The risks that books run may be seen by the following examples. A valuable volume-first edition of Sir J. Elliott's The Governor-a small octavo book, had been brought out for a customer to inspect. Though containing the autograph of Lord Cecil of Elizabethan fame it was not sold. Some days afterwards Mr. Salkeld was looking over the boxes of old books outside his shop, when lo! in a sixpenny box he spied the precious volume. For some days it had been picked up and put down again, and all the while the handlers of the same unwittingly missed the opportunity of getting for twenty-four farthings what afterwards went for £4. It had probably been carelessly laid on a sixpenny heap, and so was taken out with the lot.

Another valuable book did not fare so well. It was Chapman's translation of Homer's Iliad. It was taken up from a pile by a customer, and £5 was its price, but it was not sold. A day or so after Mr. Salkeld thought he would have a look at it, but it was not to be found. Since it had been brought The Leisure Hour.

out a lot of rubbish had been sent off to the mill to be destroyed. The cover and title being discovered, it was evident that it had gone off with the waste. A messenger was sent off at once to the office of the millowners, and obtained an order to search the sacks which had been sent. On his arrival he was told that some of the books had been turned into pulp, but he might look at the rest. With heavy heart and anxious eyes he began the search. One and another book was turned over. At last-could it be? Yes, there was the wandering Chapman, in a sad plight, but whole in its text. It was brought home and had to be sold for £4, though eventually it fetched a good deal more when done up.

The gentleman who had inspected the book had laid it down on the heap of rubbish which was immediately carted away, and but for the happy desire to have a look at the volume and the prompt search for it, in an hour or two it would have been reduced to pulp, worth few pence a pound.

J. P. Hobson.

The Cornhill Magazine.

Prof. Murray is one of those rare classical scholars who add to their professional erudition a fine and ardent sense of things literary. This double quality marks every page of his contribution to the series of volumes on "The Athenian Drama." It is a book which should appeal to readers of all types and of every grade of attainment; charming in outward form, with its delightful illustrations from Greek vases; and singularly complete and satisfying in its union of great critical insight with exceptional felicity in the difficult art of verse translation. With the possible exception of Browning's "Balaustion's Adventure" and "Aristophanes' Apology," we know of no work which brings the English reader more closely into touch with fifth-century Athens and with the spiritual issues which were then swaying the minds of men so different and yet so strangely akin as Aristophanes and Euripides. Out of the material available for his purpose, Prof. Murray has

"Eurpiides," Taanslated by Gilbert Murray. (George Allen.)

chosen, firstly, the "Hippolytus" and the "Bacchae," to the latter of which, in particular, he devotes his introductory essay; secondly, the "Frogs" of Aristophanes, "the chief ancient criticism of Euripides, a satire penetrating, brilliant, and, though preposterously unfair, still exceedingly helpful"; and, thirdly, a certain number of the lost plays, the outlines of which he endeavors to trace from such notices and fragments of them as survive.

The "Hippolytus" is, of course, one of Euripides' earlier plays, written in the first eager days of the Athenian hegemony, when all the world seemed breaking into flower together, before the bitterness and the disillusion came. It tells how Hippolytus served the austere wood goddess Artemis, and neglected Aphrodite, and how Aphrodite would be revenged, and through her might made Phaedra a flaming sword and brought Hippolytus to ruin. It would not be from Euripides if it had not its irony and its questioning of established things; but in the main it is marked by the serene beauty of all the

earlier plays. The quality of Phaedra's love, as Prof. Murray notes, "apart from its circumstances, is entirely fragrant and clear." And, from beginning to end, the piece is full of exquisite poetry. Hippolytus enters with a prayer to his mistress:

To thee this wreathed garland, from a green

And virgin meadow bear I, O my Queen,

Where never shepherd leads his grazing ewes

Nor scythe has touched. Only the river dews

Gleam, and the spring bee sings, and in the glade

Hath Solitude her mystic garden made. From the choruses we select that which is sung at the crisis of the play, while the poor love-distraught Phaedra is setting her white neck to the "noose of death" behind the stage. The pastoral aspiration comes as an interlude between two passion-flecked scenes:

Could I take me to some cavern for mine hiding,

In the hill-tops where the Sun scarce hath trod;

Or a cloud make the home of mine abiding,

As a bird among the bird-droves of God!

Could I wing me to my rest amid the roar

Of the deep Adriatic on the shore, Where the water of Eridanus is clear, And Phaethon's sad sisters by his

grave

Weep into the river, and each tear Gleams, a drop of amber, in the

wave.

To the strand of the Daughters of the Sunset,

The Apple-tree, the singing and the gold;

Where the mariner must stay him from his onset,

And the red wave is tranquil as of old;

Yea, beyond that Pillar of the End
That Atlas guardeth, would I wend;

Where a voice of living waters never ceaseth

In God's quiet garden by the sea, And Earth, the ancient life-giver, increaseth

Joy among the meadows, like a tree. Half a century elapsed between "Hippolytus" and the "Bacchae." In the interval the tragedy of Athens had been played. All the high hopes had faded. Hegemony had degenerated into empire. And then came the war, with its pitiful relaxation of moral and intellectual fibre. Athens, once "farther removed from primitive savagery" than any other people, had learnt from Cleon not to be "misled by the three most deadly enemies of empire, Pity and Eloquent Sentiments, and the Generosity of Strength." Euripides himself had incurred the dislike of his fellow-countrymen, and had had to leave Athens, under circumstances unknown to us, "because of the malicious exultation over him of nearly all the city." He fled to Macedonia, and dwelt on the wild northern slopes of Olympus:

In the elm-woods and the oaken,

There where Orpheus harped of old, And the trees awoke and knew him, And the wild things gathered to him, As he sang amid the broken

Glens his music manifold.

Here he wrote the "Bacchae," which was produced, not quite finished, after his death. It is a story of how a god came to his own and his own received him not. The god was Dionysus:

A man of charm and spell, from Lydian seas,

A head all gold and cloudy fragrancies,
A wine-red cheek, and eyes that hold
the light
Of the very Cyprian!

Having won all the East to his worship, he set his foot in Thebes, the home of his mother Semele. And all the women, led by Agave, sister of