CHAPTER LXXXIV

.: INTITLED "THE RENDING IN SUNDER." REVEALED AT MECCA

In the name of the most merciful GOD. When the heaven shall be rent in sunder, and shall obey its LORD, and shall be capable _thereof_; and when the earth shall be stretched out, and shall cast forth that which _is_ therein, and shall remain empty, and shall obey its LORD, and shall be capable _thereof_: O man, verily laboring thou laborest to _meet_ thy LORD, and thou shalt meet him. And he who shall have his book given into his right hand shall be called to an easy account, and shall turn unto his family with joy: but he who shall have his book given him behind his back shall invoke destruction _to fall upon him_, and he shall be sent into hell to be burned; because he rejoiced insolently amidst his family _on earth_. Verily he thought he should never return _unto God_: yea verily, but his LORD beheld him. Wherefore I swear by the redness of the sky after sunset, and by the night, and the _animals_ which it driveth together, and by the moon when she is in the full; ye shall surely be transferred _successively_ from state to state. What _aileth_ them, therefore, that they believe not _the resurrection_; and that, when the Korân is read unto them, they worship not? Yea: the unbelievers accuse _the same_ of imposture: but GOD well knoweth the _malice_ which they keep hidden _in their breasts_. Wherefore denounce unto them a grievous punishment, except those who believe and do good works: for them _is prepared_ a never-failing reward.

THE PRAYER OF AL-HARIRI

From the 'Makamat' of al-Hariri of Basra: Translation of Theodore Preston

We praise thee, O God, For whatever perspicuity of language thou hast taught us, And whatever eloquence thou hast inspired us with, As we praise thee For the bounty which thou hast diffused, And the mercy which thou hast spread abroad: And we pray thee to guard us From extravagant expressions and frivolous superfluities As we pray Thee to guard us From the shame of incapacity and the disgrace of hesitation: And we entreat thee to exempt us from temptation By the flattery of the admirer or connivance of the indulgent, As we entreat thee to exempt us from exposure To the slight of the detractor or aspersion of the defamer: And we ask thy forgiveness Should our frailties betray us into ambiguities, As we ask thy forgiveness Should our steps advance to the verge of improprieties: And we beg thee freely to bestow Propitious succor to lead us aright, And a heart turning in unison with truth, And a language adorned with veracity, And style supported by conclusiveness, And accuracy that may exclude incorrectness, And firmness of purpose that may overcome caprice, And sagacity whereby we may attain discrimination; That thou wilt aid us by thy guidance unto right conceptions, And enable us with thy help to express them with clearness, And thou wilt guard us from error in narration, And keep us from folly even in pleasantry, So that we may be safe from the censure of sarcastic tongues, And secure from the fatal effects of false ornament, And may not resort to any improper source, And occupy no position that would entail regret, Nor be assailed by any ill consequences or blame, Nor be constrained to apology for inconsideration. O God, fulfill for us this our desire, And put us in possession of this our earnest wish, And exclude us not from thy ample shade, Nor leave us to become the prey of the devourer: For we stretch to thee the hand of entreaty, And profess entire submission to thee, and contrition of spirit, And seek with humble supplication and appliances of hope The descent of thy vast grace and comprehensive bounty.

THE WORDS OF HARETH IBN-HAMMAM

From the 'Makamat' of al-Hariri of Barra: Translation of Theodore Preston

On a night whose aspect displayed both light and shade, And whose moon was like a magic circlet of silver, I was engaged in evening conversation at Koufa With companions who had been nourished on the milk of eloquence, So the charms of conversation fascinated us, While wakefulness still prevailed among us, Until the moon had at length disappeared in the West. But when the gloom of night had thus drawn its curtain, And nothing but slumber remained abroad, We heard from the door the low call of a benighted traveler, And then followed the knock of one seeking admission; And we answered, "Who comes here this darksome night?" And the stranger replied:--

"Listen ye who here are dwelling! May you so be kept from ill! So may mischief ne'er befall you, Long as life your breast shall fill! Gloom of dismal night and dreary Drives a wretch to seek your door, Whose disheveled hoary tresses All with dust are sprinkled o'er; Who, though destitute and lonely, Far has roamed on hill and dale, Till his form became thus crooked, And his cheek thus deadly pale; Who, though faint as slender crescent, Ventures here for aid to sue, Hospitable meal and shelter Claiming first of all from you. Welcome then to food and dwelling One so worthy both to share, Sure to prove content and thankful, Sure to laud your friendly care."

Fascinated then by the sweetness of his language and delivery, And readily inferring what this prelude betokened, We hasted to open the door, and received him with welcome, Saying to the servant, "Hie! Hie! Bring whatever is ready!" But the stranger said, "By Him who brought me to your abode, I will not taste of your hospitality, unless you pledge to me That you will not permit me to be an incumbrance to you, Nor impose on yourselves necessity of eating on my account."

* * * * *

Now it was just as if he had been informed of our wishes, Or had shot from the same bow as our sentiments; So we gratified him by acceding to the condition, And highly commended him for his accommodating disposition. But when the servant had produced what was ready, And the candle was lighted up in the midst of us, I regarded him attentively, and lo! it was Abu-Zeid; Whereupon I addressed my companions in these words:-- "May you have joy of the guest who has repaired to you: For though the moon of the heavens has set, The full moon of poetry has arisen; And though the moon of the eclipse has disappeared, The full moon of eloquence has shone forth." So the wine of joy infused itself into them, And sleep flew away from the corners of their eyes, And they rejected the slumber which they had contemplated, And began to resume the pleasantry which they had laid aside, While Abu-Zeid remained intent on the business in hand. But as soon as he desired the removal of what was before him, I said to him, "Entertain us with one of thy strange anecdotes, Or with an account of one of thy wonderful journeys." And he said:--"The result of long journeys brought me to this land, Myself being in a state of hunger and distress, And my wallet light as the heart of the mother of Moses; So I arose, when dark night had settled on the world, Though with weary feet, to seek a lodging, or obtain a loaf; Till, being driven on by the instigation of hunger, And by fate, so justly called 'the parent of adventures,' I stood at the door of a house and improvised these words:--

"'Inmates of this abode, all hail! all hail! Long may you live in plenty's verdant vale. Oh, grant your aid to one by toil opprest, Way-worn, benighted, destitute, distrest; Whose tortured entrails only hunger hold (For since he tasted food two days are told); A wretch who finds not where to lay his head, Though brooding night her weary wing hath spread, But roams in anxious hope a friend to meet, Whose bounty, like a spring of water sweet, May heal his woes; a friend who straight will say, "Come in! 'Tis time thy staff aside to lay."'

"But there came out to me a boy in a short tunic, who said:--

"'By Him who hospitable rites ordained, And first of all, and best, those rites maintained, I swear that friendly converse and a home Is all we have for those who nightly roam."

"And I replied, 'What can I do with an empty house, And a host who is himself thus utterly destitute? But what is thy name, boy? for thy intelligence charms me.' He replied, 'My name is Zeid, and I was reared at Faid; And my mother Barrah (who is such as her name implies), Told me she married one of the nobles of Serong and Ghassân, Who deserted her stealthily, and there was an end of him.' Now I knew by these distinct signs that he was my child, But my poverty deterred me from discovering myself to him."

Then we asked if he wished to take his son to live with him; And he replied, "If only my purse were heavy enough, It would be easy for me to undertake the charge of him." So we severally undertook to contribute a portion of it, Whereupon he returned thanks for this our bounty, And was so profusely lavish in his acknowledgments, That we thought his expression of gratitude excessive. And as soon as he had collected the coin into his scrip, He looked at me as the deceiver looks at the deceived, And laughed heartily, and then indited these lines:--

"O thou who, deceived By a tale, hast believed A mirage to be truly a lake, Though I ne'er had expected My fraud undetected, Or doubtful my meaning to make!

I confess that I lied When I said that my bride And my first-born were Barrah and Zeid; But guile is my part, And deception my art, And by these are my gains ever made.

Such schemes I devise That the cunning and wise Never practiced the like or conceived; Nor Asmai nor Komait Any wonders relate Like those that my wiles have achieved.

But if these I disdain, I abandon my gain, And by fortune at once am refused: Then pardon their use, And accept my excuse, Nor of guilt let my guile be accused."

Then he took leave of me, and went away from me, Leaving in my heart the embers of lasting regret.

THE CALIPH OMAR BIN ABD AL-AZIZ AND THE POETS

A Semi-Poetical Tale: Translation of Sir Richard Burton, in 'Supplemental Nights to the Book of The Thousand Nights and A Night'

It is said that when the Caliphate devolved on Omar bin Abd al-Aziz, (of whom Allah accept!) the poets resorted to him, as they had been used to resort to the Caliphs before him, and abode at his door days and days; but he suffered them not to enter till there came to him 'Adi bin Artah, who stood high in esteem with him. Jarir [another poet] accosted him, and begged him to crave admission for them to the presence; so 'Adi answered, "'Tis well," and going in to Omar, said to him, "The poets are at thy door, and have been there days and days; yet hast thou not given them leave to enter, albeit their sayings abide, and their arrows from the mark never fly wide." Quoth Omar, "What have I to do with the poets?" And quoth 'Adi, "O Commander of the Faithful, the Prophet (_Abhak!_) was praised by a poet, and gave him largesse--and in him is an exemplar to every Moslem." Quoth Omar, "And who praised him?" And quoth 'Adi, "Abbás bin Mirdás praised him, and he clad him with a suit and said, 'O Generosity! Cut off from me his tongue!'" Asked the Caliph, "Dost thou remember what he said?" And 'Adi answered, "Yes." Rejoined Omar, "Then repeat it;" so 'Adi repeated:--

"I saw thee, O thou best of the human race, Bring out a book which brought to graceless, grace. Thou showedst righteous road to men astray From right, when darkest wrong had ta'en its place:-- Thou with Islâm didst light the gloomiest way, Quenching with proof live coals of frowardness: I own for Prophet, my Mohammed's self, and men's award upon his word we base. Thou madest straight the path that crooked ran Where in old days foul growth o'ergrew its face. Exalt be thou in Joy's empyrean! And Allah's glory ever grow apace!"

"And indeed," continued 'Adi, "this Elegy on the Prophet (_Abhak!_) is well known, and to comment on it would be tedious."

Quoth Omar, "Who [of the poets] is at the door?" And quoth 'Adi, "Among them is Omar ibn Rabí'ah, the Korashi;" whereupon the Caliph cried, "May Allah show him no favor, neither quicken him! Was it not he who spoke impiously [in praising his love]?--

'Could I in my clay-bed [the grave] with Ialma repose, There to me were better than Heaven or Hell!'

Had he not [continued the Caliph] been the enemy of Allah, he had wished for her in this world; so that he might, after, repent and return to righteous dealing. By Allah! he shall not come in to me! Who is at the door other than he?"

Quoth 'Adi, "Jamil bin Ma'mar al-Uzri is at the door." And quoth Omar, "'Tis he who saith in one of his love-Elegies:--

'Would Heaven, conjoint we lived! and if I die, Death only grant me a grave within her grave! For I'd no longer deign to live my life If told, "Upon her head is laid the pave."'

Quoth Omar, "Away with him from me! Who is at the door?" And quoth 'Adi, "Kutthayir 'Azzah": whereupon Omar cried, "'Tis he who saith in one of his [impious] Odes:--

'Some talk of faith and creed and nothing else, And wait for pains of Hell in prayer-seat; But did they hear what I from Azzah heard, They'd make prostration, fearful, at her feet.'

Leave the mention of _him_. Who is at the door?" Quoth 'Adi, "Al-Ahwas al-Ansari." Cried Omar, "Allah Almighty put him away, and estrange him from His mercy! Is it not he who said, berhyming on a Medinite's slave girl, so that she might outlive her master:--

Allah be judge betwixt me and her lord Whoever flies with her--and I pursue.'

He shall not come in to me! Who is at the door other than he?" 'Adi replied, "Hammam bin Ghalib al-Farazdak." And Omar said, "Tis he who glories in wickedness.... He shall not come in to me! Who is at the door other than he?" 'Adi replied, "Al-Akhtal al-Taghlibi." And Omar said, "He is the [godless] miscreant who saith in his singing:--

'Ramazan I ne'er fasted in lifetime; nay I ate flesh in public at undurn day! Nor chid I the fair, save in word of love. Nor seek Meccah's plain in salvation-way: Nor stand I praying, like rest, who cry, "Hie salvation-wards!" at the dawn's first ray....'

By Allah! he treadeth no carpet of mine. Who is at the door other than he?" Said 'Adi, "Jarir Ibn al-Khatafah." And Omar cried, "Tis he who saith:--

'But for ill-spying glances, had our eyes espied Eyes of the antelope, and ringlets of the Reems! A Huntress of the eyes, by night-time came; and I cried, "Turn in peace! No time for visit this, meseems."'

But if it must be, and no help, admit Jarir." So 'Adi went forth and admitted Jarir, who entered saying:--

'Yea, He who sent Mohammed unto men. A just successor of Islam assigned. His ruth and his justice all mankind embrace. To daunt the bad and stablish well-designed. Verily now, I look to present good, for man hath ever transient weal in mind.'

Quoth Omar, "O Jarir! keep the fear of Allah before thine eyes, and say naught save the sooth." And Jarir recited these couplets:--

'How many widows loose the hair, in far Yamamah land, How many an orphan there abides, feeble of voice and eye, Since faredst thou, who wast to them instead of father lost when they like nestled fledglings were, sans power to creep or fly. And now we hope--since broke the clouds their word and troth with us-- Hope from the Caliph's grace to gain a rain that ne'er shall dry.'

When the Caliph heard this, he said, "By Allah, O Jarir! Omar possesseth but an hundred dirhams. Ho boy! do thou give them to him!" Moreover, he gifted Jarir with the ornaments of his sword; and Jarir went forth to the other poets, who asked him, "What is behind thee?" ["What is thy news?"] and he answered, "A man who giveth to the poor, and who denieth the poets; and with him I am well pleased."

DOMINIQUE FRANÇOIS ARAGO

(1786-1853)

BY EDWARD S. HOLDEN

Dominique François Arago was born February 26th, 1786, near Perpignan, in the Eastern Pyrenees, where his father held the position of Treasurer of the Mint. He entered the École Polytechnique in Paris after a brilliant examination, and held the first places throughout the course. In 1806 he was sent to Valencia in Spain, and to the neighboring island of Iviza, to make the astronomical observations for prolonging the arc of the meridian from Dunkirk southward, in order to supply the basis for the metric system.

[Illustration: D. FR. ARAGO]

Here begin his extraordinary adventures, which are told with inimitable spirit and vigor in his 'Autobiography.' Arago's work required him to occupy stations on the summits of the highest peaks in the mountains of southeastern Spain. The peasants were densely ignorant and hostile to all foreigners, so that an escort of troops was required in many of his journeys. At some stations he made friends of the bandits of the neighborhood, and carried on his observations under their protection, as it were. In 1807 the tribunal of the Inquisition existed in Valencia; and Arago was witness to the trial and punishment of a pretended sorceress,--and this, as he says, in one of the principal towns of Spain, the seat of a celebrated university. Yet the worst criminals lived unmolested in the cathedrals, for the "right of asylum" was still in force. His geodetic observations were mysteries to the inhabitants, and his signals on the mountain top were believed to be part of the work of a French spy. Just at this time hostilities broke out between France and Spain, and the astronomer was obliged to flee disguised as a Majorcan peasant, carrying his precious papers with him. His knowledge of the Majorcan language saved him, and he reached a Spanish prison with only a slight wound from a dagger. It is the first recorded instance, he says, of a fugitive flying to a dungeon for safety. In this prison, under the care of Spanish officers, Arago found sufficient occupation in calculating observations which he had made; in reading the accounts in the Spanish journals of his own execution at Valencia; and in listening to rumors that it was proposed (by a Spanish monk) to do away with the French prisoner by poisoning his food.

The Spanish officer in charge of the prisoners was induced to connive at the escape of Arago and M. Berthémie (an aide-de-camp of Napoleon); and on the 28th of July, 1808, they stole away from the coast of Spain in a small boat with three sailors, and arrived at Algiers on the 3d of August. Here the French consul procured them two false passports, which transformed the Frenchmen into strolling merchants from Schwekat and Leoben. They boarded an Algerian vessel and set off. Let Arago describe the crew and cargo:--

"The vessel belonged to the Emir of Seca. The commander was a Greek captain named Spiro Calligero. Among the passengers were five members of the family superseded by the Bakri as kings of the Jews; two Maroccan ostrich-feather merchants; Captain Krog from Bergen in Norway; two lions sent by the Dey of Algiers as presents to the Emperor Napoleon; and a great number of monkeys."

As they entered the Golfe du Lion their ship was captured by a Spanish corsair and taken to Rosas. Worst of all, a former Spanish servant of Arago's--Pablo--was a sailor in the corsair's crew! At Rosas the prisoners were brought before an officer for interrogation. It was now Arago's turn. The officer begins:--

"'Who are you?'

"'A poor traveling merchant.'

"'From whence do you come?'

"'From a country where you certainly have never been.'

"'Well--from what country?'

"I feared to answer; for the passports (steeped in vinegar to prevent infection) were in the officer's hands, and I had entirely forgotten whether I was from Schwekat or from Leoben. Finally I answered at a chance, 'I am from Schwekat;' fortunately this answer agreed with the passport.

"'You're from Schwekat about as much as I am,' said the officer: 'you're a Spaniard, and a Spaniard from Valencia to boot, as I can tell by your accent.'

"'Sir, you are inclined to punish me simply because I have by nature the gift of languages. I readily learn the dialects of the various countries where I carry on my trade. For example, I know the dialect of Iviza.'

"'Well, I will take you at your word. Here is a soldier who comes from Iviza. Talk to him.'

"'Very well; I will even sing the goat-song.'

"The verses of this song (if one may call them verses) are separated by the imitated bleatings of the goat. I began at once, with an audacity which even now astonishes me, to intone the song which all the shepherds in Iviza sing:--

Ah graciada Señora, Una canzo bouil canta, Bè bè bè bè. No sera gaiva pulida, Nosé si vos agradara, Bè bè bè bè.

"Upon which my Ivizan avouches, in tears, that I am certainly from Iviza. The song had affected him as a Switzer is affected by the 'Ranz des Vaches.' I then said to the officer that if he would bring to me a person who could speak French, he would find the same embarrassment in this case also. An emigré of the Bourbon regiment comes forward for the new experiment, and after a few phrases affirms without hesitation that I am surely a Frenchman. The officer begins to be impatient.

"'Have done with these trials: they prove nothing. I require you to tell me who you are.'

"'My foremost desire is to find an answer which will satisfy you. I am the son of the innkeeper at Mataro.'

"'I know that man: you are not his son.'

