity, " the king of gods and men," openly blasphemed. 78 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF MSCHYLUS. This view of the matter, if it be the real one, were cer- tainly a rare illustration for those partial declaimers who know no more cunning way of exhibiting the brightness of Christianity, than by smearing the face of heathenism indiscriminately over with pitch ; but the philologists by profession were bound, as a matter of duty, not only not to overlook this formidable difficulty, but to do something, if it might be done fairly, to redeem Greece from the mon- strous reproach of a theology altogether without moral distinctions, and a religion altogether without reverence. It is this very natural, and we may say necessary feeling on the part of the philologists, that has given rise to much of the recent discussion on the subject ; a discussion, the reader will observe, of the most vital importance, not only to the classical scholar, but to the theologian and the philosopher ; and which at once transfers the Promethean myth from the vague floating limbo of poetical fancy into the earnest central point, a point to be found only in a man's own heart, of religious philosophy. Not without a very significant propriety, therefore, has Professor Lasaulx entitled his recent tract on this subject " a contribution to the philosophy of religion;" and, though we may not pledge ourselves to all his views, we cannot but think there is a great general truth — and a truth specially applicable to the Prometheus — contained in the following observations with which he ushers in his treatise : — " The mythology of the heathen nations of antiquity stands before us as a mysterious dream-like depicturement of ante-historical huma- nity, a dreamy prophecy, of which the true significance was given only, when the destined ages were completed, in the person of Him who was more than all prophets, in Christ, — of Him whose victorious voice broke the charm of the old serpent, and, redeeming the hitherto unblest race of mortal men from the slavery of sin and of the law, brought ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF JESGHYLUS. 79 them into the perfect freedom of the children of God. The beginning, and the first-born of every creature, the image of the invisible God, the pattern at once of us and of the world, did, in His character of the first-born Son of the God of all gods, embrace in Himself all gods that afterwards appeared. " Considered in this light, profane history, no less than the history of the Hebrews, appears as invested with a typical character fore- shadowing Christianity ; and from the history of the religions of anti- quity there may be restored and reconstructed a second apocryphal Old Testament, which, along with that canonical one which we already have, finds its progression and its fulfilment in the New Testament. To show how in the collective world, before Christ actually appeared, the germ of His coming was contained — how it was clearly prophesied in Judaism, and in Heathenism everywhere divined and anticipated ; how the desired of all nations was revealed, under different forms, both among the heathens and among the Jews : to set forth this in detail, is the problem of a Christian philosophy of religion, to which the present remarks on the Prometheus are to be regarded as a con- tribution." No doubt this view, which sees in heathenism a sort of imperfectly foreshadowed and dimly anticipated Chris- tianity, is capable of very great abuse in its application, and must be received as true only to some extent, and in some cases ; but in so far as it asserts the essential religious unity of human nature in all ages, though it be a unity that manifests itself by gradations, the philo- sophic mind will readily acknowledge it as a most pregnant and most significant truth. Such a mind certainly will not rashly exclude the common religious sentiment from the heart of a whole people, any more than it will expect to find an identity of religious insight in nations the most diverse in capacity and in situation. It will be disposed to handle a religious question among heathen Greeks and Romans no less than among Christians, seriously as a reli- gious question ; and it will not be inclined gratuitously to suppose that a nation, in every other respect the most 80 ON THE PROMETHEUS BMJND OF AESCHYLUS. highly developed, should in religion only present a con- fusion of the most abnormal aberrations, and a farrago of the most portentous monstrosities. So far, and so far only, do we request the English reader to receive with favour the views of those German writers, such as Lasaulx and Schoemann, who have prominently brought forward the religious and the peculiarly Christian element in the Prometheus, in a way, as we shall see, quite opposed to that glorification of man, as it should almost seem, at the expense of Jove, which we have found in Shelley 1 and Bellmann. For, to enter upon the wild domain of mytho- logy, even in cultivated Greece, so full of moral crudities of all sorts, with a systematic predetermination to make the " wisdom of the ancients" appear to have been in all cases as great as possible, were an extreme equally remote from the chance of truth, with the negative and unfruitful principle to which it is opposed ; and in this regard the caution of Hermann, against seeking in every old legend " enigmata abstrusae cujusdam sapientiae," is most necessary ; though certainly, with regard to this particular matter of the Promethean myth, the darkest enigmas of the most abstruse wisdom are not more worth- less in the way of elucidation than the flat prosaic expla- nation — after the manner of Euhemerus — which Hermann himself, in his dissertation " on the most ancient mytho- 1 This observation applies strictly to Prometheus as a moral ideal. In his Jove as the god of JSschylus and of Preface he distinctly states, that in his Greece. As for Shelley personally, he poem he delineates Prometheus as he has, in his Prometheus (Act II. Sc. 4), would wish to see him delineated, not nobly shaken himself free from that exactly as ^Eschylus, following the pre- strange atheism, which is enunciated in scribed course of the mythologic legend, Queen Mab. This great poet, indeed, would have worked out the catastrophe, is in no wise chargeable with the con- The whole passage will be given in a sequences that flow from the assump- more appropriate place below, tion, that ./Eschylus meant to represent ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF ^ESCHYLUS. 81 logy of the Greeks" (Opusc. n. 186), has enunciated. But to proceed : — Schiitz, who, in common with Byron and Shelley, represents the supreme god of the Greeks as a cruel and unprincipled tyrant, was not, as a philologist, altogether blind to the grand religious difficulty which we have stated; but in attempting to cut gallantly, it appears to us that he only grazes lightly by the Gordian knot, and allows himself to be deceived by an unsubstantial glamour. His words are these : — " Quod vero .ZEschylus sub Jovis nomine, quern deorum hominumque regem venerabatur populus, tyrannorum injustitiam et crudelitatem castigavit, id sane, si res ad veram aetatis nostrae de Dei numine philo- sophandi rationem exigenda esset, impium et sceleratum, populique nioribus perniciosum fuisset ; cum autem istis de Jove opinionibus tota Graecorum natio dudum imbuta esset, non magis in poeta nostro quam in Homero reprehendi debet, eum humana potius ad Deos, quam quae vere divina essent, ad homines transtulisse." And to the same effect Hermann (Opusc. iv. 256), " neque utile quserere (et quaesivere quidam) quomodo in Jovis persona crudelissimi tyranni exemplum proponere potuerit poeta. Neque habuerunt ista apud Grsecos offen- sionem, nee potuerunt habere, ut in religionibus quae totse ex hujuscemodi fabulis essent compositse." We are not to express surprise, says Hermann, at the glaring impiety and irreverential audacity of the Prometheus, " because the ivhole Greek religion is full of such things!' Now there is a great general truth in these words, but which, when narrowly examined, will be found insufficient to explain the phenomena of the present case. It is quite true that in many of the theological legends of the Greeks no ideas of a character entitled to the name of moral are discover- able. Every school-boy feels this. As little is it to be 82 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF JESCHYLUS. denied that, in many familiar instances with which the pages of Homer teem, the relation between man and God seems to have appeared to the most ancient Greek mind rather as a relation of contrariety and opposition than as one of submission and subjection, much less of love. The gods, according to the rude popular conception, seem more ready to fear the greatness of man than to approve his virtue. Their justice shows rather like jealousy; and their wrath has the inspiration of revenge. Crude ideas of this kind are common to the theological conceptions of all barbarous or semi-civilized peoples. In the Iliad a Diomede encounters Mars in the fight ; the mortal routs the immortal ; and it is nothing strange. Why then should we allow our fastidious moral sense, trained as it has been and cultivated by the Christianity of 2000 years, to take hasty offence at the quarrel between the son of Iapetus and the son of Kronos, and the freedom of speech which the bold-mouthed poet allows the former ? Such is the argument of Hermann and Schtitz, stated as strongly as we can put it. Still we say it throws only a pleasant mist about the subject, and does not approach the diffi- culty. For, in the first place, it does not follow, accord- ing to the Homeric theology, that because a mortal like Diomede, with the assistance of one god — Pallas Athene — may get the better of another, therefore a mortal, or an inferior god, like Prometheus, may ride triumphantly over the supremacy of Zeu? v^lcttos, fie^iero? ; much less does it follow that a modem poet like iEschylus — for such he was to the Greeks who witnessed his plays — may seize upon any old religious legend which seems to place the supreme god of the country in an odious light, dress up and systematically exaggerate its odiousness, and, upon the open stage of a religious metropolis, hold up the ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF sESCHYLUS. 83 object of general worship to public hatred and contempt. There is manifestly a great and most unallowable jump in this logic. It is one thing to say that a popular mythology contains many unworthy and immoral stories of the gods ; another and altogether a different thing to maintain, that a dramatist in a religious country shall, without offence, exhibit a native religious tradition in such a shape and manner, that its whole theme shall be rebellion, its drift impiety, its spirit the spirit of scoffing, and its eloquence the breath of blasphemy. A public exhibition of this kind is, in our opinion, as man is constituted, morally impossible ; not even the Bushmen, i almost or altogether atheists, of South Africa, of whom Moffat tells, 1 could achieve such a portent. With regard j to Greece, making full allowance for the crudities of its early theology, the considerate student will have no diffi- culty in adopting the language of Toepelmann (p. 57), '" Non licebat poetis tragieis deos religionis vulgaris, nedum majorum gentium, nicdos pravosque exhibere et de- pingere, ut licitum erat comoediae eos ludibrio laedere." I The distinction here made between tragedy and comedy has been overlooked by some ; but those who know human nature in all its moods, and who have watched it specially in some of its religious phases in Italy and Spain, will not be slow to acknowledge its important bearing on the present question. The manner in which Plautus handles Jupiter in the Amphitryo can supply no rule whereby to gauge the relation of iEschylus to Zeus in the j Prometheus. On the freedom with which poets before the Preformation handled churchmen see Dr. M'Crie's Life of Knox, c. i. But they never attacked the fundamentals of :the popular faith. The case, therefore, as Schutz and 1 Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa, c. xvi. xvii. 84 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF ^SCHYLUS. Hermann and Bellmann and also Welcker 1 put it, is hope- less. iEschylus did not, and could not, in a free country, represent the supreme god as an odious tyrant, nor in a religious country hold up a daring blasphemer as an object of unqualified admiration. Writing under the influence of a theology which acknowledged power as the distinctive attribute of the supreme god, and relative weakness as the characteristic quality of all other beings, whether divine or human (see Iliad, vni. init.), under the influ- ence of such a universally received conception, the poet of the Prometheus did not, and could not intend to repre- sent the disobedience of the crafty demi-god as a thing absolutely right, much less as a well-grounded rebellion of which the success might be conceived probable or even possible. Were this the case we might with justice revert 1 " The Zeus of this tragedy, and with him the main part of the mythical substratum, is taken from the theogony ; but he has changed his character. For whatever ideas the theogony may in- clude under the type of different celes- tial dynasties, one thing is certain, that it excludes all idea of moral estimate and sequence. iEschylus is not slow to perceive his advantage, and uses the materials provided for him by the old poet, for the rilling up of a far more comprehensive plan. He brings studi- ously into the foreground every circum- stance purely human, that was inter- woven with the theologic legend, for the purpose of connecting one symbol with another ; everything that can be found in it tending to place Jove in a disad- vantageous light. The supreme god, ac- cordingly, appears in this drama, not as more godlike, only as more powerful than Prometheus, only as the recently elevated despot before the unbending freeman : the hero that, like an Achilles among the gods, breathes a spirit of haughty defiance in a pure though not quite understood consciousness of good deeds. Both are absolutely equal under the eternal and jnst sway of destiny. The Zeus of this tragedy is represented strictly according to the pattern of tyrant, and that in the most glaring outline : whether in thus painting him the Persian invader was in the imagina- tion of the soldier who fought at Mara- thon, or, as I rather think, only Grecian history and politics in general, that by this representation of the free-minded Titan, he might fan the flames of free- dom in the hearts of his countrymen or finally, his object might be only tc give free scope to his own feelings as they had been fostered during his resi dence in Sicily, a country in whicl he had the image of a just and equit able sovereign before him, which migh" readily suggest its counterpart in th» character of the despotical son of Kro nos."— Trll. p. 21-2. ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF JESCHYLUS. 85 to the ready criticism of the old French school, and give our verdict coolly in the words of La Harpe, " Le sujet de Promethee est monstrueax." We have called Prometheus a demi-god. He calls himself a god in the play (v. 92), and Hephaestus bears testimony to the propriety of the addition (v. 14). Some persons have been eager to make much of this point, and to bring it forward as a key to the otherwise inexplicable impiety of the piece. Had Prometheus been a mere man, they argue, iEschylus, in writing as he has written, would have been justly chargeable with blasphemy; but a god may surely be allowed to battle with a god, not with words only but with blows, and, according to the Greek ideas, no offence result. But, in the first place, the supremacy of Jove, according to the idea of the Iliad, whatever changes of celestial dynasty may have preceded, is an established fact that admits no question. 1 Gods, in the Homeric theology, may justly battle with gods ; but Zeus is god in a higher sense, sitting apart from the vulgar throng — ' A/cporaTT] Kopvtprj wdkvBeipaBos OvkvpuToio, ', serene where all are troubled, supreme where all are subordinate. And if the dynasty of Jove — though a thing that had an acknowledged beginning — was, in the days of Homer, a power beyond the power of popular concep- tion or poetic fancy to shake, how much more in the days of iEsehylus ? In the second place, the rank which Pro- 1 Such representations as that in faith in the time of Homer, much less Iliad, i. 400, where Here, Poseidon, in the age of iEschylus. Besides, in all and Pallas are said to have conspired such legends — even in the portentous to bind Jove, are, in our opinion, to be heaven- stormings of Hindu Yogees — looked on as fragments of the old amor- the supreme god always retains his phous theology of the rudest Pelasgi, seat. The fiction of possible dethrone- long before the age of Homer, and as ment seems to have been devised partly | forming no living element of religious to show the stability of the throne. 86 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF JESCHYLUS. metheus held as a god in the popular faith of Greece was practically very low ; theoretically indeed, that is to say, according to the genealogy of Hesiod, he appears as the contemporary and the equal of Jove, the son of Iapetus, and the son of Kronos, being, in fact, brothers' sons ; but, as in the aristocratic arrangements of modern society, the elder and younger branches of the family often share very different fates, so in the world-upheaving turmoil of Titanic contention, the lines of lineal and collateral relationship in the celestial family were strangely disturbed ; and, as ages rolled on, the degree of divinity in competing candidates for popular homage was estimated, not by the descent, but by the event. Thus, in the days of iEschylus, the cousin of Jove had become a local demi-god, the patron-saint of the potters in the Ceramicus — scarcely a degree more. 1 In the third place, let Prometheus be perched as high as we will in the scale of divinity, we never can overlook the fact, that not only in the representation of iEschylus, but in the old popular representation, so far as we know it, everywhere and characteristically Prometheus appears as the representative of man. Whatever his original descent, he has in the course of the fated aeons identified himself with man, and stands forward as the living impersonation of human interests as opposed to divine. 2 This character of the legend is admitted by all who have been at pains to receive it into their imaginations purely as it is given by the Greek authorities ; and if so, the struggle of the Titan against the Olympian is in fact not merely a new 1 See the whole subject of the wor- power, is altogether lost sight of by alle- ship of Prometheus in Athens, admir- gorizers like Swayne, who arbitrarily ably handled by Weislce, pp. 497-521. makes Prometheus the representative of divine love, satisfying the demands oi 2 This essential contrast between divine justice. See above. — This Keen- Prometheus, as the representative of tious Christianizing of Hellenic myths man, and Zeus, as the highest celestial can lead to nothing but confusion. ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF sESCHYLUS. 87 scene in the great primeval battle of the gods, but an ominous collision between earth and heaven, an unequal contest between the weakness of man and the omni- potence" of Jove. If free in his own right to rebel — although even this can scarcely be supposed — yet as the representative of man, Prometheus, according to Greek ideas, was not blameless, and could not be prosperous in his contumacy. The office and virtue of Molpa, or Fate in the Greek theology, is another point which has been brought forward prominently by those who, assuming the perfect rectitude of the moral position of Prometheus, are necessitated to find in the popular conceptions of religion a superior power which may adjudicate between the oppressed Titan and the tyrannical son of Kronos. Thus Welcker (p. 88) ; thus Bellmann (p. 53) ; nor had they far to go for then- arbiter ; Prometheus himself had put into their mouths the remarkable passage — Chorus. TV? ovv avayKT)^ ecrriv oiafcoarpoipos. Prom. Molpac rpifiopcfrcu, /jLvrj/jioves t Epivves. Chorus. Tovtcov apa Zevs eariv aaOevecnepos. Prom. OvKOVV CLV €fCcf)VJOC rye T7]V ireTrpco/uLevrjv. In the hands of a modern Christian, or christianizing speculator, it requires very little stretch of idea to meta- morphose this dim dark power called ireirpcofjuivrj, of which we hear so much in the Greek drama, into a regular 88 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF JESCHYLUS. irpovoia, or clear and distinct superintending providence, which shall hold the balance of fates human and divine much more equitably than Zeus does in the Iliad. But to prove that the Greeks in the days of iEschylus, or the ancients indeed anywhere (except here and there, per- haps, in the pious paragraphs of a Marcus Antoninus), had any idea of a superintending and retributive irpovoia, above and beyond, and even contrary to the will of Jove, who is emphatically called firjTiera Zevs — the counsellor ; this is a very different affair, and will, we fear, go far beyond the strength of those who shall attempt to make it out. Hesiod very significantly makes the Molpai daughters of Night (Theog. 217) ; and in darkness, doubtless, they were involved, to the ancient Greek mind, too deep to admit of their being employed as definite and legitimate arbiters in a strife between the supreme god and a contumacious demi-god. Altogether the Molpai seem to present them- selves in classical writers more as an unfathomable back- ground in which the origin of all things may be supposed to lie concealed, than as a prominent personal agency fit for the purposes of the dramatic poet ; and with regard to Zeus, it is like to prove a very delicate investigation how far the doings of the Molpai in the general case are not identical with his own will. On this point Schoemann in a note has put forward a statement (p. 110) with which we are inclined to concur. « Why," says Bauer (Symbolik, n. 340), " may the Molpa not have been an intelligent principle ? A moral harmony, the idea of an eternal justice dispensing to each his proper lot, and with severity anticipating every trans- gression of the appointed limits of different agencies. Such an idea, what is it but the great law of the universe which preserves in constant equilibrium the world of gods and ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF ^ESCHYLUS. 89 men, the world both of intelligent beings and of uncon- scious nature V "I am of opinion, however, that, accord- ing to the Greek conception, this great law of the world had never attained to a clear embodiment in the person of any individual god, not even in the Molpai. Such a law, indeed, rules from the beginning, and determines in the last instance all that is and happens ; it is the regulating norm of the whole course of the universe : but among all the powers endowed with a distinct personality which in the course of ages have been evolved, there is no one being whose intelligence completely embraces this all-compre- hensive law, and possesses it with distinct consciousness as a matter of knowledge. Zeus alone stands so high, that in the province which belongs to him his intelligence invariably harmonizes with that law of the world ; where- fore, also, the theogony makes Themis, the conservatrix of that law, his spouse, and the Molpai, the dispensers of the lots of individual beings, his daughters ; that is to say, by means of Jove only are these beings elevated into the sphere of intelligence, and from mere physical mights become intel- ligent and moral beings. The same relation is expressed by others when they represent the Moipai as associated round the throne of Zeus (Jto? irapa Opovov a^orarai 6ev, — A gam. v. 170, which had passed away, and been superseded indeed, but which still lin- gered in the background of the Hel- lenic system ; and to this he devoted himself with the more energy, in pro- portion to his disquiet, perhaps with the more zeal, for that the old faith seemed neglected. The real gods of his devo- tion were Earth, with her Titan brood, of whose time-honoured inheritance the Olympic dynasty had possession but questionably and precariously — the Fates — the Furies — and above all, the dread power of Destiny." This pas- sage avoids the offensive harshness of Welcker's language ; and the sentences we have given in italics seem to bring the writer's view, to a certain extent, into harmony with that unquestioned su- premacy of Jove, which we allege to be a characteristic of iEschylus and the Prometheus, as much as of the an- cient poetry of Homer and Hesiod. We much fear, however, that the represen- tation thus given of the relation of iEschylus to Zeus is only a hasty gene- ralization from the Prometheus, as it affects us in its present truncated shape. The very passage of the Agamemnon quoted by the writer proves the devout allegiance of the poet to Zeus as dis- tinctly, at least, as any expressions in the Prometheus prove his disaffection. As little can we see, in the juridical pleadings of the Eumenides, any con- certed irony against the received gods : we perceive only the necessary awk- wardness into which a dramatist falls, whose plot leads him to put into a legal and argumentative shape the thousand and one absurdities of a purely legen- dary faith. 1 Prowett, Introduction, p. 8. So also Mr. Whiston, in Smith's Biographical Dictionary, art. ^Eschylus, " The re- ligious views and tenets of iEschylus, so far as they appear in his writings, were Homeric." 94 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF jESCHYLUS. very solemn and devout opening chorus of the Aga- memnon. 1 In vain, therefore, as it should seem, is every argu- ment tried, and every hypothesis ventured, to reconcile the commonly received notion of the iEschylean Prome- theus, either with the religious opinions of Greece gene- rally, or with the theological views of the poet. Turn where we will in search of a satisfactory explanation, we are baffled. It therefore remains only that we carefully review our facts, that we recur to our original impression, and see whether there may not be good reason to question its accuracy. Our sympathies, as we read the piece, are confessedly altogether with Prometheus, while our unmi- tigated hatred is centred on Jove. But is it absolutely necessary, is it in any view imperative, that we should suppose the same representation to have made the same impression on the minds of the Athenians ? For were it possible to imagine, that from difference of position and susceptibility, the sympathies of the Athenians were dif- ferent from ours, perhaps ran altogether in the opposite direction, then there is an end of the question ; literature and religion being no longer at war, neither learning nor ingenuity are necessary to reconcile them. Now, on this head, it is most obvious to remark, that of all the component parts of a foreign and distant literature, that which concerns religion is the most difficult for the stranger student to realize. The squabbles of the market- place, and the wranglings of the forum, being pretty much the same in an ancient or a u modern Athens," will be easily understood by a reader of any time and place ; but 1 On the opening words of the in- nle!" (p. 104). A case must be very vocation to Jove in that chorus — Zevs hopeless that requires such perverse Bans •nor' iariv — Welcker remarks, — ingenuity as this. " Sicker schrieb er dies nicht ohne Iro- ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF ^ESCHYLUS. 95 between Christianity and heathenism the gulf is so wide, that a perfect recognition of the ancient by the modern can be achieved only in the case of the studious few, and that not without much labour, and a peculiar emotional sensibility. We are bound, therefore, to approach pro- blems of this kind with a certain cautiousness and self- suspicion, quite the reverse of the indifierent carelessness by which, in respect of them, our judgment is generally possessed. In particular, we are bound not merely to dispossess ourselves of all modern notions which have grown with our growth, but to possess ourselves of all corresponding ancient notions which grew with the growth of the Athenians ; we must put a force upon our own convictions, and conjure up in our souls a factitious reverence for names that were once powers and virtues and mighty agencies in the moral world. We must approach the reading of the Prometheus Bound, as the pious Athenian came to witness its representation, with a mind prepossessed, and that strongly, not in favour of Prometheus, but in favour of Zeus. This prepossession alone will go far to change the whole aspect of the case ; but we can happily go much further : we are in a condition to come to the reading of the Prometheus with the same detailed knowledge of the legend, and the same received interpretation of it, that possessed the mind of the ancient Athenian. The potters and the torch-runners of the Cera- micus, in all likelihood, knew no more of it than we do. We possess, in fact, the Greek Bible on the subject ; — so far, at least, as the floating fanciful religion of the Greeks could be said to have a Bible, — we possess Hesiod. What then does the pious old Ascrsean say on the subject? This is the preparatory question from which every thorough investigation into the theology of the 96 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF JESCHYLUS. iEschylean drama must start. The Athenian came thus prepared ; and to place ourselves in the same position, so must we : not with a portentous logical deduction, like Bellmann, who (p. 37) boasts that he will bring out the idea of the play, " solo scriptore duce," as if the writer himself ever dreamt of addressing blank minds, and did not rather calculate upon the preconceived ideas and ten- dencies of his audience, as on a main matter on which the effect of his artistical exhibition depended ! Well ; Hesiod tells the story, as we all know it in the facts, not once, but twice, with considerable breadth of detail, in the Theogony (507), and in the Works and Bays (48) ; but the tone in which he tells it, and the moral with which he couples it, are less known, and for the most part not at all present to the mind of the general, or even the learned reader ; so completely with his bold and daring grandeur has the more modern dramatist thrown the simple-hearted theologer into the shade. But this tone and this moral are the very soul of the legend : they represent the reli- gious mind of Greece on the subject ; or, if they do not, nothing else does ; and it is from this source only that we Gan learn, at the present day, the feelings with which an Athenian audience, in the days of the Persian war, came to witness a theatrical exhibition, of which the fire-filching demigod was the hero. Let any man, therefore, read the Theogony from the beginning to the conclusion of the Promethean Episode, and say how he is affected by the representation there given. It is plain the pious old genealogist — and this is the main point — approves no more of the conduct of the son of Iapetus than of the host of other Titans : these strove by violence against Zeus, he by cunning ; but they were both rebels against him whom the Greeks worshipped as both omnipotent and omniscient ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF jESCHYLUS. 97 as not merely the highest physical force, but the supreme moral power in the system of the world; 1 and in the character of rebels they were both punished. Which was the greater guilt, whether to oppose Zeus by force or by fraud, the bard does not inquire ; but if there be degrees in wickedness of this kind, the sinner who endeavours to deceive the all-knowing one will scarcely seem less guilty than he who vaunts himself to subdue the all-powerful. Such certainly was the notion of Hesiod, who concludes both hi3 narratives with the distinct moral, — 12? ovk eart Alo<$ fcXeyfrai voov ovSe irape\6elv — (Tkeog. 613; Op. 92) a moral, be it observed, no less characteristically Christian than Heathen, and in which the true Christian signifi- cance of the Prometheus indicated by Lasaulx lies ; though indeed the distinct enunciation of this moral was not at all necessary, as the whole tone and connexion of the narrative in both works prove the same thing. Wherein, then, according to the old poet, does the guilt of Prome- theus consist ? Plainly, in the impious attempt to deceive and to defraud the supreme god, with an obstinate per- versity of cunning, on two several occasions ; first, in regard to sacrificial rites — which circumstance, by the way, iEschylus has thought fit to drop — and then in the great matter of using celestial fire for terrestrial purposes. No doubt the result of both these attempts is in favour of man ; the benevolent end seems to sanctify the unworthy means ; but the piety of the poet is nowise affected by this circumstance. He only knows that Jove is supreme ; and 1 We do not, of course, mean to say £-evio$, etc., altogether preclude the idea that the Homeric idea of Jove was of looking on him as merely an imper- precisely that of a Christian's idea of sonation of supreme power in the phy- God ; but the familiar epithets of 6'pxio?, sical world. 98 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF JSSCHYLUS. that every boon, however gracious, conferred without his consent and against his will, cannot be without guilt on the part of the giver, and danger on the part of the receiver. That Prometheus is guilty forms in fact the foundation of the whole legend, according to Hesiod. 1 This is so manifest, that even among those modern com- mentators who consider Jove as tyrannical in his conduct, there are many who equally admit the guilt of Prome- theus. That the Athenians, at least, must have started with this as an undeniable axiom seems as certain as that a modern Christian reads the third chapter of Genesis with the undoubting faith that Adam and Eve, and the serpent, sinned grievously in what they did. " Persuasum erat auditoribus reum luere justam poenam" says Toepel- mann (p. 37). So even Herder admits the guilt of Pro- metheus partially, though he represents Jove as having been much more blameful, putting forth Themis, strangely enough (one of Jove's wives !), or eternal justice, to adju- dicate betwixt them. So Welcker also ; 2 only not Byron and Bellmann, Shelley, and Schtitz, and Goethe. What, then, let us inquire further, the Athenian mind being thus fore-armed, with Hesiodic views, was the moral effect of the iEschylean Prometheus on the spectators ? The answer to this question depends on the answer to another one, Is the iEschylean Prometheus the same as the Pro- metheus of Hesiod — morally, we mean, of course — or is he different ? He is the same in every respect substantially ; only JEschylus brings his better qualities, his fortitude and 1 So, in a much later age, true to the the one great deceit by which the moral of the old legend, Horace — mind endeavours to lay violent hold of " Audax omnia perpeti what is divine (das Gottliche an sich zu Gens humana ruit per vetitum nefas ; reissen"), p. 73, and a great deal more Audax Iapeti genus ^ ^ game effect {n ^ chapter _^ &e ,. Ignem fraude mala gentibus nitulit. ,. _ , , _. ,. „ Od. i. 3. 25. die Bedeutung des Ganzen — well worthy 2 " The proper crime of Prometheus, of study. ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF jESCHYLUS. 99 self-sustainment, into the foreground, while a shade is cast over his cunning and his crime. These bad qualities, however, are hi nowise withheld. . He is called the thief of fire, and charged again and again, by mouths com- manding respect, with rashness and pride ; with audacity and obstinacy, and vPpis in every shape. The modern reader, indeed, may not choose to give any weight to this judgment ; but with the ancient spectator it was at once the ground and the body of all orthodoxy. iEschylus therefore does not deny the moral of Hesiod ; and if he does not do it, either expressly or by implication, most assuredly his audience would not do it for him. Every believer in a popular theology — no matter whether wise or absurd — is slow to have his faith shaken. A direct attack must be made before he will be roused ; then indeed his vengeance is terrible. But the chorus, the impartial spectator, the spokes- man of all morality, and the preacher of all propriety in the Greek drama, does he — or in this case rather, does she — not sympathize with the suffering Titan, and express her detestation of the tyranny of Jove ? One passage there certainly is in this view very strong ; it is as fol- lows. We quote the whole, for it is short : — CHORUS. Xevaaco npofitjOev' (j)oj3epa B efioiatp ocraots, o/XL^Xa irpoarj^e 77X77^77? ScLKpvayv, gov Se/Jias etaiBovcra ireTpcus TTpoaavcLLvopbevov ralcrB aBa^avToBeroiaL Xu/iat?* veoi yap oiaKovojxoi Kparova OXv/mttov veoxjjiols Be Br) vo/jlol<; Zevs aOercos Kparvvet tcl irpiv Be TreXcopca vvv ala-rol. — W. 144-51. These are certainly distinct words — AOETI2Z ; and if 100 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF jESCHYLUS. there were no other statement from the same quarter to a different effect in the same play, the question might be considered as triumphantly settled in favour of the popular view. A consistent verdict of this kind from an ancient chorus could not have brooked contradiction from any modern critic. But the persons of the chorus in the Prome- theus are scarcely to be looked upon as judges. No busy actors are they indeed, and parties directly interested, like the fell-snorting, black-banded sisterhood in the Eumenides ; but they are simple ocean-maids, amiable, kindly, and tender-hearted, and, like all proper women, eager for nothing so much as to sympathize always with all affliction, ever pleading for mercy, without inquiring curiously into the claims of justice. They therefore con- fine their office, in the present drama, almost altogether to the expression of sympathy with the sufferer, and that, as was necessary in noble characters, not by word only, but by deed. They pretend, however, to no judgment in so gigantic a strife ; or, if they judge at all, express an opinion on the side of Zeus ; for the strong words above quoted are more than negatived by the decided language of an opposite tendency that occurs as the action of the play advances. But it may still be argued, if the chorus gives no opinion in the matter, does not iEschylus himself do so ? Has he not drawn the whole portraiture, determined every attitude, thrown every light with the view, and to the effect, of engaging the whole stream of our sympathies in favour of the sufferer ? Assuredly he has drawn a strong picture of manly fortitude, and in doing so, unquestion- ably he wished to excite sympathy in behalf of the sufferer ; but the conclusion, therefore, is not legitimate, which Schiitz and Bellmann have drawn, that he wished ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF AESCHYLUS. 101 to exhibit Prometheus as in all respects a moral model, in the fashion somewhat of the stoical wise man. There are great and manly virtues in Macbeth and Richard, which our greater ^Eschylus meant that we should admire, with- out prejudice to our condemnation of the main character of these persons. So, also, Milton has tricked out the devil with more of the trappings of heroism than is agree- able to many. Goethe's Mephistopheles, it has been thought, is a much more proper devil ; a fiend whom you can hate thoroughly, without being tempted to admire. In the same way, we may feel that the crafty fraudulent Prometheus of the theogony is a much more fit subject for the pillory of the Caucasus than the " High-minded sou of right-decreeing Themis," whom the father of Greek tragedy has elevated to the culminating point of the sublime in endurance. But iEschylus and Milton alike, in this modification of the character of their heroes, followed their lofty genius, not the popular conception. Wise in doing so ; and safe from misinterpretation of their main scope, by the strength of general prepossession, and the stability of the popular faith. One most important point in the Athenian conception of the Promethean myth still remains to be noticed. The Greeks learned more from Hesiod than the unques- tionable guilt of Prometheus, and the justice of his punishment. They learned, at the same time, the pallia- tion of that guilt, and the limit of that castigation. He had opposed the will of the supreme ; therein his guilt was great ; but his main object was not essentially base or selfish ; his theft was from the gods, but for the benefit of man : fire, the " mother of arts," was a gift that the 102 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF jESCHYLUS. giver of all good things — the Scorrjpe? edov, could not mean finally to withhold from creatures who so much required it ; Prometheus, therefore, sinned in the form rather than in the drift and result of his offending ; and for him, according to all reasonable ideas of a divine pro- cedure, mercy was reserved. The old myth accordingly taught that Prometheus, after suffering unexampled woes, was finally to be liberated, and that even by the agency of the great Hellenic liberator, Hercules. This the Athenian audience distinctly knew from Hesiod (Theog. 526) ; but it is announced also with no less distinctness in our drama (v. 772) ; and the effect of this annunciation must neces- sarily have been to remove from their minds any appear- ance of harshness and severity on the part of Zeus, which the terrible nature of the punishment seemed to wear. The degree of punishment, no doubt, in theological legends of this kind, is popularly estimated, not by any curious admeasurement of the magnitude of the crime or the capacity of the sinner, but by the transcendental nature of the being against whom the offence is committed. Still the offence of Prometheus was one which, in the most severe view, could scarcely seem worthy of never- ending torture. The " Sedet seternumque sedebit infelix Theseus" of Virgil applies to a crime of much more flagrant atro- city. Final pardon, therefore, the Athenian spectator looked for confidently ; as ages rolled on, the period would certainly come when it would be consistent with the sovereignty of the supreme god to temper his stern justice with mercy ; when a reconciliation between the offending demigod, having expiated sin by suffering, and the justly offended deity, would take place. The previous know- ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF JESCHYLUS. 103 ledge of this final satisfactory settlement of the great con- troversy was sufficient to quiet the conscience of a pious Athenian, if at any time the whetted words of the tor- tured Titan seemed to cast reproaches in the ear of Zeus, more bitter than might be grateful to pious ears to hear. The poet when he represented, and the people when they beheld, painted with glaring colours individual aspects of the portentous myth, only the more decidedly that their heart rested with perfect faith in the acknowledged righte- ousness of the anticipated catastrophe. But there is more than this, — the spectators of the Prometheus Bound not only knew what the catastrophe should be, but there is every reason to believe that they actually saw it. That iEschylus wrote three, and per- haps four plays on this significant myth has long been a patent and well-known fact to scholars. That he wrote a Prometheus Unbound is the most certain tradition of all ; for we actually have a translation from it in a work so commonly read as the Tusculan Questions of Cicero (it. 9). Of this fact, not a single scholar, pro- bably, who has criticised the Prometheus for the last three hundred years, has been ignorant ; but, in recognising the bearing of so important a fact on the interpretation of the now existing play, many writers, even in the most recent times, have been strangely deficient. If the Bound Pro- metheus is only introductory to an Unbound Prometheus, which, in the actual representation, immediately followed, as itself was introduced by a fire-bringing Prometheus, it is manifest that we are not. at present in a condition to judge of the total effect of the trilogy, any more than from one act of a modern play the spectator can always divine — for sometimes certainly he may divine — the whole. Our modern critics, however, even those who mav the 104 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF jESCHYLUS. least suspect it, have proceeded too generally on the assumption that the present play contains within itself the elements of a just judgment as to its tendency. So prepossessed with this very natural notion does Hermann, for instance, seem to be, that he expends not a little forced ingenuity of labour in endeavouring to disprove against Welcker the natural continuity of the play which follows with that which precedes. There is no direct testimony, indeed, from the ancients, either that the Prometheus Unbound was in actual representation given directly after the play which we now possess, or that the npofirjdev^ 7rvp(f>opo? immediately preceded it. Hermann also insists that this first part of the assumed trilogy was identical with the npo/jL7}0evs irvpicaevs, mentioned by Pollux, 1 and which we know from the argument of " the Persians" to have been a satiric drama, the last in the tetralogy there given. But leaving this point undecided — as most likely it never can be decided — the hypothesis, that the Upoy^Qem \vofievos, which forms so natural a sequel to the Bea/jbcorTj^, was disjoined from it in the actual exhibition, is so forced and gratuitous, that not even the name of Hermann will induce the sound-minded student to give it a serious con- sideration. In criticism as in morals, probability, not possibility, must be our guide. The conclusion that the \vofievos was exhibited immediately after the Sea^rr)^, is not only the most obvious and natural in the case, but it is a supposition which the admitted theological diffi- culties of the introductory play imperatively demand. The catastrophe thus evolved, irrespective altogether of what we know from Hesiod, were sufficient of itself to remove every objection arising from the apparent impiety of the piece ; the supposition of a continuous trilogy, or, 1 ix. 156 ; x. 64. ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF AESCHYLUS. 105 at least, of a second play following the present, is, in fact, a theory which satisfactorily explains all the pheno- mena ; while the opposite theory explains nothing, being useful only, so far as a plain man may see, to prop the crumbling consistency of ancient error, and to enable the old school of philologists to be gathered to their fathers with the comfortable assurance that they have not been vanquished by the new. 1 As to the precise manner in which the reconciliation between Jove and his stout-hearted adversary was brought about by the poet in the last piece of the trilogy, there exist materials large enough to justify a few probable conjectures, but too scanty to admit of any approach to certainty. 2 The most satisfactory attempt to reconstruct the lost framework of iEschylus, the German scholar will find in Schoemann s very valuable work ; an author with whose views on almost every point of the Promethean question we are disposed to coincide ; and to whom the present writer owes it more directly, that his own long- revolved imaginations on this subject have at length organized themselves into the present tangible shape. 1 " If there ever was a case in which a just poetic discernment he perceived it was justifiable to assume positively the necessity of the lost play to evolve the existence of a connected trilogy it is the catastrophe of the present piece, this case of the Prometheus." — Quart and how clearly he perceived that the Review, vol. lxx. p. 353. N.B. — I had poet must have brought about the not read this when I wrote the text. catastrophe by a reconciliation of the The coincidence of independent opinion contending parties. Adhering, how- has of course a certain value. ever, strictly to the idea that Zeus is 2 Those who have read Shelley's Pro- to be looked on only "as the oppressor metheus need not be told that no of mankind," it is no wonder he could attempt is there made to reconstruct find in the iEschylean sequel no theme the lost play of iEschylus. From any worthy of his genius. The following is attempt of this kind the poet's instinc- from the Preface :— " The Prometheus tive good taste, as well as his bold and Unbound of iEschylus supposed the re- original genius, were sufficient to deter conciliation of Jupiter with his victim, him. It is of importance to us, how- as the price of the disclosure of the ever, to remark specially, with what danger threatened to his empire by the 106 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF ^ESCHYLUS. Before concluding these remarks, it will be necessary to advert for a moment to a view of the moral connexion of the Bound and the Unbound Prometheus, first pro- posed by Dissen in a letter to Welcker (Trilog. p. 92), and brought forward again by Dr. Julius Caesar in oppo- sition to the views of Schoemann. Professor Schoemann does not assume any more than ourselves that it is neces- sary, in the final reconciliation of the contending parties, to suppose any confession of error or change of character on the part of Jove. We both suppose with Hesiod that the punishment suffered by Prometheus was merited; and with the Greeks generally that the moral sovereignty of Zeus is not to be questioned ; nor the degree of pun- ishment which he chooses to inflict on the offender a matter about which the curious casuistry of human wit can legitimately be exercised. But there are scholars who, agreeing with us in the point of the guilt of Prometheus, are not able to shake themselves free from the impression of gross tyranny which is left upon the modern reader by the perusal of the present truncated work. These per- con summation of his marriage with fable, which is so powerfully sustained Thetis. Thetis, according to this view by the sufferings and endurance of Pro- of the subject, was given in marriage metheus, would be annihilated, if we to Peleus; and Prometheus, by the per- could conceive of him as unsaying his mission of Jupiter, delivered from his high language, and quailing before his captivity by Hercules. Had I framed successful and perfidious adversary, my story on this model, I should have The only imaginary being resembling done no more than have attempted to in any degree Prometheus is Satan ; restore the lost drama of ^Eschylus ; — and Prometheus is, in my judgment, a an ambition which, if my preference to more poetical character than Satan, be- the mode of treating the subject had cause, in addition to courage, and ma- incited me to cherish, the recollection jesty, and firm and patient opposition of the high comparison such an attempt to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of would challenge might well abate. But, being described as exempt from the in truth, I was averse from a cata- taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and strophe so feeble as that of reconciling a desire for personal aggrandizement, the champion with the oppressor of which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, mankind. The moral interest of the interfere with the interest." ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF ^ESCHYLUS. 107 sons, therefore, have been driven to the invention of a sort of middle hypothesis between the two views con- trasted in this paper ; a hypothesis conceived purposely so as to admit on the one hand the penitent submission of Prometheus, and on the other the progressive ameliora- tion and final perfectionation of Jove. The following are the words of Dissen : — " What has always offended me most in the Prometheus is the total giving up of the character of Jove, which seems to be the effect of the poet's representation ; and I have never been able to convince myself that it was the intention of .ZEschylus to exalt the world of Titans without qualification, and to depreciate the presently existing gods. The first idea that occurred to me, to remove this difficulty, was, that the principal actors in the Promethean myth are not heroes, with gods introduced only as a sort of machinery ; but here we have a contest of gods against gods ; and a god is freely allowed to bring accusations against Jove, such as would have constituted blasphemy in a mortal. But this explanation is not satisfactory. We have two questions to answer. Can the controversy between Jove, a tyrant of the world, and his accusers, be looked on as a matter of personal feeling between the parties concerned ; or is it meant that we, the spectators, and in our person the Greek religion, henceforth are to look upon Jove under the same aspect of tyranny in which he appears to the principal actor in the play 1 The one supposition is insufficient ; for Jove is made to do that which actually is tyrannical, so manifestly that the spectator cannot look upon it as a collision arising out of personal animosity. The other supposition I cannot prevail upon myself, without more ado, to adopt. I have accordingly been forced to another view of the subject, which is this, — I look upon the whole as a Titanomachy, as the last great struggle of that mighty time; as, indeed, we find that the myth of Prome- theus, according to the theogonic chronology, follows immediately after the battle of the Titans, and forms in fact their conclusion. In such an age — in the early epoch of mundane development — when the ele- ments of the future system of the world were not yet in equilibrium, violence and exaggeration on both sides are quite natural ; and as Prometheus, on his part, was not free from blame, so Jove also erred in the exercise of a tyrannical authority. I therefore look upon the tyrannical character of Zeus, exhibited in the Bound Prometheus, as only a transition state of things which is to vanish with the final estab- 108 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF ^JSCHYLUS. lishment of the new order of things, to be represented in the third piece. In this epoch, if the system of the world is still felt as tyrannical, it can only be so in the feeling of an individual ; in a higher view of the whole, the tyranny disappears ; and in this regard I imagine ^Eschylus could never have meant to represent the government of Jove as a per- manent tyranny — a representation which would have been at war both with the Greek tragedy and with the Grecian world. Prometheus, in the exercise of an excessive benevolence, has given to men that which belongs to the gods ; and in as much as he has thereby planted man on a more commanding platform, as against the gods, Jove, jealous of his power, persecutes him, and will not tolerate the higher elevation of man till such time as he — so I view the relation — being reconciled to Pro- metheus, is at the same time reconciled to the new order of the world, and is brought to the insight that it is better for him to reign over ennobled men, than over creatures little better than the brutes. For Jove also must have come forth from that terrible Titanic struggle, not in his original character, but with a higher consciousness. Force and forcible rule were essential elements of the Titanic period, in which one celestial power after another dethroned its predecessor; in perfect keeping with which general character it is, that the Jove of that epoch is suspicious, haughty, despotical, etc., even because he forms the tran- sition between the old and the new, till, with the conclusion of the Titanic struggles, a higher phasis appears. When I contemplate the whole trilogy in this light, it appears to me a profoundly-conceived glorification of the new order of the world, as having put an end to the licentious exaggerations of the preceding period. Sluggish insensibility (Stumpfheit); oppression and tyranny, have come to an end : the free development of the mind in the unfolding of the arts commences ; everything marches to meet a higher destiny. And this feeling, I may add, is precisely that which would naturally be predominant in the poet's mind at the time when he wrote. The period immediately follow- ing the Persian wars was accompanied with an expansive movement in the Greek mind, which corresponds happily with the sublime idea of mundane development, as I imagine it represented in the trilogy." The objection to this theory, according to our view, is, that if we have proved anything by the preceding remarks, it is altogether unnecessary, being invented, according to the declaration of the author, to obviate a difficulty which never existed in the Athenian mind. The ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF JESCHYLUS. 109 Athenians, we have distinctly stated — for this is the point on which the whole discussion hinges — did not, and could not, look upon the conduct of Jove as tyrannical in the matter. The general impression of the tyrannical char- acter of Jove is the mere offspring of modern partial conceptions, formed in the total disregard both of Hesiod and of the Trilogy. Independent of this objection, how- ever, the hypothesis is faulty, because it is too fine-spun and metaphysical ; abstract and speculative, rather than practical and popular. In modern times a theologian of no common notoriety has written a work on " the develop- ment of Christian doctrine ;" and no doubt all religious doctrines and ideas, Christian as well as heathen, are sub- ject to what may be called a development ; that is, they are understood differently, more narrowly or more largely, more grossly or more spiritually, according to the capacity of the minds into which they are received ; but a formal exposition of such a development of intellectual and moral phases in a faith generally received would seem to fall within the province of the theologian and the philosopher rather than that of the poet. The dramatist, certainly, of all men who come in contact with a popular religion, is the least hopeful person to make a physiological unfolding of its growth and a public demonstration of its anatomy. He receives it as a thing given, and makes the best of it. It is a general moral element which all his fantastic per- sonages must breathe ; not a separate theme for himself to handle. The Greek religion, no doubt, so purely ima- ginative and emotional, afforded a philosophical dramatist a wide field for inoculating mythical personages with abstract notions, such as a definite and closely-reasoned creed would have barred ; but it is going too far to main- tain that the writer of a publicly exhibited sacred opera 110 ON THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF MSCHYLUS. — standing somewhat in the position of Metastasio at Vienna — should have presumed to set before a pious audience the process of growth of their supreme god, and to show them, step by step, how Zeus the cruel, in the course of years and by power of destiny, became Zeus the just, somehow as a modern physiologist will expound leisurely how a tadpole, which is substantially a finny fish, can in the course of days, by the benign influence of light, become a footed frog. All this forced and unnatural theorizing is avoided by the simple supposition that the Athenian audience believed in Homer and Hesiod ; and that the fortitude and constancy of the sufferer, which in the more popular modern view colours the whole of the iEschylean drama, was in fact but a strong dramatic point in the mind both of the ancient dramatist and his audi- ence ; while the religious soul that inspired the complete legend was the solemn conviction of the Greek, as it is also of the Christian mind, 1 that whether in man or in demi-god — the representative of man, every function is to be exercised, every energy put forth blissfully, only under subjection to the will of the Supreme ; ottl fia\ ov Stjvclios b? aOavdroicn ixayjf}Tai. 1 Besides Lasaulx and Schoernann, Volcker also, in his Mythologie des Iape- tischen Geschkchts (Gene v. 1824), recog- nises in the Promethean myth, as given by Hesiod in the Works and Days, a heathen account of the Fall of Man. We shall best forestall contradiction by say- ing, that the sin of Adam in Genesis iii., and the sin of Prometheus in Hesiod and iEschylus, however they may differ in form and in effect, are in conception and principle substantially the same. ON THE PHILOLOGICAL GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF THE NEO-HELLENIC DIALECT OF THE GREEK LANGUAGE. Proposition i. — All spoken language is a growth, sub- ject, like the creature who uses it, to a constant course of mutation ; it is a living organism, developed according to certain laws, partly inherent, partly superinduced; and, though it is liable to decay, disintegration, and death, this disintegration, except in special cases of exter- mination, becomes the soil of a new growth, and this death the cradle of a new life. The historical action of this process of mutation is to produce either new varieties or dialects of one language, or new species of one family of languages. Proposition ii. — Though no living language is cap- able of an absolute stoppage, and, according to the Heracli- tan doctrine of iravra pec, must either go on growing or be exterminated, yet there are certain influences at work in the constitution of human society that may retard the process of change to an indefinite period, creating a more or less fixed type, from which deviations are few and far between. These influences are of two kinds, internal and external, or as we may say, intellectual and political : in- tellectual, proceeding from the predominant and authori- 112 ON THE PHILOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF tative force of great creative intellects, such as Homer and Dante ; political, proceeding from the unifying effect of a stable form of government, and a permanent type of social order. In other words, the changes that natur- ally go on in language, as in everything vital, will be impeded and retarded by the traditions of the past so long as these retain a firm hold on the national habit of thought and expression. And the duration of the type of any language will be in the direct ratio of the force of the controlling influences, internal and external. Proposition hi. — In the case of the Greek language, while the internal conservative influences were peculiarly strong, the external were loose and variable. An abso- lute political cohesion in the Roman style the Greeks never had. Variety by expansion, and dispersion, and consolidation round a number of special social nuclei, was during their most brilliant period the law of their exter- nal growth ; but during this period, the influence, first of an Ionic minstrelsy in Asia Minor, and then of an Attic culture in south-eastern Europe, was so strong that it controlled, in a very imperial fashion the separative and particularizing forces of independent political centres ; and afterwards, when a strong central government was established, and continued for many centuries at Con- stantinople, this unifying influence, acting with the double power of Church and State, though disturbed at first by the intrusion of a strong Roman vein, com- bined, with an unexampled weight of intellectual and moral tradition, to retard and impede, or practically to ignore, the changes which, by a process of nature, were naturally going on in the Greek language, in an increas- ing ratio, from the overthrow of the political and intel- THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 113 lectual supremacy of Athens by the Macedonians, to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, and from that time by natural propagation, though with diminished force, up to the present hour. Proposition iv. — These retarding forces, however, being in a manner artificial, and acting contrary to the natural law of variation by growth, are necessarily limited in their operation, and can, of course, act only where they are felt ; that is to say, in those classes of society which are " kept constantly under the moulding and controlling influence of the inherited traditions of the past, or, in common language, in the well-educated classes of the community. The uneducated classes, on the contrary, by whom the controlling power of this traditional culture is not felt, or felt only indirectly and with greatly dimin- ished force, go on, partly breaking down old forms of speech, partly sending forth new shoots, so as to form what becomes a distinctly marked dialect of their own ; and in this way the language of a whole people in a state of imperfect and inadequate culture may be pro- pagated in two distinct parallel lines, like an upper and a lower stratum in geology, without coalescing into any common type. Proposition v. — This bistratified condition of a spoken language is exactly what we find realized in the capital of the Byzantine Empire at the time of the Crusades. For here, while a remarkably strong and unbroken chain of literary and ecclesiastical tradition had preserved, with very trivial alterations, the Catholic dia- lect of the Greek tongue, of which Attic is the most finished type, the gradual disintegration of an ill-governed 114 ON THE PHILOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF empire had combined with various influences, topogra- phical and commercial, social and political, to shake the language of the great mass of the illiterate masses loose from all precedent, and to favour the growth of a corrupt and hybrid dialect, which, with the aid of favour- able circumstances, might in due season shape itself, like the barbarous Latin of the middle ages, into a new lan- guage. Of this we have happily the most distinct and clear evidence in the two short poems of the monk Theodore Ptochoprodromus, written in the popular dia- lect, and addressed to the Emperor Manuel, who came to the throne in the year 1143. These poems are composed, not only, like the Annals of Constantine Manasses, who wrote about the same period, with a total disregard of the old classical rhythmical laws, but with a phraseology, and in a style so corrupt and so hybrid, that, even after the lights thrown on the work by Du Cange, Koraes, and other scholars, not a few pas- sages still remain obscure, and would be much more so, were it not that the Latin, which forms one of the chief corrupting elements, is a language with which the readers of Byzantine Greek are generally familiar. Proposition vi. — We must not suppose, however, from the fact of Theodore, or any other stray writer of the Byzantine period, having taken it into his head to write a book or two of verses in the corrupt popular dialect, that this dialect had at that time asserted for itself a place, and received a certain recognition in the world of books. Quite the contrary. In those dreary days, there arose no popular genius to stamp the popular dialect with a certain character of limited classicality ; but even had the Byzantines of those times had strength THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 115 to produce a Burns, the traditional Greek of the court, the Church, and all educated intellects, was too strong to allow a mere lyrical variety, fostered in the hotbed of barbarism and corruption, to claim for itself more than a very little corner in a very large vineyard. The conse- quence was, that while the lower stratum of the spoken language was ripening from day to day into the well- marked form of a new dialect, or even a new language, it does not appear to have advanced a single step out of its ignored position as a literary organ, from the time of Theodore down to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. Byzantine Greek was classical Greek from beginning to end, with only such insignificant changes as altered circumstances, combined with the law of its original genius, naturally produced. Proposition vii. — By the fall of the last Palseologus, the bond of unity which held the motley provinces of the Byzantine Empire together was broken ; one of the two strong external links that connected the degraded pre- sent with the glorious past was snapped ; and with the ruin of the Greek Empire, if the example of the Western Empire was to be a precedent, the death of the Greek language might naturally be expected to follow. But this result did not follow, and that principally from the action of three very powerful forces. The system of government introduced by the conquering Turks was not such as to render a fusion of the dominant and subject races possible ; here was the first element of repulsion ; in the domain of religion the repellent force on the side of the vanquished was even stronger ; and, if we add to these two influences the fact, that the accumulated intel- lectual forces of ages were all on the same side, we shall 116 ON THE PHILOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF have no difficulty in perceiving how the taking of Byzan- tium by the Turks could have no such effect on the lan- guage of the Greeks, as the Lombard reign in Italy had on that of Rome, or the Norman invasion of England, in a much more decided way, on the speech of the Anglo- Saxons. Nor were matters much different in the south- western division of the Greek Empire, where the Vene- tians and other Franks had parcelled among themselves, in governments of greater or less permanency, the dis- membered inheritance of the Byzantine Csesars ; for the Greeks hated the Pope, who had on various occasions endeavoured to deprive them of their ecclesiastical liber- ties, scarcely with less intensity than they did the Turks, who had deprived them of all liberty ; and thus, in Frankish Greece also, the new forces introduced by ex- ternal conquest were not strong enough to effect the disintegration of the old linguistic inheritance, and the construction of a new language, or even the general recog- nition of a new dialect. Proposition viii. — But in spite of the strong and long-continued action of these retarding forces, nature would have her way ; a process of growth was slowly going on, which could not but issue in the formation either of an entirely new language, or of a well-marked species of an old language ; and under the continued action of the strong conservative forces indicated, the latter was the only result possible. The matter was brought to a practical decision, like so many other signi- ficant events in modern times, by the invention of print- ing and the diffusion of books. By means of these power- ful engines, the great storehouses of knowledge were no longer confined to the few, but gradually, as by a well- THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 117 organized system of irrigation, the refreshing waters were brought down from the far hills, and dispersed through the plains ; and an essential part of such a machinery, of course, was the adoption of a language understood by the great mass of the people. If the Greek people were to be raised from the state in which they were kept by their political oppressors, the great preparatory instru- ment, till an opportunity for physical resistance should present itself, was popular education ; and popular educa- tion remained impossible so long as the learned wrote in a dialect artificially fed from reservoirs of dead tradition, not beating with the living pulses of the present. Under the influence of this patriotic necessity, books of various kinds, especially theological and ecclesiastic, had been issued from the Greek- press in a popular dialect, some- what similar to, but not nearly so corrupt as that used by Ptochoprodromus ; and works originally written in classical Greek, like the well-known Church History of Meletius, Bishop of Athens (ob. 1714), were translated into Romaic or modern Greek, just as we modernize Chaucer for the benefit of the million. These patriotic exertions for elevating the popular intellect were brought to a distinctly marked and generally recognised climax by the learned Adamantine Koraes (nat. 1748), a Smyr- niote Greek of great learning, philological talent, and ardent patriotism. This distinguished man, living under the inspiring influence of the great French Revolution, showed his countrymen, by precept and example, how it was possible to use the popular dialect according to its own now fully formed type, while preserving a well-balanced medium between the classical norm familiar to scholars and the gross barbarisms practised in the most remote districts, and by the rudest portion of the community. 118 ON THE PHILOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF This wise and patriotic example, followed generally by a succession of accomplished men, has issued in planting modern Greek, or Neo-Hellenic, as it is now called in its perfect form as one of the recognised types of the great Greek language, on the same platform with the Ionic of Homer and the Doric of Theocritus. Proposition ix. — In attempting now to state scien- tifically the specific characteristic differences between the Neo-Hellenic dialect and what we are accustomed to call ancient Greek in all its extent, two important questions occur on the threshold. First, what do we mean by a dialect of a language, as distinguished from a new lan- guage formed from old materials ; and from what sources, as a standard, are we to make our inductions with regard to the real philological character of modern Greek ? The first question is one which, in theory, it may be very dif- ficult to answer ; but practically we may say, that when- ever the old materials of a language are so modified as that only a very few words remain in their original form, and that more accidentally than systematically, and when the obscurity arising from this source is increased by the admixture, in larger or smaller quantity, of foreign mate- rials, in this case, as in the case of Spanish and Italian, a new language has been created. 1 But whenever the changes induced on the old materials are comparatively slight and more sporadic than penetrating and pervading 1 The lines in Italian — are altogether exceptive, as any one " In mare irato, in subita procella, may perceive by taking a stanza of Invoco te, nostra benigna stella," Ottava rima either in Tasso or Ariosto, often quoted (C. Lewis's " Romanic Lan- and counting how very few words in guages," 2d edit. p. 246) to prove the the eight lines have retained the unal- nearness of Italian to Latin, are no tered form of the Latin from which proof of the rule in that language, but they are derived. THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 119 in their character, with only a very spare admixture of foreign materials, in this case we shall have only a new dialect — not a new language. The second question, as to what we may take as a fair standard of modern Greek, can be answered as a matter of fact only by hitting a judi- cious medium between the two extremes of gross cor- ruption, and that greater or less approximation to the standard of classical Greek, which the practice of some writers presents. Topographical and political causes con- spired to create different shades, grades, or types of modi- fication in the popular Greek dialect, which had more or less of a local character. The Byzantine Greek of Theodorus, the Albanian Greek of the Epirotic Klephts, and the Cretan Greek of Cornaro, who wrote the romance of Erotocritus, in the first half of the eighteenth cen- tury (first edition, Venice, 1737), are in some character- istic points, essentially diiferent. These constitute what, according to a botanical analogy, we might call local varieties of a common species ; and such varieties, as a rule, present a greater amount of deviation from the normal classical type than the floating mass of modern Greek common to all the existing race. On the other hand, since the time of Koraes, there has commenced a process of purification and restoration which tends to remove from the modern language some of those peculi- arities which are its most distinctive characteristics. In judging of the language as a whole, therefore, it is wise to take some work or book of an essentially popular char- acter written for general circulation in the last century, before the appearance of Koraes ; and I have used for this purpose a translation of the Arabian Nights into modern Greek, published at Venice by the well-known house of Glycys, in the year 1792. This choice, however, 120 ON THE PHILOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF was dictated purely with a view to the conclusions of philological science ; for practical purposes, it is manifest that the best type of the Greek actually now spoken in Greece is contained in the Greek newspapers destined for general circulation. But neither can the philologer, though he refuses to accept local varieties, as part of the general norm of the dialect, overlook them as a fact. They are part either of the disintegration of the old type, or of the growth of the new, of which, in all its stages, he is bound to take cognizance ; the more that the phenomena of linguistic change, which are the most interesting to him, present themselves more strikingly in the more corrupt than in the less corrupt forms of the language. Proposition x. — In examining the processes of modi- fication through which the Neo-Hellenic language has attained its present type, the most obvious helps are, of course, the dictionaries of medieval Greek by Du Cange and Meursius, the learned commentaries of Koraes on Theodorus, the dictionary of Byzantine Greek by Sophocles, the dictionaries of modern Greek by Gerasi- mus, Bentotes, Kind, De Heque, Byzantius, and others, with the grammars from Thomas downwards to that of Sophocles and Mullach, which is the most complete. Be- sides the grammar, Mullach has edited the Batracho- myomachia of Demetrios Zenos, from which the student will reap benefit ; and with him should be taken the collection of mediaeval Greek chronicles and poems by Ellisen. Great zeal has been shown in the same depart- ment of Hellenic study by the French, of which the Collection de Monuments pour servir a VEtude de la langue Neo-Hellenique, by Monsieur le Grand, and the Paris association for the same object, of which Monsieur THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 121 d'Echthal is the moving genius, furnish ample evidence.* English scholars as a rule have paid little attention to the subject. Pashley, Tozer, and the late Viscount Strang- ford, with the late Professor Felton in America, were the only English names known to me in connexion with this branch of scholarship, till the publication last year of the highly original and ingenious work of M. Geldart ; in Scotland special praise is due to Dr. Clyde, and after him to Donaldson, t The late Cornewall Lewis, unfortunately, was altogether ignorant of this branch of philology : otherwise, as is evident from a note in his Essay on the Romanic Languages (p. 237, second edit.), he was pre- pared to have made an admirable use of it. Proposition xi. — When scholars talk of a type of language, such as the strange events of long centuries * 1. Koraes arcucra. — 2. Sophocles' Glossary of Byzantine Greek ; London, 1860. — 3. Gerasiini Thesaurus quatuor Linguarum ; Venet. 1723. — 4. Kind, Handbuch der Neu-griechischen Spra- che; Leipzig, 1841. — 5. De Heque ; Paris, 1825. — 6. Ae£i/coi/ 'EXkrjvucov kol TclWlkov ; by Byzantius ; Athens, 1846. — 7. Xe^iKov TpiyXaxT&ov ; by Bentotes and Blante ; Venice, 1820. — 8. Nova Methodus Linguae Graecae vulgaris ; auc- tore Thoma ; Paris, 1709.— 9. Methode pour etudier la langue Grecque mo- derne, par David; Paris, 1821. — 10. Grammatica linguae Graecae recentioris ; Franz, Romae, 1837. — 11. Sophocles' Mo- dern Greek Grammar ; Hartford, 1842. — 12. Grammatik der Griechischen Vul- gar Sprache ; Mullach; Berlin, 1856. — 13. Analekten der Mittel und Neu Grie- chischen Litteratur, Ellisen ; Leipzig, 1855. — 14. Demetrii Zeni ; Paraphrasis Batrachomyomachia,Mullachius ; Bero- lini, 1837. — 15. Collection de monu- ments pour servir a l'etude de la langue Neo-Hellenique, par Emile le Grand; Paris, 1869. — 16. Mediaeval Greek texts ; the Philological Society's extra volume ; by W. Wagner ; London, 1870. — 17. Association pour l'encou- ragement des Etudes Grecques en France; Annuaires ; Paris, 1868-71. + 1. Pashley ; Travels in Crete ; Lon- don, 1837. — 2. Tozer ; Researches in the Highlands of Turkey ; London, 1869. — 3. Viscount Strangford on the Cretan Dialect, in Spratt's Travels in Crete ; London, 1865. See also col- lected works of Viscount Strangford ; London, 1871. — 4. Clyde; Romaic and Modern Greek compared ; Edinburgh, 1855. — 5. Donaldson ; Modern Greek Grammar; Edinburgh, 1853. — 6. Gel- dart ; the Modern Greek Language in its relation to Ancient Greek ; Oxford, 1870. — 7. Professor Felton published a collection of pieces in modern Greek, which was once in my possession, but of which I cannot now recover the title. 122 ON THE PHILOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF have produced in modern Greece, they are apt to talk of it altogether as a corruption, and as the pure result of phonetic decay. But this is only a part, and a small part of the truth. A language is corrupt when it abandons its own natural analogies, or adopts foreign ones, which do ' not harmonize with its original type, or when it is defaced and disfigured in various ways by sheer ignorance and carelessness. In this sense it is quite correct in Italian, for instance, to say, that donna is a corruption of domina, avuto of habitum ; and in the same way, in Neo-Hellenic, to say that ly/3dXKa> is a corruption of e/c(3d\\a), and fxa6alv(o of fjuavOdvo) ; and of such corruptions, no doubt, a large part of Italian, and a certain much less considerable part of modern Greek, is composed. But, on the other hand, it is no corruption when, in the progress of time, an old word comes to be used in a modified, or perhaps alto- gether different sense ; as when fcdfivco, in modern Greek, takes the place of iroiw, when o-tjkoco, which in Plutarch signifies to weigh, in modern Greek signifies to raise, when iKvio^ai, to arrive, or iratievay for ^ao-rcyoco, as they are not only in modern Greek, but in the New Testament. Such progressions and transmutations of meaning are always going on in all living languages, of which ample illustrations could be produced from English and every spoken language, if it were necessary. As little can it be called a corruption, when new forms blossom out from old roots, so long as these new forms follow the fair analogies of the language. No one, for instance, supposes that the English language is corrupted when we bring into currency such words as solidarity, complicity, utilize, and similar French forma- tions from Latin roots long ago acknowledged in both languages. In the same way, xpwwmw, voo-ri/jLevofiac, and THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 123 other such words, are perfectly legitimate formations, even though it be true that the Attics were not in the habit of affixing the termination evco to verbals in fio? ; for the Athenians at all times had their peculiar local idioms, just as London has its Cockneyisms ; and the mere Attic usage could prescribe the law to the common Greek tongue, only so long as Athens remained the political and literary capital of Greece, which it ceased to be exclu- sively when the centre of intellectual activity was trans- ferred first to Alexandria and then to Byzantium. To write pure Attic Greek, after the Athenian literary dic- tatorship had ceased, was an affectation of which only pedantry or a false fastidiousness could be guilty. The barbarism to which, in a general way, a certain class of scholars would consign such words, is more justly regarded as an overgrowth of lusty vitality. Such new-coined words may not indeed be necessary ; the old words might have served all purposes equally well ; but they are the natural and legitimate product of the right of a living organism to put forth new shoots according to its type. If it be said that a word is always barbarous till it be stamped by the authority of a great classic of the lan- guage, I answer this may be a very healthy limitation which a writer at a certain period of the adult growth of a language may choose to put on his choice of vocables ; but it is to the eye of the philologer an arbitrary pro- cedure of which science can take no account. To him claritudo, and gratitudo, and heatitudo are perfectly good Latin words, whether Cicero happens to use them or not ; and in such words — what a nice Ciceronian of the Bembo school would brand as a departure from the norm of Latin purity — a philologer may often have cause to recognise a natural extension and fair enrichment of a meagre and 124 ON THE PHILOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF inadequate medium of expression. If, therefore, Homer uses not only yXv/cvs, but yXv/cepos, there is no reason why a scholar should condemn as barbarous varieties of a similar description in the existing Greek tongue ; and if the ancients, in their exuberant play of terminational affixes, chose to say dXi)6ivd, to refrain, restrain, carry. Ka}xap(j)V(ji (o(o), to give one's-self airs, to admire, vault or arch. racrcro), to promise, arrange. (TVVTpkyjbi, to assist, run together. iSl'to/ACt, manners, a peculiarity. AaAw, sing, prate. Xwvw, conceal, heap up. crwva) (a-w£to), suffice, save. KVpLOSj a father, a master. KOfJ.j36<0, deceive, to bind up, gird. X), place, set, go- 6dv(i), to arrive, to get before. avoids, the spring, opening. 7rAaT^, shoulder, flat part of an oar. vTroKUfxevoVj a person, a subject. dpdcrcra), to land, to crash. o-Kid^ofxai, to be afraid, to shade one's-self. dSetd^oif to fire a gun, to give an amnesty. 7rvev/xaTtKO, a clergyman, windy. ra X i', the morning, swift. yeu//,a, dinner, taste, smack. to, crcucTTa, sense, wits, things saved. orvfX7rd0eta ) pardon, sympathy. OKOTlfo, stun, astonish, darken. Proposition xiii. — But these changes of meaning and application in old words, however strange, and how- ever important to be noticed as presenting a practical difficulty to a student passing from the classical to the modern dialect, are only what must take place in any language, which for the space of more than a thousand years has been allowed to float freely on the surface of the popular mind without any central authoritative control. More characteristic of the peculiar genius of the Greek tongue is the luxuriant growth of new terminations to old roots, especially verbal, which the living dialect pre- sents. This habii^ of luxuriating in a variety of verbal forms differing nothing in signification, but displaying only, to adopt a botanical phrase, a greater breadth of THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 127 terminal blossom, was characteristic of Hellenic speech from the earliest times. Thus, from the adjective ofj,a\o<; we have the three equivalent forms 6/ia\lfo, SfjLaXvvco, and ofiaXoco, for which our meagre English is only too happy to find that it possesses the single equalize ; and in the same way, from the root cre/3, we have the verbal forms o-efioficu, o-efid&ijLcu, cre/3/£a>, and later aefiao-fudZco (in Zonaras), all perfectly identical in signification. And though, no doubt, it may seem that d&, as in eX/cva-rdfa, and vfa as in epirvfya, had originally a frequentative meaning, yet this distinctive feature was lost in the growth of the language ; and between arevco and o-Tevdfa there is only a difference of sound, as, in Latin, between claritas and claritudo. Fol- lowing out this instinct of rich terminational ramification and efflorescence, the current Greek vocabulary presents such varieties as the following : — Modern. Ancient. SaKpv£a> y cip^ofiai. SaKpvu). ttcutx^, $o/fyt£a>, 7racrx<«>. , to fling one's-self down across the mattress and sleep. ^eKapSt^byucu, my heart leaps out of my body, as with violent joy. dpKovStlo), to go on all-fours like a bear, as children do. A similar lustihood of terminational vitality — a point in which our English tongue is so remarkably feeble — dis- plays itself in the terminations of adjectives and substan- tives, some of which are authorized by ancient analogy, as in fipcopepo?, for BvacoSr)?, and others are a separate creation of the modern linguistic instinct, as in (jypovtfjudBa, voo-TifiaZa, and the whole family of abstract nouns in dha. Proposition xiv. — But it is not only in termina- tional variety that the ample vitality of the living Greek tongue asserts itself. As in the ancient, so in the modern dialect, the tendency to a florid growth of ever new com- pound words is irresistible. It is in the domain of the verbs again where this tendency exhibits itself most strongly. Here, of course, the compounding elements are often prepositions ; but other elements are not excluded ; and not a few very expressive compounds are formed from elements of which, for this purpose, the ancients made little or no use. Let the following serve as examples : — avaKarovu) (oo>), to turn upside down. a-rpecfioyvpL^o), to turn round and round. airoKap.ap6v(a 1 to contemplate with admiration. gavOoyvpofxaWos, having red and curly hair. TroXvo-Kovpidfo, to cover with rust. yzLXripLovKTpLlto, to neigh. tKKOKKivtfa, to turn pale, lit, to go out of the red. KaXoKVTTa^oy, to look favourably on. yXvKvcfaXQ, to give sweet kisses. yXvKvyapd^o), to break sweetly, as of the dawn. yXvKVKVTTovpyai, to make incarnate. cnraraXo KpopASr) ?, an onion-gourmand. /So/J,f3oKTV7ri^O), to din the ears, obtundo. HocrypKapvov, nutmeg. €7TO(f)6aXjJLtl0 7 to cast an envious eye on. eKfJLVCTTTJp I dfofJLOU, to reveal. Kpao"07raT6pas, a wine-bibber. These examples, and a host of others that might be adduced, show how absurd it is to class under the head of corruption those changes in a long-lived language, which indicate a buoyant juvenescence rather than a withered decrepitude of expression. Let us now turn our attention to those changes in the form of the lan- guage, which fall distinctly under the category of loss or abatement, though by no means necessarily under that of DEFACEMENT and DISFIGUREMENT. Proposition xv. — As language, in long ages of neglect and semi-barbarism, is used by the masses princi- pally for purposes of convenience, it is plain that considera- i 130 ON THE PHILOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF tions of an aesthetical nature, such as influence men of genius and high culture in their use of language, will be subordinated ; and the purely scientific considerations, on which the philologer puts a high value, will not influence the popular mind at all. Carelessness, convenience, cus- tom, and sometimes mere freak, fashion, and the itch of novelty, will produce important changes in the structure of a language which a delicate sense of harmony, and a scientific perception of organic completeness, would alike repudiate. Among the phenomena of this kind which continually tend to -break down the classical form of words, those known to grammarians under the heads of aphceresis, apocope, and syncope, are the most frequent. But, not to encumber a plain subject with learned phraseo- logy, we shall say simply, that all cultivated languages, when used merely for convenience, without the continued check of a higher aim, are liable to have their vocabulary changed by a process of curtailment which makes a part of the word serve for the whole. Thus in America, from the rattling haste in which the people delight, " an acute man" is called " a 'cute man;" from the same careless instinct, the ignorant English peasant, or the sharp Lon- don street boy, talks of the " varsity" instead of the " university ;" and the familiar words, bus and cab, are only the tail and head respectively of two polysyllabic words, borrowed the one from the Latin, the other from the French. That this is a corruption, not of a very ele- gant kind, no person will deny ; for even when the origi- nal form of the word may have died out from the popular memory, it requires only a little bookish culture to mak one feel that a segment has been cut from the full sound of the thing, the absence of which makes itself felt. Cur tailments of this kind are obvious everywhere in French THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 131 and Italian, and in not a few German words also derived from Latin and Greek, as in probst for 'propositus, jofingst for TrevTTjfcoo-rri, and such like. Now, it is manifest that these corruptions may be made in various ways. Some- times only a weak initial or final letter or short syllable may be dropt, which leaves the word not much the worse ; sometimes a half, and that not the most impor- tant half, may be left, after the amputation, and in such a fashion it may be, that only a scientific eye can recognise its original identity. One of the commonest forms of curtailment in Greek is that of an initial short vowel, of which the following list contains some of the most common : — ... Aiyos, for oXtyos. 