still it requires to be used with tact and judgment.  There is no objection to Mr. Mahaffy’s describing Philopoemen as the Garibaldi, and Antigonus Doson as the Victor Emmanuel of his age.  Such comparisons have, no doubt, a certain cheap popular value.  But, on the other hand, a phrase like ‘Greek Pre-Raphaelitism’ is rather awkward; not much is gained by dragging in an allusion to Mr. Shorthouse’s John Inglesant in a description of the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius; and when we are told that the superb Pavilion erected in Alexandria by Ptolemy Philadelphus was a ‘sort of glorified Holborn Restaurant,’ we must say that the elaborate description of the building given in Athenaeus could have been summed up in a better and a more intelligible epigram.

On the whole, however, Mr. Mahaffy’s book may have the effect of drawing attention to a very important and interesting period in the history of Hellenism.  We can only regret that, just as he has spoiled his account of Greek politics by a foolish partisan bias, so he should have marred the value of some of his remarks on literature by a bias that is quite as unmeaning.  It is uncouth and harsh to say that ’the superannuated schoolboy who holds fellowships and masterships at English colleges’ knows nothing of the period in question except what he reads in Theocritus, or that a man may be considered in England a distinguished Greek professor ’who does not know a single date in Greek history between the death of Alexander and the battle of Cynoscephalae’; and the statement that Lucian, Plutarch, and the four Gospels are excluded from English school and college studies in consequence of the pedantry of ‘pure scholars, as they are pleased to call themselves,’ is, of course, quite inaccurate.  In fact, not merely does Mr. Mahaffy miss the spirit of the true historian, but he often seems entirely devoid of the temper of the true man of letters.  He is clever, and, at times, even brilliant, but he lacks reasonableness, moderation, style and charm.  He seems to have no sense of literary proportion, and, as a rule, spoils his case by overstating it.  With all his passion for imperialism, there is something about Mr. Mahaffy that is, if not parochial, at least provincial, and we cannot say that this last book of his will add anything to his reputation either as an historian, a critic, or a man of taste.

Greek Life and Thought:  from the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest.  By J. P. Mahaffy, Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. (Macmillan and Co.)

MR. MORRIS’S COMPLETION OF THE ODYSSEY

(Pall Mall Gazette, November 24, 1887.)