the fervor for liberty that swept through the world in those days. It seems absurd; it seems almost insane. And yet it was very real-at all events it gave birth to beautiful poems.

Heine was not quite so serious as his contemporaries. His mind was curved in such a way that nothing stood very steadily on it. He was a little like the fool in Lear, for he spoke the truth in bitter words and jested. He might have died on a barri

cade, but only if he could have made an epigrammatic "dying speech." His sense of humor saved him from any uncontrollable impulse toward martyrdom.

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There was a great deal of the Parisian in him. Exiled from Germany and his own race, he found his true home in Montmartre. Of all German writers he is the best-known in France. He lived in Paris. All the writers in his day speak of him in their memoirs and souvenirs. He was a German

poet, who did newspaper work" in Paris. And yet I doubt whether Heine is much read or much loved here. The French translations are pale and cold-not quite so bad as Sir J. Martin's English versions, but bad enough. Heine himself said, after reading a French translation of I know not which of his poems, that he felt as though he had been dragged by the hair into the market-place to the cries of "There's the clown-heave a brick at him!" Another time he said that his songs, when translated, were like stuffed "moonbeams," which is, perhaps, a trifle occult. And yet Frenchmen like Gerard de Nerval, Saint Rene Taillandier and Edmond Schure, have worked at his verse.

In France Heine's name is celebrated and his work is unknown.

Heine loved France and despised it-and this complex sentiment is eminently German. There are Germans who will explain to you how they can entertain a similar sentiment for the Emperor Wilhelm II.

No more than any one of us was Heine the son of his father; he was the child of the society in which he was bred. His childish imagination had been caught by the splendor of Napoleonism. He had seen the grand army file by-seen, he often thought, the grey clad figure of the Emperor riding ahead. Always the "Marseillaise" sung in his brain. And then the sensuous beauty of Paris appealed to him--its abundant sparkle and fervor of life. So he came here to suffer-and die. Now and then a nostalgia for Germany took him. He sighed for the Rhine-as Byron, yawning among his Venetian girls, dreamed fitfully of the sullen Thames. But he did not go back to the Rhine. He was well enough pleased with rhyming his homesickness-how do the verses go?

He was not a German poet then; he was not a French poet. There were odd elements in him. If you throw his poems into the chemical tube you get strange reactions-Byronism, Heilenism, and a cergenius certain indifferent thinkers explain by saying tain sensuality all Oriental. This complexity of

He was a Jew." I think not. I think not. Certainly a simpler explanation would be to say, "He was a man.” In all of us there is a poet who sleeps-and the sleeping goat. In all of us there is a little of Greece and a hint of Judea. In all of us there is the idealist who would fain die for fantastic absurdities such as liberty, justice and national honorand there is as well the compromiser and the coward. There are a few great men who do not compromise. Neither you nor I nor Heine are of them. And his work will last a century and yours and mine will last a day-but always the work of the compromiser dies. Surely, it perishes - even though like Heine's it be embalmed in genius. VANCE THOMPSON in The Criterion.

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The Oldest Guide-Book in the World.*

Some seventeen centuries ago an old gentleman of antiquarian temper and simple faith set out upon a journey through Greece. Wherever he went he kept his eyes and his ears open, and though he was not gifted with the power of vivid observation he heard and remembered the reckless gossip of a hundred local guides. Fortified, moreover, by the study not only of Thucydides and Herodotus, but of as many county histories as he could find, he resumed in his proper person all the historical and geographical knowledge of his time. Whether or no he believed the book which he compiled after his many tours a masterpiece of literature, remains uncertain; but no immodesty could have persuaded him that his compost of legends and itineraries was destined to outlive the manifold shocks of time and chance. But while the wave of oblivion has overtaken Sappho, whom he quotes, and Menander, whose grave he reverently contemplated, his "Description of Greece' has been flung, like an old. shoe, high upon the beach.

Nor does his good fortune end with his survival. He not only lives; he lives in the light of day. No modern guide-book to Greece can be compiled without his aid, and even the tourist is familiar with his name. Moreover, the subject of his treatise has made him a plaything of scholarship, and you might fill a library with books and pamphlets based upon his researches. The Germans have contem

* "Pausanias' Description of Greece"; translated with a commen. tary by J. G. Frazer. In six volumes; London, 1898.