"'You are right: I told you that I should change my answers till I found one to suit you. I am a marionette player from Lerida.'

"A huge laugh from the crowd which had listened to the interrogatory put an end to the questioning."

Finally it was necessary for Arago to declare outright that he was French, and to prove it by his old servant Pablo. To supply his immediate wants he sold his watch; and by a series of misadventures this watch subsequently fell into the hands of his family, and he was mourned in France as dead.

After months of captivity the vessel was released, and the prisoner set out for Marseilles. A fearful tempest drove them to the harbor of Bougie, an African port a hundred miles east of Algiers. Thence they made the perilous journey by land to their place of starting, and finally reached Marseilles eleven months after their voyage began. Eleven months to make a journey of four days!

The intelligence of the safe arrival, after so many perils, of the young astronomer, with his packet of precious observations, soon reached Paris. He was welcomed with effusion. Soon afterward (at the age of twenty-three years) he was elected a member of the section of Astronomy of the Academy of Sciences, and from this time forth he led the peaceful life of a savant. He was the Director of the Paris Observatory for many years; the friend of all European scientists; the ardent patron of young men of talent; a leading physicist; a strong Republican, though the friend of Napoleon; and finally the Perpetual Secretary of the Academy.

In the latter capacity it was part of his duty to prepare _éloges_ of deceased Academicians. Of his collected works in fourteen volumes, 'Oeuvres de François Arago,' published in Paris, 1865, three volumes are given to these 'Notices Biographiques.' Here may be found the biographies of Bailly, Sir William Herschel, Laplace, Joseph Fourier, Carnot, Malus, Fresnel, Thomas Young, and James Watt; which, translated rather carelessly into English, have been published under the title 'Biographies of Distinguished Men,' and can be found in the larger libraries. The collected works contain biographies also of Ampère, Condoreet, Volta, Monge, Porson, Gay-Lussac, besides shorter sketches. They are masterpieces of style and of clear scientific exposition, and full of generous appreciation of others' work. They present in a lucid and popular form the achievements of scientific men whose works have changed the accepted opinion of the world, and they give general views not found in the original writings themselves. Scientific men are usually too much engrossed in advancing science to spare time for expounding it to popular audiences. The talent for such exposition is itself a special one. Arago possessed it to the full, and his own original contributions to astronomy and physics enabled him to speak as an expert, not merely as an expositor.

The extracts are from his admirable estimate of Laplace, which he prepared in connection with the proposal, before him and other members of a State Committee, to publish a new and authoritative edition of the great astronomer's works. The translation is mainly that of the 'Biographies of Distinguished Men' cited above, and much of the felicity of style is necessarily lost in translation; but the substance of solid and lucid exposition from a master's hand remains.

Arago was a Deputy in 1830, and Minister of War in the Provisional Government of 1848. He died full of honors, October 2d, 1853. Two of his brothers, Jacques and Étienne, were dramatic authors of note. Another, Jean, was a distinguished general in the service of Mexico. One of his sons, Alfred, is favorably known as a painter; another, Emmanuel, as a lawyer, deputy, and diplomat.

[Illustration: Signature: Edward S. Holden]

LAPLACE

The Marquis de Laplace, peer of France, one of the forty of the French Academy, member of the Academy of Sciences and of the Bureau of Longitude, Associate of all the great Academies or Scientific Societies of Europe, was born at Beaumont-en-Auge, of parents belonging to the class of small farmers, on the 28th of March, 1749; he died on the 5th of March, 1827. The first and second volumes of the 'Mécanique Céleste' [Mechanism of the Heavens] were published in 1799; the third volume appeared in 1802, the fourth in 1805; part of the fifth volume was published in 1823, further books in 1824, and the remainder in 1825. The 'Théorie des Probabilités' was published in 1812. We shall now present the history of the principal astronomical discoveries contained in these immortal works.

Astronomy is the science of which the human mind may justly feel proudest. It owes this pre-eminence to the elevated nature of its object; to the enormous scale of its operations; to the certainty, the utility, and the stupendousness of its results. From the very beginnings of civilization the study of the heavenly bodies and their movements has attracted the attention of governments and peoples. The greatest captains, statesmen, philosophers, and orators of Greece and Rome found it a subject of delight. Yet astronomy worthy of the name is a modern science: it dates from the sixteenth century only. Three great, three brilliant phases have marked its progress. In 1543 the bold and firm hand of Copernicus overthrew the greater part of the venerable scaffolding which had propped the illusions and the pride of many generations. The earth ceased to be the centre, the pivot, of celestial movements. Henceforward it ranged itself modestly among the other planets, its relative importance as one member of the solar system reduced almost to that of a grain of sand.

Twenty-eight years had elapsed from the day when the Canon of Thorn expired while holding in his trembling hands the first copy of the work which was to glorify the name of Poland, when Würtemberg witnessed the birth of a man who was destined to achieve a revolution in science not less fertile in consequences, and still more difficult to accomplish. This man was Kepler. Endowed with two qualities which seem incompatible,--a volcanic imagination, and a dogged pertinacity which the most tedious calculations could not tire,--Kepler conjectured that celestial movements must be connected with each other by simple laws; or, to use his own expression, by harmonic laws. These laws he undertook to discover. A thousand fruitless attempts--the errors of calculation inseparable from a colossal undertaking--did not hinder his resolute advance toward the goal his imagination descried. Twenty-two years he devoted to it, and still he was not weary. What are twenty-two years of labor to him who is about to become the lawgiver of worlds; whose name is to be ineffaceably inscribed on the frontispiece of an immortal code; who can exclaim in dithyrambic language, "The die is cast: I have written my book; it will be read either in the present age or by posterity, it matters not which; it may well await a reader since God has waited six thousand years for an interpreter of his works"?

These celebrated laws, known in astronomy as Kepler's laws, are three in number. The first law is, that the planets describe ellipses around the sun, which is placed in their common focus; the second, that a line joining a planet and the sun sweeps over equal areas in equal times; the third, that the squares of the times of revolution of the planets about the sun are proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from that body. The first two laws were discovered by Kepler in the course of a laborious examination of the theory of the planet Mars. A full account of this inquiry is contained in his famous work, 'De Stella Martis' [Of the Planet Mars], published in 1609. The discovery of the third law was announced to the world in his treatise on Harmonics (1628).

To seek a physical cause adequate to retain the planets in their closed orbits; to make the stability of the universe depend on mechanical forces, and not on solid supports like the crystalline spheres imagined by our ancestors; to extend to the heavenly bodies in their courses the laws of earthly mechanics,--such were the problems which remained for solution after Kepler's discoveries had been announced. Traces of these great problems may be clearly perceived here and there among ancient and modern writers, from Lucretius and Plutarch down to Kepler, Bouillaud, and Borelli. It is to Newton, however, that we must award the merit of their solution. This great man, like several of his predecessors, imagined the celestial bodies to have a tendency to approach each other in virtue of some attractive force, and from the laws of Kepler he deduced the mathematical characteristics of this force. He extended it to all the material molecules of the solar system; and developed his brilliant discovery in a work which, even at the present day, is regarded as the supremest product of the human intellect.

The contributions of France to these revolutions in astronomical science consisted, in 1740, in the determination by experiment of the spheroidal figure of the earth, and in the discovery of the local variations of gravity upon the surface of our planet. These were two great results; but whenever France is not first in science she has lost her place. This rank, lost for a moment, was brilliantly regained by the labors of four geometers. When Newton, giving to his discoveries a generality which the laws of Kepler did not suggest, imagined that the different planets were not only attracted by the sun, but that they also attracted each other, he introduced into the heavens a cause of universal perturbation. Astronomers then saw at a glance that in no part of the universe would the Keplerian laws suffice for the exact representation of the phenomena of motion; that the simple regular movements with which the imaginations of the ancients were pleased to endow the heavenly bodies must experience numerous, considerable, perpetually changing perturbations. To discover a few of these perturbations, and to assign their nature and in a few rare cases their numerical value, was the object which Newton proposed to himself in writing his famous book, the 'Principia Mathematica Philosophiæ Naturalis' [Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy], Notwithstanding the incomparable sagacity of its author, the 'Principia' contained merely a rough outline of planetary perturbations, though not through any lack of ardor or perseverance. The efforts of the great philosopher were always superhuman, and the questions which he did not solve were simply incapable of solution in his time.

Five geometers--Clairaut, Euler, D'Alembert, Lagrange, and Laplace--shared between them the world whose existence Newton had disclosed. They explored it in all directions, penetrated into regions hitherto inaccessible, and pointed out phenomena hitherto undetected. Finally--and it is this which constitutes their imperishable glory--they brought under the domain of a single principle, a single law, everything that seemed most occult and mysterious in the celestial movements. Geometry had thus the hardihood to dispose of the future, while the centuries as they unroll scrupulously ratify the decisions of science.

If Newton gave a complete solution of celestial movements where but two bodies attract each other, he did not even attempt the infinitely more difficult problem of three. The "problem of three bodies" (this is the name by which it has become celebrated)--the problem of determining the movement of a body subjected to the attractive influence of two others--was solved for the first time by our countryman, Clairaut. Though he enumerated the various forces which must result from the mutual action of the planets and satellites of our system, even the great Newton did not venture to investigate the general nature of their effects. In the midst of the labyrinth formed by increments and diminutions of velocity, variations in the forms of orbits, changes in distances and inclinations, which these forces must evidently produce, the most learned geometer would fail to discover a trustworthy guide. Forces so numerous, so variable in direction, so different in intensity, seemed to be incapable of maintaining a condition of equilibrium except by a sort of miracle. Newton even suggested that the planetary system did not contain within itself the elements of indefinite stability. He was of opinion that a powerful hand must intervene from time to time to repair the derangements occasioned by the mutual action of the various bodies. Euler, better instructed than Newton in a knowledge of these perturbations, also refused to admit that the solar system was constituted so as to endure forever.

Never did a greater philosophical question offer itself to the inquiries of mankind. Laplace attacked it with boldness, perseverance, and success. The profound and long-continued researches of the illustrious geometer completely established the perpetual variability of the planetary ellipses. He demonstrated that the extremities of their major axes make the circuit of the heavens; that independent of oscillation, the planes of their orbits undergo displacements by which their intersections with the plane of the terrestrial orbit are each year directed toward different stars. But in the midst of this apparant chaos, there is one element which remains constant, or is merely subject to small and periodic changes; namely, the major axis of each orbit, and consequently the time of revolution of each planet. This is the element which ought to have varied most, on the principles held by Newton and Euler. Gravitation, then, suffices to preserve the stability of the solar system. It maintains the forms and inclinations of the orbits in an average position, subject to slight oscillations only; variety does not entail disorder; the universe offers an example of harmonious relations, of a state of perfection which Newton himself doubted.

This condition of harmony depends on circumstances disclosed to Laplace by analysis; circumstances which on the surface do not seem capable of exercising so great an influence. If instead of planets all revolving in the same direction, in orbits but slightly eccentric and in planes inclined at but small angles toward each other, we should substitute different conditions, the stability of the universe would be jeopardized, and a frightful chaos would pretty certainly result. The discovery of the actual conditions excluded the idea, at least so far as the solar system was concerned, that the Newtonian attraction might be a cause of disorder. But might not other forces, combined with the attraction of gravitation, produce gradually increasing perturbations such as Newton and Euler feared? Known facts seemed to justify the apprehension. A comparison of ancient with modern observations revealed a continual acceleration in the mean motions of the moon and of Jupiter, and an equally striking diminution of the mean motion of Saturn. These variations led to a very important conclusion. In accordance with their presumed cause, to say that the velocity of a body increased from century to century was equivalent to asserting that the body continually approached the centre of motion; on the other hand, when the velocity diminished, the body must be receding from the centre. Thus, by a strange ordering of nature, our planetary system seemed destined to lose Saturn, its most mysterious ornament; to see the planet with its ring and seven satellites plunge gradually into those unknown regions where the eye armed with the most powerful telescope has never penetrated. Jupiter, on the other hand, the planet compared with which the earth is so insignificant, appeared to be moving in the opposite direction, so that it would ultimately be absorbed into the incandescent matter of the sun. Finally, it seemed that the moon would one day precipitate itself upon the earth.

There was nothing doubtful or speculative in these sinister forebodings. The precise dates of the approaching catastrophes were alone uncertain. It was known, however, that they were very distant. Accordingly, neither the learned dissertations of men of science nor the animated descriptions of certain poets produced any impression upon the public mind. The members of our scientific societies, however, believed with regret the approaching destruction of the planetary system. The Academy of Sciences called the attention of geometers of all countries to these menacing perturbations. Euler and Lagrange descended into the arena. Never did their mathematical genius shine with a brighter lustre. Still the question remained undecided, when from two obscure corners of the theories of analysis, Laplace, the author of the 'Mécanique Céleste,' brought the laws of these great phenomena clearly to light. The variations in velocity of Jupiter, Saturn, and the moon, were proved to flow from evident physical causes, and to belong in the category of ordinary periodic perturbations depending solely on gravitation. These dreaded variations in orbital dimensions resolved themselves into simple oscillations included within narrow limits. In a word, by the powerful instrumentality of mathematical analysis, the physical universe was again established on a demonstrably firm foundation.

Having demonstrated the smallness of these periodic oscillations, Laplace next succeeded in determining the absolute dimensions of the orbits. What is the distance of the sun from the earth? No scientific question has occupied the attention of mankind in a greater degree. Mathematically speaking, nothing is more simple: it suffices, as in ordinary surveying, to draw visual lines from the two extremities of a known base line to an inaccessible object; the remainder of the process is an elementary calculation. Unfortunately, in the case of the sun, the distance is very great and the base lines which can be measured upon the earth are comparatively very small. In such a case, the slightest errors in the direction of visual lines exercise an enormous influence upon the results. In the beginning of the last century, Halley had remarked that certain interpositions of Venus between the earth and the sun--or to use the common term, the transits of the planet across the sun's disk--would furnish at each observing station an indirect means of fixing the position of the visual ray much superior in accuracy to the most perfect direct measures. Such was the object of the many scientific expeditions undertaken in 1761 and 1769, years in which the transits of Venus occurred. A comparison of observations made in the Southern Hemisphere with those of Europe gave for the distance of the sun the result which has since figured in all treatises on astronomy and navigation. No government hesitated to furnish scientific academies with the means, however expensive, of establishing their observers in the most distant regions. We have already remarked that this determination seemed imperiously to demand an extensive base, for small bases would have been totally inadequate. Well, Laplace has solved the problem without a base of any kind whatever; he has deduced the distance of the sun from observations of the moon made in one and the same place.

The sun is, with respect to our satellite the moon, the cause of perturbations which evidently depend on the distance of the immense luminous globe from the earth. Who does not see that these perturbations must diminish if the distance increases, and increase if the distance diminishes, so that the distance determines the amount of the perturbations? Observation assigns the numerical value of these perturbations; theory, on the other hand, unfolds the general mathematical relation which connects them with the solar distance and with other known elements. The determination of the mean radius of the terrestrial orbit--of the distance of the sun--then becomes one of the most simple operations of algebra. Such is the happy combination by the aid of which Laplace has solved the great, the celebrated problem of parallax. It is thus that the illustrious geometer found for the mean distance of the sun from the earth, expressed in radii of the terrestrial orbit, a value differing but slightly from that which was the fruit of so many troublesome and expensive voyages.

The movements of the moon proved a fertile mine of research to our great geometer. His penetrating intellect discovered in them unknown treasures. With an ability and a perseverance equally worthy of admiration, he separated these treasures from the coverings which had hitherto concealed them from vulgar eyes. For example, the earth governs the movements of the moon. The earth is flattened; in other words, its figure is spheroidal. A spheroidal body does not attract as does a sphere. There should then exist in the movement--I had almost said in the countenance--of the moon a sort of impress of the spheroidal figure of the earth. Such was the idea as it originally occurred to Laplace. By means of a minutely careful investigation, he discovered in its motion two well-defined perturbations, each depending on the spheroidal figure of the earth. When these were submitted to calculation, each led to the same value of the ellipticity. It must be recollected that the ellipticity thus derived from the motions of the moon is not the one corresponding to such or such a country, to the ellipticity observed in France, in England, in Italy, in Lapland, in North America, in India, or in the region of the Cape of Good Hope; for, the earth's crust having undergone considerable upheavals at different times and places, the primitive regularity of its curvature has been sensibly disturbed thereby. The moon (and it is this which renders the result of such inestimable value) ought to assign, and has in reality assigned, the general ellipticity of the earth; in other words, it has indicated a sort of average value of the various determinations obtained at enormous expense, and with infinite labor, as the result of long voyages undertaken by astronomers of all the countries of Europe.

Certain remarks of Laplace himself bring into strong relief the profound, the unexpected, the almost paradoxical character of the methods I have attempted to sketch. What are the elements it has been found necessary to confront with each other in order to arrive at results expressed with such extreme precision? On the one hand, mathematical formulae deduced from the principle of universal gravitation; on the other, certain irregularities observed in the returns of the moon to the meridian. An observing geometer, who from his infancy had never quitted his study, and who had never viewed the heavens except through a narrow aperture directed north and south,--to whom nothing had ever been revealed respecting the bodies revolving above his head, except that they attract each other according to the Newtonian law of gravitation,--would still perceive that his narrow abode was situated upon the surface of a spheroidal body, whose equatorial axis was greater than its polar by a three hundred and sixth part. In his isolated, fixed position he could still deduce his true distance from the sun!

Laplace's improvement of the lunar tables not only promoted maritime intercourse between distant countries, but preserved the lives of mariners. Thanks to an unparalleled sagacity, to a limitless perseverance, to an ever youthful and communicable ardor, Laplace solved the celebrated problem of the longitude with a precision even greater than the utmost needs of the art of navigation demanded. The ship, the sport of the winds and tempests, no longer fears to lose its way in the immensity of the ocean. In every place and at every time the pilot reads in the starry heavens his distance from the meridian of Paris. The extreme perfection of these tables of the moon places Laplace in the ranks of the world's benefactors.

In the beginning of the year 1611, Galileo supposed that he found in the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites a simple and rigorous solution of the famous problem of the longitude, and attempts to introduce the new method on board the numerous vessels of Spain and Holland at once began. They failed because the necessary observations required powerful telescopes, which could not be employed on a tossing ship. Even the expectations of the serviceability of Galileo's methods for land calculations proved premature. The movements of the satellites of Jupiter are far less simple than the immortal Italian supposed them to be. The labors of three more generations of astronomers and mathematicians were needed to determine them, and the mathematical genius of Laplace was needed to complete their labors. At the present day the nautical ephemerides contain, several years in advance, the indications of the times of the eclipses and reappearances of Jupiter's satellites. Calculation is as precise as direct observation.

