with a 'likely.' Now, denying as we do, that Europe in her present advanced state can be so affected by any sudden inundation of specie as she was in those times when a great sovereign had but a single pair of silk stockings, and a Scottish one borrowed a pair from one of his magnates, we must leave the solution of all such problems to others, and adhere to our own text as inscribed in the book of Nature. We therefore say, that if the general law respecting gold, found to hold true from the days of Job, has not been specially reversed in California, it follows that, as every trough or basin has its bottom, and that at a shallow depth, the best stuff must be dug out and washed from the rubbish in periods shorter or longer according to the amount of population employed in each digging. The words henceforth' and annually' cannot, therefore, be statistically applied to such troughs or basins. For example, if worked by a scanty Spanish or Indian population, Upper California might supply a million sterling per annum for many a year; but, with tens of thousands of active Jonathans thrown into it, that country may be cleared of all its superficial gold in a few years-and this even though the annual supply may never exceed the four or five millions sterling which are modestly talked about. England is the great gold-consuming country-and not more than three or four millions have, as far as we can learn, found their way to our shores in the last two years. Yet, however we may decline to enter into the arcana of figures, there is one general observation connected with the statistical branch of this inquiry which in parting we must take leave to make. So long as Europe shall be agitated as she has been during the last two or three years by democracy and socialism, so long will many persons who have the wherewithal' provide themselves with well-filled purses to meet the days of proscription and exile. To what extent distrust and panic operate in abstracting the precious metals from circulation, was but too well known and felt in Germany, France, and Italy* at that recent period when the perpetual shifting of the scenes of the political drama furnished an amiable friend with his Woburn Epilogue: 'Old names go down like mighty ships at sea, And the wild waves scarce answer where they be; Who's that upon the dickey?—It's the Pope!'-— * We had occasion in a recent article to give some details of the disappearance of all coin and precious metals in the richest cities and provinces of revolution-ridden Italy. In the Austrian dominions on this side the Alps, even at this moment (Aug. 1850) no gold nor silver whatever is to be seen! Hardly one specimen even of copper! The small circulation is still, as it was last year, paper-the note for 3 kreutzers being further divisible into four bits! Thanks Thanks to the steady front presented to a Chartist mob by our upper and middle classes, an English poet could thus spout "at home at ease' for a pleasant Christmas party in a ducal saloon. But even in this hitherto favoured land, to which money flows in from all sides as to the securest haven, it is a most remarkable fact, that in each of the years 1848 and 1849 about forty thousand guineas, half-guineas, and seven-shilling pieces-golden coin suppressed during the last two reigns, and therefore unknown to our juvenile readers were brought to the Mint to be melted! Passing by therefore the loss, exhaustion, and wear and tear of gold, which will explain the disappearance of so much bullion, we beg a little attention to this one feature of hoarding. If that plan has been acted upon already even here, we venture to prophesy that, should the Continental disturbances be renewed and extend themselves to our firesides, not all the heaps of Siberia and gulches of California will more than replace the gold which will be secreted; and a considerable proportion of which will for ever disappear, owing to the secrecy observed by the hoarders in their operations. As a lesson therefore, more useful to the multitude than any they will learn at the 'diggins,' we recommend economists to prepare an estimate, to be distributed in a penny's worth of type, to show at one view how much specie is withdrawn from circulation on each occasion of social and political disturbance-and thus try to settle the debtor and creditor account with those Utopians of the Peace Society who, to arrive at their millennium, have boasted that they will destroy mighty empires with as much ease as they crumple up pieces of paper' before credulous Cockneys. ART. V.-A Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece. By William Mure of Caldwell. Vols. I.—III. 8vo. 1850. THES THESE are the opening volumes of a work which, if completed on the same scale of fulness, and without any defalcation in breadth of research, independence of thought, and vigour of style, will establish its author in the first rank of literary historians. There exists no book in any language that can fairly claim the same title; nor even if K. O. Müller had lived to finish his excellent one, would it have supplied the blank which we may hope to see filled up by Colonel Mure: for firstly, he had not ventured on anything like the Colonel's minuteness of detail and freedom of illustration; secondly, he was a mere scholar, and a mere untravelled German scholar-profoundly read in learned authorities and academical controversies, but betraying continually the want of that knowledge of life and affairs which is so peculiarly 435 Colonel Mure on the Literature of Ancient Greece. peculiarly required in the expositor of Greek literature:—and moreover hampered by indistinctness of conception as to the actual physical features of Greece;-this latter deficiency being so much felt by himself that he declined to pursue his work without having personally explored the country-in which effort he met his early and lamented death. In all these points his successor has a conspicuous advantage over him. To every appliance of English and also of German education, the Member for Renfrewshire has added abundant experience and observation of man, society, and business. Our readers are no strangers to his Travels in Greece,* or probably to the many critical essays in English and in foreign journals which have sustained the impression that book made. Both Travels and Essays may be considered as the preparations and prælusions of this History-which, its preface tells us, has been the chief occupation of his mind during twenty years. We are willing to hope that he has already performed the heaviest part of his labour. A man of his sense would hardly have begun the composition of such a work, certainly not have given any instalment of it to the public, before he had deliberately reviewed the whole compass of his subject and materials, and seen clearly in his mind's eye the scope and interdependence of its multifarious sections. After the reading and noting which such a survey and the subsequent step imply, the mere writing may cost