7TW/)fcKa, for oVto/OfcKa. fiaXia, ,, apuXXa, f3pi(TK(3i, „ €Vpi(TKU). /ZlAto, ,, o/ziAw. /3 Adyta, ,, euAdyca. 7T6S, ,, et7re§ (ItTre). A^/zipt, ,, 6Xrffj,epi. vos, „ eves. /3ayyeAiov, „ eiWyyeAiov. ifr)\6. TravSpevofJLCU f ,, vwavSpevopai. (^ereivos, „ ecfyertvos. (TKVTTTOi ,, eicTKvirra). partovia, J? aiparoo}. ycaXos, „ alyiaXos. prjpLOKXrjfTL, ?J eprjpLa eKKXrjaria. peyofxai, „ dpeyo/xai. 7rerpa)(rjXt } }) e7rirpa-)^yjXtov. o-a£a>, „ la-d(o). yeia, , j vyleia. (TiX>9lKa^ „ ecrcoOiKa, i.e. evroadta. 7TMXIO, ,, 07TlO-to. /x/3ati/a), „ e[xj3atvoj. ttas, „ ^/x5?. piropQi^ „ €/X7TOpW. Aa/xviu, ,, eAai;i/(o. T6/H, ,, €T0U/0OS. yAfrova), ,, l*dyero, Xatvi for Xayeviov, TrevTrjVTa for irevTiqicovTa, and with a large initial curtailment aapdvra for Tea-aapaKovra. Two of the most familiar examples of this medial curtailment are those which take place on the verbs Xeyco and virdyco. When I was living a lodger in Athens, about twenty years ago, a little girl, the landlord's daugh- ter, as I was going out, used to say to me irov m-are. When I heard this first I was considerably puzzled, and began at once to think of irarew and pattens ; but this scent led me far astray, and on inquiry I found that the mystical dis- syllable was only a curtailed form of virdyeTe, as that word is used in the New Testament (Matthew xvi. 23). The same habit of dropping the medial gamma, I afterwards found, led to the forms Xe?, Xere, xiv, familiarly used for Xeyeis, Xeyere, and Xeyow ; and in like manner $av stands for ? iv a. e'A#2/, ™X ei > jj I'va e^et, ™x«, >> to e'x«, Trwp^erat, ?> 07TOV e/)^e TW7ra, 5) to It7ra, and others of a similar description, which occur frequently in the Erotocritus. Proposition xxi. — These remarks, taken singly, might naturally lead to the idea that modern Greek is a sort of amputated ancient Greek, as the Saxon half of English is a sort of amputated German — a meagre dialect in which every dissyllable has been cropped down into a monosyl- lable, and every trisyllable into a dissyllable. But this is by no means the case. Miserable and meagre, in point of vocal swell and syllabic roll, as our truncated Saxon tongue would have been, had it not been reinforced by the strong intrusion of the sonorous element from the classical lan- guages, the tongue of the ancient Hellenes has suffered no such loss as to produce any bald disfigurement of this kind. The explanation of this is obvious. The words of the Greek language are so exuberantly polysyllabic, that the abstraction of a single syllable from each word would leave the great body of the language still distinctly poly- syllabic ; thus, Vt^y/xw falls upon the ear with pretty much the same amplitude as the full form eiriOvixco. But further, the fact is that the curtailments of which we have spoken affect only a limited class of words ; and, singularly enough, the largest class to which apocope is applied contains a compensation which leaves the apocopated word as many syllables, or perhaps more than the original word of the 138 ON THE PHILOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF classical tongue. This apparent paradox arises out of that substitution of diminutives for the original word, which we have already noted as characteristic of the modern dialect. For the diminutive in Greek, and all the Aryan languages, while it lessens the idea, increases the magni- tude of the word, as in /3pevX\Lov, fiecpa^, fieipa/ciov, adpi;, aapicapiov, and so forth, from which the consequence follows, that where a diminutive is systematically substi- tuted for the simple word, and afterwards apocopated, the syllabic magnitude of the word is not diminished. Some- times it may even be increased, as waiBl, iraihiov, irals ; tto- ra/jbc, TTorafuov, irorafjuo^ ; yepovraKL, yepovraiciov, €pva>, KoXvdco for KoXkdco, a fashion clearly traceable in the. New Testament. There we have Bepvco for Secpco, oindvoiiai for ottto/jlcil, xvvcd for x ea) > sional form of the word for the sake of French, it is always prefixed, even euphony ; the rule is, that, while in where no traces of it are found in Italian the initial e or i in such cases Latin. Cornewall Lewis on the Romanic is never added, but regularly rejected, Languages, 2d edit. p. 107. in Provencal, Spanish, and early popular 142 ON THE PHILOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF and others. In fact, this peculiarity is as old as Homer, who has dvvco and Bvvco for dvco and Svco, and the lengthened form of dyive'a) for ayo). We need not therefore be sur- prised at its great prevalence in modern Greek. From the Alexandrians downwards, the people have always been in the habit of inserting a v before the final vowel of the large class of verbs in dco ; as in the common , and dvco the modern ctkotovco, and such like, it as a strengthened form of aca." This belongs only to the present indicative, may be quite true ; only in such verbs THE MODEBN GREEK LANGUAGE. 143 causes, irregularities and anomalies have once got a place in it, which disregard or contradict its characteristic analo- gies, the establishment of a classical norm of speech, by a succession of authoritative writers, may stereotype such irregularities as a recognised part of the language for an indefinite period. Thus in English the irregular plurals — fragments, by the way, of an old regularity — men, vjomen, oxen, and a few others, remain fixed ; and so in Greek, the aoristic forms in Ka, eOrjKa, eScofca, r)Ka, contrary to the general rule of verbal formation. But so soon as the firm control of intellectual authority is weakened, as by the removal of some artificial constraint, the popular ear falls back on the familiar analogy, and abolishes the anomaly ; and thus in modern Greek, eOrjica becomes eOeo-a, e$a)/ca eScocra, dveyvcov dveyvcoaa (also in ancient Ionic), and so forth. A familiar example of this tendency is the seed for seen, coomed for come, etc., of the common people in England. Similarly we find in Greek etyepOrjv from oXk\p. r) (f>T€pa, ?) TTTCplS. r) cfiopaSa, J5 op as. And this termination dSa, when it had once caught the popular ear, became a favourite norm for the forma- tion of abstract substantives even when there was no objective case of the third declension from which to make the transfer. Thus, — For XafjiTrpoTy]?, XapirvpaSa. For cf>p6vrj(TLS, (ppovrjjxdSa. From vS(ttl[jlos voa-rtfidSa. In the same way with masculines, — For c/xos, e'/oeoTas. ,, TraTiqp, Trarepas. „ arjp, depas. „ jSacnXevs, (^acnXuds. „ rex (Lat.) prjyas. For, in fact, 9 in non- Attic Greek was the favourite termination of masculine agents, as we see in Cosmos, Ducos, and other proper names of the Middle Ages. So for the Attic dpToiroios, they preferred the shorter form dpTfl?, for oypokoyoiroLo^, wpoXoyds, and many others. The 1 Cornewall Lewis, in his essay on larly as objects of our thoughts and the Romanic Languages (2d edit. 1862, feelings, that is, grammatically, we p. 91), while tracing this tendency to generally use the objective case ; and prefer the accusative case through all even in the case of agents, we feel the Romanic languages, says that " he more strongly, and have to express is unable to suggest any very satisfac- more frequently, our action on them tory explanation" of the phenomenon. than their action on us ; as, I like him, The explanation seems simply to be I hate him, I tell him, I order him, / that, in the case of most nouns, which forbid him, etc. are not agents, we think of them regu- THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 145 prevalence of this termination is specially marked by the systematic use of the form (SkeirayvTas for jSXeircov as the nominative of the participle, and that in both genders. The termination o? of the second declension is sometimes used in the same way, as yepo<$ for yepcov, Spd/co? for Spd/ccov ; of which confusion we have examples also in the classic authors, as dxdo-ropos (Homer, iEschyl., and Soph.) for dxdcr- Toop, iidprvpo? for fidprvp. To the same category of regular- isation belong, of course, the forms fcaXiJTepos, nroWoTaro^, /.ceya\^T€po<;, /jLeyaXoraros, for the well-known irregular forms of the classical grammar. Pkoposition xxv. — The previous observations relate exclusively to the changes that time has wrought on individual words, apart from their relation to one an- other. The elements of language which indicate the method of the connexion of one word with another, or of one sentence with another, are chiefly the cases of nouns, the tenses and moods of verbs and prepositions and conjunctions. Every change, indeed, made on a verb by diminution or increase, does not mark a change in the law of the dependence of words on each other, or of sentences on sentences ; but for the sake of a complete view (in addition to what was said above), it will be con- venient to note the principal changes made on the verb in this place. Now, every one who bears in mind the prodigal luxuriance of form in the Greek verb will be prepared to find that the change here falls almost exclu- sively under the category of loss. Thus the common third person plural of the present indicative in ow, some- times owe, is a manifest curtailment of the old Doric ovti, Latin tint. This ow of the indicative is then transferred to the subjunctive, and we have irpdgow for irpd^wat, and K 146 ON THE PHILOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF similar forms. The next thing that strikes us is the total disappearance of that double form of the aorist, which gives so much annoyance to young students of the classical tongue. The first aorist with the a as its final syllable has gained a decided victory over the o form in the active voice ; and in the passive the aspirated form which appears in earaXd^v is preferred to the Attic earaXyv. Thus, even when the second aorist is retained, because no first aorist existed, it assumes the a, which is the characteristic of the first aorist. So eXa/Sav for eXafiov, a peculiarity already prominent in the Septuagint. But the two most striking amputations which the verb has suffered, and which most prominently affect the syntax, are those of the optative and the infinitive mood, both changes for which the way was fully prepared in ancient times, as the student of the New Testament must be aware. The loss of the optative as the natural and sym- metric form, of the conjunctive after a past tense in the leading clause, is no doubt in an assthetical point of view to be lamented. Its effect in modern Greek is the same as if in English we should say, " I gave you this property that you may enjoy yourself on it." Practically, however, it occasions no ambiguity, and accordingly we find that, in the language of the New Testament, the place of the optative in such dependent clauses is almost always taken by the subjunctive ; and not in the New Testament only, but frequently in Plutarch, and not seldom even in Thucydides. It may be said, therefore, with perfect truth, that the dropping of the optative is in the end an improvement, rather than a corruption of the language ; as it is better that a person should be dead altogether than that, being alive, his occasional presence should serve only to remind us with the more acute pain of his THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 147 habitual absence. But the loss of the infinitive mood is something to which the thoroughbred classical scholar will feel it much more difficult to reconcile his ear. If there is one thing more than another that distinguishes the flexible grace of Greek syntax from the somewhat formal dignity of the Roman, it is the frequent use of the infinitive mood. And one cannot but express a wonder at first blush, that a form of expression so con- venient and so flexible as the infinitive certainly is, should have given place to the lumbering form of a con- junction with tbe subjunctive or indicative mood. But so it is ; for even the Greeks in their best days said olSa co? or on, instead of the less circuitous infinitive or par- ticiple ; and the Romans, who, for a special class of cases well known to school-boys, had prescribed the accusative before the infinitive as the only form, before the time of St. Augustine began pretty generally to say, Scio quod Petrus est vir doctus, or even quia, which is the mother of the French que and the Italian die. Whence the habit now so characteristic of modern Greek took its rise of using va (for tva), with the subjunctive instead of the old infinitive, it seems useless to inquire. I have some- times thought it might be by a contagion caught from the Roman syntax ; but the relation of the two languages was of such a kind as to create a current of contagion from Greek upon Latin syntax (as indeed we see in Tacitus) rather than the reverse. I shall say, therefore, it was only a change of fashion. Certain it is that the partiality for Iva with the subjunctive mood appears already largely developed in the New Testament in cases where a classical ear feels the want of the familiar infini- tive. But custom, which exercises a despotic authority in such matters, soon reconciles us to the change ; which, 148 ON THE PHILOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF indeed, when considered apart from the habit of the ear, is anything but an important one, and quite in harmony with the commonest grammatical phenomena, both in ancient and modern languages. When I say in English, for instance, it is too bad that you should do so and so, I am merely using the modern Greek syntax of Seovov va tcl rotavra /cd/nr}? for the classical Betvbv to ra roiavra oe'ye irparrecv ; and the apparently more awkward syntax, Sia to va irpa-^Owcri TavTa, for Trpa^Orjvai TavTa, is again Only the English on account of the fact that, and the Latin prop- terea quod. There is only one other amputation in the Greek classical verb which must be mentioned, for it is certainly the most grievous of all. I mean the loss of the future and the pluperfect, with the substitution therefor of the auxiliary verbs, OeXco or 6d, and e%w. Now, it is no doubt true that the particle dv, so familiar in the classical dialect, and ice in Homer, could have been no- thing in their origin but auxiliary verbs ; and so 6a may plead a classical precedent. True also it is that the verb e^ft) is not unfrequently in the tragic writers joined with the past participle in a way that has some analogy to the function of an auxiliary verb ; but it is in reality very different ; and as there is nothing in modern Greek that so offends the polite ear of the elegant scholar as the presence of these auxiliary verbs, it is matter of con- gratulation that the best modern writers know so rarely and so dexterously to use them, that the offence is prac- tically reduced to a minimum, and with some writers appears to cease altogether. There is another character- istic of Neo-Hellenic prose closely allied to such essenti- ally modern syntactic combinations. I mean the use of such modern turns of speech as fidWa) eU irpafyv, to put into execution ; ydvw ttjv o-TpaTav, to lose the way ; tcdjj,v? av or adv with ]s veovpyetTcu f] ktlctis, XovpyeLTCU 6 KTt(TT7]s, X a ^P € , vv/j,rj dvv/xfavTe. 1 Then, as to the effect of the excessive frequency of the feeble sound of i, expressed by the term itacism, we must bear in mind that, though the modern pronunciation applied absolutely to certain picked lines of the ancient classics might produce a very petty vocal effect, it does 1 Sergii, v^lvos aKciOicrTos rrjs Georo- tianoruin. Christ ei Paranikas. Leips. kov. Anthol. Graeca Carminum Chris- 1871, p. 140. THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 155 not at all follow that the same result will be produced when the modern language is used by those who know how to handle it. Such a sequence of weak identical sounds, for instance, as occurs when the law of itacism is applied to a word like ir\7)0 uvdeirj, does not exist in the Neo-Hellenic verb ; for the optative is obsolete. But further, it seems to be quite certain, that, if certain lines in classical Greek have their music marred by the applica- tion of the modern itacism, the harmony of the whole language is destroyed by the barbarous English pronun- ciation of the diphthong ov, in which the rude canine ow is substituted for the soft and velvety oo. And with regard to this beautiful ov, which the English so pervert, it is a noticeable fact, that not only is it one of the most prominent sounds in classical Greek, but it has extended its sphere in the modern dialect so as to produce some new and sonorous terminations. How beautiful, for instance, are the diminutives in ov\a, as — pa\ovXa } for pa-xi- fiavovka, „ fMOLVT]. avyovXa, ,, avy?/. ^or/ovAa, n <£cov^. TrepSiKovXa, , 3 irephiKLOv. 7raAata KA^crovAa, ,, 7raAata Ik/cAt^cro, KapSouAa, ,, KapSta. AaAouAa, „ XdXrjjxa. /3pvcrov\a } „ /3pV(TlV(TKO(l). KOvSoVVlOV, 5J KtoStoV. f3povx££<», J? ft^X w - (TKOV^(J) } 53 (TKV^O). CTKovf3a\ov, 3? (TKVj3a\0V) and others. Nor is the sonorous sound of a, according to Dionysius the most musical of the vowels, but which the English in many cases degrade into the feeble rank of rj (Scotch), less prominent in the modern than in the ancient dialect. On the contrary, many beautiful new substantive forms are used with a marked preference to which this rich vowel gives the key-note, as in o-yjfiaSi, for arjfxeiov. (TKOTaSt, , , ctkotos. 7TOTa/U, ,, 7TOTa/x6povr)Lia. With the troop of favourite diminutives in dpi and dia. And I must say, generally, that in reading through the Erotocritus, I was more struck by the predominance of these two rich musical sounds of a and ou, than by any offensive accumulation of itacised syllables ; and both in that poem and in the Klephtic ballads, my ear not seldom rested on lines of a full and masculine melody, not in- ferior to the best in Homer. Thus we read — 'OXrjLiepovXa TroXefxa, to (3pdBv KapaovXi. " All day we fight, and all the night we waste in sleepless watches." And 2kotov€4 tovs ' Ayaprjvovs Tre^ovpa kou Ka/3dXo. " He mows them doivn, the Agarenes, both foot and horse he mows them." THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 157 And again, HoXXrj pavptXXa e^erou, pavprj crdv KaXtaKovSi. 11 A blackness siveeps across the plain, black as a troop of ravens." 1 And what can be more vigorous and powerful, so far as sound is concerned, than the following lines from the Erotocritus, describing the impatient steeds at a battle, eager to start at the first blast of the trumpet ? Ktvttovv rd 7r68ta rovs (rrrjv yyjv, rrjv (TKovq duacr-qKovovv, To rpe^tfjLov dva^qrovv, dcfrpt^ovv, Kal Sptpwvovv. *H yXwcra-a pe to crropa tovs irai^.i to ^aXivapi, ToVa Kal t' aAAo dypLevero, crdv Kavet to Xtovrdpt. TdpOovvta tovs KairvL^ovcri) o~v^vd t d<^rid craXcvovv, Kai vd Kivr\yovv (iid^ovrai, vd Tpe^ovcrt, yvpevovv. Or, again, take the beautiful little %e/uSoWyita, or swallow song to welcome the spring, from Kind's collection — e O 'A7rpiXr]s 6 yXvKvs ecfaOave, Sev Vat paKpvd' To, irovXaKia KeXaSovv, rd SevSpaKta cfryXXavOovv, Ta opvidta vd yevvovv ap-^qcrav Kal vd kXoxtctovv, Ta KOTrdSta dp^LVOvv v' dva/Satvovv 's Ta /3ovvd, Ta Kai^iKia vd TrrjSovv Kal vd rpwyovv rd /) 7T€<£t(D. StLKVVJJLl, )) Seixvto. TTTCO^OS, j> t^Tto^o?. 7TT6/DVy€S, )j Tepovyes. pLTTTU), j) ptyyta. paTTTO), 5J pdT(o. aTTTOfxai^ J5 a.(f>T(i). TTTaio), n <£tcu'(o. And many more. The same tendency to aspiration — closely connected with the sibilation so common in classi- cal Greek — has led to the lisping of every 8, and the softening of ft into our English v, which often produces a very pleasant effect, as when voolomw, the Romaic pro- nunciation of PovXofjbcu is compared with the rude and canine English boulomai. And if the modern Greek has shown no objection to the classical aspirates, as little has he felt inclined to soften down the masculine f — a:? — after the fashion of the Italians, into a double sibilant. Be- sides retaining the ancient f in all cases where it existed, THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 159 he has new created a large class of compound verbs with Ik or ef, of which the characteristic is, that the initial vowel is omitted or transposed, so that etc becomes fe, and the word appears commencing with the double consonant. Of this class the following are characteristic examples : — £ 3 to cease loving — grow cool. £oLKOV(TTO(rVV7], celebrity. £a.(TTepia, clear starry brightness. gafayyapia, rnoonlessness. ^€/3dTTT(i), to take out the colour. ^ejSovWovo), to unseal. £e8ovTi£(0, to draw teeth. ^eKapSi^o), to dishearten. ^eKapcji6v(n i to take out nails. £ep.av6dvu), to unlearn. £e/jLva\iloftepi£a> (poftepigcD, rpofAafo rpofid^co. Of ^Eolism, the accusative plural of the first declension in ai instead of a, as Movants for Movo-a?, is a familiar example. On the other hand, it is not to be denied that there are some traces of Ionic also in modern Greek, as in the conversion and in this view it is certain that a fies with the Caucones of the ancient familiarity with the living dialect of topographers, see Mullach, Grammar, Greece would be of more value to our p. 94, and Das Tzalconische von Pro- young theologians than many of the fessor Moriz Schmidt in Studien zur branches of philology which at present Griechischen und Lateinischen Gram- occupy bheir attention. motile, herausgegeben von Georg Curt'ws, 1 On the peculiarities of the dialect voL iii. p. 347. of the Tzacones, which Mullach identi- 2 Ahrens, De Dialecto Dorica. THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 163 of o or co into ov, and the use of the slender rj for the broad a in certain adjectives in po? ; but I have not been able from my observation to confirm the strong remark of the late Viscount Strangford on this point — one of the best authorities no doubt — to the effect that " it would be easy to show two Ionisms for one iEolism or Dorism in modern Greek." 1 A kindred point to this dialectic physiognomy of the modern tongue is brought out by the occurrence in it of certain words, or forms of words, which anciently were confined to poetic usage, but have now passed into general circulation. The following is a short list of this type which 1 have collected : — criyaAos, (Pindar). Pp°xo, for v€tos. o/^aria, opLpLCLTa, Homer, for 6(f)6a\p,6s, rpiKVfiia, storm at sea, for Xalkaxf. VOOTl/XO?, for Ttpirvos. KTV7rao), eo>, Horn., for tvttto). KTipiOV, Kreap, Horn., for KTyjpia. apfieva, tackling, rigging, for 6VAa. Ai/3aSiov, from Ai/?as, for Aei/zcov. Spocrepos, for r)8vs. rdx'-vos, (Callim.), for raxvs. atdovcra, a hall. The transference of such words from poetical into com- mon usage is not a phenomenon that need excite any surprise. The popularity of a great national poet, or the affectation of some fashionable writer, may readily achieve this ; but we must bear in mind also, that what we would justly mark as poetic in an Attic writer may, in some of the widely scattered provinces occupied by the Greek race, have been a word which was generally current in the mouth of the people. That Homer himself, as being a popular 1 On Cretan and Modern Greek, in the Appendix to Captain Spratt's Travels in Crete, vol. i. 164 ON THE PHILOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF minstrel, addressed the inhabitants of the eastern shores of the iEgean, to which country he belonged, not in a peculiarly and distinctly marked so-called poetical style, but, like our own Burns, in a language familiar to the common people, we cannot for a moment doubt ; and in this view any Homeric element in the existing Romaic may have come down by direct descent from the pre- Homeric popular dialect, not by degradation from the peculiar poetic and epic style used by literary Greece. Proposition xxxi. — In conclusion, it seems not im- proper, in the case of a famous language of such remarkable longevity, to cast an eye into the future, and calculate the chances of its permanence. And in this divination past experience certainly entitles us to say with confi- dence, that a language which has survived so many changes, and resisted such a succession of destructive forces, will maintain its vitality unimpaired, so long as the moral motive power of the world is mainly Christian, and the science of the world is proud to root itself in Greek traditions. For whether the present little Greek king- dom shall have strength enough to grow into an indepen- dent political integer, or whether, which seems its more probable destiny, it shall at no distant day be attached to the great Russian Empire in the manner of an outlying principality, as Cymric Wales was attached to Saxon England, it does not appear that it will have to contend with any disintegrating or exterminating force in any way so strong as those which it successfully resisted when under Turkish and Venetian supremacy. The conserva- tive force of the Welsh language in the south-western corner of our insular triangle is a fact of such potency, as to have been deemed worthy of special notice and wise THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 165 concession by our administrative council in London j 1 but if Cymric, which is no doubt as old a language as Greek, with its scanty stores of literary tradition, still flourishes in a green old age, the extinction of Greek, with its im- mense momentum of intellectual and moral force, not less intense in kind than extensive in operation, is not a thing to be looked for within any assignable period. If the Greek kingdom should unfortunately not be able to main- tain its position against the combination of internal faction and external aggression, which may at any moment break it up, there is nothing in the antecedents of any of the great powers into whose hands a dismembered Greece might fall, to warrant the apprehension that they would employ any severe measures for the purpose of stamping out the national language. Russia certainly, which in religion is full sister to Greece, would have neither desire nor interest to look upon the language of Athens with the same jealousy that she looks on that of Warsaw. Under Russia the Greeks might readily become the founders of an enlightened Broad Church party in that country, just as under the Turks they became first the necessary inter- preters, and then the wise governors of great and impor- tant provinces. As for the form in which it seems most desirable that this noble language should be transmitted to distant ages, it seems necessary, on the one hand, to warn against any forced and affected recurrence to the classical type, and on the other to invite literary men to the culture of the popular dialect as the fittest for a cer- 1 In the winter of 1872 a representa- respect to the representation in future, tion was made to the British Govern- in so far as it might be possible to do so ment on the evils arising from the with a due regard to the legal know- appointment to judicial situations in ledge of the persons appointed, i.e. that Wales of barristers unacquainted with a Welsh-speaking barrister should in the language of the natives ; and the future be preferred, if his abilities and Government pledged themselves to have learning were equal. 166 PHILOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF MODERN GREEK. tain style of lyrical and essentially popular poetry. As in Scotland the language of popular song runs in its own channel, apart from the English used as a general literary medium, so the Greek of Coraes and the newspapers might still continue to occupy a middle place between the Greek of classic tradition and the Greek of the popular ballads. Variety was one of the distinguishing features of the Greek family of languages from the beginning, and it may well remain so to the end. Whether or not the course of affairs shall ever be so ordered by Divine Providence, as that, according to the pious aspirations of Monsieur d'Eichthal, and other eminent French Hellenists, it may at no distant period be prepared to take the place of Latin as a catholic medium of correspondence between cultivated men of all countries, it seems in vain to specu- late ; but, in the form that it has now assumed, and in all likelihood will maintain for centuries, there is no reason why it should not be much more extensively studied by all classes than at any previous period. When our classical scholars shall have become ashamed of their false methods and narrow prejudices, and when a succession of intelligent travellers shall have been practically convinced that it is as easy to learn Greek in Athens, as to learn German in Berlin, or French in Paris, the sons or grand- sons of Monsieur d'Eichthal and his French associates may behold with joy the probable advent of that kingdom of Pan-Hellenic brotherhood of which it is now only per- mitted to dream. ON SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN THE INTERPRETA- TION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. Of all the branches of interesting and curious learning, there is none which has been so systematically neglected in this country as mythology — a subject closely connected both with theology and philosophy, and on which those grand intellectual pioneers and architects, the Germans, have expended such a vast amount of profitable and un- profitable labour. The consequence of this neglect has been, that of the few British books we have on the sub- ject, the most noticeable are not free from the dear seduc- tion of favourite ideas, which possess the minds of the writers as by a juggling witchcraft, and prevent them from looking on a rich and various subject with that many-sided sympathy and catholic receptiveness which it requires. In fact, some of our most recent writers on this subject have not advanced a single step, in respect of scientific method, beyond Jacob Bryant, unquestionably the most learned and original speculator on mythology of the last century ; but whose great work, nevertheless, can only be compared to a grand chase in the dark, with a few bright flashes of discovery, and happy gleams of sug- gestion by the way. For these reasons, and to make a necessary protest against some ingenious aberrations of 168 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH Max Miiller, Gladstone, Inman, and Cox in the method of mythological interpretation, I have undertaken the present paper; which, if it possess only the negative virtue of warning people to be sober-minded and cautious when entering on a path of so slippery inquiry, cannot be deemed impertinent at the present moment. For the sake of distinctness and compactness, I shall state what I have to say in a series of articulate proposi- tions. Proposition i. — By the mythology of a people I under- stand the general body of their traditions, handing down from the earliest times the favourite national ideas and memories, in a narrative form, calculated to delight the imagination and stimulate the affections of love and reverence. Prop. ii. — The dress of all mythology, as appealing to the imagination, is necessarily poetical ; the contents of it are generally fourfold — (1.) Theological; (2.) Physical; (3.) Historical ; and (4.) Philosophical and Moral. Prop. iij. — In the theological and moral myth, the idea is the principal thing, the narrative only the medium ; in the historical and physical myth the fact is the principal thing ; what goes beyond the fact is mere scenic decora- tion or imaginative exaggeration. 1 Prop, iv.— A myth intended to convey an idea is dis- tinguished from an allegory or parable by the consciousness 1 Sometimes, however, a historical the person is really a secondary con- person, like Faust, may be seized on by sideration : a real person he remains, the people, merely as a convenient no doubt ; but, for a legendary nucleus, vehicle for embodying a floating mass any other person would have done as of mythological notions. In this case well. SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 169 of purpose with which allegories and parables strictly so called are put forth and received. Prop. v. — As it has been well said of popular proverbs, that they are the wisdom of many and the wit of one, so theological and moral myths grew up in the popular imagination, and were nursed there till in happy season they received a definite shape from some one representa- tive man, whose inspiration led him to express in a striking form what all felt to be true and all were willing to believe. Prop. vi. — The first framers of myths were, no doubt, perfectly aware of the real significance of these imagina- tive pictures ; but they were aware as poets, not as analysts. It is not, therefore, necessary to suppose that in framing their legends they proceeded with the full consciousness which belongs to the framers of fables, allegories, and parables. A myth is always a gradual, half-conscious, half-unconscious growth ; a parable is the conscious creation of the moment. Prop. vii. — During a certain early stage of national life, which cannot be accurately defined, but which always precedes the creation of a regular written literature, the popular myth, like a tree or a plant, becomes subject to a process of growth and expansion, in the course of which it not only receives a rich embellishment, but may be so transformed by the vivid action of a fertile imagination, and by the ingrafting of new elements, that its original intention may be altogether obscured and forgotten. How far this first significance may in after times be rightly apprehended depends partly on the degree of its 170 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH original obviousness, partly on the amount of kindred culture possessed by the persons to whom it is addressed. Prop. viii. — As of essentially popular origin and growth the myth cannot, in the proper sense, be said to have been the creation of any poet, however distinguished. Much less could a popular minstrel, like Homer, using a highly polished language, and who manifestly had many predecessors, be said to have either created the characters or invented the legends about the Greek gods, which form what the critics of the last century used to call the machinery of his poems. In regard to theological myths, which are most deeply rooted in the popular faith, such a poet as Homer could only turn to the best account the materials already existing, with here and there a little embellishment or expansion, where there was no danger pi contradicting any article of the received imaginative creed. Prop. ix. — The two most powerful forces which act on the popular mind, when engaged in the process of form- ing myths, are the physical forces of external nature, and the more hidden, though fundamentally more awful powers of the human will, intellect, and passions. It is to be presumed, therefore, that all popular myths will contain imaginative representations of both these powers ; and, in their original shape, they are in fact nothing more than the assertion of the existence of these two great classes of forces in a form which speaks to the imagina- tion — that is, in the form of personality ; and there will be a natural presumption against the adopting of any system of mythological interpretation which ignores entirely either the one or the other of these elements. If this SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 171 proposition be correct, the objections of Max Muller (Chips, ii. 156) to the Greek derivation of'Epivvs, from the old Arcadian epivvvew (Pausan. viii. 25, 26), are un- founded. Prop. x. — The most fertile soil for purely theological myths is polytheism ; and the most obvious as well as the largest field for a religion of multiform personalities is external nature. In the interpretation of such myths, therefore, we shall be justified in searching primarily for the great forces and phenomena of the physical world, as underlying the imaginative narrative and imparting to it its true significance ; and in proportion to the prominence of these phenomena, and the potency of these forces, will the probability be that we shall find them fully repre- sented in any body of polytheistic theology. Prop, xi. — As the essence of polytheism thus consists in the habitual elevation of what we call physical facts and forces into divine personalities, the line betwixt a purely physical myth and a theological myth will naturally be extremely difficult to draw. Zeus, for instance, as the Thunderer, represents a physical fact as well as a theolo- gical doctrine : nevertheless, it would be wrong to assume that there is no such element in tradition as a strictly jDhysical myth. Certain striking facts of volcanic action or geological change, strange and grotesque shapes of rocks and other natural objects, unusual conformations of land- scape, not to mention the occasional discovery of gigantic fossil bones, and even entire skeletons of animals no longer existing, might well form the basis of what is properly termed a physical or a geological, rather than a theological myth; and, as Hartung well remarks (Gr. Myth. i. 168), 172 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH notable recurrent events in nature, such as the heavy rains at the end of summer, are peculiarly calculated to impress the popular imagination, and to produce myths. Prop. xii. — But as to man there is, after all, nothing more interesting and more important than man, it is in the highest degree unreasonable, in the interpretation of myths, to proceed on the assumption that all myth is idea, and that no myth contains any historical element. It may be true, no doubt, that in the case of some particular nation all action of the popular imagination on human personalities has been excluded; but such a one-sided action is not to be presumed ; it must be proved ; and that in such a rich and various mythology as the Greek all reference to human characters and human exploits should be systematically excluded is in the highest degree improbable. In a country where the gods descended so easily into humanity, it were strange if men had not occa- sionally ascended into godhood. Prop. xiii. — In a theology so thoroughly anthropomor- phic as the Greek, the distinction between the divine and human element will sometimes be difficult to trace ; for the same feelings, situations, and actions will necessarily belong to human gods and to godlike men. But this state of the case, in the interpretation of any particular myth, is a ground for doubt, not for dogmatism. It in- cludes the possibility or the probability of one of two explanations, but the certainty of neither. Prop. xiv. — The incredible exaggerations or embel- lishments with which the name of any national hero may have been handed down in a popular myth afford no pre- SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 173 sumption against the genuine historical character of its nucleus. On the contrary, it is just because extraordinary characters have existed that extraordinary and incredible, miraculous and even impossible stories are invented about them. A plain, sober, critical, matter-of-fact account of its early popular heroes is not to be expected from any people. Prop. xv. — The error of certain ancient rationalizing interpreters of the Greek myths did not consist in presum- ing historical fact as the nucleus of some myths, but in the indiscriminate application of the historical interpreta- tion to all myths, and that often in a very prosaic and altogether tasteless way. Prop. xvi. — The error of certain modern idealizing interpreters of the Greek mythology does not consist in endeavouring to recover the ideas which originally lay at the root of some myths, the full significance of which had been lost so early as Homer, but in the partial and one- sided application of a few favourite ideas to all physical facts, and in the broad denial of any historical elements underlying any personality of early tradition. Prop. xvii. — Among the ancients the extreme of the rationalizing interpretation of the Greek theological myths is what may be called the irreligious, godless, and alto- gether prosaic system of Euhemerus (b.c. 300), who wrote a book to prove that all the Greek gods, not even except- ing Jove, had been originally dead men deified. The error of this system consisted, not in the assertion that the elevation of extraordinary human characters to a divine rank with religious honour after death is an element trace- 174 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH able in the Hellenic, as in some other popular theologies, bnt in the wholesale declaration that religious worship had no other origin, and that this element, which is always secondary and derivative in the popular creed, is primitive and exclusive. Prop, xviii. — In order to ascertain how far the prin- ciple of Euhemerus may apply to any particular case, the general religious tendencies and habits of the nation or people must be considered in the first place, and then the whole circumstances and features of the mythical narra- tive must be accurately surveyed and carefully weighed, and a separation of the canonized man from the deified nature element with which he may have been mixed up, made accordingly. Prop. xix. — Euhemerus, however, was altogether wrong in supposing that this system of interpretation could be applied on any extensive scale to the mythical theology of the Greeks ; and the few French and English writers who, in the flatness of the last century, gave a limited currency to this idea, have found no followers in the present. Prop. xx. — An opposite theory to that of Euhemerus, much in fashion with the Germans, is, that whereas he said the gods were elevated men, we ought rather to say that many men, perhaps all the heroes of legendary story, are degraded gods. That in the course of religious deve- lopment, especially when mixed up with great changes in the political relations of different races, such a degrada- tion may have taken place, is certain ; that it has taken place in certain special cases will be a just conclusion from SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 175 an analysis of the character and worship of certain heroes, when a cumulative view of the myths connected with them suggests the theory of a divine rather than a human significance ; but there is no scientific warrant for the assertion which it is now the fashion to make (Baring Gould on Religious Belief, vol. i. p. 167), that the old heroic names of a country, as King Arthur, for instance, are in the mass to be treated as degraded gods. Prop. xxi. — The best authorities for the facts of a myth are not always the poets, nor even the most ancient poets, as Homer, who in the exercise of their art often take large liberties with sacred tradition; but the reliable witnesses are rather such as Pausanias, who record the old temple lore in its fixed local forms. This distinction, often forgotten, has given rise to not a little confusion, and created some needless difficulty in mythological inter- pretation; and Hartung (i. 184) has done important service to comparative mythology by drawing attention emphatically to the difference between sacred legends as believed by the people, and religious myths freely handled by the poets. Prop. xxii. — In the interpretation of any popular myth, the first thing to be done is to ascertain carefully what the thing to be interpreted actually is ; and this can only be done by collecting all the facts relating to it, working them up into a complete, and if possible consis- tent picture, and not till then attempting an explanation. Now, as the facts relating to any single god, let us say in the Greek Pantheon, are scattered over a wide space, and come from various sources, to attempt the explanation of these facts without the previous labour of critical and 176 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH well-digested scholarship, may be an ingenious amusement, but never can be a scientific procedure. All the facts must be collected, and all the criticisms weighed, before a verdict can be pronounced. Prop, xxiii. — But the mere collection of facts will never help a prosaic or an irreverent man to the interpre- tation of what is essentially poetic and devout. A book supplies what must be read; but the eye that reads it can see only what by natural faculty and training it is fitted to see. As the loving and reverential contempla- tion of nature was the original source of the polytheistic myths, so the key to them will often be recovered by a kindred mind acting under influences similar to those which impressed the original framers of the myth ; and if this may be done with a considerable amount of success by a poetical mind, acted on by nature in any country, much more will such success be achieved by such a mind in the country where the myths were originally formed. But as the aspects of nature are various, and the fancies of poetic minds no less so, it will always be necessary to verify any modern notion of an ancient deity thus acquired, by confronting it accurately and continuously with the traditional materials contained in books and works of art. Highly poetical minds, such as Shelley, Keats, and Buskin, when dealing with Greek mythology, without the constant correction of accurate scholarship, are not seldom found using Greek myths to represent modern ideas, rather than human ideas to interpret Greek myths. And the example of the Germans proves, that in minds naturally fertile and ingenious, no amount of erudition affords a safeguard against the besetting sin of mythological interpreters, to find in ^11 myths a select field and enclosed hunting-ground for SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 177 the pleasant disport of an unfettered imagination. Dis- coveries are easy to make in a region where plausibility so readily gains currency as proof. Prop. xxiv. — An important aid in the interpretation of myths will often be supplied by the etymology of the names of the mythological personages ; and in this way new deities will sometimes be found to have arisen from the mere epithets of old ones, as Jacob Bryant saw clearly nearly 100 years ago ; nay, even magnificent myths may at times be traced to no more sublime origin than a false etymology which had taken possession of the popular ear. The significance of divine names must, of course, be sought in the first place in the language to which the mythology belongs ; but in applying this test, with the view of obtaining any scientific result, great care must be taken to avoid treating doubtful etymologies in the same way that certain ones may be treated. For where the etymology is uncertain, that is, does not shine out plainly from the face of the word (as in the case of the Harpies in Hesiod), then the elements of doubt are often so many, that it is wiser to abstain altogether from this aid, than to attempt founding any serious conclusions upon it. For, in the first place, we may not have the word in its original form ; and, in the second place, two or three etymologies may be equally probable. The best etymologies, what- ever theorists pleasantly possessed with one idea may say to the contrary, are only accessories of mythological inter- pretation, not the chief corner-stone. Prop. xxv. — If the mythological names have no sig- nificance in the language to which they belong, then recourse may be had to cognate languages ; and in the M 178 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH case of European tongues, with propriety to the Eastern sources from which they are demonstrably derived. But here a double caution is necessary ; for accidental resem- blances may be found in all languages, and extensive learning, coupled with a vivid imagination, may readily supply the most plausible foreign derivations, which are merely fanciful. Prop. xxvi. — By referring to another, and it may be a more primitive and ancient language, for the etymo- logical key to a religious myth of any people, we are treading on historical ground extrinsic to the people with whose myths we may be dealing. For comparative philo- logy, like archaeology, recovers the earliest history of a people before writing was known ; and this raises the inquiry, whether a mythology which bears a foreign no- menclature on its face may not convey foreign ideas in its soul — that is, to take an example, whether the Greek mythology, if the names of its personages are more readily explained in Hebrew or Sanscrit than in Greek, may not, in respect of its ideas and legends, be more properly inter- preted from original Hebrew or Sanscrit than from native Greek sources ? And may we not hope, in this way, in the Hebrew Scriptures, or the Sanscrit Vedas perhaps, to put our fingers on the ancient germs of those anthropo- morphic myths which Homer and Hesiod present to us in adult completeness and full panoply ? and thus the highest end of scientific research will be obtained, not only to dissect the flower, but to trace it to the seed, and follow it through every stage of its rich and beautiful meta- morphosis. Prop, xxvii. — The prospect thus held out of tracing SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 179 famous European religious myths to their far home in the East is extremely inviting. 1 It satisfies at once scientific minds by the promise of going to the root of a matter which has hitherto been treated superficially, and that not incon- siderable class of literary men and scholars who have a keener eye for an ingenious novelty than for a stable truth. When we bear in mind also the significance of the homely proverb, that " far birds have fair feathers," and the well-known fact, that every mother is apt to prefer her own bairn to others which may be more healthy and beautiful, we shall see reason to proceed, not without hope indeed, but with more than Scottish caution, in this Oriental adventure. There is a class of persons in the world who have a strange pleasure in travelling a thousand leagues to quarry out a truth which they might have picked up from beneath their nose. Against these seductions, therefore, in the first place, while prosecuting this foreign chase, we must be on our guard. We ought to know that we are hunting on very deceitful ground ; that we are dealing with a class of phenomena, that, like clouds and kaleidoscopic figures, are very apt to change their shape, not only by their own nature, but specially also according to the position of the observer ; and that the same nebulous conglomerate may at one moment look very like a whale, at another moment very like Lord Brougham, and at a third moment very like Olympian Jupiter. And in the prospect of such a possible ridiculous conclusion to the sublime adventure on which he is starting, every inquirer into the remote origin of European myths ought to take with him these cautions — 1 " The whole theology of Greece was derived from the East." — Bryant, vol. i. p. 184. 180 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH (1.) That there is no necessity and no scientific war- rant for seeking a foreign explanation of deities, which already sufficiently explain themselves by the character which they bear, or the symbols which they exhibit in their own country. (2.) That the formative power by which myths were created, viz., the imagination, possesses a wonderful magic, in virtue of which the materials on which it acts, espe- cially with a quick and vivid people unfettered by formal creeds, are subjected to a perpetual process of transmuta- tion, which renders the recognition of the original identity of two diverging myths an extremely difficult and not seldom an altogether hopeless task. In this respect the recognition of the original identity of different words in cognate languages by comparative philology is a much more safe and scientific process than a similar recognition of the identity of different persons of two Pantheons through the shifting masks of comparative mythology. (3.) That the principal relations under which the great objects of nature, such as the sky, the sun, the sea, etc., may appear, when subjected to the process of imaginative impersonation, are in many cases so obvious that two different polytheistic peoples may easily hit upon them without any historical connexion. Even in the free ex- ercise of poetical talent in the case of individual poets of highly potentiated imagination, we constantly stumble on comparisons which have been made independently by other poets at other times or in distant countries, and which superficial critics are sometimes eager to fasten on as plagiarisms ; much more, in the vulgar exercise of the imagination, by the mass of the people on certain given natural objects may we expect frequent instances of coincidence without connexion. This consideration will SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 181 restrain a prudent investigator in this department from building any theory of foreign origin of myths on a few points of natural similarity. Taking these cautions along with us, we now observe, in reference to the probable Eastern origin of certain Greek myths — Prop, xxviii. — That the borrowing of one nation from another in the province of mythological ideas, as in the case of philological materials, may take place in a twofold fashion, either in the way of original descent from a com- mon stock, far back in the cradle of the race, or by im- portation through the medium of commerce or great religious revolutions and invasions. Of these two methods of borrowing* it is impossible to say, a priori, which promises the greater amount of gain to the adventurous inquirer ; for, while the advantage of greater closeness belonging to the original identity of stock may be in a great measure neutralized by the distance of time and place, and the changes which they induce, the disadvan- tage of a more loose connexion which belongs to the foreign importer may be amply compensated by the firm hold which the commerce, and polity, and intelligence of a superior may take of an inferior people. Prop. xxix. — It must be borne in mind, also, that the recognition of a supposed identity between the gods of any two polytheistic peoples may easily take place with- out any real borrowing. For the desire of harmonizing and classifying discordant phenomena, which belongs to the very nature of intellectual action, is particularly dis- played in the field of popular religion — to such an extent, indeed, that it became a fixed habit of the Greek and 182 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH Roman mind to identify the deities of foreign countries with their own native deities by certain signs more or less superficial. The testimony of the Greeks, therefore, with regard to the supposed identity of certain personages in their Pantheon with certain gods or goddesses in the Egyptian or Phoenician, and their consequent foreign ex- traction, will require to be examined with the severest scrutiny. Prop. xxx. — In deriving any god from a foreign source, even though his foreign origin should appear in some respects perfectly certain, we must not conclude that all the phenomena which his person and character present are to be explained from abroad. Nothing is more natural than that he should be a compound god, one-half native and one-half foreign, or even a monstrous conglo- merate of many gods. Peop. xxxi. — Of all the foreign sources to which the Hellenic mythology has at different times been referred by the learned, Egypt is at once the most reputable and the least likely. For here we have neither original con- nexion by identity of stock, nor any such commercial or political action of the more ancient over the more modern people, as would lead to the importation of religious ideas. The ancient Greeks had a great respect, and a sort of awful reverence for the wisdom and the antiquity of the Egyptians ; but this respect and reverence was more likely to lead them, as in fact it often did, to the recog- nition of superficial resemblances (as in the case of Io and Isis) than to the trace of original identity. Modern re- searches have added nothing to the probability of the favourite notion of Bryant and Blackwell, that the prin- SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 183 cipal persons and legends of Hellenic mythology came directly from the land of Ham. Prop, xxxii. — For the Hebrew origin of some of the Greek theological ideas — the darling notion of Church Fathers and Protestant theologians, and which has been recently revived by a statesman of distinguished character, talent, and erudition— there is even less to be said. For, in the first place, here we are comparing a polytheistic system with a monotheistic, where antagonism rather than similarity is to be looked for; the elements of original or superinduced connexion between the two peoples are altogether wanting ; and the original unity of the human family, which is the only link that binds the Greek to the Jew, is so remote that it requires no incon- siderable amount of hardihood to drag them into the arena of the present comparison. This hardihood, how- ever, has never been wanting ; and, besides its own virtue, has always found great favour with the religious public, which is pleased with nothing so much as the idea that everything good, beautiful, or excellent in any way that heathen religions may be allowed to possess must have come either from the Hebrew Scriptures directly, or from some more ancient source of primeval revelation. And no doubt there may be a certain truth in this view ; but it is a truth which affects the monotheistic element, that in the person of Zeus lies as the background of the Hellenic polytheism, rather than the polytheistic per- sonages to whom it has been applied. A consciousness of this truth led the early mythological interpreters of this school to apply the principle of Euhemerus largely to the Old Testament, in such a way only as to recognise the venerable Hebrew patriarchs under various masks of old Pelasgic gods or demigods. 184 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH Prop, xxxiii. — For the Phoenician influence on the formation of the early Greek theology there is much more to be said. We can, indeed, scarcely imagine a race of such distinguished merchants and navigators, commanding the Greek seas in the early ages of European civilisation, without supposing some such contagion and ingrafting of religious ideas, as the genius of polytheism was on all occasions prone to invite. We shall, therefore, be dis- posed to receive favourably any distinct proof, or even probable indication, of the derivation of Greek gods from a Phoenician source ; but we must bear in mind at the same time, that the Phoenicians were known to the Greeks as mere traders, with temporary settlements on the coast of the Mediterranean, and that their character, as ex- hibited in the Odyssey, was by no means possessed of such attractions as might aid to allure the Greeks to the adoption of any of their peculiar objects of worship. Pe,op. xxxiv. — The last source of Greek myths, for which a strong claim has recently been put forth by a German of distinguished talent, taste, and learning in this country, is Sanscrit. And here at last some people seem to think, that with all certainty we have got at the true source of the many- winding mythological Nile. But after looking into this matter with all possible care, and with no preju- dice whatever (for nothing would please me so much as to catch the infant Mercury in the bosom of a cloud, floating over the shining peak of the Hindu Kush, or to hook Proteus in one of his many forms at the mouth of the Ganges), I must honestly confess, that hitherto the inter- preters of Hellenic myths from Sanscrit roots and Vedic similes have inspired me rather with distrust than with confidence. The principal characters of the Hellenic Pan- SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 185 theon tell their own story, to a poetical eye, more obviously and effectively than with the help of a Sanscrit root ; and those few of them which are more doubtful, such as Hermes and Athena, seem to be precisely those in which the Sanscritizing mythologers have most egregiously failed. I consider, therefore, that, while the Vedic mythology, preferably to any other polytheistic system, presents an ample field from which some of the Hellenic legends may be aptly illustrated, and a few, perhaps, correctly inter- preted, the attempt to explain the great and prominent phenomena of the Greek Pantheon, by an ingenious appli- cation of a few favourite physical ideas variously imper- sonated by the fancy of the Vedic poets, must be regarded in the meantime, at least, as a failure. 1 Peop. xxxv. — Without, therefore, in the slightest degree wishing to throw discouragement on the delightful and interesting study of comparative mythology, — a study which promises the most fruitful results in the domain of theology and moral philosophy, — the procedure of exact science seems to demand that, before venturing on exten- sive excursions into foreign regions, we should, in the first place, carefully survey and exhaust our home domain — that is to say, that the Greek traditions with respect to their gods, interpreted by themselves, and the general principles of mythical interpretation laid down in the above propositions, afford a surer basis for this branch of mythological science than hints suggested by Oriental etymologies, or analogies from the Yedic hymns. And in order to make this more clear, I will select a few examples 1 The interpretation of certain person- confirmed by the judicious sobriety of ages in the Greek Pantheon from sources our countryman Dr. Muir. See his of Sanscrit etymology, to which Max paper in Edinburgh Royal Society Miiller has given currency, is not at all Transactions, vol. xxiii. p. 578. 186 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH of personages from the motley theatre of Hellenic legend, which may be best adapted for testing the value of the different methods of interpretation. Prop, xxxvi. — As examples of how the elemental sig- nificance of the Hellenic gods reveals itself to a sympathetic eye, from the mere presentation, epithets, attitudes, and badges of the mythologic personages, we need do no more than mention Zeus, Poseidon, and Apollo, in whom all the ancients, who exercised reflection at all on the matter, recog- nised, with one voice and by an unerring instinct, the great elemental powers of the sky, the sea, and the sun. And these are precisely the powers which, from their promi- nence, might a priori have been predicated as certain to obtain a conspicuous place in an anthropomorphic Pan- theon of elemental origin. Of these three great gods also be it noted, that the first is the only one of which we can trace the etymology with any certainty ; but neither does this one etymology, when recognised in the Sanscrit word Diva, to shine, add anything to the already recognised idea of the Hellenic Zeus, nor does the lack of an etymon in the other two cases render our perception of the charac- ter of the two gods less clear, or our knowledge of their significance more certain. With regard to Poseidon, Mr. Gladstone's recent attempt to fix on him a Phoenician pedigree must be regarded as unsuccessful. The people who at an early period sailed to Colchis and to Troy did not require to borrow a lord of the flood from the mer- chants of Tyre and Sidon. Prop, xxxvii.— In Hera, who, to the people and the people's poet, was simply the spouse of Zeus, a large class of ancient speculators, as is well known, were inclined to SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 187 recognise the lower region of the atmosphere, of which Zeus represented the aldr\p, or upper region. But a little consideration has convinced most modern interpreters that this idea was a mistake. When by the completion of the anthropomorphic process the original ovpavos had become " Father Jove/' it was most natural that his elemental counterpart Ttj } Mother Earth, should become the matron Hera ; and with this supposition, the well-known descrip- tion of the sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera (II. xiv. 345), together with the cow-symbolism belonging to the Booottk, and her Argive priestess Io, notably harmonize. It is no objection to this view, that Ceres or Demeter is also the anthropomorphosed earth ; for " the many names of one shape," ttoWcov ovo/mdrcov popfyr) fiia, characteristic of the oldest elemental theology could easily and did often crystallize into two or more shapes of one power. We shall, therefore, say with no rash confidence, that the Hel- lenic Hera means the earth ; and we readily allow the etymological conjectures connected with her name to remain conjectures. Prop, xxxviii. — On Athena, Max Mtiller says, " The Sanscrit root Ah, which in Greek would regularly appear as Ach, might likewise then have assumed the form of Ath; and the termination Ene, is Sanscrit Ana" (Science of Language, vol. ii. p. 503); and again, " How Athena being the Dawn, should have become the goddess of wis- dom, we can best learn from the Vedas. In Sanscrit, Budh means to wake and to know" (Ibid. p. 504). But this is manifestly following out a favourite idea upon theories of the most flimsy texture. If any etymo- logy is to be sought for the syllable AS, the native root aid which signifies to glow, corresponding as it does with 188 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH the familiar epithet of y\avfcod7n<;, or "flashing-eyed" (which I think Welcker suggests), is preferable to that suggested by the distinguished Sanscrit scholar. But here, as in other slippery cases, the principles laid down in the preceding propositions lead me to set etymology aside, and to look at the finished figure of the goddess, with her badges, relations, and actions, as the natural and sure index to her significance. Now if Zeus, according to the Greek conception, was the strong, stormy, and thun- derous element of the sky — as his epithets Kekaive^, and epi/3pefi6T7}s, and T€p7rifeepavvo<;, sufficiently declare — his flash- ing-eyed daughter, who alone is privileged to wield his thunderbolt (JEschyl. Eumen. 814), must be some action or function of the sky. Let her, therefore, be the flashing lightning, or the bright rifted azure sky between the dark rolling thunder clouds, or both if you please, and you have at once an elemental theory which explains adequately her anthropomorphic parentage and presentation. As to her moral and mental significance, that follows necessarily from her Jovian fatherhood. When the all-powerful was recognised as at the same time the all- wise and the great counsellor (jubTjrlera Zevs), his daughter, as a matter of course, became the goddess of practical wisdom, that is, of the great arts of peace and war (as the vases largely show), the patron and protector of all men of valour like Achilles, and of sagacity like Ulysses. Prop, xxxix. — The Hellenic Hermes is one of those mythological personages who from an originally simple root has grown up into such a rich display of graceful ramification, that, when we approach him from his most familiar side we are the least likely to interpret his true significance. But if we attend to the earliest indication SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 189 of his functions as found in Homer, and as displayed in the familiar phallic symbol (Herod, n. 51), we can have no difficulty in evolving, by a series of graduated expan- sions, his final avatar as a god of eloquence, from his original germ as a pastoral god of generation and increase (Horn. II. xiv. 491). As the god of shepherds and moun- taineers, he was necessarily the guide of all wanderers through the many winding glens, and across the many- folded hills of the Arcadian Highlands. This early func- tion accordingly appears in Homer : he is the friendly guide of all persons who have lost their way or who wander in the dark (Od. x. 277 ; II xxiv. 334). His connexion with music and with wrestling, the natural recreations of a pastoral people, of course belong to this his earliest Hellenic character. Afterwards, when in the necessary progress of society the patriarchal shepherd of the hills resigned his social position into the hands of the rich merchant of the great towns, Hermes became the god of gain generally ; and, with gain, of all those arts of adroitness and sharpness which belong to the career of a successful trader. The kindly guide of night- wandering shepherds has now become the expert negotiator, and the trusty messenger ; he is the winged servant of the gods above ; and among men his oaten pipe is exchanged for the charm of winged words, which sways the counsels of the wise, and soothes the clamours of the turbulent. With this natural and obvious interpretation of a purely Hellenic deity, as given within the bounds of Greece itself, we shall raise only a brilliant confusion, if we follow Max Mtiller across the Hindu Kush, and curiously attempt to find the germ of the Pelasgic shepherd-god in the breeze of the early dawn, which ushers in the march of the busy day. Such remote conjectures may be both beautiful and 190 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH ingenious, but they are a mere play of fancy, and travel obviously far out of the way of a sober, a scientific, and a stable interpretation. Prop. xl. — Dionysus was a god of comparatively re- cent introduction into Greece (Herod, n. 49), confessedly of Asiatic origin, and in whom the union of fervid wine with the phallic symbol and violent orgies can leave no doubt as to his true character. He is the male god of generation, according to the Asiatic conception, as the Syrian goddess of Lucian (De Dea Syria, 16) was the female one ; and the old Heraclitan principle that fire is the origin of all things, rudely conceived by the popular imagination, is manifestly that which in this god identi- fies the glow of the vine juice, the brewst of the sun, with the fervour of the generative process. The fact that the worship of Dionysus was not native in Greece, but imported from the East, naturally led to the representa- tion of this god as a wonderful conqueror, in the fashion of Sesostris and Alexander the Great ; from which ana- logy, coupled with his preaching the gospel of wine, Bryant and other speculators have been eager to find in him a perverted Noah ; but the application of the prin- ciple of Euhemerus in this case evidently rests on too slender a foundation to afford any grounds for a scientific interpretation. Prop. xli. — Aphrodite is that goddess in whose case Mr. Gladstone's favourite idea of Phoenician influence on the Greek Pantheon has long been recognised as the most certain (Herod. T. 105 ; Pausan. I. 14-6). The recogni- tion of this Phoenician element, however, does by no means imply that the existence of an original Hellenic SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 191 impersonation of the passion of love, and the seductions of personal beauty, should be denied. On the contrary, the female deity whom the Phoenicians were seen worship- ping in their factories on the coasts of the Mediterranean would most probably be accepted by the ancient Pelasgic tribes chiefly because they found in her attributes a striking identity with their own native Aphrodite. Prop. xlii. — Phoenician influence is also undoubtedly to be acknowledged in the very complex and composite mythology connected with the name of Heracles. But the person of Heracles, as we find him in Homer, exhibits nothing beyond the exaggerated traits of a stout and muscular humanity in combat with fate and circumstance, and the wild beasts of the forest — a plain Hellenic coun- terpart, in fact, to the Hebrew Samson, of whose historical reality, to a mind not violently possessed by German theories, there cannot be the slightest reason to doubt. The exaggerations connected with his story are the natural and necessary effects of the excited popular imagination brought to bear on such a character ; but these exaggera- tions, taken at their highest, are exhibited on a very small platform in Homer, and present a very modest array of achievements compared with the multiform mass of myth that afterwards accumulated round this representa- tive Greek hero. The principle of growth, of such luxuri- ant vitality in popular myths, has been obviously at work here ; and the sort of omnipresence latterly attributed to this wandering queller of monsters is most readily explained from the influence of the Phoenician factories in the Mediterranean, in whose Melcarth the Greeks delighted to recognise their own stout son of Jove and Semele. And if this Tyrian Hercules, as Phoenician 192 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH scholars incline to believe (Moevers, vol. i. p. 385), really was a sun-god, the twelve labours of Hercules will, of course, only be the symbolical expression for the progress of the Titan sun through the twelve months of the solar year. This the ancients themselves, in the Orphic theo- logy at least, distinctly recognised. Prop, xliii. — In Bellerophon the Germans find a favourite example of their theory, that all the heroes of the so-called heroic age are the degraded gods of an early elemental worship. How this theory is worked out in the present case it may be instructive to consider. The winged steed, of course, brings you at once into the region of the sun. Then you turn up Eustathius' commentary on the well-known episode of the Corinthian hero in the sixth book of the Iliad (v. 181), and you find there that there was an old Greek word eXXepo?, used by Callimachus, which is equivalent to /ca/co<; or bad ; but bad things are black things ; therefore, with the help of the digamma, transmuting eWepo? into /3eXXe/jo9, we arrive at the conclu- sion that fieWepocfrovTr)? means the slayer of darkness, and, of course, can be nothing but the Hght, or the sun. Bel- lerophon is thus, by a dexterous etymological feat, already a solar god in full panoply ; and when, in addition to this, we find that the worship of the sun was much practised at Corinth, the native place of the hero, and that he died in Lycia, a country famous for its devotion to the same deity, the case for a degraded "HXm>? seems to be satisfactorily made out. But, on the other hand, the oldest version of the story in Homer has no hint of the winged horse, and for the rest, looks in every trait as much like a purely human history of those early Greek times as the story of St. Columba shows like a real legend of a real Catholic SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 193 apostle in early Christian times. We shall, therefore, in my opinion, more wisely say that the airy flight of the grandson of Corinthian Sisyphus on his winged Pegasus is only the imaginative painting out of a real human journey made from such real and natural causes as those which Homer details ; and, if the winged horse has anything to do with the worship of the sun at Corinth, it is more reasonable to suppose that such a blazon should have been added for the glorification of a real great man than that all the great men of early Corinth should have been clean swept from the popular memory to make way for an unmeaning Pantheon of degraded and forgotten gods. Prop. xliv. — Descending lower down into the region of what has the aspect, not of metamorphic theology, but of plain human fact, we may take the names of Achilles and Theseus as examples of how far the German school is inclined to carry its peculiar tactics of finding nothing in all early tradition but theological ideas and symbols. As to Achilles, the favourite notion with most German writers is that this hero is a water god, — a notion founded on nothing that I can see, save on the etymological analogy of Achelous, the happy coincidence of Peleus with the Greek name for mud (77-17X05), and the fact that the mother of the hero was a sea-goddess ; and on this notion Forchhammer, I believe, or some one of the erudite fancymongers beyond the Rhine, constructed a theory that the Iliad is really a great geological poem, in which water power is represented by Achilles, and land power by Hector (from e^co, to hold, restrain, keep back) ! This is really too bad. If a man in Thurso, to take a modern example, named Waters — and it is a characteristic name in that quarter, — were to marry a woman called Loch — a N 194 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, WITH well-known name in Sutherland — and a daughter, the offspring of this marriage, should join herself in wedlock to an English gentleman named Rivers, no sane person could see in this conjunction of congruous etymologies anything but one of those curious coincidences which amuse a newspaper reader for a minute, and then are for- gotten. Why, then, we ask, should the occurrence of water, and mud, and a sea-nymph, among the family names of an old Thessalian throne, be supposed to possess any more profound significance, even on the supposition that the etymologies are certain, which they certainly are not ? And accordingly, we find this favourite water theory discarded by the Germans themselves the moment it does not suit the theory of the interpreter. To Max Muller Achilles can be nothing but a solar god ; for his imagination, fired with sunlight from the flaming east, can see nothing in the stout battles of Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad but the grand struggle between the powers of light and darkness. Of the probability of this theory I have sought in vain for the shadow of a proof. If Helen of Troy, whose name can obviously be identified with brightness (o-e'Xa? aekrivrj), must on this account take her place with her brothers, as a sidereal phenomenon (sic Fratres Helence, lucida sidera), this does seem to me an exceeding weak foundation for the transformation of the whole topographical and traditional heroes of the Iliad into a meteoric spectacle. If, according to the views set forth in this paper, there is no scientific ground for raising Achilles into the cate- gory of gods, whether aquarian or solar, much stronger are the reasons which induce us, with unsophisticated old Plutarch, to see in Theseus no myth, but a great histori- cal reality. If the principle be once accepted, that a SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 195 single miraculous fact or incredible story connected in the popular imagination with a great popular name shall de- prive him simjDliciter of all claim to a historical existence, we shall make strange havoc, I fear, with some of the most brilliant and the most instructive pages of national record. There is no need of believing all the wonderful stories that Athenian reverence and wonder accumulated round the name of Theseus, as little as there is of believ- ing all the silly miracles that the Lausiac history narrates of the Egyptian ascetics ; but there is certainly as little wisdom in roundly denying the historical germ to which, in all such cases, these accretions were attached. I have thus pointed out, in a rapid and succinct way, what seem to be the leading principles on which a sound and safe interpretation of early popular myths must pro- ceed. I have kept myself purposely within the bounds of what appears sober statement, not being ambitious of the glory of adventure in this nebulous field ; and, if I shall seem to have achieved a very small thing when I keep myself within these bounds, I have at least kept myself clear of nonsense, which in mythological science is as common as sunk rocks in the Shetland seas. To Max Muller, and other Sanscrit scholars, I hope I shall always be grateful for any happy illustrations which they may supply of the general character of Aryan myths, and of occasional coincidences of the Hellenic mode of imagining with the Indian ; and I think the somewhat cold and un- imaginative race of English scholars are under no small obligations to him for having taught them to recognise poetical significance and religious value in some legends, which passed in their nomenclature for silly fables or worthless facts ; but I profess to have been unable to derive any sure clue from the far East to the most difii- 196 ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS. cult questions of Greek mythology ; nor do I expect that, when every obsolete word in the BAgveda shall have been thoroughly sifted and shaken, a single ray of intelligible light will thence now on the Athena of the Parthenon, or the Hermes of the Cyllenian slopes. I believe that in the region of mythology they will ultimately be found to be the wisest, who are at present content to know the least ; that, while some mythological fables are too trifling to deserve interpretation, others are too tangled to admit of it ; and that the man who, at the present day, shall attempt to interpret the Greek gods from the translitera- tion of Sanscrit or Hebrew words, will be found, like Ixion, to have embraced a cloud for a goddess, and to have fathered a magnificent lie from the fruitful womb of his own conceit. There is no more dangerous passion than that which an ingenious mind conceives for the fine fancies which it begets. ON THE SOPHISTS OF THE FIFTH CENTURY, b.c. One of the most remarkable phenomena in our recent historical literature is a tendency to whitewash all char- acters which had previously presented a black aspect ; to prefer the intellectual divination of a subtle modern professor to the plain testimony of a sober old chronicler ; and generally to unsettle all things that we had in previ- ous ages been taught to look on as settled. That this tendency, dating from the gigantic excavations of Niebuhr and Wolf, had its origin in an honest love of truth, and a searching scrutiny of evidence, cannot be doubted. That its results have in the main been beneficial is equally cer- tain ; but, on the other hand, it is not to be denied that it has sometimes run into the most wanton excesses, and has tainted not a few of the most notable historical productions of our age with a vice which will render it necessary for a future generation to repeat the work now done from a broader point of view, and with a juster criti- cism. Among the great works which have not escaped this prevalent contagion must be named the History of Greece, by George Grote. In this work, while the demo- cratic institutions of Athens have been vindicated in the most masterly manner, and the political tone of the work may be regarded as, on the whole, sound, the author has in some prominent sections blotted his pages with the peculiarly German rage of substituting conjecture for fact, and overriding testimony by theory. And in doing this 198 ON THE SOPHISTS he has not only acted more like a German than an Englishman, but he has in some instances proceeded far beyond the bounds of negative criticism and bold assertion which the best German writers have observed. In no part of his work does this tendency, not only to overdo, but altogether to invert the natural order of things, appear more prominently than in his chapter on Socrates and the Sophists. In this part of his work, while he presents himself to the general reader as the chivalrous champion of injured innocence, the accurate weigher of historical evidence sees only another instance of the won- derful effect of a favourite theory in blinding a sensible man to the truth which radiates from the strongest testi- mony. To the reader of Mr. Grote's chapter it must cer- tainly seem as if Socrates had spent his life most stupidly, if not most basely, in fighting with a class of men, of which he himself was one, the best among many good, and that Protagoras was a far more sensible man, and at bottom a much more profound philosopher than Plato. The effect produced by this chapter of the history has been rather increased than diminished by the distin- guished historian's comment on the Protagoras and other dialogues in his recent work on Plato. Here also we are regularly given to understand that Plato was a much overrated man, and that the true objects of human admira- tion are rather the men whom it was the constant object of his philosophy to refute. This is even a bolder stroke of what, borrowing a phrase from mathematicians, I may call the invertendo style of criticism, than any with which the world has been favoured from the disintegrating school of Lachmann, Kochly, and other trans-Phenane commentators on the Homeric poems. They, at least, while they annihilated the poet, left us the poem to OF THE FIFTH CENTURY, B.C. 199 admire. Here the divine objects of old reverence are thrown away as idols, and the old recognised idols are set up as the true God. The great authority of Mr. Grote in all matters of Greek history, and the wide circulation of his work, ren- der it expedient that a public contradiction should be given to his errors from as many independent quarters as possible ; and, though I am perfectly satisfied with what I find written on this subject by an excellent scholar, Mr. Cope of Cambridge, in the Cambridge Philological Jour- nal, vol. i., as also by Professor Zeller, in his Philosophic der Griechen, Tubingen, 1856 ; yet, as my own opinions have been formed altogether independently, and are based on a careful study of Plato, extending through a series of years, I have thought that a succinct statement of the bearings of this important historical question would not prove unacceptable to persons interested in the history of Greek philosophy. I proceed, therefore, to make a short statement of Mr. G rote's theory, followed by an equally short statement of how, from my point of view, his argu- ments ought to be met. Mr. Grote ushers in the statement of his views by this general declaration — " I know few characters in history who have been so hardly dealt with as the Sophists ; they bear the penalty of their name in its modern sense ; " and the modern sense of the word, according to the whole tenor of the learned gentleman's argument, is about as far removed from the original and genuine sense, as the Eng- lish word demon is from the Homeric word Sal/Awv. To restore its proper meaning, as he conceives, to this sadly misunderstood word, the learned historian brings forward, according to my analysis, six arguments. (1.) It is plain from Plato himself— in this case we 200 ON THE SOPHISTS must suppose an unwilling witness — that many of the Sophists were excellent and sensible men, and in every way capable of being the instructors of youth. (2.) In fact, the Sophists were the great teachers of the age to which they belonged ; and Socrates owed his posi- tion and his influence altogether to being one of them. The great exhibition of young democratic energy which had culminated at Marathon was now riding onward tri- umphantly to another and a higher development. Of this period of transition between the youth and the manhood of the Athenian intellect the Sophists were the natural representatives, and the worthy spokesmen. (3.) Plato was a man of peculiar idiosyncrasy, a great intellect confessedly, but a crotchety pedant in some matters, and a transcendental dreamer in others. His witness — at bottom