Influenced by an exaggerated deference, modesty, timidity, France in the eighteenth century surrendered to England the exclusive privilege of constructing her astronomical instruments. Thus, when Herschel was prosecuting his beautiful observations on the other side of the Channel, we had not even the means of verifying them. Fortunately for the scientific honor of our country, mathematical analysis also is a powerful instrument. The great Laplace, from the retirement of his study, foresaw, and accurately predicted in advance, what the excellent astronomer of Windsor would soon behold with the largest telescopes existing. When, in 1610, Galileo directed toward Saturn a lens of very low power which he had just constructed with his own hands, although he perceived that the planet was not a globe, he could not ascertain its real form. The expression "tri-corporate," by which the illustrious Florentine designated the appearance of the planet, even implied a totally erroneous idea of its structure. At the present day every one knows that Saturn consists of a globe about nine hundred times greater than the earth, and of a ring. This ring does not touch the ball of the planet, being everywhere removed from it to a distance of twenty thousand (English) miles. Observation indicates the breadth of the ring to be fifty-four thousand miles. The thickness certainly does not exceed two hundred and fifty miles. With the exception of a black streak which divides the ring throughout its whole contour into two parts of unequal breadth and of different brightness, this strange colossal bridge without foundations had never offered to the most experienced or skillful observers either spot or protuberance adapted for deciding whether it was immovable or endowed with a motion of rotation. Laplace considered it to be very improbable, if the ring was stationary, that its constituent parts should be capable of resisting by mere cohesion the continual attraction of the planet. A movement of rotation occurred to his mind as constituting the principle of stability, and he deduced the necessary velocity from this consideration. The velocity thus found was exactly equal to that which Herschel subsequently derived from a series of extremely delicate observations. The two parts of the ring, being at different distances from the planet, could not fail to be given different movements of precession by the action of the sun. Hence it would seem that the planes of both rings ought in general to be inclined toward each other, whereas they appear from observation always to coincide. It was necessary then that some physical cause capable of neutralizing the action of the sun should exist. In a memoir published in February, 1789, Laplace found that this cause depended on the ellipticity of Saturn produced by a rapid movement of rotation of the planet, a movement whose discovery Herschel announced in November of the same year.

If we descend from the heavens to the earth, the discoveries of Laplace will appear not less worthy of his genius. He reduced the phenomena of the tides, which an ancient philosopher termed in despair "the tomb of human curiosity," to an analytical theory in which the physical conditions of the question figure for the first time. Consequently, to the immense advantage of coast navigation, calculators now venture to predict in detail the time and height of the tides several years in advance. Between the phenomena of the ebb and flow, and the attractive forces of the sun and moon upon the fluid sheet which covers three fourths of the globe, an intimate and necessary connection exists; a connection from which Laplace deduced the value of the mass of our satellite the moon. Yet so late as the year 1631 the illustrious Galileo, as appears from his 'Dialogues,' was so far from perceiving the mathematical relations from which Laplace deduced results so beautiful, so unequivocal, and so useful, that he taxed with frivolousness the vague idea which Kepler entertained of attributing to the moon's attraction a certain share in the production of the diurnal and periodical movements of the waters of the ocean.

Laplace did not confine his genius to the extension and improvement of the mathematical theory of the tide. He considered the phenomenon from an entirely new point of view, and it was he who first treated of the stability of the ocean. He has established its equilibrium, but upon the express condition (which, however, has been amply proved to exist) that the mean density of the fluid mass is less than the mean density of the earth. Everything else remaining the same, if we substituted an ocean of quicksilver for the actual ocean, this stability would disappear. The fluid would frequently overflow its boundaries, to ravage continents even to the height of the snowy peaks which lose themselves in the clouds.

No one was more sagacious than Laplace in discovering intimate relations between phenomena apparently unrelated, or more skillful in deducing important conclusions from such unexpected affinities. For example, toward the close of his days, with the aid of certain lunar observations, with a stroke of his pen he overthrew the cosmogonic theories of Buffon and Bailly, which were so long in favor. According to these theories, the earth was hastening to a state of congelation which was close at hand. Laplace, never contented with vague statements, sought to determine in numbers the rate of the rapid cooling of our globe which Buffon had so eloquently but so gratuitously announced. Nothing could be more simple, better connected, or more conclusive than the chain of deductions of the celebrated geometer. A body diminishes in volume when it cools. According to the most elementary principles of mechanics, a rotating body which contracts in dimensions must inevitably turn upon its axis with greater and greater rapidity. The length of the day has been determined in all ages by the time of the earth's rotation; if the earth is cooling, the length of the day must be continually shortening. Now, there exists a means of ascertaining whether the length of the day has undergone any variation; this consists in examining, for each century, the arc of the celestial sphere described by the moon during the interval of time which the astronomers of the existing epoch call a day; in other words, the time required by the earth to effect a complete rotation on its axis, the velocity of the moon being in fact independent of the time of the earth's rotation. Let us now, following Laplace, take from the standard tables the smallest values, if you choose, of the expansions or contractions which solid bodies experience from changes of temperature; let us search the annals of Grecian, Arabian, and modern astronomy for the purpose of finding in them the angular velocity of the moon: and the great geometer will prove, by incontrovertible evidence founded upon these data, that during a period of two thousand years the mean temperature of the earth has not varied to the extent of the hundredth part of a degree of the centigrade thermometer. Eloquence cannot resist such a process of reasoning, or withstand the force of such figures. Mathematics has ever been the implacable foe of scientific romances. The constant object of Laplace was the explanation of the great phenomena of nature according to inflexible principles of mathematical analysis. No philosopher, no mathematician, could have guarded himself more cautiously against a propensity to hasty speculation. No person dreaded more the scientific errors which cajole the imagination when it passes the boundary of fact, calculation, and analogy.

Once, and once only, did Laplace launch forward, like Kepler, like Descartes, like Leibnitz, like Buffon, into the region of conjectures. But then his conception was nothing less than a complete cosmogony. All the planets revolve around the sun, from west to east, and in planes only slightly inclined to each other. The satellites revolve around their respective primaries in the same direction. Both planets and satellites, having a rotary motion, turn also upon their axes from west to east. Finally, the rotation of the sun also is directed from west to east. Here, then, is an assemblage of forty-three movements, all operating alike. By the calculus of probabilities, the odds are four thousand millions to one that this coincidence in direction is not the effect of accident.

It was Buffon, I think, who first attempted to explain this singular feature of our solar system. "Wishing, in the explanation of phenomena, to avoid recourse to causes which are not to be found in nature," the celebrated academician sought for a physical cause for what is common to the movements of so many bodies differing as they do in magnitude, in form, and in their distances from the centre of attraction. He imagined that he had discovered such a physical cause by making this triple supposition: a comet fell obliquely upon the sun; it pushed before it a torrent of fluid matter; this substance, transported to a greater or less distance from the sun according to its density, formed by condensation all the known planets. The bold hypothesis is subject to insurmountable difficulties. I proceed to indicate, in a few words, the cosmogonic system which Laplace substituted for it.

According to Laplace, the sun was, at a remote epoch, the central nucleus of an immense nebula, which possessed a very high temperature, and extended far beyond the region in which Uranus now revolves. No planet was then in existence. The solar nebula was endowed with a general movement of rotation in the direction west to east. As it cooled it could not fail to experience a gradual condensation, and in consequence to rotate with greater and greater rapidity. If the nebulous matter extended originally in the plane of its equator, as far as the limit where the centrifugal force exactly counterbalanced the attraction of the nucleus, the molecules situate at this limit ought, during the process of condensation, to separate from the rest of the atmospheric matter and to form an equatorial zone, a ring, revolving separately and with its primitive velocity. We may conceive that analogous separations were effected in the remoter strata of the nebula at different epochs and at different distances from the nucleus, and that they gave rise to a succession of distinct rings, all lying in nearly the same plane, and all endowed with different velocities.

This being once admitted, it is easy to see that the permanent stability of the rings would have required a regularity of structure throughout their whole contour, which is very improbable. Each of them, accordingly, broke in its turn into several masses, which were obviously endowed with a movement of rotation coinciding in direction with the common movement of revolution, and which, in consequence of their fluidity, assumed spheroidal forms. In order, next, that one of those spheroids may absorb all the others belonging to the same ring, it is sufficient to suppose it to have a mass greater than that of any other spheroid of its group.

Each of the planets, while in this vaporous condition to which we have just alluded, would manifestly have a central nucleus, gradually increasing in magnitude and mass, and an atmosphere offering, at its successive limits, phenomena entirely similar to those which the solar atmosphere, properly so called, had exhibited. We are here contemplating the birth of satellites and the birth of the ring of Saturn.

The Nebular Hypothesis, of which I have just given an imperfect sketch, has for its object to show how a nebula endowed with a general movement of rotation must eventually transform itself into a very luminous central nucleus (a sun), and into a series of distinct spheroidal planets, situate at considerable distances from one another, all revolving around the central sun, in the direction of the original movement of the nebula; how these planets ought also to have movements of rotation in similar directions; how, finally, the satellites, when any such are formed, must revolve upon their axes and around their respective primaries, in the direction of rotation of the planets and of their movement of revolution around the sun.

In all that precedes, attention has been concentrated upon the 'Mécanique Céleste.' The 'Système du Monde' and the 'Théorie Analytique des Probabilités' also deserve description.

The Exposition of the System of the World is the 'Mécanique Céleste' divested of that great apparatus of analytical formulae which must be attentively perused by every astronomer who, to use an expression of Plato, wishes to know the numbers which govern the physical universe. It is from this work that persons ignorant of mathematics may obtain competent knowledge of the methods to which physical astronomy owes its astonishing progress. Written with a noble simplicity of style, an exquisite exactness of expression, and a scrupulous accuracy, it is universally conceded to stand among the noblest monuments of French literature.... The labors of all ages to persuade truth from the heavens are there justly, clearly, and profoundly analyzed. Genius presides as the impartial judge of genius. Throughout his work Laplace remained at the height of his great mission. It will be read with respect so long as the torch of science illuminates the world.

The calculus of probabilities, when confined within just limits, concerns the mathematician, the experimenter, and the statesman. From the time when Pascal and Fermat established its first principles, it has rendered most important daily services. This it is which, after suggesting the best form for statistical tables of population and mortality, teaches us to deduce from those numbers, so often misinterpreted, the most precise and useful conclusions. This it is which alone regulates with equity insurance premiums, pension funds, annuities, discounts, etc. This it is that has gradually suppressed lotteries, and other shameful snares cunningly laid for avarice and ignorance. Laplace has treated these questions with his accustomed superiority: the 'Analytical Theory of Probabilities' is worthy of the author of the 'Mécanique Céleste.'

A philosopher whose name is associated with immortal discoveries said to his too conservative audience, "Bear in mind, gentlemen, that in questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." Two centuries have passed over these words of Galileo without lessening their value or impugning their truth. For this reason, it has been thought better rather to glance briefly at the work of Laplace than to repeat the eulogies of his admirers.

JOHN ARBUTHNOT

(1667-1735)

Arbuthnot's place in literature depends as much on his association with the wits of his day as on his own satirical and humorous productions. Many of these have been published in the collections of Swift, Gay, Pope, and others, and cannot be identified. The task of verifying them is rendered more difficult by the fact that his son repudiated a collection claiming to be his 'Miscellaneous Works,' published in 1750.

[Illustration: JOHN ARBUTHNOT]

John Arbuthnot was born in the manse near Arbuthnot Castle, Kincardineshire, Scotland, April 29th, 1667. He was the son of a Scotch Episcopal clergyman, who was soon to be dispossessed of his parish by the Presbyterians in the Revolution of 1688. His children, who shared his Jacobite sentiments, were forced to leave Scotland; and John, after finishing his university course at Aberdeen, and taking his medical degree at St. Andrews, went to London and taught mathematics. He soon attracted attention by a keen and satirical 'Examination of Dr. Woodward's Account of the Deluge,' published in 1697. By a fortunate chance he was called to attend the Prince Consort (Prince George of Denmark), and in 1705 was made Physician Extraordinary to Queen Anne. If we may believe Swift, the agreeable Scotchman at once became her favorite attendant. His position at court was strengthened by his friendships with the great Tory statesmen.

Arbuthnot's best remembered work is 'The History of John Bull'; not because many people read or will ever read the book itself, but because it fixed a typical name and a typical character ineffaceably in the popular fancy and memory. He is credited with having been the first to use this famous sobriquet for the English nation; he was certainly the first to make it universal, and the first to make that burly, choleric, gross-feeding, hard-drinking, blunt-spoken, rather stupid and decidedly gullible, but honest and straightforward character one of the stock types of the world. The book appeared as four separate pamphlets: the first being entitled 'Law is a Bottomless Pit, Exemplified in the Case of Lord Strutt, John Bull, Nicholas Frog, and Lewis Baboon, Who Spent All They Had in a Law Suit'; the second, 'John Bull in His Senses'; the third, 'John Bull Still in His Senses'; and the fourth, 'Lewis Baboon Turned Honest, and John Bull Politician.' Published in 1712, these were at once attributed to Swift. But Pope says, "Dr. Arbuthnot was the sole writer of 'John Bull'"; and Swift gives us still more conclusive evidence by writing, "I hope you read 'John Bull.' It was a Scotch gentleman, a friend of mine, that writ it; but they put it on to me." In his humorous preface Dr. Arbuthnot says:--

"When I was first called to the office of historiographer to John Bull, he expressed himself to this purpose:--'Sir Humphrey Polesworth, I know you are a plain dealer; it is for that reason I have chosen you for this important trust; speak the truth, and spare not.' That I might fulfill those, his honorable intentions, I obtained leave to repair to and attend him in his most secret retirements; and I put the journals of all transactions into a strong box to be opened at a fitting occasion, after the manner of the historiographers of some Eastern monarchs.... And now, that posterity may not be ignorant in what age so excellent a history was written (which would otherwise, no doubt, be the subject of its inquiries), I think it proper to inform the learned of future times that it was compiled when Louis XIV. was King of France, and Philip, his grandson, of Spain; when England and Holland, in conjunction with the Emperor and the allies, entered into a war against these two princes, which lasted ten years, under the management of the Duke of Marlborough, and was put to a conclusion by the treaty of Utrecht under the ministry of the Earl of Oxford, in the year 1713."

The characters disguised are: "John Bull," the English; "Nicholas Frog," the Dutch; "Lewis Baboon," the French king; "Lord Strutt," the late King of Spain; "Philip Baboon," the Duke of Anjou; "Esquire South," the King of Spain; "Humphrey Hocus," the Duke of Marlborough; and "Sir Roger Bold," the Earl of Oxford. The lawsuit was the War of the Spanish Succession; John Bull's first wife was the late ministry; and his second wife the Tory ministry. To explain the allegory further, John Bull's mother was the Church of England; his sister Peg, the Scotch nation; and her lover Jack, Presbyterianism.

That so witty a work, so strong in typical freehand character drawing of permanent validity and remembrance, should be unread and its author forgotten except by scholars, is too curious a fact not to have a deep cause in its own character. The cause is not hard to find: it is one of the books which try to turn the world's current backward, and which the world dislikes as offending its ideals of progress. Stripped of its broad humor, its object, rubbed in with no great delicacy of touch, was to uphold the most extreme and reactionary Toryism of the time, and to jeer at political liberalism from the ground up. Its theoretic loyalty is the non-resistant Jacobitism of the Nonjurors, which it is so hard for us now to distinguish from abject slavishness; though like the principles of the casuists, one must not confound theory with practice. It seems the loyalty of a mujik or a Fiji dressed in cultivated modern clothes, not that of a conceivable cultivated modern community as a whole; but it would be very Philistine to pour wholesale contempt on a creed held by so many large minds and souls. It was of course produced by the experience of what the reverse tenets had brought on,--a long civil war, years of military despotism, and immense social and moral disorganization. In 'John Bull,' the fidelity of a subject to a king is made exactly correspondent, both in theory and practice, with the fidelity of a wife to her husband and her marriage vows; and an elaborate parallel is worked out to show that advocating the right of resistance to a bad king is precisely the same, on grounds of either logic or Scripture, as advocating the right of adultery toward a bad husband. This is not even good fooling; and, its local use past and no longer buoyed by personal liking for the author, the book sinks back into the limbo of partisan polemics with many worse ones and perhaps some better ones, dragging its real excellences down with it.

In 1714 the famous Scriblerus Club was organized, having for its members Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, Gay, Congreve, Lord Oxford, and Bishop Atterbury. They agreed to write a series of papers ridiculing, in the words of Pope, "all the false tastes in learning, under the character of a man of capacity enough, but that had dipped into every art and science, but injudiciously in each." The chronicle of this club was found in 'The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus,' which is thought to have been written entirely by Arbuthnot, and which describes the education of a learned pedant's son. Its humor may be appreciated by means of the citation given below. The first book of 'Scriblerus' appeared six years after Arbuthnot's death, when it was included in the second volume of Alexander Pope's works (1741). Pope said that from the 'Memoirs of Scriblerus' Swift took his idea of 'Gulliver'; and the Dean himself writes to Arbuthnot, July 3d, 1714:--

"To talk of 'Martin' in any hands but Yours is a Folly. You every day give better hints than all of us together could do in a twelvemonth. And to say the truth, Pope, who first thought of the Hint, has no Genius at all to it, in my mind; Gay is too young; Parnell has some ideas of it, but is idle; I could put together, and lard, and strike out well enough, but all that relates to the Sciences must be from you."

Swift's opinion that Arbuthnot "has more wit than we all have, and his humanity is equal to his wit," seems to have been the universal dictum; and Pope honored him by publishing a dialogue in the 'Prologue to the Satires,' known first as 'The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,' which contains many affectionate personal allusions. Aitken says, in his biography:--

"Arbuthnot's attachment to Swift and Pope was of the most intimate nature, and those who knew them best maintained that he was their equal at least in gifts. He understood Swift's cynicism, and their correspondence shows the unequaled sympathy that existed between the two. Gay, Congreve, Berkeley, Parnell, were among Arbuthnot's constant friends, and all of them were indebted to him for kindnesses freely rendered. He was on terms of intimacy with Bolingbroke and Oxford, Chesterfield, Peterborough, and Pulteney; and among the ladies with whom he mixed were Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady Betty Germain, Mrs. Howard, Lady Masham, and Mrs. Martha Blount. He was, too, the trusted friend and physician of Queen Anne. Most of the eminent men of science of the time, including some who were opposed to him in politics, were in frequent intercourse with him; and it is pleasant to know that at least one of the greatest of the wits who were most closely allied to the Whig party--Addison--had friendly relations with him."

