back to the landing-place, none too soon, the light-keeper gave many interesting facts about the birds. The nesting operations of all except the petrels were over. Had our visit been a fortnight later the island would have been deserted by all save a few rock finches. As it was, the feathered inhabitants seemed innumerable. Some indeed had gone, as the guillemots, but enough were left to make the rocks seem alive. At the boat we found our men with enough to do to keep her from destruction against the rocks. There was time only for a hurried farewell to the Macmillan's Magazine.

keepers, whose kindness had been so signal, and then through threatening waters we pulled for the nobby. How we got on board I do not know; nobby and boat were like two corks springing in different directions; nor do I know much about how we got home. This fact emerges; while it took over four hours to go, we were back in less than two. The crew described it as a good sailing breeze; to me it seemed quite a vigorous storm. But nothing mattered then, for we had with us the abiding consolation that we had Gone to Skellig.

H. Kingsmill Moore.

The foundation of the British School of studies at Athens, rather more than twenty years ago, concentrated and organized the energies expended on the Hellenic Renaissance of our own day. The true author of the scheme, the great Cambridge Hellenist, accepted the present writer as his colleague. The idea indeed had long been a fixed ambition with the late Sir R. C. Jebb, professor of Greek at Cambridge and member of Parliament for his University. It was my privilege, when conducting The Fortnightly Review, to provide him with the opportunity of putting his views on the subject before the world. It had already been satisfactorily ascertained that, once the programme had been explained in the periodical, there existed a reasonable prospect of giving it practical effect. Sir Richard Jebb possessed many valuable friends and accomplished sympa

*"An Epoch in Irish History." By J. P Mahaffy. (T. Fisher Unwin. 1906.)

"Pen, Patron, and Public." (Greening. 1907.) "Latest Report of the British School at Athens."

"Tragic Drama." By Lewis Campbell. (Smith, Elder & Co. 1904.)

thizers in his project, among and outside his brother scholars on the Cam. Conspicuous in this number was the present treasurer of the Athens School fund-a director also of the London and Westminster Bank, and one who, to a greater extent than has been witnessed since the historian of Greece, George Grote, combines a genius for commerce and finance with a rare insight into the temper of Greek literature and thought of all ages-Mr. Walter Leaf. His translation of the Iliad marked the same kind of epoch for English Grecophilism as had been done somewhat earlier by Philip Worsley's version of the Odyssey and J. A. Symonds' illuminating and picturesque writing about lyric and elegiac poets. To these should be added the names of Sidney Colvin and Charles Thomas Newton. At a later period the undertaking gained fresh usefulness and wider educational value by the association with it of Mr. Oscar Browning and Professor J. P. Mahaffy. None of Dr. Mahaffy's contemporaries has done more than he to prepare the popular mind to profit by Oxford and

Cambridge extension lectures, or by other agencies for diffusing an intelligent interest in the wit, wisdom, and learning of old Greece. That there exists to-day a distinct revival of Greek art and letters as not only a recognized but an effective instrument of culture, is due to the industry and research and to the attractive literary exposition of Dr. Mahaffy as much as to any individual agency connected with any seat of learning in the Empire.

However, as Dr. Mahaffy now shows, the famous foundation of which he is so bright an ornament has in the past shown more activity than some of us always remember in encouraging and systematizing the cultivation in these islands of the earliest linguistic medium common to philosophy and religion. What in relation to the Greek language Erasmus had been to Oxford in the sixteenth century, Cudworth, Henry More, Whichcote, and the other Platonists were to Cambridge a hundred years later. Long before that, the Greek curriculum of Trinity College, Dublin, had, as in a very interesting chapter Dr. Mahaffy makes clear, equipped itself with a thoroughly effective apparatus for regular teaching in the older of the two classical tongues.

Our nineteenth-century Hellenism was appreciably aided by a social function at Marlborough House which, in 1883, preceded the establishment in the Greek capital of the institution that now helps, enlightens, and guides those whom the genius of the city animates with a desire to make their sojourn under the shadow of the Acropolis instructive as well as agreeable. In the summer of 1883 the then Prince of Wales had acquainted himself with the acceptability of Sir Richard Jebb's project to his relative, the King of the Hellenes. Before the arrival of the day on which the meeting was to be held beneath his own roof, the Heir LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXV. 1860

