For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for- warded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made PURPLE CLEMATIS. [The clematis shows that the summer is nearly over; then follows autumn, and after it comes winter, which always reminds me of deaththe end of everything.] IN purple splendor drooping, The clematis by the gate, Is the symbol of summer departing, To the living spring returneth, But what avails to the dead That the grass should be green above them, Is there aught remaineth of knowledge, In some graveyard is left for a token That we who once were are not, now That ineffable mystic presence We call death stooped and kissed our brow? SONG. GOLDEN face that human sorrow Till you shone across my way; A CRADLE SONG. THE angels are bending The souls of the dead. God smiles in high heaven From The New Review. that indefatigable worker prepares during each summer in England, recording the previous winter's work in Egypt. It will be a matter of public regret when I state that this tax upon his energies has for the present so impaired his health that he must of necessity take a year's respite from his toil. He has, indeed, more than earned this leisure. THE archæological researches which have made Egypt again famous in recent times are continually finding new starting points, and continually providing the world with surprises. It is but recently that the excavations at Tell-elamarna discovered to us the wonderful fact that diplomatic correspondence What man of his age can show such a between Assyria and Egypt was not record of brilliant archæological achieveonly common fourteen centuries before ments? Christ, but that it was carried on in cuneiform writing. The great "find" of the bodies of the kings and queens in their remote hiding-place in 1881 recovered for us the body of the most famous of all Egyptian kings, Ramses II.; and in the Cairene Museum the returning visitor may see rooms of treasures which have accumulated during each year of the last decade. But no field of discovery has been more novel and fruitful than the Fayyûm, an oasis, or depression, apart from the west of the Nile valley, which seems to have been forgotten till yesterday, when the opening of a railway line from Assiout into this fruitful tract not only developed its material resources, but excited the interest of Egyptian schol ars. Meanwhile there is one large department of his discovery which he has delegated to others the task of deciphering and publishing the many texts on papyrus which he had acquired. The Coptic part is just now being brought out by Mr. Crum; the Egyptian part (hieratic and demotic) has been consigned to Mr. Griffiths, of the British Museum; the Greek part, first attacked by Mr. Sayce, who read many of the texts, though he published but a few, has come into my hands, and I have given a specimen of what they are in the "Cunningham Memoir" VIII., published with admirable autotype facsimiles by the enterprise of the Royal Irish Academy. A second and far larger instalment of these papers is at present in process of being printed. But as this publication is both expensive and intended for specialists those of Germany are already writing volumes of controversy about it it may be desirable to put in a popular form the main results of my labors for the last two years. These labors are by no means completed. It is but six weeks ago that, at the Oriental Congress in London, Mr. Newberry placed in my hands a great new consignment which will require many months of further study, and which I have already ascertained to be scraps of the very same papers, in some cases supplying the gaps in what I have already published. From this source have come most of the texts on papyrus which have engrossed the world of letters for the last few years. Some indeed, such as the famous Aristotle, have had their hidingplace hidden by those who are still searching this mine of literary gold; but the great collection purchased by the Archduke Rainer (of Austria), and many of the still more various and curious discoveries of Mr. Petrie, are from this small corner of Egypt, nor is it at all likely that we have obtained more than a tithe of what still lies beneath the sand. The Archduke Rainer's collection, dating from various centuries, and in many tongues, is being catalogued, and also carefully deciphered The collection now in my hands is and published, by a competent commit- not like that of the archduke, ranging tee of savants in Vienna. The mate-through many languages and over many rial part of Mr. Petrie's discoveries has centuries; it is a collection almost exbeen illustrated and explained in the clusively derived from a very brief fascinating series of volumes which epoch-say fifty years—but all of it far older than anything yet published | ten by scores of hands at this remote by the Vienna savants. Moreover, the date, ranging from the small, neat, proPetrie papyri from Gurob are only in fessional character of the bookseller's Greek or demotic — only perhaps half-a-scribe to the large scrawl of the private dozen in hieratic — and, strange to say, there is hardly a bilingual piece among them. The Coptic texts now being published by Mr. Crum were not found in this place, and were not all found, but purchased, by Mr. Petrie. man; from the precision of the official clerk to the untidiness of the unlettered servant. All sorts and conditions of men have left us their correspondence, their contracts, their family papers, even scraps of the books they read, in I am here only concerned with the this wonderful collection. Had the special group resulting from the excava- coffin-makers used these papers whole, tion of a small cemetery at Gurob, in there is no estimating the knowledge the Fayyûm, containing not more than they would afford