From the letters of Lord Chesterfield we learn that

"His imagination was almost inexhaustible, and whatever subject he treated, or was consulted upon, he immediately overflowed with all that it could possibly produce. It was at anybody's service, for as soon as he was exonerated he did not care what became of it; insomuch that his sons, when young, have frequently made kites of his scattered papers of hints, which would have furnished good matter for folios. Not being in the least jealous of his fame as an author, he would neither take the time nor the trouble of separating the best from the worst; he worked out the whole mine, which afterward, in the hands of skillful refiners, produced a rich vein of ore. As his imagination was always at work, he was frequently absent and inattentive in company, which made him both say and do a thousand inoffensive absurdities; but which, far from being provoking, as they commonly are, supplied new matter for conversation, and occasioned wit both in himself and others."

Speaking to Boswell of the writers of Queen Anne's time, Dr. Johnson said, "I think Dr. Arbuthnot the first man among them. He was the most universal genius, being an excellent physician, a man of deep learning, and a man of much humor." He did not, however, think much of the 'Scriblerus' papers, and said they were forgotten because "no man would be the wiser, better, or merrier for remembering them"; which is hard measure for the wit and divertingness of some of the travesties. Cowper, reviewing Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets,' declared that "one might search these eight volumes with a candle to find a man, and not find one, unless perhaps Arbuthnot were he." Thackeray, too, called him "one of the wisest, wittiest, most accomplished, gentlest of mankind."

Thus fortunate in his sunny spirit, in his genius for friendship, in his professional eminence, and in his literary capacity, Dr. Arbuthnot saw his life flow smoothly to its close. He died in London on February 27th, 1735, at the age of sixty eight, still working and playing with youthful ardor, and still surrounded with all the good things of life.

THE TRUE CHARACTERS OF JOHN BULL, NIC. FROG, AND HOCUS

From 'The History of John Bull,' Part I.

For the better understanding the following history, the reader ought to know that Bull, in the main, was an honest, plain-dealing fellow, choleric, bold, and of a very unconstant temper; he dreaded not old Lewis either at backsword, single falchion, or cudgel play; but then he was very apt to quarrel with his best friends, especially if they pretended to govern him. If you flattered him, you might lead him like a child. John's temper depended very much upon the air; his spirits rose and fell with the weather-glass. John was quick and understood his business very well; but no man alive was more careless in looking into his accounts, or more cheated by partners, apprentices, and servants. This was occasioned by his being a boon companion, loving his bottle and his diversion; for, to say truth, no man kept a better house than John, nor spent his money more generously. By plain and fair dealing John had acquired some plums, and might have kept them, had it not been for his unhappy lawsuit.

Nic. Frog was a cunning, sly fellow, quite the reverse of John in many

## particulars; covetous, frugal, minded domestic affairs, would pinch his

belly to save his pocket, never lost a farthing by careless servants or bad debtors. He did not care much for any sort of diversion, except tricks of High German artists and legerdemain. No man exceeded Nic. in these; yet it must be owned that Nic. was a fair dealer, and in that way acquired immense riches.

Hocus was an old, cunning attorney; and though this was the first considerable suit that ever he was engaged in, he showed himself superior in address to most of his profession. He kept always good clerks, he loved money, was smooth-tongued, gave good words, and seldom lost his temper. He was not worse than an infidel, for he provided plentifully for his family, but he loved himself better than them all. The neighbors reported that he was henpecked, which was impossible, by such a mild-spirited woman as his wife was.

* * * * *

HOW THE RELATIONS RECONCILED JOHN AND HIS SISTER PEG, AND WHAT RETURN PEG MADE TO JOHN'S MESSAGE

From the 'History of John Bull,' Part I.

John Bull, otherwise a good-natured man, was very hard-hearted to his sister Peg, chiefly from an aversion he had conceived in his infancy. While he flourished, kept a warm house, and drove a plentiful trade, poor Peg was forced to go hawking and peddling about the streets selling knives, scissors, and shoe-buckles; now and then carried a basket of fish to the market; sewed, spun, and knit for a livelihood till her fingers' ends were sore: and when she could not get bread for her family, she was forced to hire them out at journey-work to her neighbors. Yet in these, her poor circumstances, she still preserved the air and mien of a gentlewoman--a certain decent pride that extorted respect from the haughtiest of her neighbors. When she came in to any full assembly, she would not yield the _pas_ to the best of them. If one asked her, "Are you not related to John Bull?" "Yes," says she, "he has the honor to be my brother." So Peg's affairs went till all the relations cried out shame upon John for his barbarous usage of his own flesh and blood; that it was an easy matter for him to put her in a creditable way of living, not only without hurt, but with advantage to himself, seeing she was an industrious person, and might be serviceable to him in his way of business. "Hang her, jade," quoth John, "I can't endure her as long as she keeps that rascal Jack's company." They told him the way to reclaim her was to take her into his house; that by conversation the childish humors of their younger days might be worn out.

These arguments were enforced by a certain incident. It happened that John was at that time about making his will and entailing his estate, the very same in which Nic. Frog is named executor. Now, his sister Peg's name being in the entail, he could not make a thorough settlement without her consent. There was indeed a malicious story went about, as if John's last wife had fallen in love with Jack as he was eating custard on horseback; that she persuaded John to take his sister into the house the better to drive on the intrigue with Jack, concluding he would follow his mistress Peg. All I can infer from this story is that when one has got a bad character in the world, people will report and believe anything of them, true or false. But to return to my story.

When Peg received John's message she huffed and stormed:--"My brother John," quoth she, "is grown wondrous kind-hearted all of a sudden, but I meikle doubt whether it be not mair for their own conveniency than for my good; he draws up his writs and his deeds, forsooth, and I must set my hand to them, unsight, unseen. I like the young man he has settled upon well enough, but I think I ought to have a valuable consideration for my consent. He wants my poor little farm because it makes a nook in his park wall. You may e'en tell him he has mair than he makes good use of; he gangs up and down drinking, roaring, and quarreling, through all the country markets, making foolish bargains in his cups, which he repents when he is sober; like a thriftless wretch, spending the goods and gear that his forefathers won with the sweat of their brows; light come, light go; he cares not a farthing. But why should I stand surety for his contracts? The little I have is free, and I can call it my own--hame's hame, let it be never so hamely. I ken well enough, he could never abide me, and when he has his ends he'll e'en use me as he did before. I'm sure I shall be treated like a poor drudge--I shall be set to tend the bairns, darn the hose, and mend the linen. Then there's no living with that old carline, his mother; she rails at Jack, and Jack's an honester man than any of her kin: I shall be plagued with her spells and her Paternosters, and silly Old World ceremonies; I mun never pare my nails on a Friday, nor begin a journey on Childermas Day; and I mun stand becking and binging as I gang out and into the hall. Tell him he may e'en gang his get; I'll have nothing to do with him; I'll stay like the poor country mouse, in my awn habitation."

So Peg talked; but for all that, by the interposition of good friends, and by many a bonny thing that was sent, and many more that were promised Peg, the matter was concluded, and Peg taken into the house upon certain articles [the Act of Toleration is referred to]; one of which was that she might have the freedom of Jack's conversation, and might take him for better or for worse if she pleased; provided always he did not come into the house at unseasonable hours and disturb the rest of the old woman, John's mother.

OF THE RUDIMENTS OF MARTIN'S LEARNING

From 'Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus'

Mrs. Scriblerus considered it was now time to instruct him in the fundamentals of religion, and to that end took no small pains in teaching him his catechism. But Cornelius looked upon this as a tedious way of instruction, and therefore employed his head to find out more pleasing methods, the better to induce him to be fond of learning. He would frequently carry him to the puppet-show of the creation of the world, where the child, with exceeding delight, gained a notion of the history of the Bible. His first rudiments in profane history were acquired by seeing of raree-shows, where he was brought acquainted with all the princes of Europe. In short, the old gentleman so contrived it to make everything contribute to the improvement of his knowledge, even to his very dress. He invented for him a geographical suit of clothes, which might give him some hints of that science, and likewise some knowledge of the commerce of different nations. He had a French hat with an African feather, Holland shirts, Flanders lace, English clothes lined with Indian silk, his gloves were Italian, and his shoes were Spanish: he was made to observe this, and daily catechized thereupon, which his father was wont to call "traveling at home." He never gave him a fig or an orange but he obliged him to give an account from what country it came. In natural history he was much assisted by his curiosity in sign-posts; insomuch that he hath often confessed he owed to them the knowledge of many creatures which he never found since in any author, such as white lions, golden dragons, etc. He once thought the same of green men, but had since found them mentioned by Kercherus, and verified in the history of William of Newburg.

His disposition to the mathematics was discovered very early, by his drawing parallel lines on his bread and butter, and intersecting them at equal angles, so as to form the whole superficies into squares. But in the midst of all these improvements a stop was put to his learning the alphabet, nor would he let him proceed to the letter D, till he could truly and distinctly pronounce C in the ancient manner, at which the child unhappily boggled for near three months. He was also obliged to delay his learning to write, having turned away the writing-master because he knew nothing of Fabius's waxen tables.

Cornelius having read and seriously weighed the methods by which the famous Montaigne was educated, and resolving in some degree to exceed them, resolved he should speak and learn nothing but the learned languages, and especially the Greek; in which he constantly eat and drank, according to Homer. But what most conduced to his easy attainment of this language was his love of gingerbread: which his father observing, caused to be stamped with the letters of the Greek alphabet; and the child the very first day eat as far as Iota. By his particular application to this language above the rest, he attained so great a proficiency therein, that Gronovius ingenuously confesses he durst not confer with this child in Greek at eight years old; and at fourteen he composed a tragedy in the same language, as the younger Pliny had done before him.

He learned the Oriental languages of Erpenius, who resided some time with his father for that purpose. He had so early a relish for the Eastern way of writing, that even at this time he composed (in imitation of it) 'A Thousand and One Arabian Tales,' and also the 'Persian Tales,' which have been since translated into several languages, and lately into our own with particular elegance by Mr. Ambrose Philips. In this work of his childhood he was not a little assisted by the historical traditions of his nurse.

THE ARGONAUTIC LEGEND

The legend of the Argonauts relates to the story of a band of heroes who sailed from Thessaly to Æa, the region of the Sun-god on the remotest shore of the Black Sea, in quest of a Golden Fleece. The ship Argo bore the heroes, under the command of Jason, to whom the task had been assigned by his uncle Pelias. Pelias was the usurper of his nephew's throne; and for Jason, on his coming to man's estate, he devised the perilous adventure of fetching the golden fleece of the Speaking Ram which many years before had carried Phrixus to Æa, or Colchis. Fifty of the most distinguished Grecian heroes came to Jason's aid, while Argus, the son of Phrixus, under the guidance of Athena, built the ship, inserting in the prow, for prophetic advice and furtherance, a piece of the famous talking oak of Dodona. Tiphys was the steersman, and Orpheus joined the crew to enliven the weariness of their sea-life with his harp.

The heroes came first to Lemnos, where the women had risen in revolt and slain fathers, brothers, and husbands. Here the voyagers lingered almost a year; but at last, having taken leave, they came to the southern coast of Propontis, where the Doliones dwelt under King Cyzicus. Their kind entertainment among this people was marred by ill-fate; for having weighed anchor in the night, they were driven back by a storm, and being mistaken for foes, were fiercely attacked. Cyzicus himself fell by the hand of Jason. They next touched at the country of the Bebrycians, where the hero Pollux overcame the king in a boxing-match and bound him to a tree; and thence to Salmydessus, to consult the soothsayer Phineus. In gratitude for their freeing him from the Harpies, who, as often as his table was set, descended out of the clouds upon his food and defiled it, the prophet directed them safe to Colchis. The heroes rowing with might, thus passed the Symplegades, two cliffs which opened and shut with such swift violence that a bird could scarce fly through the passage. The rocks were held apart with the help of Athena, and from that day they became fixed and harmless. Further on, they came in sight of Mount Caucasus, saw the eagle which preyed on the vitals of Prometheus, and heard the sufferer's woeful cries. So their journey was accomplished, and they arrived at Æa, and the palace of King Æetes.

When the king heard the errand of the heroes he was moved against them, and refused to give up the fleece except on terms which he thought Jason durst not comply with. Two bulls, snorting fire, with feet of brass, Jason was required to yoke, and with them plow a field and sow the land with dragon's teeth. Here the heavenly powers came to the hero's aid, and Hera and Athena prayed Aphrodite to send the shaft of Cupid upon Medea, the youthful daughter of the king. Thus it came about that Medea conceived a great passion for the young hero, and with the magic which she knew she made for him a salve. The salve rendered his body invulnerable. He yoked the bulls, and ploughed the field, and sowed the dragon's teeth. A crop of armed men sprang from the sowing, but Jason, prepared for this marvel by Medea, threw among them a stone which she had given him, whereupon they fell upon and slew one another.

But Æetes still refused to fetch the fleece, plotting secretly to burn the Argo and kill the heroic Argonauts. Medea came to their succor, and by her black art lulled to sleep the dragon which guarded the fleece. They seized the pelt, boarded the Argo, and sailed away, taking Medea with them. When her father followed in pursuit, in the madness of her love for Jason she slew her brother whom she had with her, and strewed the fragments of his body upon the wave. The king stopped to recover them and give them burial, and thus the Argonauts escaped. But the anger of the gods at this horrible murder led the voyagers in expiation a wearisome way homeward. For they sailed through the waters of the Adriatic, the Nile, the circumfluous stream of the earth, passed Scylla and Charybdis and the Island of the Sun, to Crete and Ægina and many lands, before the Argo rode once more in Thessalian waters.

The legend is one of the oldest and most familiar tales of Greece. Whether it is all poetic myth, or had a certain foundation in fact, it is impossible now to say. The date, the geography, the heroes, are mythical; and as in the Homeric poems, the supernatural and seeming historical are so blended that the union is indissoluble by any analysis yet found. The theme has touched the imagination of poets from the time of Apollonius Rhodius, who wrote the 'Argonautica' and went to Alexandria B.C. 194 to take care of the great library there, to William Morris, who published his 'Life and Death of Jason' in 1867. Mr. Morris's version of the contest of Orpheus with the Sirens is given to illustrate the reality of the old legends to the Greeks themselves. Jason's later life, his putting away of Medea, his marriage with Glauce, and the revenge of the deserted princess, furnish the story of the greatest of the plays of Euripides.

THE VICTORY OF ORPHEUS

From 'The Life and Death of Jason'

_The Sirens_: Oh, happy seafarers are ye, And surely all your ills are past, And toil upon the land and sea, Since ye are brought to us at last.

To you the fashion of the world, Wide lands laid waste, fair cities burned, And plagues, and kings from kingdoms hurled, Are naught, since hither ye have turned.

For as upon this beach we stand, And o'er our heads the sea-fowl flit, Our eyes behold a glorious land, And soon shall ye be kings of it.

_Orpheus_: A little more, a little more, O carriers of the Golden Fleece, A little labor with the oar, Before we reach the land of Greece.

E'en now perchance faint rumors reach Men's ears of this our victory, And draw them down unto the beach To gaze across the empty sea.

But since the longed-for day is nigh, And scarce a god could stay us now, Why do ye hang your heads and sigh, And still go slower and more slow?

_The Sirens_: Ah, had ye chanced to reach the home Your fond desires were set upon, Into what troubles had ye come! What barren victory had ye won!

But now, but now, when ye have lain Asleep with us a little while Beneath the washing of the main, How calm shall be your waking smile!

For ye shall smile to think of life That knows no troublous change or fear, No unavailing bitter strife, That ere its time brings trouble near.

_Orpheus_: Is there some murmur in your ears, That all that we have done is naught, And nothing ends our cares and fears, Till the last fear on us is brought?

_The Sirens_: Alas! and will ye stop your ears, In vain desire to do aught, And wish to live 'mid cares and fears, Until the last fear makes you naught?

_Orpheus_: Is not the May-time now on earth, When close against the city wall The folk are singing in their mirth, While on their heads the May flowers fall?

_The Sirens_: Yes, May is come, and its sweet breath Shall well-nigh make you weep to-day, And pensive with swift-coming death Shall ye be satiate of the May.

_Orpheus_: Shall not July bring fresh delight, As underneath green trees ye sit, And o'er some damsel's body white, The noon-tide shadows change and flit?

_The Sirens_: No new delight July shall bring, But ancient fear and fresh desire; And spite of every lovely thing, Of July surely shall ye tire.

_Orpheus_: And now when August comes on thee, And 'mid the golden sea of corn The merry reapers thou mayst see, Wilt thou still think the earth forlorn?

_The Sirens:_ Set flowers on thy short-lived head, And in thine heart forgetfulness Of man's hard toil, and scanty bread, And weary of those days no less.

_Orpheus:_ Or wilt thou climb the sunny hill, In the October afternoon, To watch the purple earth's blood fill The gray vat to the maiden's tune?

_The Sirens_: When thou beginnest to grow old, Bring back remembrance of thy bliss With that the shining cup doth hold, And weary helplessly of this.

_Orpheus:_ Or pleasureless shall we pass by The long cold night and leaden day, That song and tale and minstrelsy Shall make as merry as the May?

_The Sirens:_ List then, to-night, to some old tale Until the tears o'erflow thine eyes; But what shall all these things avail, When sad to-morrow comes and dies?

_Orpheus:_ And when the world is born again, And with some fair love, side by side, Thou wanderest 'twixt the sun and rain, In that fresh love-begetting tide;

Then, when the world is born again, And the sweet year before thee lies, Shall thy heart think of coming pain, Or vex itself with memories?

_The Sirens:_ Ah! then the world is born again With burning love unsatisfied, And new desires fond and vain, And weary days from tide to tide.

Ah! when the world is born again, A little day is soon gone by, When thou, unmoved by sun or rain, Within a cold straight house shall lie.

Therewith they ceased awhile, as languidly The head of Argo fell off toward the sea, And through the water she began to go; For from the land a fitful wind did blow, That, dallying with the many-colored sail, Would sometimes swell it out and sometimes fail, As nigh the east side of the bay they drew; Then o'er the waves again the music flew.

_The Sirens:_ Think not of pleasure short and vain, Wherewith, 'mid days of toil and pain, With sick and sinking hearts ye strive To cheat yourselves that ye may live With cold death ever close at hand. Think rather of a peaceful land, The changeless land where ye may be Roofed over by the changeful sea.

_Orpheus:_ And is the fair town nothing then, The coming of the wandering men With that long talked-of thing and strange. And news of how the kingdoms change, The pointed hands, and wondering At doers of a desperate thing? Push on, for surely this shall be Across a narrow strip of sea.

_The Sirens:_ Alas! poor souls and timorous, Will ye draw nigh to gaze at us And see if we are fair indeed? For such as we shall be your meed, There, where our hearts would have you go. And where can the earth-dwellers show In any land such loveliness As that wherewith your eyes we bless, O wanderers of the Minyæ, Worn toilers over land and sea?