Apparent had given another proof of his remarkable aptitude for accurately and quickly mastering unfamiliar details, with such available facts as help to illustrate or explain them. The gathering itself was memorably representative of English distinction in every walk of life. Mr. Gladstone, then Prime Minister, his successor, at that time his chief opponent, Lord Salisbury, the head masters of the great public schools, the heads of the most famous colleges at the Universities, the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Frederick Leighton, the most discriminating and generous intellectual patron of his day, Lord Houghton and the Marquis of Dufferin, had all, with many others, responded to the summons. The Marlborough House meeting was not only a practical success; it elicited, thanks largely to the generous initiative of Mr. Pandeli Ralli, immediate pecuniary support; it was marked at its close by an occurrence which does not yet seem to have found its way into print, showing a famous man, now no more, in a characteristically humorous light. While the vote of thanks to the Prince of Wales was being proposed, there began to be put in circulation a sheet of foolscap at the top of which the Royal chairman had signed his name. It was taken for granted that the then master of Marlborough House desired a complete list of the company over which he had presided. Every one, therefore, hastened to sign his name. At last the paper reached Lord Dufferin; he, instead of adding his signature, put the paper in his pocket and, the proceedings being now quite over, with the courtliest of bows, left the room. "The truth is," he smilingly remarked to a friend who went with him, "one of my daughters collects autographs, and I thought the opportunity too good to be lost."

The phil-Hellenism of an earlier period was helped forward by even more

fashionable assemblages in Lady Blessington's drawing-room at Gore House, Kensington. That house has not received from posterity due credit for the part played by it in promoting some of the best and most beneficent movements of the time. When the devout and austere Edmund Burke wished to devise a scheme for providing homeless and impoverished foreigners with surroundings conducive to their moral and physical health, he consulted Lady Blessington, who at once gave orders to Count D'Orsay for immediate action. At a drawing-room meeting at Gore House the earliest association for relieving necessitous aliens was suggested and provided with a liberal endowment. Beneath Lady Blessington's roof, also during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the cult of Hellenism as it then existed was first organized into that Greek Society to which Byron and Bentham both belonged. The earliest and the most inspiring of its promoters was a man named Blaquière, noticeable in the present context because the features of his literary style in several books of foreign travel were reproduced by George Borrow some years later; they thus became models of composition for the later writers of a generation whose earlier masters of prose and guides to culture had been Edmund Gibbon and Samuel Johnson,

Greater, however, and more essential than can be measured by years is the difference between the early Greek renaissance of the nineteenth century and that of our own day. The former originated in the traditional English sympathy with the natives of an illustrious and oppressed land struggling to be free; that feeling, of course, reinforced itself with intellectual alliance furnished by letters and art. In due time the country whose classical sons, by repelling the Persian invader, prevented Asiatic influences from over

running, from dominating, or even coloring European thought, shook off the foreign yoke. The cult of Hellenism had performed its social and political work; its occupation was gone; it bequeathed to future generations no specific agency of mental discipline. In a word, it passed without making itself felt by the thought and scholarship of its own age or of posterity. Nearly a century before the friends of Greece federated themselves in a South Kensington drawing-room, John Wesley had been elected fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford (1726); the same year he became College lecturer in Greek. During the short time of his holding this office Wesley did more than any of his contemporaries towards improving the standard of Greek scholarship and extending the area of Greek studies for his University at large; his Lincoln classes for studying some points in the smaller Platonic dialogues constituted the same kind of landmark in Oxford Hellenism as was done almost a hundred years afterwards by John Henry Newman's Aristotle lectures to the Oriel undergraduates.

Among the earliest promoters of the Hellenistic cult in its first development, Jeremy Bentham alone foresaw the date when Greek art and antiquities as topics of polite conversation would rank with the "pictures, taste, Shakespeare and the musical glasses" enumerated by the Vicar of Wakefield. All this has now come to pass; an annual increase is reported in the numbers of non-academic visitors to the city of the Violet Crown who make the British School the centre of operations during their stay. For those who stay at home, Oxford and Cambridge extension lectures or the teachers provided by London University at provincial centres and the contents of Hellenic art galleries, gazed on by fashionable London to-day, by East-end sight-seers tomorrow, anon displayed to Bank-holi

day crowds in the great local capitals, may be almost described as making the twentieth-century Briton, on whatever social level, the contemporary fellow countryman of Phidias, Praxiteles, and Zeuxis. For more select companies the art or letters of the Attic prime is served up in Mayfair by Herr Emil Reich in his oral discourses, or by Mr. W. L. Courtney in his original and ingenious writings on the modern and ancient stage. The former of these masters has seemed to favor the opinion that if Plato had only lived in our own days he might have rivalled George Eliot as a novelist of sex. Blessed with a modern environment, with the perusal of newspaper law reports, and some knowledge of society behind the scenes, Euripides or Sophocles, as a writer of problem plays, might have rivalled Ibsen in the particular walk of that dramatist's genius. "When," recently said a large employer of Lancashire labor who also in his day distinguished himself in the Cambridge classical tripos, “I go home to lunch, my daughter poses me with hard questions about the Eleatic philosophy; I return to my office to be asked to adjudicate in a discussion between my workmen on the movements of the Pyrrhic dance or the formation of the Macedonian phalanx. With these experiences part of one's daily life, one almost fancies that unconsciously his works have transported themselves from the Irwell to the Ilissus."