the only serious testimony against the Sophists (for of the great jester Aristophanes in such matters we need take no account) — is consequently of no value, and cannot, without the grossest injustice, be quoted against such sober, sensible, and practical thinkers as Protagoras and Gorgias. (4.) The immoral teaching, attributed to the Sophists, and set forth by Plato through the mouth of Callicles in the Gorgias and of Thrasymachus in the Republic, must be a figment ; for the whole history of the Athenian demo- cracy shows that such doctrines would have been utterly revolting to them, and men professing such doctrines never would have been allowed the slightest influence in the education of their sons. (5.) The Sophists, in fact, as a body, had no peculiar system of morals, either bad or good ; as little had they any system of philosophic doctrine. They were a profes- sion, not a sect. OF THE FIFTH CENTURY, B.C. 201 (6.) The standing objection made to the Sophists by Plato, in almost all his Dialogues, that they were a venal and mercantile crew, because they taught philosophy for a fee, need scarcely require refutation at our hands, living, as we do, in a country where the expediency of payment for all sorts of professional work is universally recognised. One does not, indeed, see how the Sophists could have performed their duties as general Hellenic teachers, travelling from land to land, had they not exacted a considerable fee, if it were only to pay their travelling expenses. These propositions, it will be seen, have a polemical aspect, as indeed it is both the vice and the virtue of Mr. Grote's book generally, that he is everywhere writing down an old view of Hellenic matters, and writing up a new one. In order, therefore, fully to understand the drift of his statements, we must set distinctly before us the old doctrine about the Sophists which he affects to have overturned ; and though this might be done by a large array of testimonies from many quarters, it will be sufficient for our present purpose to cite two of the best known authorities, Brucker and Gillies, who may be looked on as the generally recognised exponents of the ante-Grotian doctrine with regard to the Sophists. In his History of Philosophy, vol. i. p. 549, the erudite old Augsburg theologian says: — " Erant turn temporis Athenis Sophistce, magistri docendi, quotes Leontinus Gorgias, Thrasymachus, Protagoras Abderites, Prodicus Geius, Hippias Eleus aliique, qui in eo potissimum artem consis- tere arrogantibus verbis jactabant, quemadmodum caussa inferior, dicendo superior evadere posset ; id quod, docente Cicerone sententiarum magis concinnitate argutoque et circumscripto verborum ambitu quam eorum pondere 202 ON THE SOPHISTS efficere tentabant. Hinc homines vani, ambitiosi, avari, quique soli sibi sapere videbantur, et omnium disciplinarum cognitionem sibi arrogabant, non tantum hanc in utramque partem de quavis re proposita invictis argumentis dispu- tandi artem publice exercebant, sed et magnificis earn promissis nobilem juventutem brevi tempore se docturos pollicebantiir. Quae eo ardentius ad hos nugatores depro- perabat, quod ita se utilissimam rationem discere posse speraret, populum in suas partes trahendi, et ex eivium ad quos loquendum erat, judicio et calculo summam rerum ad se trahendi, vel etiam in potestate semel aequisita, jiexo populi per istam eloquentiam obsequio, se eonjirmandi." And Gillies, in his well-known History of Greece, vol. ii. p. 133, says, in distinct antithesis to Mr. Grote, that the " appellation Sophist, in its modern sense, pretty faithfully expresses their character," and that " their morality sup- plied the springs from which Epicurus watered his gardens, and their captious logic furnished the arguments by which Pyrrho laboured to justify his scepticism." Now, in reference to these opposing views, my asser- tion is, that the old view, though not exhaustive of the whole truth of the matter, and not recognising certain modifications which tend to soften the harsher lines of the portrait, is on the whole the right view ; while the new view, if containing an element of correction in some secondary points, is on the whole a false and misleading view, or rather a total misrepresentation and inversion of the facts of the case. The proof may be given, disposing of Mr. Grote's six arguments in then- order, as follows : — (1.) The general character of the Sophists, in their capacity of public teachers, is in no wise affected by the fact that there were great differences in their personal characters, and that some of them, like Protagoras, were, OF THE FIFTH CENTURY, B.C. 202 as the world goes, most respectable and reputable men. The Scribes and Pharisees in the Gospel history were respectable and reputable enough, no doubt, or had at least many most respectable and reputable men in their body ; but not the less were their doctrines false and their teaching pernicious. So much only we may grant to the learned historian, that if any one ever said that there were no men of average respectability among the Sophists, such an assertion is altogether unwarranted, and is con- trary to the plainest indications on the very surface of Plato. (2.) A similar admission may be made with regard to the historical significance of the Sophists generally, with- out, in the slightest degree, trenching on the ground occupied by Plato. That the Sophists, like everything else in the world, had their good side, might have been assumed, if it could not have been proved ; and it is equally certain, that when once a body of men like the Sophists, or the Scribes and Pharisees, or the Romish priests, gets a bad name, the defects of character out of which that bad name arose are apt to occupy the whole of the canvas in historical tradition, while their virtues are altogether forgotten, or even denied. Hence arises the necessity for some sort of justification ; a justification, however, which, while it may be allowed slightly to qualify, does not in any wise nullify the unfavourable character of the original verdict. A sort of plea in ex- tenuation of this class of men was therefore, in the very nature of the case, to have been expected ; and I am indebted to Professor Zeller's admirable Geschichte cler Griechischen Philosophie for a reference to two of the earliest authorities, in which this reaction in favour of the Sophists appears. The one is Meiners, in his Geschichte 204 ON THE SOPHISTS der Wissenschaften, published at Lemgo in the year 1782, and the other that of Hegel, in his lectures on the history of philosophy delivered on various occasions soon after the commencement of the present century. Professor Meiners (vol. ii. pp. 172-599) says, " The Sophists deserve not merely to be despised and denounced, but in many views they claim respect and eulogy — a recognition which even their most violent opponents have not refused. They were the great public teachers and enlighteners of Greece; they were a necessary link in the chain of intellectual life in Greece." But while admitting this, the same author says a little further on, that " their morality was right in the teeth of the Socratic morality/' and that, " on a review of the whole matter, we must agree with Xeno- phon, Plato, Isocrates, and those who followed them, that the Sophists did their country more harm than good, and that they corrupted more hearts than they enlightened heads." This representation deserves special notice as contrasted with Mr. Grote's ; for, while it fully admits the extenuating circumstance, it does not deny the general truth of the crime charged. Hegel places the palliative circumstance in a stronger light ; indeed, he purposely brings it into the foreground, as being, in his phraseology, the one " positive and truly scientific side" of the matter. But by this he means, not that the faults with which the Sophists are generally charged did not really exist, but that whatever faults a faulty thing may possess, its virtues are the only element in it which has any value to a philo- sophic mind. From this point of view he says, that " the Sophists were the teachers of Greece, by whom intellectual culture (Bildung) was brought into existence. They came into the place of the poets and rhapsodists, who were originally the only teachers. Religion in Greece did not OF THE FIFTH CENTURY, B.C. 205 teach. Priests offered sacrifices, soothsayers divined the future, but instruction is something quite different." This is admirable ; but with this the great Berlin notionalist is far from shutting his eyes to the weak side of these teachers. He proceeds to represent them as practising a logic both superficial and unprincipled. He shows also the peculiar danger which attached to such a logic when applied to practical purposes in an atmosphere of sensual polytheism. " In our European world," he writes, " intellectual culture appeared under the protection, so to speak, and on the foundation, of a spiritual religion. But when intellectual dexterity had to do only with a religion of the imagination, it readily shook itself loose from any central holding-point, or, at all events, particular subor- dinate points of view might easily be made to play the part of an ultimate principle." And again, " A man of education and experience always knows how to set things in a good light to serve the occasion. In the worst action something lies which, being singled out and skilfully presented, makes it defensible. A person must have gone a very short way in his intellectual educa- tion, if he does not know how to advance fair reasons to justify the worst actions. All the evil that has happened in the world since Adam has happened with the help of fair reasons." From these passages, which I think could not possibly be better expressed, we see how little the granting of Mr. Grote's second argument has to do with the conclusion at which he so sweepingly arrives. The most comprehensive philosophical thinker of the most philosophic country in the world can see with the utmost distinctness that the Sophists were not all black, and yet that they dealt with the most important matters of human concernment in a loose and slippery fashion, which com- 206 ON THE SOPHISTS pletely justified the attitude of uncompromising hostility constantly assumed towards them by both Socrates and Plato. (3.) Hitherto Mr. Grote's arguments, so far as they present a mere plea in palliation of the Sophists, have appeared not only plausible, but in the highest degree reasonable ; and, had he stopped at this point, there would have been no question at this moment before the learned world on the matter. But, unfortunately, the democratic historian here, by over-pleading his case, betrays the inherent weakness of his cause. He claims a verdict of acquittal for his clients, and can do so only, as we shall now see, by attempting to override an array of historical testimonies, such as, in the general case, would make any but a thorough-paced German ideamonger shrink back in dismay. The witnesses in this case are not few, and they are all on one side. Let us see how the learned historian disposes of them. In the first place, he throws Plato and Aristophanes, the greatest thinker and the greatest humorist of the age, simpliciter, out of court ; and then, by either overlooking other testimonies, or referring them back to the twin authors of the original calumny, he tells the jury, with a gay confidence, that there is nothing more in the case. But there is a wholesale air about this pro- cedure, which, with a sober-minded man, only acts as a warning to use caution. To commence with the two original framers of the indictment. No doubt Aristo- phanes was a maker of jests, but he was no mere buffoon. He was a great thinker as well as a great humorist ; and his comedies expressly deal with all the principal literary, philosophical, and political questions of the age. Such men are not apt to fling their humorous shafts at a mere imagination. On the contrary, their strength lies in the OF THE FIFTH CENTURY, B.C. 207 fact that the phenomenon which they ridicule has a wide, popular recognition, and is everywhere felt to be a fact. A man of the calibre of Aristophanes could not have writ- ten such a comedy as The Clouds, against such a class of persons as the Sophists, had not such a class of persons existed, any more than the well-known scientific song of The Origin of Species, composed by a witty Scotch judge, could have existed without a Darwin and a school of Darwins. The humorist's view of the case, indeed, is not necessarily the scientific view ; but it may be, and often is, the true view, or, at all events, represents strongly one true aspect of the case. Otherwise, not only would the humour be pointless, but a great humorist certainly would not meddle with the matter at all. Incidental errors, such as the confounding of Socrates with the mass of public teachers, of which he was one, do not affect the fundamental truth of the case. The Clouds is a play against the Sophists, not against Socrates. But, however slight the value which a grave man may be inclined to give to the testimony of a great public humorist on a question of philosophy, if it stood alone, the case is completely altered the moment that his laugh- ing testimony is confirmed by the serious witness of a professional thinker. The error which the greatest thinker and the greatest humorist of the age agree in condemning is not likely to have been an imagination. No doubt, in such a case, a great deal depends on the character of the philosopher ; and Plato is not a name likely to forestall favour with a class of minds largely represented in this land, which rejoices to call itself pre- eminently practical, and shares in a more than Napo- leonic hatred of all ideology. But let us distinguish. Plato undoubtedly had his crotchets : he was in some 208 ON THE SOPHISTS things a most unpractical man, and knew that he was so ; unquestionably, also, his theory of ideas may often have been stated in exaggerated language, and with a paradoxical air, eminently provocative of the opposition which, ever since Aristotle, it has encountered. But the testimony of the philosopher in reference to the Sophists is a thing much broader, and rooted much more deeply, than any of his crotchets about methodizing the sexual instinct, or building up an ideal polity. Here we have the fact that a great philosopher of all-command- ing mind, the founder of a great and permanent school of thinking, who stood to his age in the same relation that Bacon does to ours, makes it the business of his life to write against, and represents his great master, Socrates, as having made it the business of his life to speak against, a class of men who professed certain principles generally esteemed pernicious, but which, according to Mr. Grote's view of the matter, were, in fact, most excellent and laudable. And this testimony, so given, was accepted by the universal voice of antiquity. It met, in fact, no decided contradiction till the epiphany of Mr. Grote. Now, there is nothing altogether impossible in the sup- position that Mr. Grote may be right. It may some- times be given to a Niebuhr, after a lapse of 2000 years, to reconstruct a history of Rome ; but we are not to start with a prepossession in favour of such brilliant novelties. They are rather to be looked on with suspicion, and require strong backing. Plato, moreover, it must be borne in mind, with all his tendency to one-sided exaggerations, was by no means a narrow-minded, an ungenerous, much less a spiteful or an ill-natured man. No man was more in the habit of looking at both sides of a question, and more unlikely to put up a man of straw for an adversary. His OF THE FIFTH CENTURY, B.C. 209 treatment of Protagoras, Gorgias, and other Sophists, is what we would call gentlemanly in the highest degree, and gives the reader a sort of guarantee that what he alleges against the general body to which he belonged had some good foundation. In weighing the testimony of Plato and Aristophanes also, with regard to such a class of men as the Sophists are alleged to have been, we must consider the presumptions and possibilities of the case. Is there anything strange or improbable in the statement, that in a talking town like Athens, full of all sorts of quick-witted and light-witted democratic people, there should have arisen, in an age of intellectual transi- tion, a set of shallow thinkers, who cultivated the faculty of expression at the expense of the faculty of thought and exercised their understanding with a clever logical dexterity, rather than with the earnest search after truth ? To myself it seems the most natural thing in the world to suppose the existence of such a class of men — a class of men, indeed, almost certain to exist at all times wherever there is a demand for them ; and particularly dangerous, as Hegel remarks, in a country where a sensuous religion exists, altogether divorced from any serious training, either of the intellect or the character. Starting from these presumptions, I must confess I should be inclined to accept the portrait of the Sophists in every feature, and with its full colouring, as given by the god of the philosophers, and the king of the humor- ists, even if their testimony in this matter stood alone. But the plain and admitted fact here is, that neither the philosopher nor the humorist does stand alone ; they are supported by the consenting voice of antiquity. The heritage of Greek opinion on this subject was transmitted to Cicero ; and he says {Acad. n. 23), " Sophistce appel- 210 ON TEH SOPHISTS lantur qui ostentationis aut qucestiis causa philosophantur." Among the Greeks themselves, those whose testimony was of the highest value, and who lived nearest to the time, and who were most interested in the subject, set their seal in the strongest language to the witness of the great idealist. Who are the writers whom a wise judge would call into court, and hear with impartial eagerness in a trial of this kind ? Socrates and Xenophon, Isocrates and Aristotle — any one of these would be sufficient, in my judgment, to nail down, for an absolute certainty, whatever Plato and Aristophanes might have previously combined to testify as a prominent fact in the history of Greek intellectual life. Of these four, though the most remote in point of time, Aristotle is the most weighty ; and this not only on account of the accurate, inductive, and encyclopaedic character of his mind, but specially on account of his known propensity to contradict everything that Plato says, when it comes in his way. None of the products of that peculiarly Platonic idiosyncrasy, which Mr. Grote brings forward so prominently, does the Stagy- rite show the slightest desire to spare. Spartan women and Platonic ideas are two matters, in discussing which he almost seems to lose for a moment the imperturbable judicial coolness of his intellect. But the Sophists he describes in exactly the same language as Plato, and in language which forms a sufficient justification for the peculiar use of the name in modern times. In Soph. EL I. 6, he says, "Eari yap rj (70(pL(TTiK7) ca ova a Be /jlt], kcli 6 cro(piaT7i<; %pr)/jLaTiaTr)<; airo (pcuvofievr)? o-o(j)ca<; aX\ OVK 01/(777?. The testimonies of Socrates and Xenophon need not be specified here in detail. They will be found below in a note, and have been admirably handled by Mr. Cope in OF THE FIFTH CENTURY, B.C. 211 the Essay to which I previously alluded. 1 Only to the witness of Isocrates I call particular attention, as that of a man who was by the general bent of his mind not at all inclined to sympathize with any transcendental notions of high-strung intellectualists like Plato, and who, as himself one of the most reputable of the class of Sophists to whom Gorgias belonged, would naturally feel no inclination to bring a charge against any large section of the fraternity, which might serve to increase the natural odium that in not a few quarters had always attached to the name. His words are as follows : — [Kara tcov o-ofy' I). Tts yap ovk dv pLo-fjcreLev a/xa Kal Karac^pov^creLe irpdrov pev twv irepl ra? epiSas Star/Oi/?ovT(ov, ot 7rpop.Y)v d8u)s aXX rjp.lv kvBet^ao-Oai f3ovX6p.evos, otl rots dv6pa)7rois kv tovto twv dSwdnov kcniv. Ovtoi tolvvv els tovto ToXp,rjs kXrj XvOacriV) tucrre TretpiovTat Trs.i9s.iv tovs veaiTepovs, a>s, rjv avTois TrXrjcrLdfoo-iv, a re TrpaKTeov kcrTiv eio-ovTal Kal Std TavTrjs Trjs kTTLCTTrjpLrjs ev8aip,oves yevrjo-ovTai. Kal T-qXiKovTiav dyaOcov avTovs StBao-KaXovs Kal Kvpiovs KaTao-TrjcravTes ovk alcrxvvovTai Tpels rj T€TTa/oas pvds vwep tovtwv dtTOvvTes. dXX' el /xev tl tuv dXXiov KTrjpaTWV ttoXXoo-tov p,epovs Trjs d£cas k-Xovv, ovk dv rjpt^LcrfiyJTrjcrav, a>s ovk ev povovvT€s Tvyxdvovcrt, o-vpLwacrav Se Tr)v dptTrjv Kal Tr)v evSaipLoviav ovTb)S oXiyov TtpiovTes, a>S vovv €^ovt€S h&do-KaXoi twv aAAcov a^iovcrt ytyveoSai. Kal Xkyovcn p.ev, o>s ovSev SkovTai xp-qpidTOiV, dpyvpiSiov Kal Xpvo-L&LOV tov ttAovtov a7ro/, as respects the more select body chosen out of their mem- bers ; the other the yepovala, or senate of elders, an elec- tive body chosen by the general mass from the members of their own body, of the greatest social weight and influ- ence, being not less than sixty years of age. This yepovaia may just be regarded as a standing committee of the 238 ON THE SPARTAN CONSTITUTION privileged classes, constantly renovated from the general mass by a law of merit and seniority, and intrusted with the exclusive right of discussing all important public questions, and proposing all legislative measures in the first place. In this body, therefore, — as any person prac- tically acquainted with the working of political machinery will at once divine — lay the real power of the government in Lacedsemon : at least when the constitution acted nor- mally, and was not disturbed, as it was liable to be, either by the arbitrary power of the ephors— of which anon — or by the preponderant personality of an energetic monarch. As for the larger assembly — the eKKXrjo-ta, though by the theory of the constitution possessing the supreme power in the last resort — exactly after the Homeric type, so familiarly known from the amusing scene in Iliad, u. — yet it played a very subordinate part in Spartan politics, and makes little figure in Greek history, manifestly because its interests and feelings were represented by its own best members, who regularly passed into the yepovala at the very age when their weight as public counsellors had reached its acme. An opposition between the two divi- sions of the Spartan privileged class, such as exists in our country between the House of Commons and the House of Lords, never did exist, and never could exist ; because the Spartan lower-house was in fact a house of nobles, and the upper-house was only a select standing-committee of the lower-house. Anything, therefore, like popular or demo- cratic assemblies, in our sense of the word, anything like hostile parties within the mass of the governing body, anything in the shape of popular measures, popular elo- quence, and champions of popular rights, was altogether unknown in Sparta. In this regard, Professor Curtius does not overstate the matter when he says that, " though AND THE AGRARIAN LAWS OF LYCURGUS. 239 the Spartan people had no laws or public measures of any kind thrust upon them without their concurrence, yet, as a rule, they did not govern ; they were governed." For this reason, in the annals of their public life we hear of no Olympian Pericles, no brilliant Alcibiades, no impetuous Demades, no terrible Demosthenes, not even a correct and polished, well-balanced, well-washed, well-anointed, well-combed, well-brushed, and altogether well-bred Iso- crates. They had no politica] literature. The ephors, who, like the Roman tribunes, from small beginnings rose to a power that often overshadowed the kings, and even overrode the senate, have a very mys- terious aspect to the student who first begins to look into the details of the Spartan government machine. But, on a little consideration, now that all the available evidence has been carefully collected, it appears to me that there cannot be the slightest doubt as to the true origin of the extraordinary authority which, at certain periods, they exercised in public affairs. The ephoralty arose from the necessity of providing a field for the energies of ambitious and adventurous young Spartans in the time of peace. The law that no person should become a senator till the ripe and safe age of sixty was for purposes of aristocratic conservation unquestionably a very wise one. But even in the most firmly-compacted aristocracies there are com- bustible and explosive elements which must be provided for ; and these elements exist nowhere so strong as in the hearts of young men of talent and energy. Now, in our country, the House of Commons presents exactly the sort of arena which is best adapted at once to gratify the ambition and test the capacity of such active spirits. But in Sparta, as we have seen, the ifc/cXTjala could perform no such functions ; therefore, instead of public speaking and 240 ON THE SPARTAN CONSTITUTION parliamentary tactics, a sort of overseership and censor- ship — first in smaller, and then gradually extending to more important matters — was laid open to the adventur- ous and ambitious among the young Spartans, in which field of executive activity they might blow off their steam, in time of peace, and feel that they wielded a power in certain important matters which not even the king or the senate could treat with contempt. A free career being thus laid open to the young men and the less influential aristocracy, the eKKKrjcria was in all respects qualified to play that acquiescent and innocent part which it played in Spartan history. It became, in fact, politi- cally null ; not because it had no rights, but because there was no need for exercising its rights. In this way it came about that Sparta, for the space of four hundred years, exhibited to wondering Greece the most notable pattern of a stable conservative government, without any disturbing opposition, that ancient history knew. In fact, with such a perfectly satisfied broad aristocracy, if there arose at any time any opposition to the government, it was either in the shape of absolute mutiny and revolt among the helots, and unrecognised subject-classes, or in the shape of conspiracy amongst some of the Spartans proper, who had lost their franchise by default, that is, either by not having conformed to the social regulations of Lycurgus, or by not possessing the necessary property qualification, and who were therefore no longer ojioioi, peers among peers. Of such a conspiracy we have a well- known example in the case of Cinadon, which took place at the commencement of the reign of Agesilaus, B.C. 398. The proceedings connected with the quashing of these mutinies and conspiracies reveal to us the weak point of the Spartan government. A numerous subject-population, AND THE AGRARIAN LAWS OF LYCURGUS. 241 absolutely without political rights, can be governed only by fear, and is kept in check, partly by that unity of counsel and action which belongs to all well-organized governing bodies, partly by a system of secret police, and secret execution, in that arbitrary form which is always the plague-spot of the government which employs it, and which, in the case of Sparta, was distinguished by acts of bold unscrupulousness and cold-blooded atrocity, surpassed by nothing that modern records present in the annals of Rome, Naples, Paris, or Madrid. On the whole, therefore, we see, that notwithstanding the confessedly beneficial effect of the severe physical and moral training to which the young Spartans were subjected, the results of their political system were not such as to present a purely aristocratic government in a particularly attractive light. The Spartan system made good soldiers, drilled and maintained in notable efficiency, a small compact people of privileged proprietors brave in the use of their swords ; but it altogether failed to produce a great people. In external form only, to the superficial eye the Spartan constitution exhibits that mixed form of government com- posed of the three natural elements of king, lords, and commons, which the wisest of the ancients looked on as the best possible government ; but there was, in reality, no people, no liberty, no movement, and no enterprise. What we find instead of a great, strong, free, and happy people, is a very manly and vigorous, severely-trained, well-disciplined, and thoroughly effective aristocracy ; but an aristocracy altogether unfit to go beyond the narrow territorial limits within which it grew up, and no more qualified to produce the highest type of cultivated humanity, than the institutions of Plato's paper republic, the red-tape and pipe-clay ordinances of last century Q 242 ON THE SPARTAN CONSTITUTION Berlin bureaucracy, or the religious exercitations of a Jesuits' college in Madrid or Rome. So much seems undisputed. I shall now notice two points of considerable importance in the Spartan political and social organization, which, considering the weighty names who have advocated opposite views in regard to them, must be looked on as yet sub judice in the world of learned research. The first of these points relates to the true nature and character of those Spartans who were called opoioi, Equals or Peers. With regard to these, the late Sir G. C. Lewis, in the Philological Review (vol. ii. p. 64), has advanced a theory that they were in all proba- bility " an aristocratical class within the body of the Spar- tans who were much employed in public offices, and had great influence with the government, originally, perhaps, selected for their merit ; and afterwards their rank be- came hereditary." This theory has been controverted by Professor Schoemann, in an able paper in his Opuscula Academica ; and without going into the detail of the argument, I shall only here state generally, that the pas- sages in which mention is made of these ofiotoi in the Greek classics are few and incidental, and that, after a careful examination of them all, I have come to the con- clusion that there is no sufficient ground in the existing authorities for the theory advanced by the learned English statesman ; and that, if we take the evidence as we have it, without adding to it in the way of conjecture, we must just simply say that the peers were all the Spartans who had not lost their property or other qualification. Equality, indeed, and a sort of democracy within themselves, was an essential characteristic of society in Sparta — la-ovofila and 8r)/jLOKpa,Tta irapd a^iai in the very words of Isocrates (Panath. 270, c.) ; and the formation of a class of superior AND THE AGRARIAN LAWS OF LYCURGUS. 24 3 hereditary privileged peers, in our sense of the word, is not to be assumed without the strongest reasons, in the face of the plain presumptions to the contrary, arising out of the whole constitution of oligarchy in Sparta. But the most important of the disputed points of the Spartan social organization is that which relates to the Agrarian Laws. On this subject the great English his- torian of Greece, Mr. Grote, has lately advanced a theory, which, as it runs counter not only to all the ancient autho- rities, but to the weight of learned opinion in Germany, well deserves the serious consideration of English scholars ; the more so that, so far as I can see, the weight justly due to that learned gentleman s authority has had a tendency to procure a ready admission to certain brilliant sceptical novelties, enunciated by him, in quarters where a decided opposition, on strong conservative principles, was rather to have been expected ; and thus the student of ancient his- tory comes suddenly upon the somewhat singular pheno- menon, that on one point at least of Hellenic research, while such Teutonic excavators as Ottfried Mtiller, C. T. Hermann, Schoemann, Curtius, and Diincker are mar- shalled on the side of ancient tradition and authority, in Oxford a learned professor of ancient history 1 can declare that Mr. Grote has proved, with " irresistible force," that all we have hitherto been taught of Agrarian laws in ancient Sparta is a hallucination and a dream. The two nations thus appear to be changing sides ; the compatriots of Niebuhr have become historical conservatives, while the countrymen of Clinton seem eager to blow away all early history into symbolism and myth. The mere suddenness and completeness of this rebound might seem to indicate that the matter had not been duly sifted, and that Mr. 1 Eawlinson's Herodotus, vol. iii. Appendix I. 244 ON THE SPARTAN CONSTITUTION Grote's theory lias been received more from the weight due to his authority, than from an impartial consideration of the evidence. So at least it appears to me ; and it shall be my object in what remains of this discourse to state in detail the real significance of the ancient authorities on the sub- ject, and how far they are from giving any countenance to the ingenious, but, in my opinion, baseless theory of Mr. Grote. Let it be noted, however, that when I speak of Agrarian laws as an integral part of the Lycurgean organi- zation, I do not mean to assert that the legislator intro- duced these laws for the first time any more than he in- troduced the kingship or the senate. It belongs to God to create ; the highest of mortal legislators can only use existing materials. All I say is, that, on a due considera- tion of all the ancient authorities, which are our only safe guides in this matter, Agrarian laws must be acknowledged as, from the earliest times, part and parcel of that singu- lar social organization which bore the name of Lycurgus. In Lycurgus, as a man and a lawgiver, and not as a myth, a symbol, or an indefinite somebody or anybody, for reasons that I cannot here state at length, I most potently believe ; but I am not in the slightest degree concerned to maintain that all the characteristic Spartan laws and customs on which his name was stamped, really proceeded originally from him; much less that we are bound to accept, as his actual scheme, every minute detail of his legislation as presented to us in the highly- finished, or, as we might say, cunningly cooked accounts of late historians. Let us now examine Mr. Grote's position. His denial of the Spartan Agrarian laws, as a historical fact, proceeds mainly on the assertion, that, while these laws are either ignored or contradicted by all the earlier and more trust- AND THE AGRARIAN LAWS OF LYCURGUS. 245 worthy witnesses, they are asserted only by one or two recent and less creditable authorities. This statement of the case is certainly very plausible. It is pretty much as if he had said, all the eye-witnesses knew nothing about the matter in question, only hearsay asserts it. But the nature of the existing authorities does not allow us to dispose of the question in this way. There are no eye-witnesses in the case : the oldest cited, viz., Plato, lived at least four hundred years after the great Spartan lawgiver ; and in such circumstances mere priority in point of date is not of itself sufficient to outweigh other and more material considerations. Nay, even in a common question of legal evidence, as every lawyer knows, the mere nearness of a witness to the time in which a disputed fact took place will not of itself be able to secure to his testimony any peculiar preference. I shall, therefore, adopt what appears to me the more true method of stating the evidence in a historical question of this kind. I shall first cite those authors who give a distinct and deliberate testimony to the Spartan Agrarian laws, and then inquire how far their evidence is contradicted by any testimony to the contrary. In the first place, we have Polybius, a Greek, a native of the Peloponnesus, and living in the times immediately following the Agrarian agitations of the famous Spartan kings, Agis and Cleomenes. Of his weight and judgment in political matters no one ever expressed a doubt ; and his testimony to the existence of equal allotments of land in Sparta, as one of the most characteristic elements of the Lycurgean legislation, is given in a passage (vi. 45) where he expressly discusses political constitutions, and draws a direct contrast between the Cretan and Spartan systems on this very point. A more valuable witness, therefore, on such a matter, could not be cited. Then we have 246 ON THE SPARTAN CONSTITUTION Plutarch, in his life of Lycurgus, — an author whom it is easy to call an " old wife/' but who, in fact, was one of the best-read men of his day, and a man of remarkable good sense and sound judgment. No doubt he tells many stories which, like all historical anecdotes, may have been improved in the telling, or even invented to give point to popular opinion : unquestionably also, his philosophy of history, exhibiting the whole Spartan constitution as jumping ready-made out of the brain of Lycurgus, is far from profound ; but it remains to be proved that he has ever given false representations of great historical charac- ters, or lightly stated any important historical fact. On the contrary, I feel convinced, that, before he sat down to write his life of Lycurgus, he had read Aristotle's famous work lie pi IIoXiTeicov now lost ; and that the very distinct evidence given by him as to the Spartan Agrarian laws must be regarded not as his testimony merely, but as the result of the ivhole mass of historical evidence, including, of course, Aristotle, which he had consulted on the subject. And here we must observe, that in talking of the Spartan Agrarian laws, we are dealing with a matter which, if it was not a mere figment, as Mr. Grote will have it, must have been as well known in ancient Greece as it is known in modern Europe that the government of the Romish church is monarchical, and that the principle of ecclesias- tical democracy is represented by the Presbyterians in Scotland. Facts of this kind are far too deep-fixed in their roots, and far too wide-spread in their branches, to be either invented or ignored. If they are invented,, they will not be believed ; if they are believed, it is because they cannot be ignored. To me, therefore, the testimonies of two such writers as Polybius and Plutarch, expressly handling the subject, and summing up as they AND THE AGRARIAN LAWS OF LYCURGUS. 247 do the whole historical tradition of antiquity, are quite sufficient to establish the existence of Agrarian laws in ancient Sparta, although they were not supported by any other evidence. But this is far from being the case. Isocrates, in his Panathenaic oration, where a contrast is distinctly drawn between Athenian and Lacedaemonian institutions, talks expressly (270 c.) of the equality of lots in land, which characterized the Dorians when they first settled hi the Peloponnesus, rrjs %wp this thinker made a manifest step in advance ; for air is certainly fluidity in its most perfect form : a form also of more subtle penetrative power than water — of more universal diffusiveness, and more essentially connected with all forms of vitality. But beyond this we find nothing in his doctrine of any peculiar significance. Far otherwise is the case with the next representative of this school, Heraclitus. He was a native of Ephesus, and from the manner in which he is con- stantly spoken of by the greatest of the ancients, it is easy to gather that as a thinker he peers high above his Ionic brethren, and disputes with Pythagoras and Parmenides the claim to being the most important name in the deve- lopment of Greek speculation previous to Plato. The surname of a/coTeivos, or "the obscure," which he received from the Greeks, may have arisen partly from an original moodiness of disposition, partly from a fondness for the 1 Telliamed ; or, Discourses between Missionary. From the French of De an Indian Philosopher and a French Maillet. London, 1750. 264 ON THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY. old poetic and figurative style in philosophizing, but partly, no doubt, also from the real profundity of his cogi- tations. He evidently went with a decided preference into regions where darkness more or less visible must always be the best light which finite minds are capable of receiving. The most distinctive and suggestive of his dogmas are the following : — (1.) His doctrine that irvp, or fire, is the dpxn> is a very decided step in advance both of Thales and Anaxi- menes ; for chemistry has now taught us by many curious processes, what appears no doubt broadly on the general face of Nature, that heat is the power to the action of which both water and air owe their existence. Take away heat from water and it becomes ice ; take away heat, and the expansiveness caused by heat, from a gas, and under the influence of strong pressure it becomes liquid. Heraclitus therefore proceeded by a true process of induc- tion when he put his finger on heat as that common prin- ciple which, by producing fluidity, makes life possible. (2.) But this fire or heat is nothing of a merely mate- rial kind, like the caloric, or matter of heat, of which our captains of physical science were once fond of talking. The fire of Heraclitus is a reasonable or rational heat ; it is inspired by a \dyo$ ; it is ^povip.ov and fypevrjpes (Hippol., IX. 10. Sext. Empir. adv. Math., vn. 127) ; it works by a divine necessity, which is the cause of order and law in the universe, and on which the validity and stability of all human laws ultimately depend. Mind and Reason, indeed, are diffused everywhere in the universe, and are the common elements in virtue of which a harmonious and coherent whole is rendered possible. Uvvov iarc iraai to cfrpoveiv Tpecjyovrcu yap iravres 01 avQpwiuvoi vofiou vito eVo? tov 6eiov Kpareet yap togovtov 6/coaov eOeXei, Kat, e^apKeec iraat /cal ON THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY. 265 Trepiylyverac (Stob., Florileg. in. 84). To a modern ear this doctrine may probably sound very like Pantheism ; and no doubt it is Pantheism, but a sort of Pantheism by no means like some of our modern Pantheisms, full cousin to Atheism. It is more like the Pantheism of Spinoza, which, if it is to receive a peculiar name, ought, according to Hegel, rather to be called Acosmism than Atheism. It annihilates the world by concentrating all the significance of the term existence in the idea of God. (3.) The divine rational energy, called irvp, is essentially self-motive, and never at rest. Tldvra pel — all things are in a perpetual flux, so that a flowing river is the most proper type of universal existence. (Plato, Crat. 402 a). " Nothing to hold itself is strong, But all things, like a river, Whirl along and swirl along, And bubble along for ever." (4.) But, though the motion of existence in the cosmos is shapeless and ceaseless, it is in one important respect not like the course of a river ; it is not a motion directly forward and onward ; but it is a motion forward and back- ward, with recurrent strokes like the vibrations of the string of a lyre or a bow. 1 This implies a sort of self-contra- diction inherent in the very nature of things. Life is manifested by the assertion of contraries : health, beauty, truth, and rightness of all kinds consist in a balance of opposites. This doctrine Heraclitus felt so strongly, that he did not hesitate to say that TroKefiov elvai irarepa kcll fiaaikea /ecu /evpiov irdvTwv (Plut., Is. Osir. 48), " War is the father, and king, and lord of all things;" and in putting forth this, to us strange sentiment, he no doubt in some- 1 UakivTovos ap[j,ovir} Koafxov OKcoanep \vprjs Ka\ to£ov. Plut. Is. Osir. 45. 266 ON THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY. wise anticipated the famous maxim of Spinoza, adopted by Hegel — Omms affirmatio est negatio. (5.) Heraclitus further taught that at the bottom of this constant vicissitude, which we call life and the world, there is a something which never changes, an absolute sameness in the midst of relative otherness ; so that what we call death is really only another form of life ; and the life of any one thing always grows out of the death of some other thing. 