plated him from every point of view. They have tested his dates, and doubted his credibility. To this professor he has seemed a faithful voyager; for that one he is a charlatan, collecting from books the experiences of others. He has known praise and blame, honor and contempt; but never, for all his lack of pretence, has he encountered neglect. And now, in Mr. Frazer's monumental edition, the last tribute of respect has been paid him. Translated into English, far more limpid and readable than his own cramped Greek, equipped with a commentary five or six times greater in bulk than the mere text, he takes a place in the scholar's library which does not yield in dignity to the position occupied by Mayor's "Juvenal" or the "Sophocles" of Professor Jebb. For Mr. Frazer is a prince of editors. A scholar, who is also a man of letters, an antiquarian without pedantry, a traveler, who has not hesitated to test his learning on the spot, he has made Pausanias the excuse for an invaluable work upon the history, legends and archæology of Greece. While he recognizes the importance of Pausanias' work, he does not magnify his author into an impeccable hero. On the contrary, he is alive always to his limitations and defects, and from the fulness of his own knowledge he checks and amplifies the traveler's statements at every page. Of course he has overlooked none of the German authorities, but his method of argument is not theirs. He sees through the printed word to the meaning it conveys, and shows by many a modern instance how futile is Teutonic pedantry. For example, at the very beginning of the first book Pausanias notes that there were shipsheds at Piræus down to his time. Even more, the township was so flourishing, says Pausanias, as to possess two colonnades together with sanctuaries of Zeus and Aphrodite. Whence Herr Kalkmann argues without more ado that Pausanias is not describing what he saw, but is merely pilfering from the books of his distant predecessors. And why? Because it is notorious that the docks of Piræus were burnt and its walls demolished under Sylla, and because Strabo declared that the place as he knew it was a rubbish-heap. The argument implies that nothing can be rebuilt that has once been pulled down, and that two centuries of prosperity are unavailing to repair the savagery of war. "This," says Mr. Frazer, with excellent sense, "is much as if a traveler who visited Madgeburg in 1831 should be expected to describe from personal observation the blood-stained ruins in which Tilly left the city after his ferocious sack in May, 1631.” The parallel is perfect at all points, and should be enough to reduce to absurdity the method of criticism which prevails in modern Germany.

For another reason Mr. Frazer is better qualified than any other scholar of his time to elucidate the text of Pausauias. In the province of folk-lore the

author of "The Golden Bough" has few competitors; and since, as we shall presently see, this ancient tourist was a tireless collector of legends, his text provides abundant material for commentary. Thus for the story of the rifled treasury, of which Pausanias makes Orchomenus the scene, and which is best known in the version of Herodotus, Mr. Frazer has collected some thirty parallels, while he has treated the familiar legend of Bethgellert, which has its counterparts in Phocis and ancient India, with the same fulness of illustration. Similarly there is no custom recorded by the Greek traveler which Mr. Frazer cannot match in Java or Sumatra, in Abyssinia or the islands of the distant Pacific. One may doubt whether the industrious collection of parallels can prove anything more than the unanimity of human minds; one may not doubt the ingenuity or learning of this, the final, edition. of Pausanias.

Wherefore, if it be permitted to Pausanias to look back from the land beyond the grave, he must be filled with a proud surprise. For here he is, as simple an antiquarian as ever set pack upon his shoulders, treated with the respect and erudition generally reserved for historians and poets. Who he was and what, to whom this good fortune has befallen, is unknown and probably unknowable. He was born in Lydia, and flourished in the second century under the Emperor Hadrian, "the Prince," he declares, "who did most for the glory of God and the happiness of his subjects." For the rest, we must infer his character from his book, and since he chose to hide his personality, either from natural modesty or fear of the critics, the inference is naturally partial. But it is evident that he was serious even to pedantry, incapable of humor, and far more skilled in research than in observation. That he visited the places which he described is obvious, and it needs the wrong-headed ingenuity of a German professor to prove him an impostor; but he is seldom touched by the sentiment of mountain village or wooded valley, and you picture him rather poring over a manuscript than amazed at the masterpieces of Phidias. Before all things he was a Pagan, as became a contemporary of Lucian, and you read his "Description" as you read the "True History," firm in the belief that Athens was still the capital of the world. Not even conquest killed the glory of Greece, and six centuries after Pericles the city of Sophocles and Plato, of Eschylus and Aristophanes, retained her influence. From beginning to end of the "Description" you will find no word of Christian encroachment, no word of the literature which had made the Tiber famous. Pausanias, who is constant in his reference to the poetry and history of Greece, knows nothing of Cicero or Virgil, of Livy or Plautus. Once, indeed, he records a visit which he paid to the imperial metropolis. "I saw white deer at Rome," he writes with a cur