The Greek renaissance of our time has tended to enlarge the area, to enrich the learning, to correct the mistakes and to dispel the misconceptions of professional scholars. Here the revived influence of John Wesley's Greek lectures at Lincoln has been at work. As Wesley insisted ought to be done, Polybius has been added to the teaching libraries in colleges of all denominations. Hellenism having become at

once fashionable and popular, it remains for the leading spirits of the English School at Athens to rediscover the mediaeval monuments of the classical city, and by the light of material evidence, disinterred from the rubbishheap of ages, to reconstruct its interesting and important story from the point at which Justinian's decree closed the doors of its university.

One might as soon underestimate the importance of the invention of printing as undervalue the Greek element in English letters and education. The sixteenth-century Renaissance, however, would have had for England much less important results, but for the fact that the revival of classical learning was contemporary with spiritual and intellectual emancipation from the levelling obscurantism of Rome. The dynamic force at work upon the creative minds of English letters, and so the vitalizing power of English culture, has always been the translation of the Scriptures into the vulgar tongue. In the space still at our disposal a few instances may be mentioned. Chaucer may have found the plots for his Canterbury Tales in Boccaccio and other Italian authors. When the Father of Poetry essays the part of moral teacher, as, unostentatiously indeed, throughout his writings he does, he invariably adapts Hebrew principles and ideas to English conditions. Take the most famous lines in the Canon Yeoman's Tale:

and idea; incidentally he has also shown that in the use of certain words and grammatical idioms Chaucer took for his model, particularly in the use of the definite, the indefinite article, and the word "death," an earlier version of those Scriptures from which in a later translation Shakespeare drew alike more of his phraseology and diction than from any other single source. As has been justly said by Professor Lewis Campbell in his work on the Tragic Drama, Mr. Churton Collins is unrivalled for his acute perception of similarities in literature; he has thus easily shown that the "small Latin and less Greek" for which the national poet takes credit included a considerable acquaintance with the masterpieces of the Greek stage. Even thus, however, the views of life, of character, of man's position in the universe, of his relations to destiny on the one hand and free-will on the other, to be found in Shakespeare, are in striking contrast to the ideas illustrated in every play of Aeschylus, of Euripides, of Sophocles. Whatever the foe he may find in circumstance, man is after all at some time or other the controller of fate; he has but to take at the flood the tide in human affairs to be the sure architect of his own good.

The surest materials for an analogy between the Greek dramatic writers in the period of Pericles and the dramatists of our own Elizabethan epoch are supplied by the conditions under which the Athenian and the Briton wrote. In both cases it was an era of national expansion, exaltation, of freedom from great perils, gained at the price of much blood and treasure. In Greece the Persian had been beaten back to his own side of the Aegean Sea. England the sailors and soldiers of the Virgin Queen had first withstood and then scattered the power of Spain. There exists also some likeness between the incidents in their national

In

history whence the English and the Attic playwrights drew their characters and plots. What the period and the dramatis personae of the earliest struggles of Greece against Asia were to Aeschylus, that the Wars of the Roses were to Shakespeare. The chief actors both in the classical and the mediaeval struggles were a few members of the great families. The campaign in Asia Minor against the house of Priam affected the national life of the two parties to the struggle scarcely less than the York and Lancaster contest brought within its vortex the humbler English masses. The tragic woes of the house of Pelops and Atreus had their parallels in the series of horrors, the massacres, the burnings and the mutilations which began with St. Albans and only ended with Bosworth Field. As with the creator of Hamlet, so with the author of the Faerie Queene. Spenser was primarily a court poet. To a task suitable for him as the great Queen's laureate, he adapted the mass of mediaeval superstition which he found ready to hand. Even thus, however, the didactic, which is in its origin the Hebraic, impulse of the English temper, caused him in his great poem to aim at drawing, in his own words to Philip Sidney, "a faithful picture of a Christian gentleman." To come down to our own day, Browning is Italian and Tennyson Greek; Matthew Arnold had steeped himself more deeply even than Tennyson in intellectual Hellenism. Yet the note sounded most deeply and most frequently by the author of "Merope" is as didactic as any sermon or lecture of his father, the great Rugby headmaster. So too with Wordsworth, the classical form is reproduced in such compositions as "The Ode to Duty." The lessons inculcated are those which could have been set forth only by an imagination charged with Scriptural devotion. A recent volume, "Pen, Pa