1 This side of his speculations, if carried out, might have formed the basis for a doctrine of permanency, which would have been the natural and pro- per counterpoise to the sensuous scepticism that was only too easily deduced from his favourite doctrine of flux ; but it was reserved for the philosophers of the abstract and strictly metaphysical school to give due emphasis to this essential element of the Cosmos. The fifth and last doctor of this class was Empedocles of Agrigentum, a man of noble family, lofty character, great talent, and various accomplishment, of whose poems, 7repl Quo-em and /caQap/jLol, considerable fragments are pre- served, commented on in Karsten's collection and Preller's history of Grasco -Roman philosophy. Important as was the figure which he played in his native country, in the curiously compound character of a physician, a priest, and a politician, he does not seem to have said much on philosophy that had not been already said by his pre- decessors. Like Plato, naturally a poet, and a man of a constructive imagination, he seems to have wished to combine into one rich whole the speculations of his pre- decessors, partly disguised under different names. The Water, Air, and Fire of three of his predecessors he adopted, and with the very obvious addition of Earth, 1 '0d6s apco Kcii k.6.t Pythagoras was only defining the method of operation of Mind, or X070? ; and what he called Number was only another name for what our modern men of physical science call Law. For that law is altogether a matter of calculation any one may see in the constant practice of mechanical philosophers, astronomers, and chemists ; the laws of nature are only the regularly acting forces of nature ; and all regularly acting forces are necessarily either directly or indirectly the product of mind ; as a steam-engine, for instance, however often multiplied, is always and everywhere the product of the calculating intellect of James Watt, pro- pagated and perpetuated through countless imitators. In assigning this high position to the mathematical element in the constitution of the universe, Pythagoras certainly deserves to be reverenced as the great prophet and anti- cipator of our modern scientific processes; what he de- monstrated with a fine preference in the case of the musical scale, is now demonstrated in everything; not only the motions of the stars and the arrangement of leaves in plants, but the very winds and storms are made the subjects of calculation. Unless indeed it be in the flow of emotion, the flash of wit, the play of fancy, and the fervour of passion, it is difficult now-a-days to find a domain that can boast its freedom from the wide control of calculated Number. As in reference to the mundane system, the Pytha- gorean assertion of dpidfio? necessarily implied the unity of the plan of the world, and its existence as the product of a calculating architect, so in reference to the social system the same idea brought into prominence the principle of order, and authority, and subordination, that at the present day gives its leading features to what are called ON THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY. 273 Conservative politics, as opposed to the politics of a free and equal individualism. Pythagoras accordingly pre- ceded Plato in the constitution of a republic mainly on the principle of order ; and in one respect certainly far excelled his brilliant successor ; for the constitution which the Athenian projected remained a dream upon paper, while the community established by the Samian was a realized fact of considerable social importance for a season. In the establishment of this community indeed he comes nearer to the founders of the great moral society of the Christian Church than any ancient philosopher ; it appeared, however, that in this he occupied ground which philosophy was not competent to maintain ; for the Pytha- gorean societies in South-Eastern Italy, being oligarchic in their character and operation, came into collision with that democratic element which was always so potent in the Greek colonies, and being cast out lost their organic consistency. This great failure no doubt gave the hint to Plato to content himself with founding a school at Athens, not a community ; for it is only upon very rare occasions that political parties have ventured to interfere with the ventilation of unapplied speculations in the schools. Less popularly known than Pythagoras, but scarcely of less significance in the history of thought, is Xenophanes of Colophon, who stands chronologically between the Samian and Heraclitus. As the founder of the Eleatic School, he, with Parmenides, stands forward as the cham- pion of the principle of unity in the universe, adding the necessary counterpoise to the doctrine of flux and muta- bility, on which, as we have seen, Heraclitus so moodily rung the changes. How to bridge over the gap between the one and the many— to apprehend how the ev became 274 ON THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY. iroXkd if we start from the one, and how the iroWa wai worked into the unity of a consistent whole, if we are to start from the many — that of course was, and is, the great problem of all metaphysical and theological thought. To solve this problem, the Eleatics took the method of Spinoza ; they asserted the one as the only really existent, and allowed the many to shift for themselves as they best might under the name of appearances, modifications, illu- sions (the Hindu Maya), and whatsoever you please, of the nature of fleeting, ephemeral, and without indepen- dent root and enduring reality. God only exists ; all created things are mere passing phantoms and pheno- menal illusions. As assertors of the self-existent ev, the Eleatics were naturally opposed to that breaking down of the divine nature into a multitude of discordant per- sonalities which they beheld in the popular polytheism of their country ; and it is one of the great merits of Xeno- phanes that he anticipated Plato by a century and a half in publishing a vigorous protest against the contradictions, puerilities, and immoralities of the Homeric theology. Whether the boldness of his utterances in respect to the popular theology may not have been the cause of his leaving his Asiatic home, and settling, like Pythagoras, in Southern Italy, we have no means of knowing ; the fol- lowing declarations, however, which I translate from his fragments in Karsten s collection, if they had got beyond the authors private circle, are certainly strongly enough worded to have made the writer's position sufficiently uncomfortable in that part of the world where the pre- sence of St. Paul, five centuries afterwards, raised such a storm of blatant spite and fury among the worshippers of the Ephesian Artemis. ON THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY. 275 i. " There is one God, supreme above all gods and men that be ; Not like a mortal thing in shape, nor like in thought is He. II. " vain conceit, to ween that gods like men are born, and show Our human face, and use our speech, and in our garments go ! III. " If sheep and swine, and lions strong, and all the bovine crew, Could paint with cunning hands, and do what clever mortals do, Depend upon it every pig with snout so broad and blunt, Would make a Jove that like himself would thunder with a grunt ; And every lion's god would roar, and every bull's would bellow, And every sheep's would baa, and every beast his worshipp'd fellow Would find in some immortal form, and nought exist divine But had the gait of lion, sheep, or ox, or grunting swine. IV. " Homer and Hesiod, whom we own great doctors of theology, Said many things of blissful gods that cry for large apology, That they may cheat, and rail, and lie, and give the rein to passion, Which were a crime in men who tread the dust in mortal fashion. v. " All eyes, all ears, all thought is God, the omnipresent soul, And free from toil, by force of mind He moves the mighty whole." The only other point worthy of remark with regard to Xenophanes is that he seems to have been the first Greek speculator — certainly the first of whom any record is left — who distinctly noted those curious phenomena in the crust of the earth's surface indicative of an early disturbed state of the globe, which, when collected and systematized, have grown up into the interesting modern science of Geology. The passage in which this remarkable notice occurs is in that part of the work of Hippolytus (Refut. Hcer., i. 14) which gives a review of the opinions of the Greek philosophers ; and here he distinctly says that " shells, and the prints of fishes, and marine animals were found in the rocks at Syracuse, Malta, and Paros ; and 276 ON THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY. that this was evidently the result of a watery condition of the Earth's surface, when everything was swathed in mud, and the living creatures of the sea left the impressions of their bodies in the soft beds, which afterwards became dry." The last philosopher whom our present scheme requires us to mention is Anaxagoras, the friend of Pericles, and the precursor of Plato in the complete emancipation of metaphysical speculation from physical symbols. No doubt Socrates in a well-known passage accuses this philo- sopher of not having consistently applied the intellectual principle ol the world which he laid down (Plat. Phced. 98 B.) ; but in declaring that the only adequate explana- tion of the cosmos was to be found in self-existent, self- energizing vovs or Mind, the Clazomenian certainly made a stride in advance, marking him out as well worthy of the commendation bestowed by Aristotle, that in this matter he spoke like a full-grown man as contrasted with the lisping and babblement of children. There is in fact only a very superficial difference of expression between the vov? of Anaxagoras and the Elohim of Moses. " In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth." About the exact meaning of the word "create" (**??), of course our finite intellects always must dispute : if we could understand that word fully, we should be not men, but God : apart from this, however, the fiao-iXiKo? vov$ of Anaxagoras and Plato, which is the keystone of Christian faith as well as of the highest modern thinking, is simply another name for @eo? — God. We find, therefore, in the apxn of Anaxagoras a natural and beautiful culmination which harmonizes in one significant watchword the philo- sophy ofGreece, the faith of Christendom, and the instincts of a healthy humanity. ON THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY. 277 Of the Sophists as predecessors or contemporaries of Socrates it is not necessary to say anything in this paper. They were not so much founders of systems of philosophy as disputers about philosophy — corresponding to a certain class of our literary men, who talk and write on all subjects without having any strong convictions on any subject ; some of them, indeed, as Gorgias, professing only to be teachers of rhetoric, and others adding to that some super- ficial instruction in the principles of a worldly morality and a time-serving statesmanship. The philosophy that they taught was generally of a negative and destructive character ; and the part which it played in the history of thought was mainly to bring out in full armed strength the rational ethics of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Of course I am fully aware of the attempt recently made by Mr. Grote to plant these gentlemen on a higher and more dignified platform ; but, great as are the merits of this distinguished writer in reference to the political history of Greece, I cannot but regard his chapter on the Sophists as the product of a reactionary feeling, doomed to pass away with the generation which gave it birth. REMAKES ON ENGLISH HEXAMETERS. When Mr. Southey, some fifty years ago, in his famous poem, The Vision of Judgment, resuscitated the long-laid " ghost of English hexameters/' he did not do so under such favourable circumstances (so far as himself was concerned), nor with such accompaniments of public approbation, as could invite any future candidate for rhythmical distinction to imitate his bold example. Nay, the old English mastiff sent forth one of its rough con- servative growls in the shape of a separate book of no less than eighty-four pages (price four shillings !) of " his- torical and critical remarks " on the subject, by a Reverend Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. 1 Most people imagined that the effect of this combined indifference and opposition had been, to lay the unquiet spirit of metrical innovation for ever; 2 but in these last times, amid the prevalence of many other strange fermentations, it is nothing surprising that the ghost should have again appeared. Not to men- tion Longfellow's Evangeline, — a poem which has boasted as wide a popularity as any rhythmical production of the present century, — we have had 'within the last twenty 1 Historical and Critical Remarks singular fates of hexameter verse in our upon the modem Hexametrists : by the early English literature. Reverend S. Tillbrook, B. D., Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. 1822. — A 2 " I am well aware that the public work valuable more for its facts than are peculiarly intolerant of such inno- for its philosophy, and containing some vations." — Southey, Preface to Vision curious points of information on the of Judgment. REMARKS ON ENGLISH HEXAMETERS. 279 years no less than three translations of the Iliad in hexa- meter verse -} besides a hexametrical version of the books of the Iliad in a quarter so conservative of old English ideas as Blackwood's Magazine. 2, The phenomenon is a most remarkable one, and forces itself with a strong sesthetical interest, both on the student of English litera- ture and on the classical scholar. To the one it is interest- ing to inquire how far our admirable language, even at the present late period, may admit of a new rhythmical development ; while the other is even more concerned to inquire whether, after the precedents which Pope and Dry den and Sotheby have already established, it be yet possible to make acceptable to the English ear a style of translation which shall not merely transpose the soul and the body of Greek antiquity into our Saxon speech, but exhibit even the very attitude and posture, the vesture and drapery of the Hellenic Muse. On this subject we hope the few following remarks will not prove un- acceptable. The beau ideal of a translation as a work of art unques- tionably is, that it shall be as much as possible a likeness of its original ; the same in. substance and in character, in significance and expression, in spirit and detail, in a word a Facsimile, as far as may be. There are pictures, copies from the great masters, done by their disciples, with such perfect cunning of the pencil, that even an experienced eye cannot distinguish them from the originals. To achieve that with words which has been achieved by lines and 1 By Dart, 1865; Herscliel, 1866; of English hexameters by a writer in and Cochran, 1867, privately printed. the Westminster Review, March 1845, in 2 See Blackwood for the months of a notice of Sotheby's Homer, and "the March and May 1847 ^though in fair- Iliad faithfully rendered into Homeric ness we must mention that Christopher verse :" by Lancelot Shadwell, Esquire. North was anticipated in his patronage Nos. 1 and 3. London. Pickering. 280 REMARKS ON ENGLISH HEXAMETERS. colours, were the perfection of the translator's art ; but unhappily the thing is in the general case impossible. For the translator does not work with the same materials as his original : a good black or blue in the hands of Giulio Romano may produce the same effect as in the hands of Raphael ; but no Coleridge or Shelley can in every case make the English language do that which Homer or iEschylus may have done with the Greek. A translator is often called on to make a facsimile of a golden image with brass, sometimes with hard granite or gnarled gneiss ; sometimes to reproduce upon coarse drugget and " hodden grey" that fine figured broidery which was worked by delicate hands on the velvet mantle of a king. It is in vain, therefore, to expect a perfect facsimile from a translator ; we can only demand a reproduction of the original, in so far as the material employed will allow ; and this necessary condition of the undertaking in the hands of a man of taste and judgment will often lead to very considerable encroachments on the original idea of an exact copy. It is impossible, for instance, even in the plainest prose, to give an Englishman ignorant of German any idea, through translation, of the style in which many German writers express themselves. A German sentence, partly by the habit of the language, partly by the vice of the writer, is often a thing so vast, complex, and involved, that it must be cut up into half a dozen separate sentences before it can assume the shape of readable and intelli- gible English. In like manner with the English language, it is impracticable to give an exact facsimile of some of the Greek metres, because the rhythmical constitution and habit of our tongue imperatively repels the attempt. Take, for instance, the splendid chorus in the opening of The Persians, written in what metricians call the Ionic a REMARKS ON ENGLISH HEXAMETERS. 281 minori measure, and attempt a metrical transference of that into English : — 7T€7repa/<€i' [xkv 6 TrcpckirToXis ^'817 j3a(Tl\eiOv and elsewhere — he may depend upon it the eyes of Europe are not directed to him at the pre- sent moment ; his Messiah, we are afraid, will never make one-tenth part of the noise in Europe that was made by that windy production of the same name, in which Klop- stock, the German Milton (" yes a very German Milton !") vented his vaporous piety. On a late occasion taking it up (for Sunday reading), before getting to the end of the first act, we were so afflicted with a languid sensation, similar to what oppresses the stomach after large potations of weak tea, that we could proceed no further. In The Wanderer of his brother Alexander, there are no doubt individual passages of considerable lyric power and sub- limity ; but, as a whole, it is merely a feeble and broken echo of Ghilde Harold. To condemn all the larger pro- ductions of the recent Greek Muse wholesale, we will not venture, because we have not read them ; but what we have read, besides a great deal of false and exaggerated sentiment, labours under the general vice of rhetorical diffuseness, which must be violently cut down, before any high excellence can be achieved. Among the lighter warblings of the lyre, however, we have found several pieces, and hope to find more, that well deserve a place in any collection of Greek lyric poetry ; and even in much that is feeble or exaggerated we have been delighted to recognise a flush of nationality that is powerful to lend an engaging charm even to weakness. Patriotism, like charity, covers a multitude of sins. In the following ode, for instance, of Karatsoutscas, there is much that is juvenile in style, and overworked in the sentiment ;* but 1 Kind says that the author was only of the volume from which this extract twenty years of age at the publication is taken. POPULAR POETRY OF MODERN GREECE. 313 is so thoroughly Greek, and expresses so powerfully from the hot heart of Hellenic patriotism the faith in a mighty past, and an impending future of national glory, that it must be read with very great pleasure by all who sympathize with the hopes at present animating the best minds in Greece : — Panhellenics. With Parnassus' laurel wreath, the wreath aye green and never fading, Green in face of frosty winter, and rude Boreas harsh-invading ; With the laurel I will wreathe my lyre, a song of freedom raising To my country, Greece and all her mighty glory truly praising ; Happy if my well-nerved hand shall strike no feebly falling measure, If the ears that love the land shall drink my loyal strain with pleasure, If with song while I commend thee, One kind glance of fair approval thou, my country dear, shalt lend me ! ii. For the Mars that wasted Creta, Greece a stole of sorrow weareth ; For the Mars that crushed fair Creta, Greece her locks of beauty teareth. Creta, when the Mars that crushed thee, marched his club of terror shaking, Brandishing the sword, which flashing fills the tyrant's heart with quaking, Darkened was the ray that cometh from the disk of Phoebus streaming ; From its base in darkness rooted, to its peak with white snow gleaming, Men beheld high Ida brightening, Saw the seat of Jove the Thunderer flaming with the frequent lightning. in. In the Sultan's hall, the Sultan's wisest counsellors assemble, Seize their white beards with their hands, and inly puzzled think and tremble, How thy patriot fire, Creta, they may quench with tyrant's knavery ; And the powers of Europe lend a helping hand to fix thy slavery, Ply with threats each dastard heart, and bait with golden wiles the traitor ; And amid the faithless crew, — shame, mockery of nature ! He, whom Greece had made defender Of her rights — her Consul — he was the first to cry — Surrender ! IV. And the Greek that loves his country, when he saw his Cretan brother, Prostrate, in his brother's breast the rising pity could he smother ? Was that sacred fire extinguished, that with generous inspiration, When the stranger dared to touch her, filled the wide Hellenic nation ? Did the graves not ope their jaws, and forth with wrathful resurrection Pvush the troops of harnessed shades, to pledge their father land's protection ? Did the past not fire the present, In the hall of every burgher, in the hut of every peasant ? 314 POPULAR POETRY OF MODERN GREECE. V. No ! that fire is not extinguished in the heart of Hellas glowing ; It shall burn while earth shall stand, and while old Ocean's wave is flowing. Slavery oft hath stamped on slaves the love of their own degradation : But the type of years could never stamp with serf the free Greek nation. Cursed be they who bind the hands of Hellas when her bonds she breaketh ; Cursed who bar the gates of freedom, when the glorious start she taketh ; May the curse of Creeks united Lie upon them, like the Furies, when their breath consumes the blighted ! When the joyful news was speeded, that the sons of Crete had risen, All the people clapp'd their hands to hail the captive from his prison, All the women and the children leapt for joy ; and every temple Showed the votive gifts for thee, that none on thy young rights might trample. But the hope of Greeks was darkened, and their vows had no completion, And the men that hate her triumphed ; and their hatred found addition. Treachery vile hath triumphed o'er thee, Crete ; thou liest low ; and we in vain with bitter tears deplore thee. How should Europe, silly Europe, when the sign of death is plainly Hung out on a nation's forehead, try to cheat strong nature vainly ? Can a tree be bright with blossom, can its fruit be ripe and glowing, When a worm the pith consumeth, when no juice of life is flowing ? Even the water round the root, that with such busy care thou pourest, Feeds the rot that eats the heart of the frail life that thou restorest. When life's thread is broken, never Shall the wits of all the wisest bind it with their strong endeavour. VIII. I will speak it in a figure : like a house with many chambers Turkey stands — an old house hoary with the crust of long Decembers. Many a prideful year it witnessed, now it knows the hour of sorrow ; Tottering reels one wall to-day, and another falls to-morrow. Let the hand of man approach it, and, before its ruin bury Nobler piles and worthier mansions, with a wise precaution hurry Down to cast the crazy dwelling, And upraise a safer o'er it, and in beauty more excelling. IX. Europe, if a work thou seekest where thy toil shall find a blessing, For the waste wouldst plant a garden worthy of thy nicest dressing, List, and I will tell thee wisely how, being great, thou may'st be greater. Near to Turkey is a land, a little land where kindly Nature Such a power of brilliant beauty, and each comeliest grace has showered, That no tongue can tell the store of that rich grace with which 'twas dowered. 'Tis a lovely land, concealing Virtue, like the magnet's power, to seize the sense and charm the feeling. POPULAR POETRY OF MODERN GREECE. 315 x. In this land a people dwelleth, rich in high ancestral glory ; Clio names no race more noble in her roll of various story. Bound in darkness lay the Earth ; the precious light of knowledge perished ; Rule tyrannic, deeply rooted, spread its arms abroad and flourished. The forced sweat of all the nations, and their bright blood crimson flowing, Sucked a monstrous biform dragon, proud the double ensign showing Of the crown to monarchs given, And the mitre of the priest who serves the Lord that rules in Heaven. XI. In the claws of this Chimera torn humanity lay bleeding. From the East a wasting fire-flood came, and wildly westward speeding, Spread to Earth's remotest corner, death and devastation dealing ; But unharmed amid the deluge stood the Hellenic tribe, revealing A miraculous virtue stable : by despotic sway surrounded, Greece preserved her laws and freedom undisturbed and unconfounded ; She serene and independent, All the world a march of tyrants, with a train of serfs attendant. Strong and self-sustained Greece never to a sacred priestly college Sold her right of thought : free-branching flowed the common stream of knowledge. Brutish gods she never worshipped, crocodiles and creeping creatures, But Apollo and the Muses, gods with bright benignant features. Pyramids she never piled, colossal rows of Sphynxes keeping "Watch around the solemn Dead, in their cold stone-chambers sleeping ; But she raised the glorious temple, With its clear sun-fronting rock, and its pillar'd ranges ample. XIII. In this land the seed of Poesy, by the gods benignly planted, Swelled and grew to leafy grandeur. Orpheus here and Linus chanted Songs that stirred the rooted forest, stayed the flood, and tamed the lion ; Here the stones in rhythmic order rose to please thy lute, Amphion ; Here the far career of thought first opened on the wondering nations ; Here of every art were laid, of every science, sure foundations ; And all subtle searching spirits Loved to graft their art with thoughts which all the world from Greece inherits. But alas ! a savage storm swept o'er the land, before whose power Even their trees uprooted fell, the fair trees of the Grecian bower, And the seed of truth was wafted where a cool-brained race, laborious, Reaped, from fields which thou hadst sown, an intellectual harvest glorious ; And, when feasting on the fragrance of thy fruitful gardens, never Dreamt to cast a grateful glance on thee, of these fair gifts the giver. Greece their stumbling march assisted, But in their conceit no Greece in all the vasty world existed. 316 POPULAR POETRY OF MODERN GREECE. Where the Muse of iEschylus soared on wings of solemn chorus ample, Tartar hordes the soil of Hellas with unlettered feet did trample, Then when Rigas, mighty martyr, gathered in the inspiration Of his war-song all the slender hopes that still sustained his nation. On his head the axe descended, lay his laurel crushed and bloody ; But from that free song came forth a wondrous blossom bright and ruddy ; As from a mother's throes laborious Greece was born anew in him, and Freedom rose to life victorious. xvi. Look upon the sleeping infant, lift, ye wise, your high doxology ! Come, diplomatists that finger nations with your cold phrenology, Come and touch it ! — a bright future in its noble features shining Can ye read, or does that glance outrun your powers of dull divining ? Seest thou how upon its healthful cheek the rosy beauty gloweth, Even as fair Aurora's beauty, when her fingers red she showeth, And prepares the joys which follow, When the awakened world shall blush beneath the full blaze of Apollo. XVII. Yes, my country, thou shalt never cheat the hopes of them that love thee ; Glows my heart with heat from thee, whose far-shed radiance shall approve thee To the good ; the scoffer's doubts thou shalt dispel with thy appearing. Thou shalt be a Titan, glorious through the fields of Heaven careering, Thou shalt ride thy car sublime, the bright-maned steeds thy word obeying, On the green Earth's face vivific beams of light and heat outraying. So ! in rifts, where thou art nighing, Opes the blue serene, and all the clouds that darkly lowered are flying ! XVIII. In thy cradle, my country, when thy baby-life was sleeping, In thy veins the unseen virtue of immortal gods was leaping ; When the sibilant brood assailed thee, basilisk and amphisbena, With thy young arms thou didst crush them, like the strong son of Alcmena. When their venomous spires voluminous rolled around thee, thou didst seize them, And with sudden grasp resistless like the soft clay thou did squeeze them ; And before the infant scathless Fell the terrible snake of Asia, fell the snake of Egypt breathless. Thou hast fought, and art victorious ; on thy laurels thou repairest Now thy strength ; thou needest rest to heal the bleeding wounds thou bearest. Sleep like ocean when the windless air no swelling wave is stirring, Soft as noon of sultry summer, when no wing of bird is whirring ; But like ocean thou shalt waken, when its ruffled evening mirror Bristles round the pale sea-farer, with a thousand crests of terror, When the scowling rack is drifting, And to smite the sheer black cliff his scourge the god of waves is lifting. POPULAR POETRY OF MODERN GREECE. 317 xx. Like an old and toothless lion, when its strength is all departed, Turkey roars. Up, Greek, and seize Alcides' club, the mighty-hearted ; And with steady foot firm planted, and with strong hand overpowering, Prostrate lay with deadly blow the savage monster, blood-devouring ; Let it fall, and in its fall disgorge the innocent blood it swallowed ! . Wrap its shaggy hide around thee, and bring back the great time-hallowed Kingdom, which the Caesar glorious, When the Cross subdued the nations, planted in the East victorious. It were a waste of time to criticise in detail the faults of this poem ; but the conception is good ; and, were the tone considerably subdued in some parts, the eifect would be much increased. In favourable contrast with the high rhetorical swell of the Panhellenics, stands the plaintive simplicity of the following little poem by Alexander Ypsilante, the ill-starred and crude originator of the first movement of the Greek revolution in Moldavia. The little bird represents, of course, the condition and feel- ings of a Greek in Europe without a Greece : — The Bird's Lament. Poor little bird, Fluttering low, Weary and lone, Where dost thou go ? Seekest thou rest, Near in thy nest, Poor little bird ? No nest have I ; But I flutter and fly To and fro. I seek and I find No rest to my wing ; Bliss is to me A forbidden thing, Wherever I go. I had a country when I was young ; And my hope was strong As I poured my song The white-flowered myrtle trees among, When I was young. I sat on the tree, I sang late and early, 318 POPULAR POETRY OF MODERN GREECE. I had a mate, and I loved her dearly, And she loved me. Down came a hawk with swift swoop from the sky And tore my joy from before mine eye ; And spoiled my rest, And robbed my nest, And left me bare to lie. Since then all cheerless and hopeless I roam, Without a friend, without a home. With weary wing, and wail more weary, I wander o'er the world so dreary ; With the wind I roam, Till I find a home Where no wing of the weary is stirred ; Where the monarch so proud Shall sleep with the crowd, And the hawk from the sky Shall harmless lie With the poor little innocent bird. We conclude with a little piece of some historical in- terest, written no doubt shortly after the taking of Con- stantinople by the Turks in 1453, and which points to a political consummation in which no Greek true to his blood and to his traditions refuses to indulge. We give the translation literal in the present case, with the original prefixed, that the student may have before him a fair specimen of the average popular Greek of the fif- teenth century : — Ufjpav ty)V iroXiv 7rfjpdv tv]v, 7rr}pav ttjv *2a\oviKr)v ! Urjpav kcu ttjv dytdv "Eoffnav, to fieya fJLovacrT7]pL, II' ef^e rpiaKocr la o-^/zavrpa, kou i^-rjvra Svo KafxTrdvats' Ka#e Ka/nrdva kou Trcnrnas KaBk Trainras kcu Siokos. 2t/xa vd ftyovv rot ayia, k' 6 /3acnAeas rov k6o-{mov, Kou aretATe Adyov els rrjv (ppayKidv, vol epOovv vd ra iridcrovv, Nd irdpovv rov ^pvcrbv crravpov, kcu t aytov evayyeAiov, Kat ttjv ayiav rpdire^av vd fxrj rrjv dfJLoXvvovv. 2dv t aKovcrei r) Aecr7roiva, 8aKpv£ovv rj ei/cdves* 2co7ra, Kvpia, Secnroiva ! firj K/Vat^s, /jlyj SaKpv^rjS, ITaAe fi€ xpovovs, /jl€ KcupovSj TrdXc Slkol crov tTvai. POPULAR POETRY OF MODERN GREECE. 319 LITERAL TRANSLATION. They have taken the city — they have taken it — they have taken Thessalonica ! They have taken also St. Sophia, the large minster Which had three hundred altar-bells, and sixty-two bells in the steeple, And to every bell a priest and to every priest a deacon. And when the Most Holy went out, and the Lord of the World, A voice was wafted from heaven, from the mouth of angels, " Leave off your singing of psalms, set down the Most Holy, And send word to the land of the Franks, that they may come and take it ; That they may take the golden cross, and the holy gospel, And the holy table, that the infidels may not pollute it." When our Lady heard this her images wept ; "Be appeased, Sovran Lady, and do not weep, For again, with the years and the seasons, again the minster will be yours." If this lyric is destined to be anything more than a fine dream, the modern Hellenes, with such a big neigh- bour as Russia, and such slippery spectators as England and France, will require to learn the elements of a certain political wisdom to which they have hitherto been stran- : gers ; and, even with that wisdom, it may be as easy for the Muscovite, some fine day, to snap up Constantinople, as for a big trout to catch a fly. Perhaps, however, the patriotic minstrel only meant, that Constantinople would one day come back to the possession, not indeed of the Greek people, but of the Greek church. If this issue be enough to realize the pious prayer, then its fulfil- ment is more than likely ; for that the cross will at no distant period take the place of the crescent on the dome of St. Sophia is one of the safest political prophecies on which, in the present state of Europe, a prudent man may venture. ON THE PLACE AND POWEB OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. On the subject of accent and quantity as elements of human speech, there has been such an immense amount of confusion, arising from vague phraseology, that in renew- ing the discussion nothing seems more necessary than to start with a careful and accurate definition of terms, and that a definition not taken from books, the dumb bearers of a dead tradition, but from the living facts of nature, and the permanent qualities belonging to articu- lated breath. Now, if we observe accurately the natural and necessary affections of words in human discourse, con- sidered merely as a succession of compact little wholes of articulated breath, without regard to their signification, we shall find that all the affections of which they are capable amount to four. Either (1), the mass of articu- lated breath which we call a word is sent forth in a com- paratively small volume, as in the case of a common gun, or it is sent forth in large volume, as in the case of a Lan- caster gun ; this is a mere affair of bulk, in virtue of which alone it is manifest that any word rolled forth from the lungs of a Stentor must be a different thing from the same mass of sound emitted from a less capacious bellows. In common language this difference is marked by the words loud and low. A broader wave of air impelled ON ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 321 against the acoustic machinery of the ear will always make a more powerful impression independent of any other consideration. But (2), an equal or a stronger im- pression may be made on the ear by a less volume of sound, if it be sent forth with such an amount of concen- trated energy and force as to compensate for its deficiency in mass. A more sharp and intense clap of thunder, for instance, may in this way affect the ear more powerfully than a greater peal less vigorously sent forth and more widely spread. The affection of sound brought into action here is what in language we generally call stress or emphasis ; and it depends altogether on the intensity of the projectile force, and gives to speech the qualification of more or less forcible. But (3), this force may often be, and very naturally is, accompanied with another affection of sound altogether distinct, viz., the sound may be deep and grave, or high and sharp, corresponding to what in music we call bass and treble notes. The analogy between music and articulate speech is here so striking, that it has passed into common use ; as when we talk of a person speaking in a high or a low key, in a monotone, or in a deep low sepulchral tone, and so forth. And in reference to single words, we are accustomed to say, that the acute accent stands on syllables pronounced in an elevated tone, and the grave on those pronounced with a low tone. The only difference between the musical scale and the scale of articulate speech in this view is, that the latter, besides being much narrower in its compass, rises or sinks, not by mathematically calculated intervals, but by a mere upward or downward slide, not divided by any definite intervals. The true connexion of these slides with the general doc- trine of accent has been well set forth by Mr. Walker, the author of the Pronouncing Dictionary, in a separate x • 322 ON THE PLACE AND POWER treatise. 1 (4). The fourth affection of articulated sound is that which is familiarly known to scholars and schoolboys under the name of quantity, and signifies simply the greater or less duration of time during which the sound continues to impress the ear. For it is manifest that any sound may be produced either by a sudden stroke, or jerk, or by a traction prolonged to any extent. In grammar a short vowel corresponds to a quaver or semi- quaver in music, and a long vowel to a crotchet or minim, according to the ratio of the movement. Now it should seem to be pretty plain at the outset, to all persons whose ears have been exercised in a very slight degree to discern the differences of articulate sounds, that what is called accent in grammar has to do only with the second and third of the above four elements, and not at al. with the first or fourth ; in other words, that the accent of a word is totally distinct both from the volume of voice with which the word is enunciated, and the length of time during which the speaker dwells on the syllable. Never- theless, such is the confusion which learned writers have introduced into this subject, that it is necessary at the very outset to enter a caveat against a very prevalent notion that the placing of the acute accent on a syllable naturally or necessarily implies a prolongation of the sounc of the accented vowel ; or, in other words, that to accent a syllable without making it long is impossible. In music no performer ever dreams that the rhythmical beat on th( first, we shall say, of three quavers — that is jig time- necessarily turns the quaver into a crotchet. A musiciar making such an assertion would simply be deemed drunk 1 A Key to the Classical Pronuncia- Latin Accent and Quantity. By Jokt ion of Greek and Latin Proper Names ; Walker. London, 1827. with Observations on the Greek and OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 323 or mad ; nor does it make the slightest difference in the quantity of the note receiving the musical accent, whether in respect of elevation of tone it stands high or low in the scale. It is understood by every girl who fingers the piano, that the elevation of the note, the duration of the note, and the rhythmical emphasis upon the note, are three essentially different things which never interfere with one another. But the moment we transfer this case to the analogous domain of spoken accent, — the certus quidam dicendi cantus, as Cicero called it, — we find our- selves involved in a region of confusion and contradiction I with regard to the simplest matters, than which few things can be imagined more humiliating to human reason. ) For however divergent the printed opinions of the learned | may sound, that the relative facts are exactly the same in i the case of spoken speech, as of song or played notes, is i beyond question. A single example will make this evi- i dent. The first syllable of po'-tent, for instance, accord- ing to a well-known rule in the English language, is long; , but the first syllable of the Latin word from which the .English comes is short, pot' -ens, while the accent is on the I same syllable in both languages. Now, it surely will not be alleged, in obedience to the dictates of any sane ear, that in pronouncing the Latin word I am obliged to call it po-tens, after the English fashion, on account of the tyrannic force of the acute accent. It seems, neverthe- less, that British schoolmasters and professors have acted Ainder the notion that some compulsion of this kind exists ; for as a rule they say bo'-nus, and not bon'-us, though they know very well that the first syllable of this word is not long, as in the English word po-tion, but short, as in wior-al. Such confusion of ideas on a very simple matter is a phenomenon so strange, that some reason may justly 324 ON THE PLACE AND POWER be demanded for its existence ; and on reflection I find two reasons principally that seem to account for it. The first is the confounding of a really long quantity with that predominance of a sound to the ear which is a necessary element of all accentuation. Thus, when I take the word tep'-id, and form the abstract substantive from it — tepid' - ity, by changing the place of the accent from the first syllable of the adjective to the second, I certainly have given a prominence to the short i which it did not possess before, and a prominence, no doubt, which though it con- sists principally in force, emphasis, or stress, may also carry along with it a certain dilatation of the tenuous vowel, so that it is really longer in the substantive, being accented, than when it was slurred over without emphasis in the adjective. But, though this is quite true, it is alto- gether false "to say that the vowel has been made long according to the comparative value of prosodial quantity ; for, if the second syllable of tepid' -ity be compared, not with the last syllable of the adjective tepid, but with the same syllable of the substantive, as mispronounced by some slow, deliberate Scot — tepl'-dity, tepee-dity — we shall see that the vowel i, for all rhythmical purposes, still re- mains short. The other cause which presents itself to explain the confusion of English ears on this subject is the doctrine of what the Greek and Roman grammarians call length by position. According to this doctrine, vowel before two consonants is long. What this means we may clearly conceive by the example of such words as gold, ghost, in English, or Pabst or Obst in German ; but though the vowels in these words are unquestionably long in both languages, they are so only exceptionally, the rule both in English and German being that a vowel before two consonants is short. Of this rule the word short itself OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 325 may be taken as an excellent example ; which, if it occurred in a Greek chorus, by the law of position, would be sung short, with the o prolonged, like o in shore. Now, with this classical analogy in their ears, or rather in their head (for it is by no means certain that all those authors who have written on this subject did use their ears), when I pronounce such a word as prim! -rose or 81' -bow, it is not at all uncommon for English scholars to say, and obsti- nately to insist, that the accent on the first syllable of these words is necessarily accompanied by a prolongation of the vowel. But this is a judgment of the question, not by the living fact of the sound, but by the doctrine of an old book about the sound. And as to what the old book 1 says, we in fact do not know whether length by position meant a habitual prolongation of the vowel sound in com- mon discourse, as in our words gold, told, sold, ghost, most, or only a poetical licence ; that is to say, whether the genitive plural of avr\p, of which the penult is short, was really pronounced awndrone or androne in prose. I for one am strongly inclined to think that the latter is the true fact of the case ; for, if it had been otherwise, would it not have been a more correct phraseology in the gram- marian to say that a vowel before two consonants is naturally long ? But when they tell us that a vowel which is naturally short becomes long when two consonants follow, this looks rather like an artificial exception than a natural rule. And I am inclined to think that such an exceptional rule was introduced from sheer necessity, like the long o in certain comparatives, such as aocjxorepos, because, without such a licence, really long syllables in sufficient abundance would not have been found in the language for the necessities of the early dactylico-spondaic poetry. As to any inherent natural necessity in the rule, 326 ON THE PLACE AND POWER such an idea cannot be entertained for a moment ; for the vowel is then most easily prolonged — as in the English words po'-tent, no-tion, na'-tion, pa' -tent, where it is kept separate in spelling from the influence of the succeeding consonant or consonants, which, as in por'-tion, rather act by cutting the breath short, and preventing the prolonga- tion of the vowel. The influence of the consonant in shortening the vowel will be apparent in comparing the words nom-inal and Leb'-anon with no-tional and la'-hial; nor does the addition of a second consonant in any percep- tible way alter the case. If the first syllable in prim is manifestly short, it is certainly not made long by the addition of the long syllable rose in the noun prim -rose, a word which, in the relative values of its final and penult syllables, corresponds exactly to a whole host of Greek words which usher in a long final by a short accented penult, as in nxdrcov, the name of the great philosopher of Idealism, in Anglicising which, besides attenuating the vowel, we elongate the short penult, according to the practice of our own language. It will now be distinctly understood, as a starting- point to the present inquiry, that by accent I mean merely a certain predominance, emphasis, or stress given to one syllable of a word above another, in virtue of a certain greater intensity of force in the articulated breath ; this increased intensity being naturally in many cases, but not necessarily in all cases, accompanied by an elevation in the key of the voice. My observations do not include either rhetorical accent, which affects whole sentences and clauses, or national accent, which, in addition to rhetorical accent, often includes some favourite sound, note, or vocal mannerism characteristic of different peoples. The general question to which we shall now attempt a OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 327 scientific answer is the following — What are the great leading principles on which accent, as a phenomenon oi articulate speech, depends ? Are there any such principles, or is it a matter of mere arbitrary association, fashion, and habit ? and, in the comparison of different languages what is the standard of value in respect of their accentual cha- racter ? Does sesthetical science contain any general rules which might enable us to measure the value of accents, as we do the value of sounds in language, when, for instance, we say that Italian is a more harmonious language than Gaelic, and Greek a more euphonious language than Latin ? In answering this question I would remark, in the first place, that there is no such thing as a language altogether without accent ; only a machine cou]d produce a continu- ous series of sounds in undistinguished monotonous repe- titions like the turn, turn, turn of a drum ; a rational being using words for a rational purpose to manifest his thoughts and feelings necessarily accents both words and sentences in some way or other. When, therefore, we find it stated in Adam Smith's Essay on Language, and other English writers, that the French have no accent in their words, this is either a gross mistake, or it must be understood to mean that the French do not give such a decided and marked preponderance to one syllable of the word as the English do ; which is very true, as any man may see in comparing the English velocity with the French velocite. But this is merely a difference in the quantity and quality of accent, not a contrast betwixt accent and no accent. The second postulate of all rational discussion on this sub- ject is, that the significant utterance of articulate breath, like every other manifestation of reason-moulded sense, is a part of sesthetical science, and subject to the same necessary laws which determine the excellence of a pic- 328 ON THE PLACE AND POWER ture, a poem, or a piece of music. No doubt, in the enunciation of words as in all the fine arts, fashion may often prevail to such an extent as in some cases to usurp the place of reason and propriety ; but the prevalence of false taste in any department of art does not affect the certainty of the eternal principles by which it is regu- lated, any more than the prevalence of murders or lies amongst any people can take away from the essential superiority of love to hatred, and of truth to falsehood, in all societies of reasonable beings. We are therefore justly entitled to look for a standard of excellence in the matter of orthoepy, no less certain than the standard of truth in morals or mathematics ; as, indeed, all things in the world being either directly or indirectly the neces- sary effluence of the Divine reason, must, in their first roots and foundations, be equally rational and equally necessary. Now, in looking for the necessary conditions on which the comparative excellence of accentual systems may depend, we find that they may be reduced to the four following heads : — 1. Significance. 