syllable of every line is common. To call attention to this fact, whenever the line ends with an elided syllable the letter before the elision is brought over to the beginning of the next verse, to show that there is no synapheia, as there is in tragic anapæstic systems, and as there would seem to be in these odes if elision were allowed at the end of a verse. Thus we have Καλυδών' (ν. 106), ὑμνοάνασσ' (ΧΙΙ. 1), φω/θ' (Χνι. 15), θέλοι μ' (XVII. 41). This, be it observed, is in no way due to exigencies of space. There would always be room for the letter brought over, sometimes for many more. Moreover, examples of hiatus after a long syllable at the end of a line are frequent, and we have it even after short syllables in v. 172, 177, ix. 40, xi. 12, XIII. 82, 120.

We have said that the metres used are simple, the lines short, the strophic correspondence well maintained, the resolution of long syllables rare, and still rarer any variation in the quantity of corresponding syllables, except at the end of each line. There no quantitative uniformity is required, inasmuch as the last syllable of each verse is treated as common. There is not

a single ode which does not illustrate this truth (many of them again and again) save one, the second, a very short ode containing only one strophe (with its antistrophe) of but five lines. The seventh and twelfth odes have only one metrical system, and so are not antistrophic at all. The fourth is too corrupt to afford any evidence. Therefore the whole theory denying the syllaba anceps at the end of the line is borne out only by one strophe and antistrophe five lines long. It is invalidated by all the other poems. Surely it is mere chance which has here produced the conformity in one ode. And is this fortuitous conformity, maintained for but five lines, to be set up as the standard, while the practice illustrated by all the other odes is to be set down to error and altered by arbitrary correction? Surely not. What would be said of a scientific observer who, professing to found a law of nature on induction, should then reject or garble every datum of observation or experiment which conflicted with his own preconceived hypothesis? Yet this is what some critics have attempted in applying wholesale correction in order to bring about a conformity against which the MS. our only evidence-everywhere protests. These arbitrary changes are sometimes slight enough, sometimes considerable and highly improbable, sometimes impossible. And be it noted that if in one place a short syllable at the end of a line corresponds strophically to a long one, then the principle is established that the last syllable is common, and correction ignoring the principle is shown to be quite unscientific. We Vol. 187.-No. 374.

2 H

will

πρὸ

will take only one case. In XI. 119 a short syllable at the end of the line corresponds to a long syllable in the two other epodes. The reading is undoubtedly sound. The attempt to restore πρὸ γουνοῖ' for πρόγονοι can have hardly commended itself even to its author, who essays no explanation or defence of it except a quite irrelevant reference to III. 19, apparently to prove that pò means 'in front of,' which we readily concede. Other attempts, such as πрoâ/yov, carry with them their own refutation. The true state of the case is that рóyovoι here is right and indispensable, and that a short syllable at the end of a line corresponds strophically to a long one here as in some fifty other places in the poems. To make the poems before us conform to the rules laid down in some treatises on metre, we must either rewrite the poems or rewrite the treatises. The latter, we submit, is the more reasonable proceeding. But when the MS., with a very slight correction, presents a reading against which nothing can be urged except that it records an incident not elsewhere mentioned (so far as we know), could anything be more absurd than to reject it, and give instead a statement that'they' (who? the 'Axatoi mentioned in l. 114?) 'instituted a precinct to be in front of (or in preference to) a knoll (slope); for no otherwise can we render if we read po γουνοῖ ἕσσαν ἔμεν ?

There are in Bacchylides none of those impressive complications of conflicting, or at least exuberant, imagery-those maelstroms of metaphor-which flash from Pindar, Æschylus, and Sophocles, at those moments—

When a great thought strikes along the brain

And flushes all the cheek.'

There is no hurly-burly of feeling, like that in which Pindar cries*Methinks a whetstone shrilleth on my lips; right fain it draws me on with a current of sweet breath'; or in which Sophocles † makes the chorus say that the ray of hope which was shed over the last root of the house of Edipus is mowed down by a handful of bloodstained dust' cast on the corse of Polynices; or in which Cassandra in the 'Agamemnon' ‡ exclaims, 'Lo, the oracle will no more peer from behind a veil like a bride new-wedded; nay, it is like to come and clear the welkin with a blast that will roll up against the bright horizon, like a surging billow, a horror far worse than this.' We should look in vain in Bacchylides for such spiritual excitement or its outward and visible sign in the style. He must suffer from that comparison with Pindar which Dr. Kenyon deprecates,

* O. vi. 82.

† Ant. 600 ff.

1180 ff.

but

but which is really forced upon us. We hope, however, that the specimens of his work which we have put before our readers will have shown, even to those who do not propose to study the poems in the original, that our newly-found lyrist is a shrewd observer of life, and a masterly artist in verse, with remarkable command of limpid and graceful narrative. In the closing words of the third ode, which commemorates the victory of Hiero in the chariot race in 468 B.C., words which may have been his latest utterance, and which are certainly the latest utterance to which a date has been assigned, the poet exclaims :

Hiero, thou hast held up to the view of men all that most gloriously adorns an high estate. On such triumphs as thine silence bringeth no honour. In telling them therewithal will men, launching the shafts of truth, glorify too the meed of praise which the honeyed nightingale of Ceos could bestow.