comparatively little to a practised pen. We understand that some more volumes may be expected after no considerable interval, and old as we are, speculate on handling the last of what must needs be a long series. These three goodly 8vos. bring us down only to the age of Pisistratus ;—that is, they are occupied almost exclusively, after some preliminary chapters on philology, with the history of the Epic and early Lyric poetry of Greece. The work of Müller, so well translated by Mr. George Cornewall Lewis,† advances many stages beyond this point; and for that, among other reasons, we shall defer any attempt to compare and balance the two writers, until at least one more livraison of the latter is on our desk. On the present occasion, indeed, we mean to confine ourselves within narrow limits, and to keep before us principally what critics nowa-days are apt to regard as a humble and trivial function. For we adhere to our old-fashioned notion that, when a man of rich endowments makes his first appearance, or offers the first specimen of what seems destined to be the main monument of his literary energy-but more especially when his book is of the graver class—it is the primary duty of reviewers to think not of themselves but of their author; to put the rein on indulgence in * See Q. Rev., vol. lxx. p. 129. Library of Useful Knowledge, 1847. 2 F 2 any any sort of display except the display of his qualities; to aim, in short, with a single heart at the encouragement of his zeal by awakening the curiosity and sympathy of his and their public. This by no means forbids the indication of any real or supposed error or defect of a pervading sort; on the contrary, at least in the case of the commencing portion of a bulky book, that seems a duty of commensurate obligation. But it excludes all chance of formal, original, or would-be-original, disquisition on the part of the journalist; and we suspect that even at present, when the case is really one of solid and serious claims, our friends are far from being displeased with a recurrence to the primitive notion of Nouvelles de la République des Lettres. Those, however, of our habitual readers who have attended to our statement of the period embraced in these volumes, will very easily comprehend what difficulty we should have had in adopting a more ambitious plan. They must be at once aware that the Colonel's chief theme is Homer-and will recollect that even within these few years we have devoted several entire articles to what must, of course, constitute very leading topics in his treatment of that vast theme. It is a true comfort to us that we have found our views on these questions in harmony, generally speaking, with the results of this historian's protracted study and deliberate analysis of the poems themselves— an analysis more keen and searching, as well as liberal and genial, than they, or we might, perhaps, say than any uninspired writings of antiquity ever before underwent. In some respects he has gone farther than we had previously ventured to do-in some few he halts behind the conclusions with which we have now satisfied ourselves;—and he appears to have made slender progress in one great branch of learning without which we are convinced the task which he has so much advanced cannot be perfected. But we are sure we have already said enough to justify to our readers the choice which we have avowed. We shall, in a word, endeavour to illustrate the design and method of Colonel Mure's chapters on the Homeric controversy-chapters which, if published as a distinct treatise, should have been quite sufficient to command general admiration and gratitude. In this controversy our countrymen have taken a considerable part-and on both sides of it; but the cleverest of them that occupies a prominent place among the heretics, Mr. Payne Knight, had something diseased in his mind from the beginning, and was exactly the man to adopt eagerly and defend ingeniously a theory which ran counter to the old traditions and common sense of the world. In fact, the doctrine revived and developed by Wolf as to Homer, was an offset from the determined warfare against the Bible which throughout the last century occupied so many of the liveliest intellects in Europe. Homer has been not unjustly called, by Wolf himself, the Bible of Greece; and it would be easy to show in how many ways the Antichristian conspiracy might have hoped to see its proper object forwarded by the collateral-however in many cases undesigned-co-operation of those who essayed to shake everything that had been for thousands of years accepted as to the origin, construction, and authority of the literary monument which approached nearest in claim of antiquity to the Hebrew Scriptures, and had exerted an influence only inferior to theirs on the religious belief of nations, besides directing and governing, far more than any other writings whatever, the general sentiment and taste of the cultivated world. In such a movement it was no wonder that a few leisurely and eccentric Englishmen engaged; but it was one especially suited to the marking propensities of the Germans-who have always leisure for everything in the line of reading and writing, and with whom eccentricity has long been the standard substitute for genius. Accordingly they worked each after his fashion for nearly fifty years with most pertinacious alacrity-one cutting and slashing-another pruning and paring-score upon score mumbling and nibbling—until at length there was little more left of what Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Varro, or Virgil understood by Homer, than there is of what we and our readers still venerate as the Book, for the disciples of the illustrious sect which had Voltaire for its patriarch, and has at present that eminent Professor of Divinity, Dr. Strauss, for its hierophant in chief. The attacks were conducted upon the very same principles — and it would be curious enough to exhibit in detail the precise parallels between the methods of working out these principles, the results announced, the overawing effect produced for the moment, the subsequent reaction of a scepticism against the sceptics, and the ultimate success of awakened reflection, honest investigation, and candid judgment in disentangling the whole vast web of sophistry, and restoring things, in the general opinion of the sane community of Christendom, to very nearly the status quo ante bellum. In the Homeric department Colonel Mure-notwithstanding his neglect of some very valuable resources-will, we have no sort of doubt, be held to have practically ended the strife and erected the Conservative trophy on a rescued field. For the upper classes of educated men, in this country at least, we are willing to believe that the other and graver debate may be said to have arrived sooner at a salutary termination; but in that case the discussion took a far wider range-reaching to, if not below, that immense mass of active minds which have been stimulated and set in |