iosity worthy of Samuel Pepys, "and very much was I surprised to see them; but it did not occur to me to enquire where they were brought from, whether from continents or islands." That is all, and it is an eloquent commentary upon the persistence of the Hellenic ideal. The casual reader is only too apt to chop the history of the world into separate blocks, and to forget that a definite separation is impossible. Rome climbed the summit of her power, and even faced the descent, while Greece still remained the lawgiver of the intellect. Pausanias, then, was a Pagan, and if he does not accept all the ancient legends, he records them without smile or comment. He fathers one athlete upon a river, another upon an apparition, nor does he attempt to distinguish between myth and history. Now and again he shows the cloven hoof of rationalism. For instance, he explains the fable that Procne and Philomela were turned into a swallow and a nightingale by the plaintive and dirge-like song of these birds. And worse still, he rejects the story of Narcissus, because it is folly, says he, to suppose that a person who has reached the age of falling in love should be unable to distinguish between a man and his shadow. This indeed, is the childishness of skepticism, but Pausanias does not often err so gravely, and he actually wrote a confession of faith in his maturer years. "When I began this work [the passage is in the Eighth Book] I used to look on these Greek stories as little better than foolishness, but now that I have got as far as Arcadia my opinion about them is this: I believe that the Greeks who were accounted wise spoke of old in riddles and not straight out, and accordingly I conjecture that this story about Cronus is a bit of Greek philosophy. In matters of religion I will follow tradition."

So this subject of Hadrian followed the tradition of the Greeks, and even at the first his skepticism was reluctant and transitory. He proposes an implicit faith in the gods; he believes that Apollo competed at Olympia, and that Hephaestus was an artificer in bronze. On the other hand, he was as determined to reject the possibility of hell as our own emancipated clergy. "It is not easy," says he, "to believe that the gods have an underground abode in which the souls of the dead assemble." But this doubt did not prevent a cordial faith in were-wolves and ghosts; in brief, as he said, he followed tradition, reserving to himself the privilege of occasional dissent. In one other respect, also, he resembled the best of his remoter ancestors. He had a heart-whole distrust of politics. Though he was inclined to believe with Candide that he lived in the best of all possible worlds, and that the Emperor Hadrian was the best of all possible emperors, nothing would have persuaded him to take any part in public affairs. Demosthenes is still an awful warning, and it is the orator's fate

He

which prompts the following passage: "Well, methinks, the man who throws himself heart and soul into a political career, and puts his trust in the people, never yet came to a good end." Thus he preferred travel to government, and set out upon his voyage full of confidence in the autocracy that governed the world. But even upon his journeys he carried with him his customary gravity. did not travel for traveling's sake, nor for the mere delight of the eye. History rather than sensation engrossed him, and he was as remote from jocularity as from enthusiasm. Once he permits himself what in another writer might appear to be a joke. "The moon, they say, loved Endymion," so he writes in his history of Elis, "and he had fifty daughters by the goddess. Others, with more probability, say that Endymion married a wife;" but we dare not press the point, and perhaps the jest is unconscious. In yet another respect he separates himself from the mass of travelers. He does not tell you how he journeyed from place to place, and he is severely silent on the innumerable incidents which color the least adventurous voyage with amusement or disappointment. There is no word of ships or saddle-horses; no reproach for illstocked inn or rapacious custom-house. Nor may it be pleaded for Pausanias that the austerity of his time did not permit these innocent freedoms. You cannot think that Lucian would have traveled through Elis or Attica without noting the bad roads and the hospitality of the natives. Moreover in Dicæarchus, freely quoted by Mr. Frazer, we have evidence enough that the Special Correspondent was familiar to Greece centuries before Pausanias.

For Dicæarchus (a pupil of Aristotle, if the attribution of the work be correct,) was as jaunty a tourist as ever wore a tweed suit or slung a fieldglass over his shoulder. His flow of spirits was unfailing, and his humor would have been new today. For him the eye was more important than the brain; he recorded what he saw rather than what he had learned, and therefore he is an entertaining companion. His account of Athens would have gained an instant success in a half-penny paper, for it is witty, superficial and highly spiced. He at least did not approach the greatest of all cities in an attitude of admiration. No; he found its houses mean, and its streets "nothing but miserable old lanes." Moreover, the place, so he said, "was infested with a set of scribblers who worry visitors and rich strangers." But these scoundrels were not tolerated, and the people, if it caught them, made a speedy example of them. Oropus he denounced for a nest of hucksters. "The greed of the custom-house officers," he complained, "is unsurpassed, their roguery inveterate and bred in the bone." Worse still, the citizens were coarse and truculent in their manners, and reform was impossible, since all the respectable members of the