3. Variety. 2. Euphony. 4. Convenience. And first, that Significance must be a main point in all accentual systems is manifest from the very nature of accent. For why should a man give predominance to one syllable in a word more than to another, unless that he means to call special attention to the significance of that syllable ? Nay, it may often be essential to the effect intended to be produced by the word, that its most significant syllable should be emphasized, as when Lord Derby lately said that the adoption of the Prussian system of making every citizen a sol dier would not bea OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 329 i progression but a retrogression. No doubt, in order to express such an accentual contrast as this, the English language departs from its usual fashion of accenting these words ; but this only proves that the English method of : accentuation in this case is a mere fashion, founded on no . natural law, and which accordingly must yield to the higher law of emphatic significance, when nature, like I murder, will out. And here we may observe that the English, as a merely derivative and mixed language, is by no means a favourable one for exhibiting the natural and normal laws of a rational accentuation. Neither, so far as I know, is there any language whose orthoepy pre- sents so many anomalies, and where changes entirely - reasonless and arbitrary require only the stamp of aristo- cratic or academic whim to give them currency. With regard, however, to the natural preponderance of the - contrasting element in compound words, the Saxon part of our language affords obvious examples of its recogni- tion ; as when we say, out' -side and in' -side, back? -wards and for 1 -wards, up-hill and down'-hill, male and female. So in the names of the Highland clans, as MacBain, MacDonald, MacGrigor, etc., the emphasis does not lie on the common element, the Mac, but on the distinctive element to which the other is attached ; and in this view • our Saxon pronunciation of Macintosh and Mdclntyre affords two very good examples of words where custom and fashion have inverted the natural and significant place of the accent. In the Greek language this most natural of all accentual laws operates in all such com- pounds as a/capTTO?, airais, avvoSos, irdpohos, with which we may contrast the English fruitless, childless, where the accent is on the root, and not, where it ought naturally to be, on the contrasting element of the compound. In the 330 ON THE PLACE AND POWER same category with this I am inclined to place the accent on the augment in Greek, as in ervtya, rervfificu ; for it is the augment here manifestly that contains the element of past time which is distinctive of the tense, being equiva- lent in effect — whatever its original meaning may have been — to / did strike, as opposed to / am striking. The \ same desire to call attention to the distinctive element may have determined the Greeks to accent the penult of all diminutives, contrary to their usual practice, in words with a short final syllable, as in iraihlov, iraihio-icos, k.t.\. Under this head I am sorry to record my dissent from a German writer of acknowledged excellence on this sub- ject— Br. Karl Gottling. 1 This learned writer lays down the maxim in the first place, that in the Greek language the accent falls on the syllable containing the principal idea of the word ; and, accordingly, he says that in Xe^w and other verbs not pure it falls on the penult, because this syllable is the root, and the root, as containing the principal idea of the word, is naturally emphasized. Now, looking back to the first framers of a language, I cannot see in this case any reason why the root syllable should have received the accent rather than the termination, which, for the sake of distinction and contrast, is added to the root. If we say anapiro^, because we wish to call attention to the negative particle, why should we not say Xeyco calling attention to the personal pronoun ; as, in fact, we do say in English, quoth I', quoth he ? And in the same way with regard to nouns, as the terminations of the cases were originally expressions of relation, attached to the noun for the sake of emphasis and contrast, I do not see why the schoolboy fashion of declining dominus- 1 Elements of Greek Accentuation, from the German. London : Whitaker. 1831. OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 331 i-o'-um — should not have been the original one. And so in the case of the German brauerEi and the Scotch brewer&E as contrasted with the English brewery; for though no doubt it may be said that as the root brew contains the principal idea, the accent should naturally be there, and this is what Gottling says, yet it may with more right be said, that what is intended to be emphasized here is i not mere brewing, but a place for brewing, and that the . syllable denoting the place receives the accent as appro- priately as the terminations jpiov, elov, and d>v, when used j for the same purpose in Greek. Only so much truth, therefore, can I perceive to lie in Gottling's principle, as to admit that, so soon as the original signification of | terminations is lost, and people commence to supply their place by prepositions, pronouns, and other separate words, whose significance is felt — then, and not till then, b can the accent on the root syllable be regarded as natural I and normal in language. Thus, when the German says Hdbe, laying the stress on the first syllable of the first : person singular present indicative of the verb to have, this is natural and normal, because the termination e has no significance to him, and could receive an accent only from a senseless fashion, not from a natural propriety. On the other hand, in Ab'gdbe, Hingdbe, Ziigabe, and similar compounds, the accent is properly placed on the contrasting element of the compound, of which the signi- ficance is strongly felt. The next element we have to take into consideration in measuring the value of different accentual systems is Euphony. The simple mention of this word will suffice to show how very one-sided a notion it was in Gottling, that the accent, as a general principle, should always be on the root syllable, as being the .most significant. If 332 ON THE PLACE AND POWER man were only a logical animal, this might be all very well as an a priori ideal of a perfect accentual system ; but he is also, if not always at starting, certainly when fairly developed, an sesthetical animal, which may be allowed on occasions to sacrifice the significance of ideas to the luxury of sounds. And, if this is true of man gene- rally, it is certainly so a fortiori of the Greeks, whose whole culture grew out of music, and remained in the closest connexion with it to the very end of their classical period. Supposing, therefore, that with this most musical and artistic of all peoples a regard to the mere luxury of sound had, in certain cases, determined the position of the accent, let us ask in what way this determination would naturally manifest itself? The answer is obvious. In richly terminational languages such as the Greek, where the terminations are not insig- nificant little short vowels or syllables, as in the German Gabe, Buche, Briider, etc., but deep, full-rolling, pro- longed vowel-syllables, such as wv, ot?, ao, acov, and oio, there might exist a very natural tendency to place the accent on these syllables, — not, of course, because there is any necessary connexion, as some persons say, between accenting a syllable and lengthening it, but because when a syllable by the presence of a long vowel actually is long, the placing of the accent on it is the most certain way both to bring out the full length of the vowel, and to insure the permanence of the full musical value of the syllable, so long as the language lasts. For whatever other syllables of a word may from carelessness, or haste, or reasonless fashion, be cheated of their natural quantity, the accented syllable will always most stoutly maintain its rights, even if it be a short syllable, much more if it be a long. To illustrate this by a familiar example ; in OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 333 the famous Homeric line (II. i. 49), in which the twang of Apollo's bow is described, Beivr) Be tcXayyv yever apyvpeoto fiiolo, it is manifest both that the euphony of the line lies mainly in the two terminations in oio, though these syl- lables are certainly not the significant ones in the verse ; and further, that this verse is much more beautiful when recited with the rhythmical accent on both the full- sounding penults, than when, according to the prose accen- tuation, it emphasizes only the oi of the last word. The coincidence of the termination with the accent therefore . is favourable to music ; and it is favourable also as a bar to the injury which time is always ready to inflict on final unaccented syllables. Now, with this principle to guide us, we shall have no difficulty in seeing the cause of one peculiar excellence which the ancient Roman critics recognised in the Greek, as contrasted with their own tongue, in respect of the accentual system. For, as the Romans in no word placed the accent on the last syllable, it followed that they could enjoy the rich auricular luxury of a grand terminational unison of accent and quantity only in the case of words whose ; terminations are dissyllabic. Thus, they dealt largely in final trochees — trochees both by accent and quan- tity, in such words as sermonis, penndram, clomino 1 - rura, legis, probavit, voluptatem, and so forth, but could not say dominos, or Maecenas, or any word accented in the same way as in English our engineer, volunteer, evade, capsize, demise. On the other hand, the Greek terminational accent is pretty equally divided between trochaic terminations such as oio, fyCkovai, rv^delo-a, p,v0o$, o-wfia, fiaWov, and oxytone endings, such as dya6cov, Xaffwv, 334 ON THE PLACE AND POWER Tv6eU, (j)i\€L<;. Of the prevalence of the oxytone accent in Greek, especially in large groups of adjectives and substantives, not to mention the whole army of pre- positions, and certain familiar parts of verbs, any one may convince himself by taking a sentence at random from a Greek book ; and the effect of this on the music of the sentence will be evident to the dullest ear. Some- times a whole sentence runs on with a succession of accented terminational syllables, a peculiarity which, with- out any rhetorical intention, arises naturally from the number of oxytone substantives and adjectives, and the additional fact that all substantives of the first declen- sion, whatever the accent of their termination may be, receive a long rolling accent on the last syllable of the genitive plural, while all monosyllables of the third de- clension, by a law common both to Greek and Sanscrit, transfer the accent from the radical syllable to the ter- mination in the genitive and dative cases of both numbers. Take a passage from Plato's Republic as an example : — Otre dyjpevral 7ravres, ot re /u^tcu, 7roAAot fxev ot Trepl tc\ cr^^/tara re koX xpwfiaTa, 7roAXofc Se ot irtpl fJLOvv\a/cr]v KaraXveiv WKTepivrjv h&acncofiev, and it is plain that in the only two places where a clash does occur between the spoken accent and the rhythmical beat, according to the Latinized accent, that clash dis- appears the moment the words are read according to their natural Greek accentuation. And so, not only in Iambic verse, but in every verse whatever, the introduction of the Latin accent must jar with the rhythmical flow of the line wherever the rhythmical stroke falls, as it con- stantly does, on the last syllable of a word. This prac- tical objection therefore vanishes in smoke. That gross- eared and ill-trained persons may be enabled to receive the harmonies of the two last feet in a Homeric line, with a little less trouble, or with no trouble at all, no wise educator can deem a sufficient reason for invading the whole inherited intonation of the finest language in the world, with sounds which, however proper on the banks of their native Tiber, on the banks of the Ilissus must be felt to be a gross barbarism. The rhythmical objection from the practical side is, in fact, only an ingenious apology to cover carelessness, to prop prejudice, and to mask with an attitude of apparent utility a peda- gogic procedure, alike unscientific in principle and self- contradictory in practice. Finally, if those who delight themselves in exaggerat- ing imaginary difficulties have any honest desire to see how they disappear in the actual business of teaching, let them come to me ; for I am a practical man, and speak from the experience of half a lifetime. I teach Greek on the principle that the ear is the natural and legitimate OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 393 organ which must be addressed in the first place. I pronounce every word according to its just accent and quantity, allowing its own natural emphasis to sway the proper syllable of the Greek word, just as the Latin accent emphasizes the proper syllable of the Latin word, taking special care at the same time, that in no case shall the emphasis of the accent be drawn into a prolongation of a short vowel. In the matter of quantity, I allow length by position to be pronounced short, according to the English habit, partly because I do not feel sure that this length was anything but a metrical licence unknown to prose, partly because I should not think it advisable to encumber the English light-horseman with a greater weight of heavy Spondaic armour than he can conveniently carry. On the elevation of tone which naturally accom- panies the stress, and indeed always seems to have done so at the end of a clause, I do not curiously insist, the accent being sufficiently marked without it. As little do I endeavour to distinguish between a long accented syllable, as in ^vi), and a circumflex, as in fiaXkop, though I have not the slightest difficulty myself in bringing out the combination of rising and falling inflexion on the same syllable which the circumflex properly denotes. Thus, in the reading of prose, which should be continued assiduously for six months or a year before poetry is meddled with : I then take up Homer, and forthwith intimate to my students that, as the whole doctrine of Greek metres was a part of the science of music, it necessarily followed the laws of that science, and can be understood only by an entire subordination or sinking of the spoken accent in the first place, and a recitation ac- cording to the regularly recurrent beats of the rhythm. This, which teachers imagine to be so difficult, is one of 2 c 394 ON ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. the easiest things in the world. Most human beings have ears, and can beat time. Even serpents, and elephants, and dancing bears can do this. And in order that the rhythm may be thoroughly worked into the ear, I have no objection even to what may be called a little sing-song at starting; but the pupil, of course, as he advances, must be trained to counteract the monotony of mere rhythm by that variety which a proper attention to ex- pression and punctuation produces. In this way the whole perplexing and tedious doctrine of accent and quantity is learned from beginning to end by the ear; the pain of prosody becomes a pleasure ; accent and quantity learn to observe their proper bounds, each, happy in his recognised domain, forgetting all thought of making a hostile invasion into the territory of the other. The only difficulty in the matter arises from the necessity of teach- ing a number of thoughtless and indifferent young men to unlearn all that lumber of false quantities and false accents which has either been systematically built up, or care- lessly allowed to accumulate in the schools ; but this is a difficulty which it is in the power of schoolmasters, and of schoolmasters alone, radically to remove. And I feel con- vinced that, so soon as a radical reform in this matter shall be seriously undertaken by teachers, not only will the inculcation of classical Greek be much facilitated, but the organs of utterance being rendered more flexible and more amenable to training, will accommodate themselves to the characteristic peculiarities of German, French, and other living orthoepies, with an aptitude the want of which is now so frequently lamented. ijirtntrtj at tfje IStotnburgJ) 5Snt&«3ttg $resa By Thomas and Archibald Constable, Printers to Her Majesty. . / Bedford Street, Covent Garden, London, October 1 8 73. Macmillan & Co:s Catalogue of Works in Mathematics and Physical Science; including Pure and Affiled Mathe- matics; Physics, Astronomy, Geology, Chemlstry, Zoology, Botany; Physiology, Anatomy, and Medical Works generally ; and of Works in Mental and Moral Phllosophy and Allied Subjects. MATHEMATICS. Airy.— Works by Sir G. B. 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As the laws of Magnetic Force have been experimentally examined, MATHEMATICS. ivith philosophical accuracy, only in its connection with iron and steel, and in the influence excited by the earth as a whole, the accurate portions of this work are confined to the investigations con~ nected with these metals and the earth. The latter part of the work, hozvever, treats in a more general way of the laws of the connection between Magnetism on the one hand and Galvanism and Thermo-Electricity on the other. The work is divided into Iwelve Sections, and each section into numbered articles, each of which states concisely and clearly the subject of the following paragraphs. Ball (R. S., A.M.) — experimental mechanics, a Course of Lectures delivered at the Royal College of Science for Ireland. By Robert Stawell Ball, A. M. , Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics in the Royal College of Science for Ireland (Science and Art Department). Royal 8vo. \6s. The author's aim in these twenty Lectures has been to create in the mind of the student physical ideas corresponding to theoretical laws, and thus to produce a work which may be regarded either as a sup- plement or an introduction to manuals of theoretic mechanics. To realize this design, the copious use of experimental illustrations was necessary. The apparatus used in the Lectures and figured in the volume has been principally built up from Professor Willis's most admirable system. In the selection of the subjects, the questioji of fii'actical utility has in many cases been regarded as the one of para- mount importance, and it is believed that the mode of treatment which is adopted is ?nore or less original. This is especially the case in the Lectures relating to friction, to the mechanical powers, to the strength of timber and structures, to the lazvs of motion, and to the pendulum. The illustrations, drawn from the apparatus, are nearly all original and are beautifully exe- cuted. "Ln our reading we have not met with any book of the sort in English." — Mechanics' Magazine. Bayma. — THE ELEMENTS OF MOLECULAR MECHA- NICS. By Joseph Bayma, S.J., Professor of Philosophy, Stonyhurst College. Demy 8vo. cloth. IOj-. 6d. Of the twelve Books into which this treatise is divided, the first and second give the demonstration of the principles which bear directly on the constitution and the properties of matter. The next A 2 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. three books contain a series of theorems and of problems on the laws of motion of elementary substances. In the sixth and seventh, the mechanical constitution of molectiles is investigated and determined: and by it the general properties of bodies are explained. The eighth book treats of Juminiferous ether. The ninth explains some special properties of bodies. The tenth and eleventh contain a radical and lengthy investigation of chemical principles and relations, which may lead to practical results of high importance. The twelfth and last book treats of molecular masses, distances, and pozvers. Boole. — Works by G. Boole, D.C.L, F.R.S., Professor of Mathematics in the Queen's University, Ireland : — A TREATISE ON DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS. Third Edition. Edited by I. Todhunter. Crown 8vo. cloth. 14s. Professor Boole has endeavoured in this treatise to convey as complete an account of the present state of knozvledge on the subject of Dif- ferential Equations, as was consistent with the idea of a work in- tended, primarily, for elementary instrtiction. The earlier sections of each chapter contain that kind of matter which has usually been thought suitable for the beginner, while the latter ones are devoted either to an account of recent discovery, or the discussion of such deeper questions of principle as are likely to present themselves to the reflective student in connection zvith the methods and processes of his previous course. ' ' A treatise i7icomparably superior to any other elementary book on the subject with which we are acquaintedy — Philosophical Magazine. A TREATISE ON DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS. Supple- mentary Volume. Edited by I. Todhunter. Crown 8vo. cloth. Ss. bd. This volume contains all that Professor Boole wrote for the purpose of enlarging his treatise on Differential Equations. THE CALCULUS OF FINITE DIFFERENCES. Crown 8vo. cloth, ioj-. 6d. New Edition revised. In this exposition of the Calculus of Finite Differences, particular attention has been paid to the connection of its methods with those of the Differential Calculus — a connection which in some instances involves far more than a merely formal analogy. The zvork is in some measure designed as a sequel to Professor Book's Treatise on Differential Equations. MATHEMATICS. Brook-Smith (J.)— ARITHMETIC IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. By J. Brook-Smith, M.A., LL.B., St. John's College, Cambridge; Barrister-at-Law ; one of the Masteis of Cheltenham College. Crown 8vo. \s. 6d. JVriters on Arithmetic at the present day feel the necessity of explaining the principles on which the rides of the subject are based, but few as yet feel the necessity of making these explanations strict and complete ; or, failing that, of distinctly pointing out their defective character. If the science of Arithmetic is to be ?nade an effective instrument in developing and strengthening the mental pcnvers, it ought to be worked out rationally and conclusively ; and in this work the author has endeavoured to reason out in a clear and accurate 7nanner the leading propositions of the science, and to illustrate and apply those propositions in practice. In the practical part of the subject he has advanced somewliat beyond the majority of preceding writers; particularly in Division, in Greatest Common Measure, in Cube Root, in the chapters on Decimal Money and the Metric System, and more especially in the application of Decwials to Per- centages and cognate subjects. Copious examples, original and selected, are given. Cambridge Senate-House Problems and Riders, WITH SOLUTIONS :— 1848-1851.— PROBLEMS. By Ferrers and Jackson. 8vo. cloth. 1 5.r. 6d. 1848-1851.— RIDERS. By Jameson. 8vo. cloth, js. 6d. 1854.— PROBLEMS AND RIDERS. By Walton and Mackenzie. 8vo. cloth, ioj. 6d. 1857.— PROBLEMS AND RIDERS. By Campion and Walton. 8vo. cloth. 8s. 6d. i860.— PROBLEMS AND RIDERS. By Watson and Routh. Crown 8vo. cloth, *]s- 6d. 1864.— PROBLEMS AND RIDERS. By Walton and Wil- kinson. 8vo. cloth. 10;. 6d. These volumes will be found of great value to Teachers and Students, as indicating the style ; and i-ange of mathemofcat study in the University of Cambridge. Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal. The Complete Work, in Nine Vols. 8vo. cloth. 10/. ic«. SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. Only a few copies remain on hand. Among contributors to this work will be found Sir W. Thomson, Stokes, Adams, Boole, Sir W. R. Hamilton, De Morgan, Cayley, Sylvester, Jellet, and other distinguished mathematicians. A Cheyne.— Works by C. H. H. Cheyne, M.A., F.R.A.S.:— AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON THE PLANETARY THEORY. With a Collection of Problems. Second Edition.. Crown 8vo. cloth. 6s. 6d. In this volume, an attempt has been made to produce a treatise on the Planetary theory, which, being elementary in character, should be so far complete as to co?itain all that is usually required by students in the University of Cambridge. This Edition has been carefully revised. The stability of the Planetary System has been more fully- treated, and an elegant geometrical explanation of the formula for the secular variation of the node and inclination has been in- troduced. . THE EARTH'S MOTION OF ROTATION. Crown 8vo.. $s. 6d. The first part of this work consists of an application of the method of the variation of elements to the general problem of rotation. In the second part the general rotation formula are applied to the particular case of the earth. Childe.— THE SINGULAR PROPERTIES OF THE ELLIP- SOID AND ASSOCIATED SURFACES OF THE Nth DEGREE. By the Rev. G. F. Childe, M.A., Author of "Ray Surfaces," "Related Caustics," &c. 8vo. 10s. 6d. The object of this volume is to develop peculiarities in the Ellipsoid ; and, further, to establish analogous properties in the unlimited con- generic series of which this remarkable surface is a constituent. Dodgson. — AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON DETER- MINANTS, with their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraical Geometry. By Charles L. Dodgson, M A., Student and Mathematical Lecturer of Christ Church, Oxford. Small 4to. cloth, icxr. 6d. MATHEMATICS. The object of the author is to present the subject as a continuous chain of argument, separated from all accessories of explanation or illustration. All such explanation and illustration as seemed necessary for a beginner are introduced either in the form of foot-notes, or, zvhere that zvould have occupied too much room, of Appendices. Earnshaw (S., M.A.) — partial differential EQUATIONS. An Essay towards an entirely New Method of Integrating them. By S. Earnshaw, M.A., of St. John's College, Cambridge. Crown 8vo. $s. The peculiarity of the system expounded in this work is, that in every equation, whatever be the number of original independent variables, the ivork of integration is at once reduced to the use of one indepen- dent variable only. The author's object is merely to render his method thoroughly intelligible. The various steps of the investiga- tion are all obedient to one general principle : and though in some degree novel, are not really difficult, but on the contrary, easy when the eye has become accustomed to the novelties of the notation. Many of the results of the integrations are far more general than they were in the shape in which they appeared informer Treatises, and many Equations will be found in this Essay integrated with ease in finite terms, which were never so integrated before. Ferrers.— AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON TRILINEAR CO-ORDINATES, the Method of Reciprocal Polars, and the Theory of Projectors. By the Rev. N. M. Ferrers, M. A., Fellow and Tutor of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. 6d. The object of the author in writing on this subject has mainly been to place it on a basis altogether independent of the oi'dinary Cartesian system, instead of regarding it as only a special form of Abridged Notation. A short chapter on Determinants has been introduced. Frost. — Works by Percival Frost, M.A., late Fellow of St. John's College, Mathematical Lecturer of King's College, Cam- bridge : — THE FIRST THREE SECTIONS OF NEWTON'S PRIN- CIPIA. With Notes and Illustrations. Also a Collection of Problems, principally intended as Examples of Newton's Methods. Second Edition. 8vo. cloth, icv. 6d. 8 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. Fro S t — continued. The author 's principal intention is to explain difficulties which may le encountered by the student on first reading the Principia, and to illustrate the advantages of a careful study of the methods employed by Newton, by showing the extent to which they may be applied in the solution of problems ; he has also endeavoured to give assistance to 1 the student zuho is engaged in the study of the higher branches of mathematics, by representing, in a geometrical form several of the processes employed in the Differential and Integral Calculus, and in the analytical investigates of Dynamics. AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON CURVE TRACING. 8vo. 1 2s. The author has zvritten this book under the conviction that the skill and power of the young mathematical student, in order w be thoroughly available afterwards, ought to be developed in all possible directions. The subject which he has chosen presents so many faces, pointing in 'directions towards which the mind of the intended mathematician has to radiate, that it zvould be difficult to find another zvhich, with a very limited extent of reading, combines, to the same extent, so many valuable hints of methods of calculations to be employed hereafter, with so much pleasure in its present use. In order to understand the work it is not necessary to have much knowledge of zvhat is called Higher Algebra, nor of Algebraical Geometry of a higher kind than that zvhich simply relates to the ' i: Conic Sections. From the study of a zvork like this, it is beiiezed that the student will derive many advantages. Especially he will become skilled in making correct approximations to the values of quantities, which cannot be found exactly, .to -any degree of accuracy zvhich may be required. Frost and Woistenholme. — a TREATISE ON SOLID GEOMETRY. By Percival Frost, M.A., and the Rev. J. Wolstenholme, M.A., Fellow and Assistant Tutor of Christ's College. 8vo. cloth. \Zs. Intending to make the subject accessible, at least in the earlier porti mt, to all classes of students, the authors have endeavoured to explain completely all the processes which are most useful in dealing with ordinary theorems and problems, thus directing the student to the selection of methods zvhich are best adapted to the exigencies of each problem. In the more dififiadt portions of the subject, they- have :o>i:idered themselves to be addressing a higher class of students ; MA THEM A TICS. and they have there tried to lay a good foundation on which to build, if any reader should wish to pursue the science beyond the limits to which the work extends. Godfray. — Works by Hugh Godfray, M.A., Mathematical Lecturer at Pembroke College, Cambridge : — A TREATISE ON ASTRONOMY, for the Use of Colleges and Schools. Svo. cloth. 12s. 6d. This book embraces all those branches of Astronomy which have, from time to time, been recommended by the Cambridge Board of Mathe- matical Studies : but by far the larger and easier portion, adapted to the first three days of the Examination for Honours, may be read by the more advanced pupils in many of our schools. The author's aim has been to convey clear and distinct ideas of the celestial phe- nomena. "It is a working book" says the Guardian, "taking Astronomy in its proper place in the Mathematical Sciences. . . . It is a book which is not likely to be got up unintelligently." AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON THE LUNAR THEORY, with a Brief Sketch of the Problem up to the time of Newton. Second Edition, revised. Crown 8vo. cloth. $s. 6d. These pages will, it is hoped, form an introduction to more recondite works. Dijjicidties have been discussed at considerable length. The selection of the method followed with regard to analytical solutions, which is the same as that of Airy, Herschel, etc. , was made on account of its simplicity ; it is, moreover, the' method which has obtained in the University of Cambridge. "As an elementary treatise and introduction to the subject, we think it may justly claim to supersede all former ones.'" — London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Phil. Magazine. Green (George).— mathematical papers of the LATE GEORGE GREEN, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Edited' by N. M. Ferrers, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Gonville and Caius College. 8vo. 15^. The publication of this book may be opportune at present, as several of the subjects with which they are directly or indirectly concerned have recently been introduced into the course of mathematical study at Camb?'idge. They have also an interest as being the work of an almost entirely self-taught mathematical genius , The Papers io SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. comprise the following: — An Essay on the application of Mathe- matical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism — On the Laws of the Equilibrium of Fluids analogous to the Electric Fluid — On the Dctej'mination of the Attractions of Ellipsoids of variable Densities — On the Motion of Waves in a variable Canal of small depth and zvidth — On the Reflection and Refraction of Sound— On the Reflection and Refraction of Light at the Common Surface of two No n- Crystallized Media — On the Propagation of Light in Crystallized Media — Researches on the Vibrations of Pen- dulums in Fluid Media. "It has been for some ti?ne recognized that Greeris writings are amongst the most valuable mathematical productions zve possess. " — Athenaeum. Hemming. — an elementary treatise on the DIFFERENTIAL AND INTEGRAL CALCULUS. For the Use of Colleges and Schools. By G. W. Hemming, M.A., Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. Second Edition, with Corrections and Additions. 8vo. cloth. gs. " There is no book in comtnon use from zvhich so clear and exact a knowledge of the principles of the Calculus can be so readily ob- tained.'''' — Literary Gazette. Jackson.— GEOMETRICAL CONIC- SECTIONS. An Ele- mentary Treatise in which the Conic Sections are defined as the Plane Sections of a Cone, and treated by the Method of Projections. By J. Stuart Jackson, M. A., late Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. Crown 8vo. 45*. 6d. This work has been zvritten with a view to give the student the benefit of the Method of Projections as applied to the Ellipse and Hyper- bola. When this method is admitted into the treatment of Conic Sections there are many reasons why they should be defined, not with reference to the focus and directrix, but according to the original definition from which they have their name, as Plane Sections of a Cone. This method is calculated to produce a material simplification in the treatment of these curves and to make the proof of their properties more easily understood in the first instance and more easily remembered. It is also a powerful instrument in the solution of a large class of problems relating to these curves. MA THEM A TICS. 1 1 Morgan.— A COLLECTION OF PROBLEMS AND EXAM- PLES IN MATHEMATICS. With Answers. By H. A. Morgan, M.A., Sadlerian and Mathematical Lecturer of Jesus College, Cambridge. Crown 8vo. cloth. 6s. 6d. This book contains a number of problems, chiefly elementary, in the Mathematical subjects usually read at Cambridge. They have been selected from the Papers set during late years at Jesus College. Very few of them are to be met with in other collections, and by far the larger number are due to some of the most distinguished Mathe- maticians in the University. Newton's Principia. — 4 to. cloth. 31J. 6d. It is a sufficient guarantee of the reliability of this complete edition of Newton's Principia that it has been printed for and under the care of Professor Sir William Tho?fison and Professor Blackburn, of Glasgow University. The foil caving notice is prefixed : — ' ' Finding that all the editions of the Principia are now out of print, we have been induced to reprint Newton's last edition [of 1 726] without note or comment, only introducing the ' Corrigenda ' of the old copy and correcting typographical errors.'''' The book is of a handsome size, with large type, fine thick paper, and cleanly-cut figures, and is the only recent edition containing the whole of Newton's great work. Parkinson. — Works by S. Parkinson, D.D., F.R.S., Fellow and Tutor of St. John's College, Cambridge : — AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON MECHANICS. For the Use of the Junior Classes at the University and the Higher Classes in Schools. With a Collection of Examples. Fourth Edition, revised. Crown 8vo. cloth. 9^. 6d. In preparing a fourth edition of this work the author has kept the same object in view as he had in the former editions — namely, to in- clude in it such portions of Theoretical Mechanics as can be con- veniently investigated without the use of the Differential Calculus, and so render it suitable as a manual for the junior classes in the University and the higher classes in Schools. With one or two short exceptions, the student is not presumed to require a knowledge of any 12 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. Parkinson — continued. branches of Mathematics beyond the elements of Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry. Several additional propositions have been in- corporated in the work for the purpose of rendering it more complete, and the collection of Examples and Problems has been largely in- creased. A TREATISE ON OPTICS. Third Edition, revised and en- larged. Crown 8vo. cloth, icw. 6d. A collection of Examples and Problems has been appended to this work, which are sufficiently numerous and varied in character to afford useful exercise for the student. For the greater part of them, re- course has been had to the Examination Papers set in the University and the several Colleges during the last twenty years. Phear. — ELEMENTARY HYDROSTATICS. With Numerous Examples. By J. B. Phear,- M.A., Fellow and late Assistant Tutor of Clare College, Cambridge. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. cloth. 5-r. 6d. This edition has been carefully revised throughout, and many ne-jju Illustrations and Examples added, which it is hoped will increase its usefidness to students at the Universities and in Schools. In ac- cordance with suggestions from many engaged in tuition, answers to all the Examples have been given at the end of the book. Pratt. — A TREATISE ON ATTRACTIONS, LAPLACE'S FUNCTIONS, AND THE FIGURE OF THE EARTH. By John H. Pratt, M.A., Archdeacon of Calcutta, Author of "The Mathematical Principles of Mechanical Philosophy. " Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. cloth. 6s. 6d. The author's chief design in this treatise is to give an anstver to the question, ' ' Fas the Earth acquired its present form from being originally in a fluid state ?" This edition is a complete revision of thefor?ner ones. Puckle. — AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON CONIC SEC- TIONS AND ALGEBRAIC GEOMETRY. With numerous MA THE MA TICS. 1 3 Examples and Hints for their Solution ; especially designed for the Use of Beginners. By G. H. Puckle, M.A. New Edition, revised and enlarged. Crown 8vo. cloth. Js. 6d. This work is recommended by the Syndicate of the Cambridge Local Examinations. The Athenaeum says the author '"''displays an intimate acquaintance with the difficulties likely to be felt, together with a singular aptitude in removing them" Routh. — AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON THE DYNA- MICS OF THE SYSTEM OF RIGID BODIES. With numerous Examples. By Edward John Routh, M.A., late Fellow and Assistant Tutor of St. Peter's College, Cambridge ; Examiner in the University of London. Second Edition, enlarged. Crown 8vo. cloth. 14^. In this edition the author has made several aaditions to each chapter: he has tried, even at the risk of some little repetition, to make each chapter, as far as possible, complete in itself, so that all that relates to any one part of the subject may be found in the same place. This arrange77ient will enable every student to select his own order in which to read the subject. The Examples which will be found at the end of each chapter have been chiefly selected from the Examina- tion Papers which have been set in the Unive?sity and the Colleges in the last few years. Smith's (Barnard) Works. — See Educational Cata- logue, Snowball. — the elements of plane and spheri- cal TRIGONOMETRY ; with the Construction and Use of Tables of Logarithms. By J. C. Snowball, M.A. Tenth Edition. Crown 8vo. cloth. *js. 6d. In preparing the present edition for the press, the text has been sub- jected to a careful revision ; the proofs of some of the more import- ant propositions have been rendered 7nore strict and general ; and a considerable addition of more than two hundred examples, taken principally from the questions set of late years in the public exa?ni- nations of the University and of individual Colleges, has been made to the collection of Examples and Problems for practice. 