*

We gladly join our voice to the chorus which hails the resurrection of the Ceian lyrist, and add the heartiest expression of our sense of gratitude to the trustees of the British Museum, to the editor, and to the scholars who have given him their aid, for bestowing on us a gift which is a precious addition to the literature of the world.

* We read βαλών for καλῶν.

2H 2

ART.

ART. VII.-Gardiner's History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. Vols. I. and II. London, 1894, 1897.

MR.

"R. GARDINER'S History of the Commonwealth proceeds steadily but slowly. Histories, as they are written nowadays, make a greater demand upon the reader's leisure than the ancient quartos, or even the octavos of Macaulay and Froude. The modern historian gives the public too much of his material. He sorts it, it is true; but as the interest of his work grows, so also grows in him, apparently, the desire to associate his reader with the preparation of materials, and give him not results but processes. Kinglake's later volumes are loaded with details, topographical studies, bits of regimental history, and personal anecdote. Mr. Lecky's last volume is written (one may almost say) between inverted commas. The university schools of history have created such a rage for accuracy that historians are afraid to hazard any statement without giving full proofs. In old days, controversial matters or new views were stated by the historian in his text, and discussed in notes at the end of the volume. Now, everything has to appear at once: and the reader is made to be a judge as well as a learner. Hence comes a want of proportion, and some sacrifice of the authority which is claimed by Ranke and Döllinger, and which justly belongs to Mr. Gardiner. We look to a writer of Mr. Gardiner's calibre to instruct and enlighten, not merely to record. We want to know not only the facts, but his judgment upon them. There was, perhaps, too much philosophy in the old historians, Gibbon, Hallam, and Milman; and too much fervour in Macaulay and Froude. But they made rich the blood of the world; and we cannot well spare either the philosophy or the fervour.

For

History is not merely retrospective and scientific. science we go to such books as Mr. Gardiner's own 'Historical Documents,' and Professor Prothero's companion volume. But these books are not histories. The Muse of history must not be excluded from literature, and turned over to science. If Clio listens to Sir John Seeley (who was better than his creed) and condescends to be dull, she will become a Danaid, not a Muse, and the public will not come to her empty or over-full pitcher. And if the public does not read, the publisher will not print; and so Clio is starved out. Not that there is not much reflection and instruction in these volumes: but we have to hunt for it; and we do not want to know all the opinions of all the colonels, and all the private history of the Verney family. Such things are to be found in their proper places. Macaulay would have painted the Verney

family in three pages, in a group as vivid, perhaps as compli mentary, as one of their own Vandykes. He would have touched off the colonels with lurid adjectives and brilliant generalizations in the style of Rembrandt. What then? the world is better for Vandyke and Rembrandt, though they did not paint men and women exactly as they were. We have a truer as well as a nobler idea of a time to which its painter has added more than he saw, than of one which is chronicled by a Holbein. Indeed we cannot do without either Vandyke or Holbein we want poetry and accuracy too. And Mr. Gardiner has shown us in his portraits of Montrose and Ormonde, amongst others, that he is not without the finer touch which separates the historian from the annalist. Nor is it a slight merit that by making us, as it were, the contemporaries of Cromwell, he enables us to take a juster view of him than we can get either from Carlyle or Hume, or even from Guizot. Mr. Gardiner is too modest. We want him to tell us his

own thoughts, and he sends us to 'Mercurius Politicus' and 'Putney Projects.' We lose ourselves in the crowd of inferior actors, just as in Mr. Lecky's '98. We are tempted to think the opinions of Ludlow, Fleetwood, Okey, or Desborough as valuable as those of Ireton and Hyde. Some men's opinions are valuable singly; some speak as members of groups; some as members of parties. A noisy, impracticable man like 'free born' John Lilburne, attracts more notice than his ideas are worth. His temerity and courage and his grasp of some fundamental principles make him respectable, but not representative; and like a crying child he occupies too much attention, both in his own age and in Mr. Gardiner's history.

So again, in the actions of the army between 1647 and 1649, we sometimes cannot see the wood for the trees. Either there was a common feeling which resulted in the coercion of London, Joyce's filibustering, Pride's Purge, and the High Court of Justice-measures all in turn disclaimed, accepted, and justified -so that events worked themselves out, as it were, by the momentum of past actions and the attractive power of hopes and fears; or they were prepared and transacted by a few deeply designing minds. The former is, or was, till the other day, the prevailing view since Carlyle wrote his 'Cromwell.' The latter was the old-fashioned theory, which liked to set Hector at Patroclus, Æneas at Turnus. Emathiona Liger, Corynæum sternit Asilas,' and a hundred more warriors slay and are slain to heighten the glory of the paladins. So Cromwell hunts down his destined victim, directing and dispensing life and death like an incarnate Fate. The rest of the actors are puppets; and the

tragedy