_Orpheus:_ Fair as the lightning 'thwart the sky, As sun-dyed snow upon the high Untrodden heaps of threatening stone The eagle looks upon alone, Oh, fair as the doomed victim's wreath, Oh, fair as deadly sleep and death, What will ye with them, earthly men, To mate your threescore years and ten? Toil rather, suffer and be free, Betwixt the green earth and the sea.

_The Sirens:_ If ye be bold with us to go, Things such as happy dreams may show Shall your once heavy lids behold About our palaces of gold; Where waters 'neath the waters run, And from o'erhead a harmless sun Gleams through the woods of chrysolite. There gardens fairer to the sight Than those of the Phæacian king Shall ye behold; and, wondering, Gaze on the sea-born fruit and flowers, And thornless and unchanging bowers, Whereof the May-time knoweth naught.

So to the pillared house being brought, Poor souls, ye shall not be alone, For o'er the floors of pale blue stone All day such feet as ours shall pass, And 'twixt the glimmering walls of glass, Such bodies garlanded with gold, So faint, so fair, shall ye behold, And clean forget the treachery Of changing earth and tumbling sea.

_Orpheus:_ Oh the sweet valley of deep grass, Where through the summer stream doth pass, In chain of shadow, and still pool, From misty morn to evening cool; Where the black ivy creeps and twines O'er the dark-armed, red-trunkèd pines. Whence clattering the pigeon flits, Or brooding o'er her thin eggs sits, And every hollow of the hills With echoing song the mavis fills. There by the stream, all unafraid, Shall stand the happy shepherd maid, Alone in first of sunlit hours; Behind her, on the dewy flowers, Her homespun woolen raiment lies, And her white limbs and sweet gray eyes Shine from the calm green pool and deep, While round about the swallows sweep, Not silent; and would God that we, Like them, were landed from the sea.

_The Sirens:_ Shall we not rise with you at night, Up through the shimmering green twilight, That maketh there our changeless day, Then going through the moonlight gray, Shall we not sit upon these sands, To think upon the troublous lands Long left behind, where once ye were, When every day brought change and fear! There, with white arms about you twined, And shuddering somewhat at the wind That ye rejoiced erewhile to meet, Be happy, while old stories sweet, Half understood, float round your ears, And fill your eyes with happy tears. Ah! while we sing unto you there, As now we sing, with yellow hair Blown round about these pearly limbs, While underneath the gray sky swims The light shell-sailor of the waves, And to our song, from sea-filled caves Booms out an echoing harmony, Shall ye not love the peaceful sea?

_Orpheus:_ Nigh the vine-covered hillocks green, In days agone, have I not seen The brown-clad maidens amorous, Below the long rose-trellised house, Dance to the querulous pipe and shrill, When the gray shadow of the hill Was lengthening at the end of day? Not shadowy or pale were they, But limbed like those who 'twixt the trees Follow the swift of goddesses. Sunburnt they are somewhat, indeed, To where the rough brown woolen weed Is drawn across their bosoms sweet, Or cast from off their dancing feet; But yet the stars, the moonlight gray, The water wan, the dawn of day, Can see their bodies fair and white As hers, who once, for man's delight, Before the world grew hard and old, Came o'er the bitter sea and cold; And surely those that met me there Her handmaidens and subjects were; And shame-faced, half-repressed desire Had lit their glorious eyes with fire, That maddens eager hearts of men. Oh, would that I were with them when The risen moon is gathering light, And yellow from the homestead white The windows gleam; but verily This waits us o'er a little sea.

_The Sirens:_ Come to the land where none grows old, And none is rash or over-bold Nor any noise there is or war, Or rumor from wild lands afar, Or plagues, or birth and death of kings; No vain desire of unknown things Shall vex you there, no hope or fear Of that which never draweth near; But in that lovely land and still Ye may remember what ye will, And what ye will, forget for aye. So while the kingdoms pass away, Ye sea-beat hardened toilers erst, Unresting, for vain fame athirst, Shall be at peace for evermore, With hearts fulfilled of Godlike lore, And calm, unwavering Godlike love, No lapse of time can turn or move. There, ages after your fair fleece Is clean forgotten, yea, and Greece Is no more counted glorious, Alone with us, alone with us, Alone with us, dwell happily, Beneath our trembling roof of sea.

_Orpheus_: Ah! do ye weary of the strife, And long to change this eager life For shadowy and dull hopelessness, Thinking indeed to gain no less Than this, to die, and not to die, To be as if ye ne'er had been, Yet keep your memory fresh and green, To have no thought of good or ill, Yet keep some thrilling pleasure still? Oh, idle dream! Ah, verily If it shall happen unto me That I have thought of anything, When o'er my bones the sea-fowl sing, And I lie dead, how shall I pine For those fresh joys that once were mine, On this green fount of joy and mirth, The ever young and glorious earth; Then, helpless, shall I call to mind Thoughts of the flower-scented wind, The dew, the gentle rain at night, The wonder-working snow and white, The song of birds, the water's fall, The sun that maketh bliss of all; Yea, this our toil and victory, The tyrannous and conquered sea.

_The Sirens_: Ah, will ye go, and whither then Will ye go from us, soon to die, To fill your threescore years and ten With many an unnamed misery?

And this the wretchedest of all, That when upon your lonely eyes The last faint heaviness shall fall, Ye shall bethink you of our cries. Come back, nor, grown old, seek in vain To hear us sing across the sea; Come back, come back, come back again, Come back, O fearful Minyæ!

_Orpheus_: Ah, once again, ah, once again, The black prow plunges through the sea; Nor yet shall all your toil be vain, Nor ye forget, O Minyæ!

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO

(1474-1533)

BY L. OSCAR KUHNS

Among the smaller principalities of Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, none was more brilliant than the court of Ferrara, and none more intimately connected with the literature of the times. Here, on September 8th, 1474, was born Ludovico Ariosto, the great poet of the Renaissance. Here, like Boiardo before him and Tasso after him, he lived and wrote; and it was to the family of Este that he dedicated that poem in which are seen, as in a mirror, the gay life, the intellectual brilliancy, and the sensuous love for beauty which mark the age. At seventeen he began the study of the law, which he soon abandoned for the charms of letters. Most of his life was passed in the service first of Cardinal d'Este, and afterward of the Duke of Ferrara. But the courtier never overcame the poet, who is said to have begun the famous 'Orlando Furioso' at the age of thirty, and never to have ceased the effort to improve it.

The literary activity of Ariosto showed itself in the composition of comedies and satires, as well as in that of his immortal epic. The comedies were written for the court theatre of Ferrara, to which he seems to have had some such relation as that of Goethe to the theatre at Weimar. The later comedies are much better than the early ones, which are but little more than translations from Plautus and Terence. In general, however, the efforts of Ariosto in this direction are far less important than the 'Orlando' or the 'Satires.' At the first appearance of his plays they were enormously successful, and the poet was hailed as a great dramatic genius. But these comedies are interesting to-day chiefly from the fact that Ariosto was one of the very first of the writers of modern comedy, and was the leader of that movement in Italy and France which prepared the way for Molière.

Of more importance than the comedies, and second only in interest to the 'Orlando' are the 'Satires' seven in number, the first written in 1517 and the last in 1531, thus representing the maturer life of the poet. Nearly everything we know of Ariosto's character is taken from this source. He reveals himself in them as a man who excites neither our highest admiration nor our contempt. He was not born to be a statesman, nor a courtier, nor a man of affairs; and his life as ambassador of Cardinal Ippolito, and as captain of Garafagno, was not at all to his liking. His one longing through all the busy years of his life was for a quiet home, where he could live in liberty and enjoy the comforts of cultured leisure. A love of independence was a marked trait of his character, and it must often have galled him to play the part he did at the court of Ferrara. As a satirist he was no Juvenal or Persius. He was not stirred to profound indignation by the evils about him, of which there were enough in that brilliant but corrupt age. He discussed in easy, familiar style, the foibles of his fellow-men, and especially the events of his own life and the traits of his own character.

The same views of life, the same tolerant temper, which are seen in the 'Satires,' form an important part of the 'Orlando Furioso,' where they take the form of little dissertations, introduced at the beginning of a canto, or scattered through the body of the poem. These reflections are full of practical sense and wisdom, and remind us of the familiar conversation with the reader which forms so great a charm in Thackeray's novels.

In the Italian Renaissance there is a curious mingling of classical and romantic influences, and the generation which gave itself up passionately to the study of Greek and Latin still read with delight the stories of the Paladins of Charlemagne and the Knights of the Round Table. What Sir Thomas Malory had done in English prose, Boiardo did in Latin poetry. When Ariosto entered the service of Cardinal Ippolito, every one was reading the 'Orlando Innamorato,' and the young poet soon fell under the charm of these stories; so that when the inward impulse which all great poets feel toward the work of creation came to him, he took the material already at hand and continued the story of 'Orlando.' With a certain skill and inventiveness, Boiardo had mingled together the epic cycles of Arthur and Charlemagne. He had shown the Saracen host under King Agramante driving the army of Charlemagne before them, until the Christians had finally been shut up within the walls of Paris. It was at this critical moment in his poem that Boiardo died. Ariosto took up the story where he had left it, and carried it on until the final defeat of Agramante, and his death at the hands of Orlando in the desert island.

[Illustration: LODOVICO ARIOSTO.]

But we must not think that the 'Orlando Furioso' has one definite plot. At first reading we are confused by the multiplicity of incident, by the constant change of scene, and by the breaking off of one story to make place for another. In a single canto the scene changes from France to Africa, and by means of winged horses tremendous distances are traveled over in a day. On closer examination we find that this confusion is only apparent. The poet himself is never confused, but with sure hand he manipulates the many-colored threads which are wrought into the fabric of the poem. The war between the Saracens and the Christians is a sort of background or stage; a rallying point for the characters. In reality it attracts but slightly our attention or interest. Again, Orlando's love for Angelica, and his madness,--although the latter gave the title to the book, and both afford some of the finest episodes,--have no organic connection with the whole. The real subject, if any there be, is the loves of Ruggiero and Bradamante. These are the supposed ancestors of the house of Este, and it is with their final union, after many vicissitudes, that the poem ends.

But the real purpose of Ariosto was to amuse the reader by countless stories of romantic adventure. It was not as a great creative genius, as the inventor of new characters, as the earnest and philosophical reformer, that he appears to mankind, but as the supreme artist. Ariosto represents in its highest development that love for form, that perfection of style, which is characteristic of the Latin races as distinguished from the Teutonic. It is this that makes the 'Orlando Furioso' the great epic of the Renaissance, and that caused Galileo to bestow upon the poet the epithet "divine."

For nearly thirty years Ariosto changed and polished these lines, so that the edition of 1532 is quite different from that of 1516. The stanzas in which the poem is written are smooth and musical, the language is so chosen as always to express the exact shade of thought, the interest never flags. What seems the arbitrary breaking off of a story before its close is really the art of the poet; for he knows, were each episode to be told by itself, we should have only a string of _novelle_, and not the picture he desired to paint,--that of the world of chivalry, with its knights-errant in search of adventures, its damsels in distress, its beautiful gardens and lordly palaces, its hermits and magicians, its hippogriffs and dragons, and all the paraphernalia of magic art.

Ariosto's treatment of chivalry is peculiar to himself. Spenser in the sixteenth century, and Lord Tennyson in our own day, pictured its virtues and noble aspirations. In his immortal 'Don Quixote,' Cervantes held its extravagances up to ridicule. In Ariosto's day no one believed any longer in the heroes or the ideals of chivalry, nor did the poet himself; hence there is an air of unreality about the poem. The figures that pass before us, although they have certain characteristics of their own, are not real beings, but those that dwell in a land of fancy. As the poet tells these stories of a bygone age, a smile of irony plays upon his face; he cannot take them seriously; and while he never goes so far as to turn into ridicule the ideals of chivalry, yet, in such episodes as the prodigious exploits of Rodomonte within the walls of Paris, and the voyage of Astolfo to the moon, he does approach dangerously near to the burlesque.

We are not inspired by large and noble thoughts in reading the 'Orlando Furioso.' We are not deeply stirred by pity or terror. No lofty principles are inculcated. Even the pathetic scenes, such as the death of Zerbino and Isabella, stir no real emotion in us, but we experience a sense of the artistic effect of a poetic death.

It is not often, in these days of the making of many books of which there is no end, that one has time to read a poem which is longer than the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' together. But there is a compelling charm about the 'Orlando,' and he who sits down to read it with serious purpose will soon find himself under the spell of an attraction which comes from unflagging interest and from perfection of style and construction. No translation can convey an adequate sense of this beauty of color and form; but the versions of William Stewart Rose, here cited, suggest the energy, invention, and intensity of the epic.

In 1532 Ariosto published his final edition of the poem, now enlarged to forty-six cantos, and retouched from beginning to end. He died not long afterward, in 1533, and was buried in the church of San Benedetto, where a magnificent monument marks his resting-place.

[Illustration: Signature L. OSCAR KUHNS]

THE FRIENDSHIP OF MEDORO AND CLORIDANE

From 'Orlando Furioso,' Cantos 18 and 19

Two Moors among the Paynim army were, From stock obscure in Ptolomita grown; Of whom the story, an example rare Of constant love, is worthy to be known. Medore and Cloridane were named the pair; Who, whether Fortune pleased to smile or frown, Served Dardinello with fidelity, And late with him to France had crost the sea.

Of nimble frame and strong was Cloridane, Throughout his life a follower of the chase. A cheek of white, suffused with crimson grain, Medoro had, in youth, a pleasing grace; Nor bound on that emprize, 'mid all the train, Was there a fairer or more jocund face. Crisp hair he had of gold, and jet-black eyes; And seemed an angel lighted from the skies.

These two were posted on a rampart's height, With more to guard the encampment from surprise, When 'mid the equal intervals, at night, Medoro gazed on heaven with sleepy eyes. In all his talk, the stripling, woeful wight, Here cannot choose, but of his lord devise, The royal Dardinel; and evermore Him left unhonored on the field, deplore.

Then, turning to his mate, cries, "Cloridane, I cannot tell thee what a cause of woe It is to me, my lord upon the plain Should lie, unworthy food for wolf or crow! Thinking how still to me he was humane, Meseems, if in his honor I forego This life of mine, for favors so immense I shall but make a feeble recompense.

"That he may not lack sepulture, will I Go forth, and seek him out among the slain; And haply God may will that none shall spy Where Charles's camp lies hushed. Do thou remain; That, if my death be written in the sky, Thou may'st the deed be able to explain. So that if Fortune foil so far a feat, The world, through Fame, my loving heart may weet."

Amazed was Cloridane a child should show Such heart, such love, and such fair loyalty; And fain would make the youth his thought forego, Whom he held passing dear: but fruitlessly Would move his steadfast purpose; for such woe Will neither comforted nor altered be. Medoro is disposed to meet his doom, Or to inclose his master in the tomb.

Seeing that naught would bend him, naught would move, "I too will go," was Cloridane's reply: "In such a glorious act myself will prove; As well such famous death I covet, I. What other thing is left me, here above, Deprived of thee, Medoro mine? To die With thee in arms is better, on the plain, Than afterwards of grief, shouldst thou be slain."

And thus resolved, disposing in their place Their guard's relief, depart the youthful pair, Leave fosse and palisade, and in small space Are among ours, who watch with little care; Who, for they little fear the Paynim race, Slumber with fires extinguished everywhere. 'Mid carriages and arms they lie supine, Up to the eyes immersed in sleep and wine.

A moment Cloridano stopt, and cried, "Not to be lost are opportunities. This troop, by whom my master's blood was shed, Medoro, ought not I to sacrifice? Do thou, lest any one this way be led, Watch everywhere about, with ears and eyes; For a wide way, amid the hostile horde, I offer here to make thee with my sword."

So said he, and his talk cut quickly short, Coming where learned Alpheus slumbered nigh; Who had the year before sought Charles's court, In med'cine, magic, and astrology Well versed: but now in art found small support, Or rather found that it was all a lie. He had foreseen that he his long-drawn life Should finish on the bosom of his wife.

And now the Saracen with wary view Had pierced his weasand with the pointed sword. Four others he near that Diviner slew, Nor gave the wretches time to say a word. Sir Turpin in his story tells not who, And Time has of their names effaced record. Palidon of Moncalier next he speeds; One who securely sleeps between two steeds.

* * * * *

Rearing th' insidious blade, the pair are near The place where round King Charles's pavilion Are tented warlike paladin and peer, Guarding the side that each is camped upon, When in good time the Paynims backward steer, And sheathe their swords, the impious slaughter done; Deeming impossible, in such a number, But they must light on one who does not slumber.

And though they might escape well charged with prey, To save themselves they think sufficient gain. Thither by what he deems the safest way (Medoro following him) went Cloridane Where in the field, 'mid bow and falchion lay, And shield and spear, in pool of purple stain, Wealthy and poor, the king and vassal's corse, And overthrown the rider and his horse.

* * * * *

The silvery splendor glistened yet more clear, There where renowned Almontes's son lay dead. Faithful Medoro mourned his master dear, Who well agnized the quartering white and red, With visage bathed in many a bitter tear (For he a rill from either eyelid shed), And piteous act and moan, that might have whist The winds, his melancholy plaint to list;

But with a voice supprest--not that he aught Regards if any one the noise should hear, Because he of his life takes any thought, Of which loathed burden he would fain be clear; But lest his being heard should bring to naught The pious purpose which has brought them here-- The youths the king upon their shoulders stowed; And so between themselves divide the load.

Hurrying their steps, they hastened, as they might, Under the cherished burden they conveyed; And now approaching was the lord of light, To sweep from heaven the stars, from earth the shade, When good Zerbino, he whose valiant sprite Was ne'er in time of need by sleep down-weighed, From chasing Moors all night, his homeward way Was taking to the camp at dawn of day.

He has with him some horsemen in his train, That from afar the two companions spy. Expecting thus some spoil or prize to gain, They, every one, toward that quarter hie. "Brother, behoves us," cried young Cloridane, "To cast away the load we bear, and fly; For 'twere a foolish thought (might well be said) To lose _two_ living men, to save _one_ dead;"

And dropt the burden, weening his Medore Had done the same by it, upon his side; But that poor boy, who loved his master more, His shoulders to the weight alone applied: Cloridane hurrying with all haste before, Deeming him close behind him or beside; Who, did he know his danger, him to save A thousand deaths, instead of one, would brave.

* * * * *

The closest path, amid the forest gray, To save himself, pursued the youth forlorn; But all his schemes were marred by the delay Of that sore weight upon his shoulders borne. The place he knew not, and mistook the way, And hid himself again in sheltering thorn. Secure and distant was his mate, that through The greenwood shade with lighter shoulders flew.

So far was Cloridane advanced before, He heard the boy no longer in the wind; But when he marked the absence of Medore, It seemed as if his heart was left behind. "Ah! how was I so negligent," (the Moor Exclaimed) "so far beside myself, and blind, That, I, Medoro, should without thee fare, Nor know when I deserted thee or where?"