14 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. Tait and Steele. — dynamics of a particle, with numerous Examples. By Professor Tait and Mr. Steele. New Edition. Crown 8vo. cloth. ias\ 6d. In this treatise will be found all the ordinary propositions, connected with the Dynamics of Particles, which can be conveniently deducea without the use of D 1 Alemberf s Principle. Throughout the book will be found a number of illustrative examples introduced in the text, and for the most part completely worked out ; others with occa- sional solutions or hints to assist the student are appended to each chapter. For by far the greater portion of these, the Cambridge Senate-House and College Examination Papers have been applied to. Taylor. — GEOMETRICAL CONICS ; including An harmonic Ratio and Projection, with numerous Examples. By C. Taylor, B.A., Scholar of St. John's College, Cambridge. Crown 8vo. cloth. fs. 6d. This work contains elementary proofs of the prificipal properties of Conic Sections, together with chapters on Projection and Anharmonic Ratio. Todhunter. — Works by I. Todhunter, M.A., F.R.S., of St. John's College, Cambridge : — "Perspicuous language, vigorous investigations, scrutiny of difficulties, and methodical treatment, characterize Mr. Todhunter s works." — Civil Engineer. THE ELEMENTS OF EUCLID; MENSURATION FOR BEGINNERS ; ALGEBRA FOR BEGINNERS ; TRIGO- NOMETRY FOR BEGINNERS; MECHANICS FOR BEGINNERS. — See Educational Catalogue. ALGEBRA. For the Use of Colleges and Schools. Sixth Edition. Crown 8vo. cloth. Js. 6d. This work contains all the propositions which are usually included in elementary treatises on Algebra, and a large number of Examples for Exercise. The author has sought to render the work easily in- telligible to students, without impairing the accuracy of the de7non- strations, or contracting the limits of the subject. The Examples, about Sixteen hundred and fifty in number, have been selected with MA THEM A TICS. 1 5 Todhunter (I.)— continued. a view to illustrate every part of the subject. The work will be found peculiarly adapted to the wants of students who are without the aid of a teacher. The Answers to the Examples, with hints for the solution of some in which assistance may be needed, are given at the end of the book. In the present edition two New Chapters and Three hundred miscellaneous Examples have been added. "It has merits which unquestionably place it first in the class to which it belongs.'''' — Educator. KEY TO ALGEBRA FOR THE USE OF COLLEGES AND SCHOOLS. Crown 8vo. iar. 6d. AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON THE THEORY OF EQUATIONS. Second Edition, revised. Crown 8vo. cloth. Js. 6d. This treatise contains all the propositions which are usually included in elementary treatises on the theory of Equations, together with Examples for exercise. These have been selected from the College and University Examination Papers, and the results have been given when it appeared necessary. In order to exhibit a compre- hensive viezv of the subject, the treatise includes investigations which are not found in all the preceding elementary treatises, and also some investigations which are not to be found in any of them. For the second edition the work has been revised and some additions have been made, the most i?nportant being an account of the Researches of Professor Sylvester respecting Newton' s Rule. "A thoroughly trustworthy , complete, and yet not too elaborate treatise.''' — Philosophical Magazine. PLANE TRIGONOMETRY. For Schools and Colleges. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. cloth. 5.?. The design of this work has been to render the subject intelligible to beginners, and at the same time to afford the student the oppor- tunity of obtaining all the information which he will require on this branch of Mathematics. Each chapter is followed by a set of Exa7nples : those which a7-e entitled Miscellaneous Examples, together with a few in some of the other sets, may be advantageously reserved by the student for exercise after he_ has made some progress in the subject. In the Second Edition the hints for the solution of the Examples have been considerably increased. SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE Todhuilter (I.)— continued. A TREATISE ON SPHERICAL TRIGONOMETRY. Third Edition, enlarged. Crown 8vo. cloth. 4s. 6d. The present work is constructed on the same plan as the treatise on Plane Trigonometry, to which it is intended as a sequel. In the account of Napier's Rules of circular parts, an explanation has been given of a method of proof devised by Napier, which seems to have been overlooked by most modem writers on the subject. Con- siderable labour has been bestowed on the text in order to render it comprehensive and accurate, and the Examples (selected chiefly from College Examination Papers) have all been carefully verified. 11 For educational purposes this work seems to be superior to any others on the subject. " — Critic. PLANE CO-ORDINATE GEOMETRY, as applied to the Straight Line and the Conic Sections. With numerous Examples. Fourth Edition, revised and enlarged. Crown Svo. cloth. *]s. 6d. The author has here endeavoured to exhibit the subject in a simple manner for the benefit of beginners, and at the same time to include in one volume all that students usually require. In addition, therefore, to the propositions which have always appeared in such treatises, he has introduced the methods of abridged notation, which are of more recent origin : these methods, which are of a less elementary character than the rest of the work, are placed in separate chapters, and may be omitted by the student at first. A TREATISE ON THE DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS. With numerous Examples. Sixth Edition. Crown 8vo. cloth. 10s. 6d. The author has endeavoured in the present %vork to exhibit a compre- hensive view of the Differential Calculus on the method of limits. In the more elementary portions he has entered into considerable detail in the explanations, with the hope that a reader who is without the assistance of a tutor ??iay be enabled to acquire a competent ac- quaintance with the subject. The method adopted is that of Dif- ferential Coefficients. To the different chapters are appended Exaniples sufficiently numerous to render another book unnecessary ; these Examples being mostly selected from College Examination Papers. This and the following work have been translated into MATHEMATICS. i 7 Todhunter (I.)— continued. Italian by Professor Battaglini, who in his Preface speaks thus : — " In publishing this translation of the Differential and Integral Calculus of Mr. Todhunter, we have had no other object than to add to the books which are in the hands of the students of our Uni- versities, a work remarkable for the clearness of the exposition, the rigour of the demonstrations, the just proportion in the parts, and the rich store of examples which offer a large field for useful exercise.'''' A TREATISE ON THE INTEGRAL CALCULUS AND ITS APPLICATIONS. With numerous Examples. Third Edition, revised and enlarged. Crown 8vo. cloth. 10s. 6d. This is designed as a zvork at once elementary and complete, adapted for the use of beginners, and sufficient for the zvants of advanced students. In the selection of the propositions, and in the mode yf establishing them, it has been sought to exhibit the principles clearly, and to illustrate all their most important results. The process of summation has been repeatedly brought forward, witli the view of securing the attention of the student to the notions which form the true foundation of the Calculus itself as well as of its most valuable applications. Every attempt has been made to explain those difficulties which usually perplex beginners, especially with reference to the limits of integrations. A new method has been adopted in regard to the transformation of multiple integrals. The last chapter deals with the Calculus of Variations. A large collection of Exer- cises, selected from College Examination Papers, has been appended to the several chapters. EXAMPLES OF ANALYTICAL GEOMETRY OF THREE DIMENSIONS. Third Edition, revised. Crown 8vo. cloth. 4s. A TREATISE ON ANALYTICAL STATICS. With numerous Examples. Third Edition, revised and enlarged. Crown 8vo. cloth, ioj-. 6d. In this work on Statics (treating of the laws of the equilibrium of bodies) will be found all the propositions which usually appear in treatises on Theoretical Statics. To the different chapters Examples are appended, zvhich have been principally selected from University Examination Papers. In the Third Edition many additions have been made, in order to illustrate the application of the principles of the subject to the solution of problems. 18 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. Todhunter (I.)— continued. A HISTORY OF THE MATHEMATICAL THEORY OF PROBABILITY, from the Time of Pascal to that of Laplace. 8vo. . i8j. The subject of this work has high claims to consideration on account of the subtle problems which it involves, the valuable contributions to analysis which it has produced, its important practical applica- tions, and the e7ninence of those who have cultivated it ; nearly every great mathetnatician within the range of a century and a half comes under consideration in the course of the history. The author has endeavoured to be quite accurate in his statements, and to reproduce the essential elements of the original works which he has analysed. Besides being a history, the work may claim the title of a comprehensive treatise on the Theory of Probability, for it assumes in the reader only so much knozuledge as can be gamed from an elementary book on Algebra, and introduces him to almost every process and every special problem zvhich the literature of the subject can furnish. RESEARCHES IN THE CALCULUS OF VARIATIONS, Principally on the Theory of Discontinuous Solutions : An Essay to which the Adams' Prize was awarded in the University of Cambridge in 187 1. 8vo. 6s. The subject of this Essay was prescribed in the following terms by the Examiners : — "A determination of the circumstances under which discontinuity of any kind presents itself in the solution of a problem of maximum or 7?iinimum in the Calculus of Variations, and applications to particular instances. It is expected that the discus- sion of the instances should be exemplified as far as possible geo- metrically, and that attention be especially directed to cases of real or supposed failure of the Calculus." While the Essay is thus mainly devoted to the consideration of discontinuous solutions, various other questions in the Calculus of Variations are examined and elucidated ; and the author hopes he has definitely co7itributed to the extension and improvement of our kncncledge of this refined depart- ment of analysis. A HISTORY OF THE MATHEMATICAL THEORIES OF ATTRACTION, and the Figure of the Earth, from the time of Newton to that of Laplace. Two vols. $ve. 24s. MATHEMATICS. 19 Wilson (W. P.)— A TREATISE ON DYNAMICS. By W. P. Wilson, M.A., Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and Professor of Mathematics in Queen's College, Belfast. 8vo. gs. 6d. Wolstenholme. — A BOOK OF MATHEMATICAL PROBLEMS, on Subjects included in the Cambridge Course. By Joseph Wolstenholme, Fellow of Christ's College, some time Fellow of St. John's College, and lately Lecturer in Mathe- matics at Christ's College. Crown 8vo. cloth. Ss. 6d. Contents : — Geometry (Euclid) — Algebra — Plane Trigonometry — Geomet?-ical Conic Sections — Analytical Conic Sections — Theory of Equations — Differential Calculus — Integral Calculus — Solid Geo- metry — Statics — Elementary Dynamics — Newton — Dynamics of a Point — Dynamics of a Rigid Body — Hydrostatics — Geometrical Optics — Spherical Trigonometry and Plane Astronomy. In some cases the author has prefixed to certain classes of problems frag- mentary notes on the mathematical subjects to which they relate. "Judicious, symmetrical, and well arranged.'''' — Guardian. 2o SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. PHYSICAL SCIENCE. Airy (G. B.)— POPULAR ASTRONOMY. With Illustrations. By Sir G. B. Airy, K.C.B., Astronomer Royal. Seventh and cheaper Edition. i8mo. cloth. 4.S. 6d. This work consists of Six Lectures, which are intended ' ' to explain to intelligent persons the principles on which the instruments of an Observatory are constructed (omitting all details, so far as they are merely subsidiary), and the principles on which the observations made with these instruments are treated for deduction of the distances and weights of the bodies of the Solar System, and of a few stars, omitting all minutice of formula, and all troublesome details of calculation." The speciality of this volu??ie is the direct reference of every step to the Observatory, and the full description of the methods and instruments of observation. Bastian. — Works by H. Charlton Bastian, M.D., F.R.S., Professor of Pathological Anatomy in University College, London, etc. : — THE MODES OF ORIGIN OF LOWEST ORGANISMS : Including a Discussion of the Experiments of M. Pasteur, and a Reply to some Statements by Professors Huxley and Tyndall. Crown 8vo. 4.S. 6d. The present volume contains a fragment of the evidence which will be embodied in a much larger work — now almost completed — relating to the nature and origin of living matter, and in favour of what is termed the Physical Doctrine of Life. ' ' Lt is a work worthy of the highest respect, and places its author in the very first class of scientific physicians. . . . It would be difficult to name an instance in tvhich skill, knowledge, perseverance, and great reasoning power have been more happily applied to the investigation of a complex biological problem." — British Medical Journal. PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 2 i Bastian (H. C.)— continued. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE : Being some Account of the Nature, Modes of Origin, and Transformations of Lower Organ- isms. In Two Volumes. With upwards of ioo Illustrations, Crown 8vo. 28,s\ These volumes contain the results of several years' 1 investigation on the Origin of Life, and it was only after the author had proceeded some length with his observations and experiments that he was compelled to change the opinions he started with for those announced in the present work — the most important of which is that in favour of " spontaneoits generation " — the theory that life has never ceased to be actually originated. The First Part of the work is intended to show the general reader, more especially, that the logical conse- quences of the now commonly accepted doctrines concerning tie " Conservation of Energy " and the " Correlation of the Vital and Physical Forces " are wholly favourable to the possibility of the in- dependent origin of "living" matter. It also contains a view of the ' ' Cellular Theory of Organisation. " In the Second Part of the work, under the head " Archebiosis," the qtiestion as to the present occurreiice or non-occurrence of " spontaneous generation " is considered. ' ' It is a book that cannot be ignored, and must inevitably lead to renewed discussions and repeated observations, and through these to the establishment of truth." — A. R. Wallace in Nature. Birks (T. R.)— ON MATTER AND ETHER £or, The Secret Laws of Physical Change. By Thomas Rawson Birks, M.A., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. Crown 8vo. $s. 6d. The author believes that the hypothesis of the existence of besides matter, a luminous ether, of immense elastic force, supplies the true and suf- ficient key to the remaining secrets of inorganic matter, of the phe- nomena of light, electricity, etc. In this treatise the author endea- vours first to form a clear and definite conception with regard to the real nature both of matter and ether, and the laws of mutual action which must be supposed to exist between them. He then endeavours to trace out the main consequences of the fundamental hypothesis, and their correspondence with the known phenomena of physical change. 22 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. Blanford (W. T.)— geology and zoology of ABYSSINIA. By W. T. Blanford. 8vo. lis. This work contains an account of the Geological and Zoological Obser- vations made by the author in Abyssinia, when accompanying the British Army on its march to Magdala and back in 1 868, and during a short journey in Northern Abyssinia, after the departure of the troops. Part I. Personal Narrative ; Part II. Geology ; Part III Zoology. With Coloured Illustrations and Geological Map. "The result of his labours," the Academy says, "is an important contribution to the natural history of the country." Clodd.— THE CHILDHOOD OF THE WORLD : a Simple Account of Man in Early Times. By Edward Clodd, F.R.A.S. Second Edition. Globe 8vo. 3s. " Likely, ive think, to prove acceptable to a large and growing class of readers."— Vail Mall Gazette. Professor Max Muller, in a letter to the Author, says : " I read your book with great pleasure. I have no doubt it will do good, and I hope you will continue your work. Nothing spoils our tempei- so much as having to unlearn in youth, manhood, and even old age, so many things which we zvere taught as childrejt. A book like yours will prepare afar better soil in the child's mind, and I was delighted to have it to read to my children." Cooke (Josiah P., Jun.)— first principles of CHEMICAL PHILOSOPHY. By Josiah P. Cooke, Jun., Ervine Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy in Harvard College. Crown 8vo. 12s. The object of the author in this book is to present the philosophy of Chemistry in such a form that it can be made with profit the subject of College recitations, and furnish the teacher with the means of testing the student's faithfulness and ability. With this view the subject has been developed in a logical order, and the principles of the science are taught independently of the experimental evidence on 'a hick they rest. Cooke (M. C.)— HANDBOOK OF BRITISH FUNGI, with full descriptions of all the Species, and Illustrations of the Genera. By M. C. Cooke, M.A. Two vols, crown 8vo. 245-. PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 23 During the thirty-five years that have elapsed since the appearance of the last complete Mycologic Flora no attempt has been made to revise it, to incorporate species since discovered, and to bring it up to the standard of modern science. No apology, therefore, is necessary for the present effort, since all will admit that the want of such a manual has long been felt, and this work makes its appearance under the advantage that it seeks to occupy a place which has long been vacant. No effort has been spared to make the work worthy of confidence, and, by the publication of an occasional supplement, it is hoped to maintain it for many years as the "Handbook" for every student of British Fungi. Appended is a complete alpha- betical Index of all the divisions and subdivisions of the Fungi noticed in the text. The book contains 400 figures. " Will main- tain its place as the standard English book, on the subject of which it treats, for many years to come." — Standard. Dawkins,— CAVE-HUNTING: Researches on the Evidence of Caves respecting the Early Inhabitants of Europe. By W. Boyd Dawkins, F.R.S. Illustrated. 8vo. [In the Press. Dawson (J. W.) — ACADIAN GEOLOGY. The Geologic Structure, Organic Remains, and Mineral Resources of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. By John William Dawson, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S. , F.G.S., Principal and Vice-Chaucellor of M'Gill College and University, Montreal, &c. Second Edition, revised and enlarged. With a Geological Map and numerous Illustrations. 8vo. iSs. The object of the first edition of this work was to place within the reach of the people of the districts to which it relates, a popular account of the more recent discoveries in the geology and mineral resources of their country, and at the same time to give to geologists in other countries a connected view of the structure of a very in- teresting portion of the American Continent, in its relation to general and theoretical Geology. In the present edition, it is hoped this design is still more completely fulfilled, with reference to the present more advanced condition of knozvledge. The author has endea- voured to convey a knowledge of the structure and fossils of the region in such a manner as to be intelligible to ordinary readers, and has devoted much attention to all questions relating to the nature and present or prospective value of deposits of useful minerals. 24 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. Besides a large coloured Geological Map of the district, the work is illustrated by upwards of 260 cuts of sections, fossils, animals, etc. " The book will doubtless find a place hi the library, not only of the scientific geologist, but also of all who are desirous of the in- dustrial progress and commercial prosperity of the Acadian pro- vinces. " — Mining Journal. ' ' A style at once popular and scientific. . . . A valuable addition to our store of geological knowledge.'''' — Guardian. Flower (W. H.)— AN INTRODUCTION TO THE OSTE- OLOGY OF THE MAMMALIA. Being the substance of the Course of Lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1870. By W. H. Flower, F.R.S., F.R.C.S., Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology. With numerous Illustrations. Globe 8vo. Js. 6d. Although the present work^ contains the substance of a Course of Lectures y the form has been changed, so as the better to adapt it as a hand- book for students. Theoretical viezvs have been almost entirely ex- cluded: and while it is impossible in a scientific treatise to avoid the employnient of technical terms, it has been the author's endeavour, to use no more than absolutely necessary, and to exercise due care in selecting only those that seem most appropriate, or which have re- ceived the sanction of general adoption. With a very few excep- tions the illustrations have been drawn expressly for this work from specimens in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. Gallon. — Works by Francis Galton, F.R.S. :— METEOROGRAPHICA, or Methods of Mapping the Weather. Illustrated by upwards of 600 Printed Lithographic Diagrams. 4to. gs. As Mr. Gallon entertains strong viezvs on the necessity of Meteorolo- gical Charts and Maps, he determined, as a practical proof of what could be done, to chart the entire area of Europe, so far as meteorological stations extend, during one month, viz. the month of December, 1861. Mr. Galton got his data from authorities in every part of Britain and the Continent, and on the basis of these has here drawn up nearly a hundred different Maps and Charts, showing the state of the weather all over Europe during the above period. ' ' If the various Governments and scientific bodies would perform for the PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 25 Gait on — continued. whole zvorldfor two or three years what, at a great cost and labour, Mr. Gallon has done for a part of Europe for one month, Meteoro- logy would soon cease to be made a joke of." — Spectator. HEREDITARY GENIUS : An Inquiry into its Laws and Con- sequences. Demy 8vo. 12s. " I propose," the author says, "to show in this book that a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same li7Jtitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. I shall show that social agencies of an ordinary character, whose influences are little suspected, are at this moment working towards the degradation of human nature, and that others are working towards its improvement. The general plan of my argu- ment is to shoza that high reputation is a pretty accurate test of high ability ; next, to discuss the relationships of a large body of fairly eminent men, and to obtain from these a general survey of the laws of heredity in respect of genius. Then will follow a short chapter, by zvay of comparison, on the hereditary transmission of physical gifts, as deduced from the relationships of certain classes of oarsmen and wrestlers. Lastly, I shall collate my results and draw conclu- sions." The Times calls it "a most able and most interesting book;" and 'Mr. Darwin, in his " Descent of Man" (vol. i. p. ill,), says, ' ' We knozv, through the admirable labours of Mr. Gallon, that Genius tends to be inherited" Geikie (A.)— SCENERY OF SCOTLAND, Viewed in Connec- tion with its Physical Geography. With Illustrations and a new Geological Map. By Archibald Geikie, Professor of Geology in the University of Edinburgh. Crown 8vo. \os. 6d. i ' We can confidently recommend Mr. Geikie f s zvork to those who wish to look below the surface and read the physical history of the Scenery of Scotland by the light of modern science." — Saturday Review. " Amusing, picturesque, and instructive." — Times. Guillemin. — THE FORCES OF NATURE: A Popular Intro- duction to the Study of Physical Phenomena. By Am^dbe Guillemin. Translated from the French by Mrs. Norman Lockyer ; and Edited, with Additions and Notes, by J. Norman 26 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. Lockyer, F.R.S. Illustrated by n Coloured Plates and 455 Woodcuts. Second Edition. Imperial 8vo. cloth, extra gilt. M. Guillemin is already well known in this country as a most success- ful populariser of the results of accurate scientific research, his works, while eloquent, intelligible, and interesting to the general reader, being thoroughly trustworthy and up to date. The present work consists of Seven Books, each divided into a nw7iber of Chapters, the Books treating respectively of Gravity, Sound. Light, Heat, Magnetism, Electricity, and Atmospheric Meteors. The programme of the work has not been confined to a simple explanation of the facts : but an attempt has been made to grasp their relative bearings, or, in other words, their laws, and that too without taking for granted that the reader is acquainted with mathematics. " The author's aim has been to smooth the way for those who desire to extend their studies, and likewise to present to general readers a sufficiently exact and just idea of this branch of science." — Daily News. " Translator and Editor have done justice to their trust. The text has all the force andflotv of original writing, combining faithfulness to the author s meaning with purity and independence in regard to idiom ; while the historical precision and accuracy pervading the tvork throughout, speak of the watchful editorial supervision which has been given to every scientific detail. Nothing can well exceed the clearness and delicacy 0/ the illustrative woodcuts, borrowed from the French edition, or the purity and chromatic truth of the coloured plates. Altogether, the work may be said to have no parallel, either in point of fulness or attraction, as a popular manual of physical science. .... What we feel, however, bound to say, and tvhat we say with pleasure, is, that among works of its class no publication can stand comparison either in literary completeness or in artistic grace with it." — Saturday Review. Henslow.— THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION OF LIVING THINGS, and the Principles of Evolution applied to Religion considered as Illustrative of the Wisdom and Beneficence of the Almighty. By the Rev. George Henslow, M.A., F.R.S. Crown 8vo. 6s. PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 27 Hooker (Dr.)— THE STUDENT'S FLORA OF THE BRITISH ISLANDS. By J. D. Hooker, C.B., F.R.S., M.D., D.C.L., Director of the Royal Gardens, Kew. Globe 8vo. 1 or. bd. The object of this work is to supply students and field-botanists with a fuller account of the Plants of the British Islands than the manuals hitherto in use aim at giving. The Ordinal, Generic, and Specific characters have been re-written, and are to a great extent original, and drawn from living or dried specimens, or both. ' ' Cannot fail to perfectly fulfil the purpose for which it is intended" — Land and Water. ' ' Containing the fullest and most accurate manual of the kind that has yet appeared." — Pall Mall Gazette. Huxley (Professor). — lay SERMONS, ADDRESSES, AND REVIEWS. By T. H. Huxley, LL.D., F.R.S. New and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. Js. 6d. Fourteen Discourses on the following subjects: — (1) On the Advisable- ness of Improving Natural Knowledge: — (2) Emancipation — Black and White : — (3) A Liberal Education, and where to find it: — (4) Scientific Education : — (5) On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences: — (6) On the Study of Zoology: — (7) On the Physical Basis of Life: — (8) The Scientific Aspects oj Positivism ."—(9) On a Piece of Chalk: — (10) Geological Contem- poraneity and Persistent Types of Life : — ( 1 1 ) Geological Reform : — (12) The Origin of Species .*— ( 13) Criticisms on the "Origin of Species:'''' — (14) On Descartes' "Discourse touching the Method of using One 's Reason rightly and of seeking Scientific Truth.''' 1 The momentous influence exercised by Mr. Huxley 's writings on physical, mental, and social science is universally ac knoivl edged : his works must be studied by all who would comprehend the various drifts of modern thought. ESSAYS SELECTED FROM LAY SERMONS, ADDRESSES, AND REVIEWS. Crown 8vo. is. This volume includes Numbers I, 3, 4, 7, 8, and 14, of the above. CRITIQUES AND ADDRESSES. 8vo. 10s. 6d. These " Critiques and Addresses," like the "Lay Sermons," etc., pub- lished three years ago, deal chiefly with educatio7tal, scientific, and 28 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE, Huxley (Professor)— < w *a«»«/'. philosophical subjects ; and, in fact, as the author says, "indicate the high-water mark of the various tides of occupation by which 1 have been carried along since the beginning of the year 1870." The following is the list of Contents: — I. Administrative Nihilism. 2. The School Boards : what they can do, and what they may do. 3. On Medical. Education, 4. Yeast. 5. On the Formation of Coal. 6. On Coral and Coral Reefs. 7. Oit the Methods and Results of Ethnology. 8. On some Fixed Points in Bi'itish Eth- nology. 9. Palceoniology and the. Doctrine of Evolution. 10. Biogenesis and A biogenesis. 11. Mr. Darwin' 's Critics. 12. The Genealogy of Animals, 13. Bishop Berkely on the Metaphysics of Sensation. LESSONS IN ELEMENTARY PHYSIOLOGY. With numerous Illustrations. New Edition. i8mo. cloth. 4^. 6d. This book describes and explains, in a series of graduated lessons, the principles of Human Physiology, or the Structure and Functions of the Human Body. The first lesson supplies a general view op the subject. This is followed by sections on the Vascular or Venous System, and the Circulation ; the Blood and the Lymph ; Respira- tion : Sources of Loss and of Gain to the Blood ; the Function of Alimentation ; Motion and Locomotion ; Sensations and Sensory Organs ; the Organ of Sight ; the Coalescence of Sensations with one another and with other States of Consciousness ; the Nervous System and Innervation ; Histology, or the Minute Structure of the Tissues. A Table of Anatomical and Physiological Constants is appended. The lessons are fully illustrated by numerous en- gravings. The new edition has been thoroughly revised, and a con- siderable number of new illustrations added: several of these have been taken from the Rabbit, the Sheep, the Dog, and the Frog, in order to aid those who attempt to make their knowledge real, by acquiring some practical acquaintance with the facts of Anatomy and Physi- ology. ' ' Pure gold throughout. " — Guardian. ' ' Unquestionably the clearest and most complete elementary treatise on this subject that we possess in any language." — Westminster Review. Jellet (John H., B.D.) — A TREATISE ON THE THEORY OF FRICTION. By John H. Jellet, B.D., PHYSICAL SCIENCE, 29 Senior Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin ; President of the Royal Irish Academy. Svo. 8s. 6d. The Theory of Frictio?i, considered as a part of Rational Mec/iuriics, has not, the author thinks, received the attention which it deserves. On this account many students have been probably led to regard the discussion of this force as scarcely belonging to Rational Mechanics at all ; whereas the theory of friction is as truly a part of that subject as the theory of gravitation. The force with which this theory is concerned is subject to laws as definite, and as fully susceptible of mathematical expression, as the force of gravity. This book is taken up with a special investigation of the laws of friction; and some of the principles contained in it are believed to be here enunciated for the first li?ne. The work consists of eight Chapters as follows : — /. Definitions and Principles. II. Equili- brium with Frictions. III. Extreme Positions of Equilibrium. IV. Movement of a Particle or System of Particles. V. Motion of a Solid Body. VI. Necessary and Possible Equilibrium. VII Determination of the Actual Value of the Acting Force of Friction. VIII. Miscellaneous Problems —\. Problem of the Top. 2. Friction Wheels and locomotives. 3. Questions for Exercise. '* The book supplies a want which has hitherto existed i?i the science of pure mechanics. " — Engineer, Jones. — THE OWENS COLLEGE JUNIOR COURSE OF PRACTICAL CHEMISTRY. By Francis Jones, Chemical Master in the Grammar School, Manchester. With Preface by Professor Roscoe. i8mo. with Illustrations, is. 6d. Kingsley. — GLAUCUS : OR, THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. By Charles Kingsley, Canon of Westminster. New Edition, revised and corrected, with numerous Coloured Plates. Crown 8vo. $s. Kirchhoff (G.)— RESEARCHES ON THE SOLAR SPEC- TRUM, and the Spectra of the Chemical Elements, By G. Kirchhoff, Professor of Physics in the University of Heidelberg. Second Part. Translated, with the Author's Sanction, from the Transactions of the Berlin Academy for 1862, by Henry R. Roscoe, B.A., Ph.D., F.R.S., Professor of Chemistry in Owens College, Manchester. Part II. 4to. $s. , 3 o SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. "It is to Kirchhoff we are indebted for by far the best and most accurate observations of these phenomena.'''' — Edin. Review. " This memoir seems almost indispensable to every Spectriwi observer." — Philo- sophical Magazine. Lockyer (J. N.) — Works by J. Norman Lockyer, F.R.S.— ELEMENTARY LESSONS IN ASTRONOMY. With nu- merous Illustrations. New Edition. i8mo. 5^. 6d. The author has here aimed to give a connected view of the whole subject, and to supply facts, and ideas founded on the facts, to serve as a basis for subsequent study and discussion. The chapters treat of the Stars and Nebula; ; the Sun; the Solar System ; Apparent Move- ments of the Heavenly Bodies ; the Measurement of Time; Light ; the Telescope and Spectroscope ; Apparent Places of the Heavenly Bodies ; the Real Distances and Dimensions ; Universal Gravitation. The most recent Astronomical Discoveries are incorporated. Mr. Lockyer 's work supplements that of the Astronomer Royal. "The book is full, clear, sound, and zvorthy of attention, not only as a popular exposition, but as a scientific ''Index.'''''' — Athenaeum. "The most fascinating of elementary books on the Sciences.'''' — Nonconformist. THE SPECTROSCOPE AND ITS APPLICATIONS. By J. Norman Lockyer, F.R.S. With Coloured Plate and numerous Illustrations. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 2 s - &d. This forms Volume One id Hamilton altogether erroneous. The author believes that errors spring far more frequently from obscure, inadequate, indis- tinct, and confused Notions, and from not placing the Notions in their proper relation in judgment, than from Ratiocination. In this treatise, therefore, the Notion (with the term, and the Relation of Thought to Language) will be found to occupy a larger relative place than in any logical work written since the time of the famous 62 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. M ' C O Sh ( J . )— continued. Art of Thinking. " The amount of sum?narized information which it contains is very great; and it is the only work on the very important subject with which it deals. Never was such a zvork so much needed as in the present day." — London Quarterly Review. CHRISTIANITY AND POSITIVISM : A Series of Lectures to the Times on Natural Theology and Apologetics. Crown 8vo. Js. 6d. These Lectures were delivered in New York, by appointment, in the beginning of 1871, as the second course on the foundation of the Union Theological Seminary. There are ten Lectures in all, divided into three series : — /. ' ' Christianity and Physical Science'''' (three lectures). II. "Christianity and Mental Science" (four lectures). III. " Christianity and Historical Investigation''' (three lectures). The Appendix contains articles on "Gaps in the Theory of Development ;" " Darwin' s Descent of Man ;" "Principles of Herbert Spencer's Philosophy." In the course of the Lectures Dr. M' Cosh discusses all the most important scientific problems which are supposed to affect Christianity. MasSOIl.— RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY : A Review, with Criticisms ; including some Comments on Mr. Mill's Answer to Sir William Hamilton. By David Masson, M.A., Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh. Crown 8vo. 6s. The author, in his usual graphic and forcible manner, reviews in considerable detail, and points out the drifts of the philosophical speculations of the previous thirty years, bringing under notice the work of all the principal philosophers who have been at work during that period on the highest problems which concern humanity. The four chapters are thus titled: — I. "A Survey of Thirty Years." II. ' ' The Traditional Differences : how repeated in Carlyle, Hamilton, and Mill." III. " Effects of Recent Scientific Con- ceptions on Philosophy." IV. "Latest Drifts and Groupings." The last seventy-six pages are devoted to a Review of Mr. Mill's criticism of Sir William Hamilton' 's Philosophy. "We can nowhere point to a work which gives so clear an exposition of MENTAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY, ETC. 63 the course of philosophical speculation in Bi'itain during the past century, or which indicates so instructively the mutual influences of philosophic and scientific thought." — Fortnightly Review. Maurice. — Works by the Rev. Frederick Dexison Maurice, M.A., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cam- bridge. (For other Works by the same Author, see Theological Catalogue.) SOCIAL MORALITY, Twenty-one Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge. New and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. 10s. 6d. In this series of Lectures, Professor Maurice considers, historically and critically, Social Morality in its three main aspects : I. " The Relations which spring from the Family — Domestic Morality." II. i ' TJie Relations which subsist among the various constituents of a A T ation — National Morality." III. "As it concerns Uni- versal Humanity — Umversal Morality." Appended to each series is a chapter on " Worship :" first, "Family Worship;" second, "National Worship;" third, "Universal Worship." " Whilst reading it we are charmed by the freedom from exclusiveness and prejudice, the large charity, the loftiness of thought, the eagerness to recognize and appreciate whatever there is of real worth extant in the world, which animates it from one eiud to the other. We gain nrd) thoughts and new ways of viewing things, even more, perhaps, from being brought for a time under the influence of so noble and spiritual a mind." — Athenaeum. THE CONSCIENCE : Lectures on Casuistry, delivered in the University of Cambridge. New and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. 5i\ In this series of nine Lectures, Professor Mat/rice, with his wonted force and breadth and freshness, endeavours to settle what is meant by the word "Conscience," and discusses the most important questions immediately connected with the subject. Taking " Casu- istry " in its old sense as being the "study of cases of Conscience" he endeavours to show in what way it may be brought to bear at the present day upon the acts and thoughts of our ordinary existence. He shows that Conscience asks for laws, not rules : for freedom, not chains ; for education, not suppression. He 64 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. Maurice (F. D .)— continued. has abstained from the use of philosophical terms, and has touched on philosophical systems only when he fancied "they zvere inter- fering with the rights and duties of wayfarers." The Saturday Review says: "We ?'ise from them with detestation of all that is selfish and mean, and with a living impression that there is such a thing as goodness after all." MORAL AND METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHY. New- Edition and Preface. Vol. I. Ancient Philosophy and the First to the Thirteenth Centuries ; Vol. II. the Fourteenth Century and the French Revolution, with a glimpse into the Nineteenth Century. New Edition. 2 Vols. 8vo. 25 s. This is an Edition in two volumes of Professor Maurice 's History of Philosophy from the earliest period to the present time. It was formerly scattered th7-oughout a number of separate volumes, and it is believed that all admirers of the author and all students of philosophy tvill zvelcome this compact Edition. The subject is one ■of the highest importance, and it is treated here with fulness and candour, and in a clear and interesting manner. In a long intro- duction to this Edition, in the form of a dialogue, Professor Maurice justifies some of his own peculiar vieivs, and touches upon some of the most important topics of the time. Murphy,— THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF FAITH. By Joseph John Murphy, Author of " Habit and Intelligence." Svo. 14X. " The book is not without substantial value ; the writer continues the zvork of the best apologists of the last century, it may be with less force and clearness, but still with commendable persuasiveness and tact; and with an intelligent feeling for the changed conditions of the problem." — Academy. Picton.— THE MYSTERY OF MATTER AND OTHER ESSAYS. By J. Allanson Picton, Author of " New Theories and the Old Faith." Crown Svo. 10s. 6d. Contents :— The Mystery of Matter — The Philosophy of Igno- rance — The Antithesis of Faith and Sight — The Essential Nature of Religion —Christian Pantheism. 3IEXTAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY, ETC. 65 Thring (E., M. A.)— THOUGHTS ON LIFE-SCIENCE. By Edward Thring, M.A. (Benjamin Place), Head Master of Uppingham School. New Edition, enlarged and reused. Crown 8vo. Is. 6d. In this volume are discussed in a familiar manner some of the most interesting problems behveen Science and Religion, Reason and Feeling. * ' Learning a nd Science, ' ' says the author, ' ' are claiming the right of building up and pulling doton everything, especially the latter. It has seemed to me no useless task to look steadily at what has happened, to take stock as it were of merts gains, and to endeavour amidst new circumstances to arrive at some rational estimate of the bearings of things, so that the limits of what is possible at all events may be clearly marked out for ordinary readers This book is an endeavour to bring out some of the main facts of the world." Venn. — THE LOGIC OF CHANCE : An Essay on the Founda- tions and Province of the Theory of Probability, with especial reference to its application to Moral and Social Science. By John Venn, M.A., Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Fcap. 8vo. Js. 6d. This Essay is in no sense mathematical. Probability, the author thinks, may be considered to be a portion of the province of Logic regarded from the material point ofziew. The principal objects of this Essay are to ascertain how great a portion it comprises, where we are to draw the boundary between it and the contiguous branches of the general science of evidence, what are the ultimate foundations upon which its rules rest, what the nature of the evidence they are capable of affoi'ding, and to what class of subjects they may most fitly be applied. The general design of the Essay, as a special treatise on Probability, is quite original, the author believing that erroneous notions as to the real nature of the subject are disastrously prevalent. " Exceedingly well thought and well written," says the Westminster Review. The Nonconformist calls it a "masterly book." LAY, SONS, AKD TAYLOR, l'RINTERS, BREAD STREET HILL 1 •/? Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: July 2006 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16066 (724)779-2111 LIBRARY OF congress 003 231057 6