us; a whole society thirty coffins, or, rather, mummy cases, of Greeks of this remote date would for the human figure is rudely modelled | rise in all its detail into the light of the in these receptacles. But owing to the nineteenth century. But, alas! the scarcity of wood, they were constructed from a mass of waste papers, by laying and gluing together these papers in layers, and were then coated within and without with clay, and painted with designs. The case, when complete, represented a swathed mummy with its face exposed, the whole richly colored. It now appears, from the fact that parts of the same text are found in divers of these cases, that they were made up at the same time, and probably by tradesmen who acquired this mass of papyri for the purpose. As four or five of the texts are dated in the year 186 B.C. we may not assume that any of the cases were made earlier. But the great mass of the dated papers range from 260 B.C. to 223 B.C., and none at all from the interval between the later date and 186. They are, therefore, a collection from the palmiest days of Greek Egypt, when the second and third Ptolemies had made their kingdom prosperous, admired, and respected by all the nations of the civilized world. papers were all torn into patches of moderate size, the surfaces of many of them daubed with mud which effaced the ink, the whole mass confused and mixed up, as it were by deliberate intention. The task, therefore, of cleaning, deciphering, guessing, combining, is one of great patience, and the results often barren after weeks of toil. Most of the smaller fragments, generally some items in a private account, are of no use or interest, but one can never tell that even such stray words will not fill a gap in a larger text, which remains unintelligible till that gap is supplied. Sometimes a hopelessly effaced scrawl will suddenly yield its secret, and afford a veritable triumph to the decipherer; sometimes an apparently easy hand will conceal puzzles that baffle all his ingenuity. It is in these alternations of hope and despair that I have been exercised ever since I was introduced to the subject, and taught my first lessons by Mr. Sayce, at Oxford. In another year I may hope the task will be accomplished, so far as my efforts can do it. But there will be an ample harvest for other men in adding to my results and When the reader reflects that most of our Greek MSS. date from the later Middle Ages; that the age of even the Egyptian fragments of the classics hith-correcting my errors. erto known in no case ascend with cer- The substance of these papyri may be tainty above the Christian era; that a dated Greek handwriting of the third century B.C. was hitherto an unheard-of thing, he will appreciate the fascinating position in which good fortune has placed me. For I have now for two years been daily handling papers writ briefly classified as follows: (1) A small number of classical texts, which were books carried by the Greek settlers into the Fayyûm. These texts may be considerably older than the dated papers, and some of them probably ascend above the year 300 B.C. Most of them were easily identified. There was the of them are copies of public records. conclusion of the "Antiope" of Eurip- The subjects of these are so various Then there was a miserable scrap of | decree. Some of these documents are the actual copy sent, with the address on the back, and are written in more or less formal or easily read hands (where not effaced or broken). Others are only the rough drafts, scrawled in a most untidy way, or full of erasures and corrections written over the lines. Some are from Egyptians to Greeks, some even from Egyptian officials to one another; and they show plainly that the red-tape of office was as rife then as it、 now is in the departments at Whitehall. The official who makes a report always quotes the letters sent to him verbatim, and the replying authority rehearses the facts with explicit care. These documents are dated, but merely by the current year of the reign and the month, without giving the king's name. Hence Among the prose classical texts the it is only from the dates to companion most important is that of the "Phædo" | documents, the character of the writing, of Plato - two or three pages are preserved, in a beautiful hand, archaic even in comparison with the other papers, and containing variants from our current texts, not indeed anything so violent as those of the Iliad papyrus, but still sufficient to excite a similar controversy in Germany. The "edition" is certainly older, but is it better than the famous Oxford MS. of the ninth century A.D.? I may also here announce that I have just found, in a hand somewhat similar, a considerable passage from the "Laches" of Plato, which will soon be published. The rest of those just enumerated are facsimiled 66 my Cunningham Memoir." There are, besides, fragments of prose texts, of which the author is not yet identified. We may pass on to (2) the private, or rather every-day documents, for some in the analogy of the subjects, and the identity in site that we can make sure that they come from the very early date which I have asserted for them. Moreover, when we find all the letters to and from Cleon, the architect of the province, dated year 30, or year 31, there can be no doubt that the king was the second Ptolemy (Philadelphus), for the next king who reigned so long was Euergetes II., a century later, and not a single one of the fully dated papers mentions his name. These fully dated papers are: (1) Wills, of which we have a large group, giving us the dispositions of property made by various landholders in the Fayyûm, and accordingly among the most interesting in the whole collection. (2) There are also receipts and contracts, all dated carefully after this |