So saying, in the wood he disappears, Plunging into the maze with hurried pace; And thither, whence he lately issued, steers, And, desperate, of death returns in trace. Cries and the tread of steeds this while he hears, And word and threat of foeman, as in chase; Lastly Medoro by his voice is known, Disarmed, on foot, 'mid many horse, alone.

A hundred horsemen who the youth surround, Zerbino leads, and bids his followers seize The stripling; like a top the boy turns round And keeps him as he can: among the trees, Behind oak, elm, beech, ash, he takes his ground, Nor from the cherished load his shoulders frees. Wearied, at length, the burden he bestowed Upon the grass, and stalked about his load.

As in her rocky cavern the she-bear, With whom close warfare Alpine hunters wage, Uncertain hangs about her shaggy care, And growls in mingled sound of love and rage, To unsheath her claws, and blood her tushes bare, Would natural hate and wrath the beast engage; Love softens her, and bids from strife retire, And for her offspring watch, amid her ire.

Cloridane, who to aid him knows not how, And with Medoro willingly would die, But who would not for death this being forego, Until more foes than one should lifeless lie, Ambushed, his sharpest arrow to his bow Fits, and directs it with so true an eye, The feathered weapon bores a Scotchman's brain, And lays the warrior dead upon the plain.

Together, all the others of the band Turned thither, whence was shot the murderous reed; Meanwhile he launched another from his stand, That a new foe might by the weapon bleed, Whom (while he made of _this_ and _that_ demand, And loudly questioned who had done the deed) The arrow reached--transfixed the wretch's throat And cut his question short in middle note.

Zerbino, captain of those horse, no more Can at the piteous sight his wrath refrain; In furious heat he springs, upon Medore, Exclaiming, "Thou of this shalt bear the pain." One hand he in his locks of golden ore Enwreaths, and drags him to himself amain; But as his eyes that beauteous face survey, Takes pity on the boy, and does not slay.

To him the stripling turns, with suppliant cry, And, "By thy God, sir knight," exclaims, "I pray, Be not so passing cruel, nor deny That I in earth my honored king may lay: No other grace I supplicate, nor I This for the love of life, believe me, say. So much, no longer, space of life I crave, As may suffice to give my lord a grave.

"And if you needs must feed the beast and bird, Like Theban Creon, let their worst be done Upon these limbs; so that by me interred In earth be those of good Almontes's son." Medoro thus his suit, with grace, preferred, And words to move a mountain; and so won Upon Zerbino's mood, to kindness turned, With love and pity he all over burned.

This while, a churlish horseman of the band, Who little deference for his lord confest, His lance uplifting, wounded overhand The unhappy suppliant in his dainty breast. Zerbino, who the cruel action scanned, Was deeply stirred, the rather that, opprest, And livid with the blow the churl had sped, Medoro fell as he was wholly dead.

* * * * *

The Scots pursue their chief, who pricks before, Through the deep wood, inspired by high disdain, When he has left the one and the other Moor, _This_ dead, _that_ scarce alive, upon the plain. There for a mighty space lay young Medore, Spouting his life-blood from so large a vein He would have perished, but that thither made A stranger, as it chanced, who lent him aid.

THE SAVING OF MEDORO

From 'Orlando Furioso,' Canto 19

By chance arrived a damsel at the place, Who was (though mean and rustic was her wear) Of royal presence and of beauteous face, And lofty manners, sagely debonnair. Her have I left unsung so long a space, That you will hardly recognize the fair Angelica: in her (if known not) scan The lofty daughter of Catay's great khan.

Angelica, when she had won again The ring Brunello had from her conveyed, So waxed in stubborn pride and haught disdain, She seemed to scorn this ample world, and strayed Alone, and held as cheap each living swain, Although amid the best by fame arrayed; Nor brooked she to remember a gallant In Count Orlando or King Sacripant:

And above every other deed repented, That good Rinaldo she had loved of yore; And that to look so low she had consented, (As by such choice dishonored) grieved her sore. Love, hearing this, such arrogance resented, And would the damsel's pride endure no more. Where young Medoro lay he took his stand, And waited her, with bow and shaft in hand.

When fair Angelica the stripling spies, Nigh hurt to death in that disastrous fray, Who for his king, that there unsheltered lies, More sad than for his own misfortune lay, She feels new pity in her bosom rise, Which makes its entry in unwonted way. Touched was her naughty heart, once hard and curst, And more when he his piteous tale rehearsed.

And calling back to memory her art, For she in Ind had learned chirurgery, (Since it appears such studies in that part Worthy of praise and fame are held to be, And, as an heirloom, sires to sons impart, With little aid of books, the mystery,) Disposed herself to work with simples' juice, Till she in him should healthier life produce.

And recollects an herb had caught her sight In passing thither, on a pleasant plain: What (whether dittany or pancy hight) I know not; fraught with virtue to restrain The crimson blood forth-welling, and of might To sheathe each perilous and piercing pain. She found it near, and having pulled the weed, Returned to seek Medoro on the mead.

Returning, she upon a swain did light, Who was on horseback passing through the wood. Strayed from the lowing herd, the rustic wight A heifer missing for two days pursued. Him she with her conducted, where the might Of the faint youth was ebbing with his blood: Which had the ground about so deeply dyed Life was nigh wasted with the gushing tide.

Angelica alights upon the ground, And he, her rustic comrade, at her best. She hastened 'twixt two stones the herb to pound, Then took it, and the healing juice exprest: With this did she foment the stripling's wound, And even to the hips, his waist and breast; And (with such virtue was the salve endued) It stanched his life-blood, and his strength renewed.

And into him infused such force again, That he could mount the horse the swain conveyed; But good Medoro would not leave the plain Till he in earth had seen his master laid. He, with the monarch, buried Cloridane, And after followed whither pleased the maid. Who was to stay with him, by pity led, Beneath the courteous shepherd's humble shed.

Nor would the damsel quit the lowly pile (So she esteemed the youth) till he was sound; Such pity first she felt, when him erewhile She saw outstretched and bleeding on the ground. Touched by his mien and manners next, a file She felt corrode her heart with secret wound; She felt corrode her heart, and with desire, By little and by little warmed, took fire.

The shepherd dwelt between two mountains hoar, In goodly cabin, in the greenwood shade, With wife and children; in short time before, The brand-new shed had builded in the glade. Here of his grisly wound the youthful Moor Was briefly healed by the Catayan maid; But who in briefer space, a sorer smart Than young Medoro's, suffered at her heart.

[She pines for love of him, and at length makes her love known. They solemnize their marriage, and remain a month there with great happiness.]

Amid such pleasures, where, with tree o'ergrown, Ran stream, or bubbling fountain's wave did spin, On bark or rock, if yielding were the stone, The knife was straight at work, or ready pin. And there, without, in thousand places lone, And in as many places graved, within, Medoro and Angelica were traced, In divers ciphers quaintly interlaced.

When she believed they had prolonged their stay More than enow, the damsel made design In India to revisit her Catay, And with its crown Medoro's head entwine. She had upon her wrist an armlet, gay With costly gems, in witness and in sign Of love to her by Count Orlando borne, And which the damsel for long time had worn.

No love which to the paladin she bears, But that it costly is and wrought with care, This to Angelica so much endears, That never more esteemed was matter rare; This she was suffered, in the isle of tears, I know not by what privilege, to wear, When, naked, to the whale exposed for food By that inhospitable race and rude.

She, not possessing wherewithal to pay The kindly couple's hospitality,-- Served by them in their cabin, from the day She there was lodged, with such fidelity,-- Unfastened from her arm the bracelet gay, And bade them keep it for her memory. Departing hence, the lovers climb the side Of hills, which fertile France from Spain divide.

THE MADNESS OF ORLANDO

From 'Orlando Furioso,' Canto 23

The course in pathless woods, which without rein The Tartar's charger had pursued astray, Made Roland for two days, with fruitless pain, Follow him, without tidings of his way. Orlando reached a rill of crystal vein, On either bank of which a meadow lay; Which, stained with native hues and rich, he sees, And dotted o'er with fair and many trees.

The mid-day fervor made the shelter sweet To hardy herd as well as naked swain: So that Orlando well beneath the heat Some deal might wince, opprest with plate and chain. He entered for repose the cool retreat, And found it the abode of grief and pain; And place of sojourn more accursed and fell On that unhappy day, than tongue can tell.

Turning him round, he there on many a tree Beheld engraved, upon the woody shore, What as the writing of his deity He knew, as soon as he had marked the lore. This was a place of those described by me, Whither oft-times, attended by Medore, From the near shepherd's cot had wont to stray The beauteous lady, sovereign of Catay.

In a hundred knots, amid these green abodes, In a hundred parts, their ciphered names are dight; Whose many letters are so many goads, Which Love has in his bleeding heart-core pight. He would discredit in a thousand modes, That which he credits in his own despite; And would perforce persuade himself, _that_ rind Other Angelica than his had signed.

"And yet I know these characters," he cried, "Of which I have so many read and seen; By her may this Medoro be belied, And me, she, figured in the name, may mean." Feeding on such like phantasies, beside The real truth, did sad Orlando lean Upon the empty hope, though ill contented, Which he by self-illusions had fomented.

But stirred and aye rekindled it, the more That he to quench the ill suspicion wrought, Like the incautious bird, by fowler's lore, Hampered in net or lime; which, in the thought To free its tangled pinions and to soar, By struggling is but more securely caught. Orlando passes thither, where a mountain O'erhangs in guise of arch the crystal fountain.

* * * * *

Here from his horse the sorrowing county lit, And at the entrance of the grot surveyed A cloud of words, which seemed but newly writ, And which the young Medoro's hand had made. On the great pleasure he had known in it, This sentence he in verses had arrayed; Which to his tongue, I deem, might make pretense To polished phrase; and such in ours the sense:--

"Gay plants, green herbage, rill of limpid vein, And, grateful with cool shade, thou gloomy cave, Where oft, by many wooed with fruitless pain, Beauteous Angelica, the child of grave King Galaphron, within my arms has lain; For the convenient harborage you gave, I, poor Medoro, can but in my lays, As recompense, forever sing your praise.

"And any loving lord devoutly pray, Damsel and cavalier, and every one, Whom choice or fortune hither shall convey, Stranger or native,--to this crystal run, Shade, caverned rock, and grass, and plants, to say, 'Benignant be to you the fostering sun And moon, and may the choir of nymphs provide, That never swain his flock may hither guide.'"

In Arabic was writ the blessing said, Known to Orlando like the Latin tongue, Who, versed in many languages, best read Was in this speech; which oftentimes from wrong And injury and shame had saved his head, What time he roved the Saracens among. But let him boast not of its former boot, O'erbalanced by the present bitter fruit.

Three times, and four, and six, the lines impressed Upon the stone that wretch perused, in vain Seeking another sense than was expressed, And ever saw the thing more clear and plain; And all the while, within his troubled breast, He felt an icy hand his heart-core strain. With mind and eyes close fastened on the block, At length he stood, not differing from the rock.

Then well-nigh lost all feeling; so a prey Wholly was he to that o'ermastering woe. This is a pang, believe the experienced say Of him who speaks, which does all griefs outgo. His pride had from his forehead passed away, His chin had fallen upon his breast below; Nor found he, so grief-barred each natural vent, Moisture for tears, or utterance for lament.

Stifled within, the impetuous sorrow stays, Which would too quickly issue; so to abide Water is seen, imprisoned in the vase, Whose neck is narrow and whose swell is wide; What time, when one turns up the inverted base, Toward the mouth, so hastes the hurrying tide, And in the strait encounters such a stop, It scarcely works a passage, drop by drop.

He somewhat to himself returned, and thought How possibly the thing might be untrue: That some one (so he hoped, desired, and sought To think) his lady would with shame pursue; Or with such weight of jealousy had wrought To whelm _his_ reason, as should him undo; And that he, whosoe'er the thing had planned, Had counterfeited passing well her hand.

With such vain hope he sought himself to cheat, And manned some deal his spirits and awoke; Then prest the faithful Brigliadoro's seat, As on the sun's retreat his sister broke. Not far the warrior had pursued his beat, Ere eddying from a roof he saw the smoke; Heard noise of dog and kine, a farm espied, And thitherward in quest of lodging hied.

Languid, he lit, and left his Brigliador To a discreet attendant; one undrest His limbs, one doffed the golden spurs he wore, And one bore off, to clean, his iron vest. This was the homestead where the young Medore Lay wounded, and was here supremely blest. Orlando here, with other food unfed, Having supt full of sorrow, sought his bed.

* * * * *

Little availed the count his self-deceit; For there was one who spake of it unsought: The shepherd-swain, who to allay the heat With which he saw his guest so troubled, thought The tale which he was wonted to repeat-- Of the two lovers--to each listener taught; A history which many loved to hear, He now, without reserve, 'gan tell the peer.

"How at Angelica's persuasive prayer, He to his farm had carried young Medore, Grievously wounded with an arrow; where In little space she healed the angry sore. But while she exercised this pious care, Love in her heart the lady wounded more, And kindled from small spark so fierce a fire, She burnt all over, restless with desire;

"Nor thinking she of mightiest king was born, Who ruled in the East, nor of her heritage, Forced by too puissant love, had thought no scorn To be the consort of a poor foot-page." His story done, to them in proof was borne The gem, which, in reward for harborage, To her extended in that kind abode, Angelica, at parting, had bestowed.

* * * * *

In him, forthwith, such deadly hatred breed That bed, that house, that swain, he will not stay Till the morn break, or till the dawn succeed, Whose twilight goes before approaching day. In haste, Orlando takes his arms and steed, And to the deepest greenwood wends his way. And when assured that he is there alone, Gives utterance to his grief in shriek and groan.

Never from tears, never from sorrowing, He paused; nor found he peace by night or day; He fled from town, in forest harboring, And in the open air on hard earth lay. He marveled at himself, how such a spring Of water from his eyes could stream away, And breath was for so many sobs supplied; And thus oft-times, amid his mourning, cried:--

* * * * *

"I am not--am not what I seem to sight: What Roland was, is dead and under ground, Slain by that most ungrateful lady's spite, Whose faithlessness inflicted such a wound. Divided from the flesh, I am his sprite, Which in this hell, tormented, walks its round, To be, but in its shadow left above, A warning to all such as trust in love."

All night about the forest roved the count, And, at the break of daily light, was brought By his unhappy fortune to the fount, Where his inscription young Medoro wrought. To see his wrongs inscribed upon that mount Inflamed his fury so, in him was naught But turned to hatred, frenzy, rage, and spite; Nor paused he more, but bared his falchion bright,

Cleft through the writing; and the solid block, Into the sky, in tiny fragments sped. Woe worth each sapling and that caverned rock Where Medore and Angelica were read! So scathed, that they to shepherd or to flock Thenceforth shall never furnish shade or bed. And that sweet fountain, late so clear and pure, From such tempestous wrath was ill secure.

* * * * *

So fierce his rage, so fierce his fury grew, That all obscured remained the warrior's sprite; Nor, for forgetfulness, his sword he drew, Or wondrous deeds, I trow, had wrought the knight; But neither this, nor bill, nor axe to hew, Was needed by Orlando's peerless might. He of his prowess gave high proofs and full, Who a tall pine uprooted at a pull.

He many others, with as little let As fennel, wall-wort-stem, or dill uptore; And ilex, knotted oak, and fir upset, And beech and mountain ash, and elm-tree hoar. He did what fowler, ere he spreads his net, Does, to prepare the champaign for his lore, By stubble, rush, and nettle stalk; and broke, Like these, old sturdy trees and stems of oak.

The shepherd swains, who hear the tumult nigh, Leaving their flocks beneath the greenwood tree, Some here, some there, across the forest hie, And hurry thither, all, the cause to see. But I have reached such point, my history, If I o'erpass this bound, may irksome be. And I my story will delay to end Rather than by my tediousness offend.

ARISTOPHANES

(B.C. 448-380?)

BY PAUL SHOREY

The birth-year of Aristophanes is placed about 448 B.C., on the ground that he is said to have been almost a boy when his first comedy was presented in 427. His last play, the 'Plutus,' was produced in 388, and there is no evidence that he long survived this date. Little is known of his life beyond the allusions, in the Parabases of the 'Acharnians,' 'Knights,' and 'Wasps,' to his prosecution by Cleon, to his own or his father's estate at Aegina, and to his premature baldness. He left three sons who also wrote comedies.

Aristophanes is the sole extant representative of the so-called Old Comedy of Athens; a form of dramatic art which developed obscurely under the shadow of Attic Tragedy in the first half of the fifth century B.C., out of the rustic revelry of the Phallic procession and Comus song of Dionysus, perhaps with some outside suggestions from the Megarian farce and its Sicilian offshoot, the mythological court comedy of Epicharmus. The chief note of this older comedy for the ancient critics was its unbridled license of direct personal satire and invective. Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes, says Horace, assailed with the utmost freedom any one who deserved to be branded with infamy. This old political Comedy was succeeded in the calmer times that followed the Peloponnesian War by the so-called Middle Comedy (390-320) of Alexis, Antiphanes, Strattis, and some minor men; which insensibly passed into the New Comedy (320-250) of Menander and Philemon, known to us in the reproductions of Terence. And this new comedy, which portrayed types of private life instead of satirizing noted persons by name, and which, as Aristotle says, produced laughter by innuendo rather than by scurrility, was preferred to the "terrible graces" of her elder sister by the gentle and refined Plutarch, or the critic who has usurped his name in the 'Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander.' The old Attic Comedy has been variously compared to Charivari, Punch, the comic opera of Offenbach, and a Parisian 'revue de fin d'année.' There is no good modern analogue. It is not our comedy of manners, plot, and situation; nor yet is it mere buffoonery. It is a peculiar mixture of broad political, social, and literary satire, and polemical discussion of large ideas, with the burlesque and licentious extravagances that were deemed the most acceptable service at the festival of the laughter-loving, tongue-loosening god of the vine.

[Illustration: ARISTOPHANES]

The typical plan of an Aristophanic comedy is very simple. The protagonist undertakes in all apparent seriousness to give a local habitation and a body to some ingenious fancy, airy speculation, or bold metaphor: as for example, the procuring of a private peace for a citizen who is weary of the privations of war; or the establishment of a city in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land where the birds shall regulate things better than the featherless biped, man; or the restoration of the eyesight of the proverbially blind god of Wealth. The attention of the audience is at once enlisted for the semblance of a plot by which the scheme is put into execution. The design once effected, the remainder of the play is given over to a series of loosely connected scenes, ascending to a climax of absurdity, in which the consequences of the original happy thought are followed out with a Swiftian verisimilitude of piquant detail and a Rabelaisian license of uproarious mirth. It rests with the audience to take the whole as pure extravaganza, or as a _reductio ad absurdum_ or playful defense of the conception underlying the original idea. In the intervals between the scenes, the chorus sing rollicking topical songs or bits of exquisite lyric, or in the name of the poet directly exhort and admonish the audience in the so-called Parabasis.