community were knocked on the head. But it was at Thebes that he reached the culmination of his displeasure. The inhabitants of the Boeotian capital were, in this estimation of this traveler, rash, insolent and overbearing. Their face was set against justice, and lawsuits commonly lasted thirty years, so that fisticuffs took the place of reason, and "the methods of the prize-ring were transferred to the courts of justice." As for the poet Laon, who praised the Boeotians, he "did not speak the truth, the fact being that he was caught in adultery, and let off lightly by the injured husband." Thus, indeed, does Dicæarchus sum up the vices of the hated province: "Greed lives in Oropus, envy in Tanagra, quarrelsomeness in Thespiæ, insolence in Thebes, covetousness in Anthedon, curiosity in Coronæa, bragging in Platæa, fever in Onchestus, and stupidity in Haliartus." Here is a pretty indictment for us, framed in the true modern style. But Pausanias is not esteemed for the qualities which give a value to the vivid pictures of Dicaarchus. The Lydian traveler indeed was a steady, conscientious, elderly pedant, incapable of recording or even of receiving quick impressions. belonged to that class which is born middle-aged, and you cannot imagine his sluggish soul stimulated to excess by anger or admiration. Were he alive to-day he would tramp round Europe with a kodak and a green butterfly-net, and if he were persuaded to write a book, the book would have to be hidden away for two or three hundred years before it attained its proper value. Such literature, in fact, is like red wine, the better for keeping; but Pausanius has endured the test of time, and his work has acquired a mellowness, which he, good soul, could never have hoped for it. Even his style proves the modesty of his ambition. Clumsy and parenthetic, it is ill-suited to the expression of sentiment, and rendered him happily incapable either of cant or of word-painting. Yet now and again you wish that he had warmed his frosty temper at the fire of enthusiasm. For his virtues of restraint carry him too far in the opposite direction, and to read his book from chapter to chapter is to recognize that his narrative is very often dry and uninspired. Though he listened with credulous attention to the guides who accompanied him to temple and picturegallery, the anecdotes which he records are drawn from myth and history. Hence, with few exceptions, they are familiar and impersonal, though when he does break out into romance, the rare interest makes you regret his limitations the more bitterly.

It is a temptation, however, to which he does. not often yield, for he is, in truth, a Bædeker, body and soul. None the less, where he was interested he showed himself a patient and conscientious workman. Above all he had a passion for religious rites and superstitions, and, if he cared little how

are.

his contemporaries looked and lived, he zealously enquired how they worshipped and what they believed. He amassed strange facts with the same zeal wherewith Robert Burton gathered strange citations. Indeed his intellect resembled, on an infinitely lower plane, the intellect of the ingenious anatomist. Mr. Frazer has collected a nosegay of the traveler's superstitions, and very curious they Thus this Pagan, who was half a sceptic at times, notes that within the precinct of Zeus on Mount Lycæus neither men nor animals cast shadows, and that whoever entered the enclosure died within the year. Still more fantastic is the legend of the trout in the river Aroanius, who sang like thrushes, and Mr. Frazer's note tells you that the legend is still believed. And with a like faith Pausanius relates that he who catches a fish in the lake near Ægiæ is straightway turned into a fish called the Fisher. So at Marathon the dead warriors rise from their graves and fight the battle over again, while neither snakes nor wolves can live in Sardinia. These are but a handful of the superstitions you will find recorded in this strange compilation; and they are no more interesting than the descriptions of worship and priestcraft, which prove that in the second century after Christ the priests still made rain by dipping an oak-branch in a spring and poured the warm blood of beasts into tombs that the dead might not suffer thirst. What matters it, then, that our guide is silent over the natural beauties of the landscape, when he has preserved for us so vast a wealth of legend and story?

But Pausanias was something else besides an amateur of folklore. Like the excellent archæologist that he was he never passed by a building or a monument without a description. He had a subdued passion for sculpture and architecture, and how faithful was his dull observation of sites and temples has been proved at Athens, at Olympia, and elsewhere. But he seldom offers a decided judgment upon the works which he examines, and his criticism is as far below the alert enthusiasm of Lucien as it is above the vague preciosity of Philostratus. Being by temperament and habit an antiquarian he preferred the old to the new, and if now and then he takes pleasure in mere archaism and betrays a taste which nowadays we should call Pre-Raphaelite, his preferences have been justified by the wisdom of all ages. However, though he never commits the sins of false admiration and shallow dilettantism, it is in the matter of Greek art that his sedulous moderation is most irritating. He who might have told us so much tells us so little. For example, he had the opportunity to solve some secrets of Greek painting. True, a lost art which appeals to the eye can never be recovered through the medium of words; but an artist full of enthusiasm for line and color might have given us news of those masterpieces, whose mere