Of Aristophanes's first two plays, the 'Banqueters of Hercules' (427), and the 'Babylonians' (426), only fragments remain. The impolitic representation in the latter of the Athenian allies as branded Babylonian slaves was the ground of Cleon's attack in the courts upon Aristophanes, or Callistratus in whose name the play was produced.

The extant plays are the following:--

'The Acharnians,' B.C. 425, shortly after the Athenian defeat at Delium. The worthy countryman, Dicæopolis, weary of being cooped up within the Long Walls, and disgusted with the shameless jobbery of the politicians, sends to Sparta for samples of peace (the Greek word means also libations) of different vintages. The Thirty Years' brand smells of nectar and ambrosia. He accepts it, concludes a private treaty for himself and friends, and proceeds to celebrate the rural Dionysia with wife and child, soothing, by an eloquent plea pronounced in tattered tragic vestments borrowed from Euripides, the anger of the chorus of choleric Acharnian charcoal burners, exasperated at the repeated devastation of their deme by the Spartans. He then opens a market, to which a jolly Boeotian brings the long-lost, thrice-desired Copaic eel; while a starveling Megarian, to the huge delight of the Athenian groundlings, sells his little daughters, disguised as pigs, for a peck of salt. Finally Dicæopolis goes forth to a wedding banquet, from which he returns very mellow in the company of two flute girls; while Lamachus, the head of the war party, issues forth to do battle with the Boeotians in the snow, and comes back with a bloody coxcomb. This play was successfully given in Greek by the students of the University of Pennsylvania in the spring of 1886, and interestingly discussed in the Nation of May 6th by Professor Gildersleeve.

'The Knights,' B.C. 424: named from the chorus of young Athenian cavaliers who abet the sausage-seller, Agoracritus, egged on by the discontented family servants (the generals), Nicias and Demosthenes, to outbid with shameless flattery the rascally Paphlagonian steward, Cleon, and supplant him in the favor of their testy bean-fed old master, Demos (or People). At the close, Demos recovers his wits and his youth, and is revealed sitting enthroned in his glory in the good old Marathonian Athens of the Violet Crown. The prolongation of the billingsgate in the contest between Cleon and the sausage-seller grows wearisome to modern taste; but the portrait of the Demagogue is for all time.

'The Clouds,' B.C. 423: an attack on Socrates, unfairly taken as an embodiment of the deleterious and unsettling "new learning," both in the form of Sophistical rhetoric and "meteorological" speculation. Worthy Strepsiades, eager to find a new way to pay the debts in which the extravagance of his horse-racing son Pheidippides has involved him, seeks to enter the youth as a student in the Thinking-shop or Reflectory of Socrates, that he may learn to make the worse appear the better reason, and so baffle his creditors before a jury. The young man, after much demur and the ludicrous failure of his father, who at first matriculates in his stead, consents. He listens to the pleas of the just and unjust argument in behalf of the old and new education, and becomes himself such a proficient that he demonstrates, in flawless reasoning, that Euripides is a better poet than Aeschylus, and that a boy is justified in beating his father for affirming the contrary. Strepsiades thereupon, cured of his folly, undertakes a subtle investigation into the timbers of the roof of the Reflectory, with a view to smoking out the corrupters of youth. Many of the songs sung by or to the clouds, the patron deities of Socrates's misty lore, are extremely beautiful. Socrates is made to allude to these attacks of comedy by Plato in the 'Apology,' and, on his last day in prison, in the 'Phædo.' In the 'Symposium' or 'Banquet' of Plato, Aristophanes bursts in upon a company of friends with whom Socrates is feasting, and drinks with them till morning; while Socrates forces him and the tragic poet Agathon, both of them very sleepy, to admit that the true dramatic artist will excel in both tragedy and comedy.

'The Wasps,' B.C. 422: a _jeu d'esprit_ turning on the Athenian passion for litigation. Young Bdelucleon (hate-Cleon) can keep his old father Philocleon (love-Cleon) out of the courts only by instituting a private court in his own house. The first culprit, the house-dog, is tried for stealing a Sicilian cheese, and acquitted by Philocleon's mistaking the urn of acquittal for that of condemnation. The old man is inconsolable at the first escape of a victim from his clutches; but finally, renouncing his folly, takes lessons from his exquisite of a son in the manners and deportment of a fine gentleman. He then attends a dinner party, where he betters his instructions with comic exaggeration and returns home in high feather, singing tipsy catches and assaulting the watch on his way. The chorus of Wasps, the visible embodiment of a metaphor found also in Plato's 'Republic,' symbolizes the sting used by the Athenian jurymen to make the rich disgorge a portion of their gathered honey. The 'Plaideurs' of Racine is an imitation of this play; and the _motif_ of the committal of the dog is borrowed by Ben Jonson in the 'Staple of News.'

'The Peace,' B.C. 421: in support of the Peace of Nicias, ratified soon afterward (Grote's 'History of Greece,' Vol. vi., page 492). Trygæus, an honest vine-dresser yearning for his farm, in parody of the Bellerophon of Euripides, ascends to heaven on a dung-beetle. He there hauls Peace from the bottom of the well into which she had been cast by Ares, and brings her home in triumph to Greece, when she inaugurates a reign of plenty and uproarious jollity, and celebrates the nuptials of Trygæus and her handmaid Opora (Harvest-home).

'The Birds,' B.C. 414. Peisthetærus (Plausible) and Euelpides (Hopeful), whose names and deeds are perhaps a satire on the unbounded ambition that brought ruin on Athens at Syracuse, journey to Birdland and persuade King Hoopoe to induce the birds to build Nephelococcygia or Cloud-Cuckoo-Burgh in the air between the gods and men, starve out the gods with a "Melian famine," and rule the world themselves. The gods, their supplies of incense cut off, are forced to treat, and Peisthetærus receives in marriage Basileia (Sovereignty), the daughter of Zeus. The _mise en scène_, with the gorgeous plumage of the bird-chorus, must have been very impressive, and many of the choric songs are exceedingly beautiful. There is an interesting account by Professor Jebb in the Fortnightly Review (Vol. xli.) of a performance of 'The Birds' at Cambridge in 1884.

Two plays, B.C. 411: (1) at the Lenæa, 'The Lysistrata,' in which the women of Athens and Sparta by a secession from bed and board compel their husbands to end the war; (2) The 'Thesmophoriazusæ' or Women's Festival of Demeter, a licentious but irresistibly funny assault upon Euripides. The tragedian, learning that the women in council assembled are debating on the punishment due to his misogyny, implores the effeminate poet Agathon to intercede for him. That failing, he dispatches his kinsman Mnesilochus, disguised with singed beard and woman's robes, a sight to shake the midriff of despair with laughter, to plead his cause. The advocate's excess of zeal betrays him; he is arrested: and the remainder of the play is occupied by the ludicrous devices, borrowed or parodied from well-known Euripidean tragedies, by which the poet endeavors to rescue his intercessor.

'The Frogs,' B.C. 405, in the brief respite of hope between the victory of Arginusæ and the final overthrow of Athens at Ægospotami. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are dead. The minor bards are a puny folk, and Dionysus is resolved to descend to Hades in quest of a truly creative poet, one capable of a figure like "my star god's glow-worm," or "His honor rooted in dishonor stood." After many surprising adventures by the way, and in the outer precincts of the underworld, accompanied by his Sancho Panza, Xanthias, he arrives at the court of Pluto just in time to be chosen arbitrator of the great contest between Aeschylus and Euripides for the tragic throne in Hades. The comparisons and parodies of the styles of Aeschylus and Euripides that follow, constitute, in spite of their comic exaggeration, one of the most entertaining and discriminating chapters of literary criticism extant, and give us an exalted idea of the intelligence of the audience that appreciated them. Dionysus decides for Æschylus, and leads him back in triumph to the upper world.

The 'Ecclesiazusæ' or 'Ladies in Parliament,' B.C. 393: apparently a satire on the communistic theories which must have been current in the discussions of the schools before they found definite expression in Plato's 'Republic.' The ladies of Athens rise betimes, purloin their husbands' hats and canes, pack the Assembly, and pass a measure to intrust the reins of government to women. An extravagant and licentious communism is the result.

The 'Plutus,' B.C. 388: a second and much altered edition of a play represented for the first time in 408. With the 'Ecclesiazusæ' it marks the transition to the Middle Comedy, there being no parabasis, and little of the exuberant _verve_ of the older pieces. The blind god of Wealth recovers his eyesight by sleeping in the temple of Æsculapius, and proceeds to distribute the gifts of fortune more equitably.

The assignment of the dates and restoration of the plots of the thirty-two lost plays, of which a few not very interesting fragments remain, belong to the domain of conjectural erudition.

Aristophanes has been regarded by some critics as a grave moral censor, veiling his high purpose behind the grinning mask of comedy; by others as a buffoon of genius, whose only object was to raise a laugh. Both sides of the question are ingeniously and copiously argued in Browning's 'Aristophanes' Apology'; and there is a judicious summing up of the case of Aristophanes _vs_. Euripides in Professor Jebb's lectures on Greek poetry. The soberer view seems to be that while predominantly a comic artist, obeying the instincts of his genius, he did frequently make his comedy the vehicle of an earnest conservative polemic against the new spirit of the age in Literature, Philosophy, and Politics. He pursued Euripides with relentless ridicule because his dramatic motives lent themselves to parody, and his lines were on the lips of every theatre-goer; but also because he believed that Euripides had spoiled the old, stately, heroic art of Aeschylus and Sophocles by incongruous infusions of realism and sentimentalism, and had debased the "large utterance of the early gods" by an unhallowed mixture of colloquialism, dialectic, and chicane.

Aristophanes travestied the teachings of Socrates because his ungainly figure, and the oddity (_atopia_) attributed to him even by Plato, made him an excellent butt; yet also because he felt strongly that it was better for the young Athenian to spend his days in the Palæstra, or "where the elm-tree whispers to the plane," than in filing a contentious tongue on barren logomachies. That Socrates in fact discussed only ethical problems, and disclaimed all sympathy with speculations about things above our heads, made no difference: he was the best human embodiment of a hateful educational error. And similarly the assault upon Cleon, the "pun-pelleting of demagogues from Pnux," was

## partly due to the young aristocrat's instinctive aversion to the coarse

popular leader, and to the broad mark which the latter presented to the shafts of satire, but equally, perhaps, to a genuine patriotic revolt at the degradation of Athenian politics in the hands of the successors of Pericles.

But Aristophanes's ideas interest us less than his art and humor. We have seen the nature of his plots. In such a topsy-turvy world there is little opportunity for nice delineation of character. His personages are mainly symbols or caricatures. Yet they are vividly if broadly sketched, and genuine touches of human nature lend verisimilitude to their most improbable actions. One or two traditional comic types appear for the first time, apparently, on his stage: the alternately cringing and familiar slave or valet of comedy, in his Xanthias and Karion; and in Dicæopolis, Strepsiades, Demos, Trygæus, and Dionysus, the sensual, jovial, shrewd, yet naïve and credulous middle-aged _bourgeois gentilhomme_ or 'Sganarelle,' who is not ashamed to avow his poltroonery, and yet can, on occasion, maintain his rights with sturdy independence.

But the chief attraction of Aristophanes is the abounding comic force and _verve_ of his style. It resembles an impetuous torrent, whose swift rush purifies in its flow the grossness and obscenity inseparable from the origin of comedy, and buoys up and sweeps along on the current of fancy and improvisation the chaff and dross of vulgar jests, puns, scurrilous personalities, and cheap "gags," allowing no time for chilling reflections or criticism. Jests which are singly feeble combine to induce a mood of extravagant hilarity when huddled upon us with such "impossible conveyance." This _vivida vis animi_ can hardly be reproduced in a translation, and disappears altogether in an attempt at an abstract enumeration of the poet's inexhaustible devices for comic effect. He himself repeatedly boasts of the fertility of his invention, and claims to have discarded the coarse farce of his predecessors for something more worthy of the refined intelligence of his clever audience. Yet it must be acknowledged that much even of his wit is the mere filth-throwing of a naughty boy; or at best the underbred jocularity of the "funny column," the topical song, or the minstrel show. There are puns on the names of notable personages; a grotesque, fantastic, punning fauna, flora, and geography of Greece; a constant succession of surprises effected by the sudden substitution of low or incongruous terms in proverbs, quotations, and legal or religious formulas; scenes in dialect, scenes of excellent fooling in the vein of Uncle Toby and the Clown, girds at the audience, personalities that for us have lost their point,--about Cleonymus the caster-away of shields, or Euripides's herb-selling mother,--and everywhere unstinted service to the great gods Priapus and Cloacina.

A finer instrument of comic effect is the parody. The countless parodies of the lyric and dramatic literature of Greece are perhaps the most remarkable testimony extant to the intelligence of an Athenian audience. Did they infallibly catch the allusion when Dicæopolis welcomed back to the Athenian fish-market the long-lost Copaic eel in high Æschylean strain,--

"Of fifty nymphs Copaic alderliefest queen,"

and then, his voice breaking with the intolerable pathos of Admetus's farewell to the dying Alcestis, added,

"Yea, even in death Thou'lt bide with me, embalmed and beet-bestewed"?

Did they recognize the blasphemous Pindaric pun in "Helle's holy straits," for a tight place, and appreciate all the niceties of diction, metre, and dramatic art discriminated in the comparison between Aeschylus and Euripides in the 'Frogs'? At any rate, no Athenian could miss the fun of Dicæopolis (like Hector's baby) "scared at the dazzling plume and nodding crest" of the swashbuckler Lamachus, of Philocleon, clinging to his ass's belly like Odysseus escaping under the ram from the Cyclops's cave; of the baby in the Thesmophoriazusæ seized as a Euripidean hostage, and turning out a wine bottle in swaddling-clothes; of light-foot Iris in the rôle of a saucy, frightened soubrette; of the heaven-defying Æschylean Prometheus hiding under an umbrella from the thunderbolts of Zeus. And they must have felt instinctively what only a laborious erudition reveals to us, the sudden subtle modulations of the colloquial comic verse into mock-heroic travesty of high tragedy or lyric.

Euripides, the chief victim of Aristophanes's genius for parody, was so burlesqued that his best known lines became by-words, and his most ardent admirers, the very Balaustions and Euthukleses, must have grinned when they heard them, like a pair of augurs. If we conceive five or six Shakespearean comedies filled from end to end with ancient Pistols hallooing to "pampered jades of Asia," and Dr. Caiuses chanting of "a thousand vagrom posies," we may form some idea of Aristophanes's handling of the notorious lines--

"The tongue has sworn, the mind remains unsworn." "Thou lovest life, thy sire loves it too." "Who knows if life and death be truly one?"

But the charm of Aristophanes does not lie in any of these things singly, but in the combination of ingenious and paradoxical fancy with an inexhaustible flow of apt language by which they are held up and borne out. His personages are ready to make believe anything. Nothing surprises them long. They enter into the spirit of each new conceit, and can always discover fresh analogies to bear it out. The very plots of his plays are realized metaphors or embodied conceits. And the same concrete vividness of imagination is displayed in single scenes and episodes. The Better and the Worse Reason plead the causes of the old and new education in person. Cleon and Brasidas are the pestles with which War proposes to bray Greece in a mortar; the triremes of Athens in council assembled declare that they will rot in the docks sooner than yield their virginity to musty, fusty Hyperbolus. The fair cities of Greece stand about waiting for the recovery of Peace from her Well, with dreadful black eyes, poor things; Armisticia and Harvest-Home tread the stage in the flesh, and Nincompoop and Defraudation are among the gods.

The special metaphor or conceit of each play attracts appropriate words and images, and creates a distinct atmosphere of its own. In the 'Knights' the air fairly reeks with the smell of leather and the tanyard. The 'Birds' transport us to a world of trillings and pipings, and beaks and feathers. There is a buzzing and a humming and a stinging throughout the 'Wasps.' The 'Clouds' drip with mist, and are dim with aërial vaporous effects.

Aristophanes was the original inventor of Bob Acres's style of oath--the so-called referential or sentimental swearing. Dicæopolis invokes Ecbatana when Shamartabas struts upon the stage. Socrates in the 'Clouds' swears by the everlasting vapors. King Hoopoe's favorite oath is "Odds nets and birdlime." And the vein of humor that lies in over-ingenious, elaborate, and sustained metaphor was first worked in these comedies. All these excellences are summed up in the incomparable wealth and flexibility of his vocabulary. He has a Shakespearean mastery of the technicalities of every art and mystery, an appalling command of billingsgate and of the language of the cuisine, and would tire Falstaff and Prince Hal with base comparisons. And not content with the existing resources of the Greek vocabulary, he coins grotesque or beautiful compounds,--exquisite epithets like "Botruodöré" (bestower of the vine), "heliomanes" (drunk-with-sunlight), "myriad-flagoned phrases," untranslatable "port-manteaus" like "plouthugieia" (health-and-wealthfulness), and Gargantuan agglomerations of syllables like the portentous _olla podrida_ at the end of the 'Ecclesiazusæ.'

The great comic writer, as the example of Molière proves, need not be a poet. But the mere overflow of careless poetic power which is manifested by Aristophanes would have sufficed to set up any ordinary tragedian or lyrist. In plastic mastery of language only two Greek writers can vie with him, Plato and Homer. In the easy grace and native harmony of his verse he outsings all the tragedians, even that Aeschylus whom he praised as the man who had written the most exquisite songs of any poet of the time. In his blank verse he easily strikes every note, from that of the urbane, unaffected, colloquial Attic, to parody of high or subtle tragic diction hardly distinguishable from its model. He can adapt his metres to the expression of every shade of feeling. He has short, snapping, fiery trochees, like sparks from their own holm oak, to represent the choler of the Acharnians; eager, joyous glyconics to bundle up a sycophant and hustle him off the stage, or for the young knights of Athens celebrating Phormio's sea fights, and chanting, horse-taming Poseidon, Pallas, guardian of the State, and Victory, companion of the dance; the quickstep march of the trochaic tetrameter to tell how the Attic wasps, true children of the soil, charged the Persians at Marathon; and above all--the chosen vehicle of his wildest conceits, his most audacious fancies, and his strongest appeals to the better judgment of the citizens--the anapæstic tetrameter, that "resonant and triumphant" metre of which even Mr. Swinburne's anapæsts can reproduce only a faint and far-off echo.