memory has conferred a kind of immortality upon Polygnotus and Panæænus. A strange fatility has destroyed well-nigh every trace of ancient painting, and but for the critics and historians we should not know that Zeuxis ever existed. And thus a superstition has grown up that the Greeks, supreme at all other points, were deprived of the sense of color, that the Athens of Pericles, in fact, was all white marble and blue sky. This superstition is exploded, no doubt, but we are still ignorant of Micon's art, we still mistake the colored aspect of Greek cities. Now Pausanius, had enthusiasm and technical knowledge come to his aid, might have given us some enlightenment. He visited the Stoa Poikile, he describes the famous Pinacotheca; he saw pictures of Scyrus captured by Achilles, and of Ulysses approaching Nausicaa and her maids as they washed their linen by the stream. But absorbed in the subject he looks upon these works as so many poems in the flat, and contents himself with contrasting Homer and Polygnotus as exponents of mythology.

However, we must not ask of a guide-book more than it can give us, and with all its shortcomings Pausanius' "Description" is unique and invaluable. It is great, perhaps, rather on account of its author's opportunities than on account of his talent. He had the good fortune to visit Athens and Olympia (for instance) before the final desolation overtook them. The account of the Parthenon occupies but a few lines, written without the smallest emotion. Yet the reader may feel some of the enthusiasm which should have stirred this industrious Bædeker. For when Pausanias visited Athens the images still stood upon their pedestals, the many shrines were still unviolated. The chryselephantine statue of the goddess still glittered within the cella of the Parthenon, and the traveler passed through the superb Propylæa to the rock which held the glories of the world. But since the time of Pausanias the Acropolis has known the shocks of war and superstition. The Parthenon, in turn, has been a Christian church and a Mahomedan mosque; the Erectheum, converted for a while to a temple of Divine Wisdom, degenerated into the harem of a turbaned Turk; the destruction, which the explosion of a powder-magazine commenced, was increased by the bombardment of Morosini and his Venetians. Then followed a period of carelessness and neglect; the priceless sculptures were targets for the heedless Turks, and might have been utterly destroyed had not Lord Elgin, Byron's Vandal, carried them away into safer keeping. And now, where once the Turk was supreme, there reigns the German archæologist, who is as remote from the simple faith of the Pagan Pausanias as was the Moslem soldier. In fact, the last sad indignity has overtaken what once was a living citadel, and temple and tower, spared demolition, have

become so many specimens in a vast museum. The specimens are cared for, it is true, and reconstructed by the scholarship that can pierce many mysteries. The scholar of today understands their meaning and purpose as well, perhaps, as the Athenians who passed them by in idle gaiety of heart. The most crabbed inscription is deciphered and explained; the scantiest indication of a column is sufficient for the reconstruction of a temple. But even a temple is half dead without its worshippers, and when once the life of Athens ceased, the Acropolis was no more than a body without a soul. But in the time of Pausanias the citadel of Athens was still animated, and you read his work with the respect due to one who has known an experience which can never be yours. After all, no guide-book has been written since which is likely to remain, after seventeen centuries, a unique treasury of fable, history and criticism; and surely thus Pausanias deserves the learning and skill Mr. Frazer has devoted to him, with an untiring thoroughness which proves how ill-judged is the common reproach that modern work is done only for the day. And as for the subject of so much labor, his own conclusion justifies his many difficult wanderings. "Many a wondrous sight may be seen," wrote he, "and not a few tales of wonder may be heard in Greece; but there is nothing in which the blessing of God rests in so full a measure as the rites of Eleusis and the Olympic games." The worst is, that, being initiate, he is silent, as in duty bound, concerning the mysteries, and that you can feel the spirit of the Olympic games more intimately in one ode of Pindar than in all Pausanias' faithful record of innumerable competitors and their forgotten triumphs. CHARLES WHIBLEY.

A Forgotten Poet.

Astronomers tell us of stars that suddenly blaze out in the clear heavens and surpass the brightest planets in their brilliancy and splendor, but which, after having been for a brief period the wonder and admiration of the world, gradually fade away until scarcely discernible. So sometimes an author writes a successful book, and suddenly becomes the idol of the people, the fashion of the hour, surpassing in popularity authors of far greater merit; but, after enjoying for a time the favor of sovereigns and the applause of the populace, he is thrown aside for the next new favorite, and is soon lost in a neglect as unaccountable as his former popularity. John Lyly, the subject of this sketch, is a striking example of the truth of the saying, "The glory of this age is the scorn of the next." The favorite of Elizabeth's court, placed by his contemporaries before Shakspere, Spenser and Chapman, his first work, "Euphues," enjoyed a popularity accorded to but few books. Gradually, however, his influence