But he has more than the opulent diction and the singing voice of the poet. He has the key to fairy-land, a feeling for nature which we thought romantic and modern, and in his lyrics the native wood-notes wild of his own 'Mousa lochmaia' (the muse of the coppice). The chorus of the Mystæ in the 'Frogs,' the rustic idyl of the 'Peace,' the songs of the girls in the 'Lysistrata,' the call of the nightingale, the hymns of the 'Clouds,' the speech of the "Just Reason," and the grand chorus of birds, reveal Aristophanes as not only the first comic writer of Greece, but as one of the very greatest of her poets.

Among the many editions of Aristophanes, those most useful to the student and the general reader are doubtless the text edited by Bergk (2 vols., 1867), and the translations of the five most famous plays by John Hookham Frere, to be found in his complete works.

[Illustration: Signature: PAUL SHOREY]

THE ORIGIN OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

From 'The Acharnians': Frere's Translation

DICÆOPOLIS

Be not surprised, most excellent spectators, If I that am a beggar have presumed To claim an audience upon public matters, Even in a comedy; for comedy Is conversant in all the rules of justice, And can distinguish betwixt right and wrong.

The words I speak are bold, but just and true. Cleon at least cannot accuse me now, That I defame the city before strangers, For this is the Lenæan festival, And here we meet, all by ourselves alone; No deputies are arrived as yet with tribute, No strangers or allies: but here we sit A chosen sample, clean as sifted corn, With our own denizens as a kind of chaff.

First, I detest the Spartans most extremely; And wish that Neptune, the Tænarian deity, Would bury them in their houses with his earthquakes. For I've had losses--losses, let me tell ye, Like other people; vines cut down and injured. But among friends (for only friends are here), Why should we blame the Spartans for all this? For people of ours, some people of our own,-- Some people from among us here, I mean: But not the People (pray, remember that); I never said the People, but a pack Of paltry people, mere pretended citizens, Base counterfeits,--went laying informations, And making a confiscation of the jerkins Imported here from Megara; pigs, moreover, Pumpkins, and pecks of salt, and ropes of onions, Were voted to be merchandise from Megara, Denounced, and seized, and sold upon the spot.

Well, these might pass, as petty local matters. But now, behold, some doughty drunken youths Kidnap, and carry away from Megara, The courtesan, Simætha. Those of Megara, In hot retaliation, seize a brace Of equal strumpets, hurried forth perforce From Dame Aspasia's house of recreation. So this was the beginning of the war, All over Greece, owing to these three strumpets. For Pericles, like an Olympian Jove, With all his thunder and his thunderbolts, Began to storm and lighten dreadfully, Alarming all the neighborhood of Greece; And made decrees, drawn up like drinking songs, In which it was enacted and concluded That the Megarians should remain excluded From every place where commerce was transacted, With all their ware--like "old Care" in the ballad: And this decree, by land and sea, was valid.

Then the Megarians, being all half starved, Desired the Spartans to desire of us Just to repeal those laws: the laws I mentioned, Occasioned by the stealing of those strumpets. And so they begged and prayed us several times; And we refused: and so they went to war.

THE POET'S APOLOGY

From 'The Acharnians': Frere's Translation.

Our poet has never as yet Esteemed it proper or fit To detain you with a long Encomiastic song On his own superior wit; But being abused and accused, And attacked of late As a foe of the State, He makes an appeal in his proper defense, To your voluble humor and temper and sense, With the following plea: Namely, that he Never attempted or ever meant To scandalize In any wise Your mighty imperial government. Moreover he says, That in various ways He presumes to have merited honor and praise; Exhorting you still to stick to your rights, And no more to be fooled with rhetorical flights; Such as of late each envoy tries On the behalf of your allies, That come to plead their cause before ye, With fulsome phrase, and a foolish story Of "violet crowns" and "Athenian glory," With "sumptuous Athens" at every word: "Sumptuous Athens" is always heard; "Sumptuous" ever, a suitable phrase For a dish of meat or a beast at graze. He therefore affirms In confident terms, That his active courage and earnest zeal Have usefully served your common weal: He has openly shown The style and tone Of your democracy ruling abroad, He has placed its practices on record; The tyrannical arts, the knavish tricks, That poison all your politics. Therefore shall we see, this year, The allies with tribute arriving here, Eager and anxious all to behold Their steady protector, the bard so bold; The bard, they say, that has dared to speak, To attack the strong, to defend the weak. His fame in foreign climes is heard, And a singular instance lately occurred. It occurred in the case of the Persian king, Sifting and cross-examining The Spartan envoys. He demanded Which of the rival States commanded The Grecian seas? He asked them next (Wishing to see them more perplexed) Which of the two contending powers Was chiefly abused by this bard of ours? For he said, "Such a bold, so profound an adviser By dint of abuse would render them wiser, More active and able; and briefly that they Must finally prosper and carry the day." Now mark the Lacedæmonian guile! Demanding an insignificant isle! "Ægina," they say, "for a pledge of peace, As a means to make all jealousy cease." Meanwhile their privy design and plan Is solely to gain this marvelous man-- Knowing his influence on your fate-- By obtaining a hold on his estate Situate in the isle aforesaid. Therefore there needs to be no more said. You know their intention, and know that you know it: You'll keep to your island, and stick to the poet. And he for his part Will practice his art With a patriot heart, With the honest views That he now pursues, And fair buffoonery and abuse: Not rashly bespattering, or basely beflattering, Not pimping, or puffing, or acting the ruffian; Not sneaking or fawning; But openly scorning All menace and warning, All bribes and suborning: He will do his endeavor on your behalf; He will teach you to think, he will teach you to laugh. So Cleon again and again may try; I value him not, nor fear him, I! His rage and rhetoric I defy. His impudence, his politics, His dirty designs, his rascally tricks, No stain of abuse on me shall fix. Justice and right, in his despite, Shall aid and attend me, and do me right: With these to friend, I ne'er will bend, Nor descend To a humble tone (Like his own), As a sneaking loon, A knavish, slavish, poor poltroon.

THE APPEAL OF THE CHORUS

From 'The Knights': Frere's Translation.

If A veteran author had wished to engage Our assistance to-day, for a speech from the stage, We scarce should have granted so bold a request: But this author of ours, as the bravest and best, Deserves an indulgence denied to the rest, For the courage and vigor, the scorn and the hate, With which he encounters the pests of the State; A thoroughbred seaman, intrepid and warm, Steering outright, in the face of the storm.

But now for the gentle reproaches he bore On the part of his friends, for refraining before To embrace the profession, embarking for life In theatrical storms and poetical strife.

He begs us to state that for reasons of weight He has lingered so long and determined so late. For he deemed the achievements of comedy hard, The boldest attempt of a desperate bard! The Muse he perceived was capricious and coy; Though many were courting her, few could enjoy. And he saw without reason, from season to season, Your humor would shift, and turn poets adrift, Requiting old friends with unkindness and treason, Discarded in scorn as exhausted and worn.

Seeing Magnes's fate, who was reckoned of late For the conduct of comedy captain and head; That so oft on the stage, in the flower of his age, Had defeated the Chorus his rivals had led; With his sounds of all sort, that were uttered in sport, With whims and vagaries unheard of before, With feathers and wings, and a thousand gay things, That in frolicsome fancies his Choruses wore-- When his humor was spent, did your temper relent, To requite the delight that he gave you before? We beheld him displaced, and expelled and disgraced, When his hair and his wit were grown aged and hoar.

Then he saw, for a sample, the dismal example Of noble Cratinus so splendid and ample, Full of spirit and blood, and enlarged like a flood; Whose copious current tore down with its torrent, Oaks, ashes, and yew, with the ground where they grew, And his rivals to boot, wrenched up by the root; And his personal foes, who presumed to oppose, All drowned and abolished, dispersed and demolished, And drifted headlong, with a deluge of song.

And his airs and his tunes, and his songs and lampoons, Were recited and sung by the old and the young: At our feasts and carousals, what poet but he? And "The fair Amphibribe" and "The Sycophant Tree," "Masters and masons and builders of verse!" Those were the tunes that all tongues could rehearse; But since in decay you have cast him away, Stript of his stops and his musical strings, Battered and shattered, a broken old instrument, Shoved out of sight among rubbishy things. His garlands are faded, and what he deems worst, His tongue and his palate are parching with thirst.

And now you may meet him alone in the street, Wearied and worn, tattered and torn, All decayed and forlorn, in his person and dress, Whom his former success should exempt from distress, With subsistence at large at the general charge, And a seat with the great at the table of State, There to feast every day and preside at the play In splendid apparel, triumphant and gay.

Seeing Crates, the next, always teased and perplexed, With your tyrannous temper tormented and vexed; That with taste and good sense, without waste or expense, From his snug little hoard, provided your board With a delicate treat, economic and neat. Thus hitting or missing, with crowns or with hissing, Year after year he pursued his career, For better or worse, till he finished his course.

These precedents held him in long hesitation; He replied to his friends, with a just observation, "That a seaman in regular order is bred To the oar, to the helm, and to look out ahead; With diligent practice has fixed in his mind The signs of the weather, and changes of wind. And when every point of the service is known, Undertakes the command of a ship of his own."

For reasons like these, If your judgment agrees That he did not embark Like an ignorant spark, Or a troublesome lout, To puzzle and bother, and blunder about, Give him a shout, At his first setting out! And all pull away With a hearty huzza For success to the play! Send him away, Smiling and gay, Shining and florid, With his bald forehead!

THE CLOUD CHORUS

From 'The Clouds': Andrew Lang's Translation

SOCRATES SPEAKS

Hither, come hither, ye Clouds renowned, and unveil yourselves here; Come, though ye dwell on the sacred crests of Olympian snow, Or whether ye dance with the Nereid Choir in the gardens clear, Or whether your golden urns are dipped in Nile's overflow, Or whether you dwell by Mæotis mere Or the snows of Mimas, arise! appear! And hearken to us, and accept our gifts ere ye rise and go.

THE CLOUDS SING

Immortal Clouds from the echoing shore Of the father of streams from the sounding sea, Dewy and fleet, let us rise and soar; Dewy and gleaming and fleet are we! Let us look on the tree-clad mountain-crest, On the sacred earth where the fruits rejoice, On the waters that murmur east and west, On the tumbling sea with his moaning voice. For unwearied glitters the Eye of the Air, And the bright rays gleam; Then cast we our shadows of mist, and fare In our deathless shapes to glance everywhere From the height of the heaven, on the land and air, And the Ocean Stream. Let us on, ye Maidens that bring the Rain, Let us gaze on Pallas's citadel, In the country of Cecrops fair and dear, The mystic land of the holy cell, Where the Rites unspoken securely dwell, And the gifts of the gods that know not stain, And a people of mortals that know not fear. For the temples tall and the statues fair, And the feasts of the gods are holiest there; The feasts of Immortals, the chaplets of flowers, And the Bromian mirth at the coming of spring, And the musical voices that fill the hours, And the dancing feet of the maids that sing!

GRAND CHORUS OF BIRDS

From 'The Birds': Swinburne's Translation

Come on then, ye dwellers by nature in darkness, and like to the leaves' generations, That are little of might, that are molded of mire, unenduring and shadowlike nations, Poor plumeless ephemerals, comfortless mortals, as visions of shadows fast fleeing, Lift up your mind unto us that are deathless, and dateless the date of our being; Us, children of heaven, us, ageless for aye, us, all of whose thoughts are eternal: That ye may from henceforth, having heard of us all things aright as to matters supernal, Of the being of birds, and beginning of gods, and of streams, and the dark beyond reaching, Trustfully knowing aright, in my name bid Prodicus pack with his preaching! It was Chaos and Night at the first, and the blackness of darkness, and Hell's broad border, Earth was not, nor air, neither heaven; when in depths of the womb of the dark without order First thing, first-born of the black-plumed Night, was a wind-egg hatched in her bosom, Whence timely with seasons revolving again sweet Love burst out as a blossom, Gold wings glittering forth of his back, like whirlwinds gustily turning. He, after his wedlock with Chaos, whose wings are of darkness, in Hell broad-burning, For his nestlings begat him the race of us first, and upraised us to light new-lighted. And before this was not the race of the gods, until all things by Love were united: And of kind united in kind with communion of nature the sky and the sea are Brought forth, and the earth, and the race of the gods everlasting and blest. So that we are Far away the most ancient of all things blest. And that we are of Love's generation There are manifest manifold signs. We have wings, and with us have the Loves habitation; And manifold fair young folk that forswore love once, ere the bloom of them ended, Have the men that pursued and desired them subdued by the help of us only befriended, With such baits as a quail, a flamingo, a goose, or a cock's comb staring and splendid. All best good things that befall men come from us birds, as is plain to all reason: For first we proclaim and make known to them spring, and the winter and autumn in season; Bid sow, when the crane starts clanging for Afric in shrill-voiced emigrant number, And calls to the pilot to hang up his rudder again for the season and slumber; And then weave a cloak for Orestes the thief, lest he strip men of theirs if it freezes. And again thereafter the kite reappearing announces a change in the breezes. And that here is the season for shearing your sheep of their spring wool. Then does the swallow Give you notice to sell your great-coat, and provide something light for the heat that's to follow. Thus are we as Ammon or Delphi unto you. Dodona, nay, Phoebus Apollo. For, as first ye come all to get auguries of birds, even such is in all things your carriage, Be the matter a matter of trade, or of earning your bread, or of any one's marriage. And all things ye lay to the charge of a bird that belong to discerning prediction: Winged fame is a bird, as you reckon; you sneeze, and the sign's as a bird for conviction; All tokens are "birds" with you--sounds, too, and lackeys and donkeys. Then must it not follow That we are to you all as the manifest godhead that speaks in prophetic Apollo?

A RAINY DAY ON THE FARM

From 'The Peace': Frere's Translation

How sweet it is to see the new-sown cornfield fresh and even, With blades just springing from the soil that only ask a shower from heaven. Then, while kindly rains are falling, indolently to rejoice, Till some worthy neighbor calling, cheers you with his hearty voice. Well, with weather such as this, let us hear, Trygæus tell us What should you and I be doing? You're the king of us good fellows. Since it pleases heaven to prosper your endeavors, friend, and mine, Let us have a merry meeting, with some friendly talk and wine. In the vineyard there's your lout, hoeing in the slop and mud-- Send the wench and call him out, this weather he can do no good. Dame, take down two pints of meal, and do some fritters in your way; Boil some grain and stir it in, and let us have those figs, I say. Send a servant to my house,--any one that you can spare,-- Let him fetch a beestings pudding, two gherkins, and the pies of hare: There should be four of them in all, if the cat has left them right; We heard her racketing and tearing round the larder all last night, Boy, bring three of them to us,--take the other to my father: Cut some myrtle for our garlands, sprigs in flower or blossoms rather. Give a shout upon the way to Charinades our neighbor, To join our drinking bout to-day, since heaven is pleased to bless our labor.

THE HARVEST

From 'The Peace': Translation in the Quarterly Review

Oh, 'tis sweet, when fields are ringing With the merry cricket's singing, Oft to mark with curious eye If the vine-tree's time be nigh: Here is now the fruit whose birth Cost a throe to Mother Earth. Sweet it is, too, to be telling, How the luscious figs are swelling; Then to riot without measure In the rich, nectareous treasure, While our grateful voices chime,-- Happy season! blessed time.

THE CALL TO THE NIGHTINGALE

From 'The Birds ': Frere's Translation

Awake! awake! Sleep no more, my gentle mate! With your tiny tawny bill, Wake the tuneful echo shrill, On vale or hill; Or in her airy rocky seat, Let her listen and repeat The tender ditty that you tell, The sad lament, The dire event, To luckless Itys that befell. Thence the strain Shall rise again, And soar amain, Up to the lofty palace gate Where mighty Apollo sits in state In Jove's abode, with his ivory lyre, Hymning aloud to the heavenly choir, While all the gods shall join with thee In a celestial symphony.

THE BUILDING OF CLOUD-CUCKOO-TOWN

From 'The Birds ': Frere's Translation

[_Enter Messenger, quite out of breath, and speaking in short snatches_.]

_Messenger_--Where is he? Where? Where is he? Where? Where is he?--The president Peisthetairus?

_Peisthetairus [coolly_]--Here am I.

_Mess. [in a gasp of breath_]--Your fortification's finished.

_Peis_.--Well! that's well.

_Mess_.--A most amazing, astonishing work it is! So that Theagenes and Proxenides Might flourish and gasconade and prance away Quite at their ease, both of them four-in-hand, Driving abreast upon the breadth of wall, Each in his own new chariot.

_Peis_.--You surprise me.

_Mess_.--And the height (for I made the measurement myself) Is exactly a hundred fathoms.

_Peis_.--Heaven and earth! How could it be? such a mass! who could have built it?

_Mess_.--The Birds; no creature else, no foreigners, Egyptian bricklayers, workmen or masons. But they themselves, alone, by their own efforts,-- (Even to my surprise, as an eye-witness) The Birds, I say, completed everything: There came a body of thirty thousand cranes, (I won't be positive, there might be more) With stones from Africa in their craws and gizzards, Which the stone-curlews and stone-chatterers Worked into shape and finished. The sand-martens And mud-larks, too, were busy in their department, Mixing the mortar, while the water-birds, As fast as it was wanted, brought the water To temper and work it.

_Peis. [in a fidget_]--But who served the masons Who did you get to carry it?

_Mess_.--To carry it? Of course, the carrion crows and carrying pigeons.

_Peis. [in a fuss, which he endeavors to conceal_]-- Yes! yes! but after all, to load your hods, How did you manage that?

_Mess_.--Oh, capitally, I promise you. There were the geese, all barefoot Trampling the mortar, and when all was ready They handed it into the hods, so cleverly, With their flat feet!

_Peis. [a bad joke, as a vent for irritation_]-- They footed it, you mean-- Come; it was handily done though, I confess.

_Mess_.--Indeed, I assure you, it was a sight to see them; And trains of ducks there were, clambering the ladders With their duck legs, like bricklayers' 'prentices, All dapper and handy, with their little trowels.

_Peis_.--In fact, then, it's no use engaging foreigners; Mere folly and waste, we've all within ourselves. Ah, well now, come! But about the woodwork? Heh! Who were the carpenters? Answer me that!

_Mess_.--The woodpeckers, of course: and there they were, Laboring upon the gates, driving and banging, With their hard hatchet-beaks, and such a din, Such a clatter, as they made, hammering and hacking, In a perpetual peal, pelting away Like shipwrights, hard at work in the arsenal. And now their work is finished, gates and all, Staples and bolts, and bars and everything; The sentries at their posts; patrols appointed; The watchman in the barbican; the beacons Ready prepared for lighting; all their signals Arranged--but I'll step out, just for a moment, To wash my hands. You'll settle all the rest.

CHORUS OF WOMEN

From the 'Thesmophoriazusæ': Collins's Translation

They're always abusing the women, As a terrible plague to men: They say we're the root of all evil, And repeat it again and again; Of war, and quarrels, and bloodshed, All mischief, be what it may! And pray, then, why do you marry us, If we're all the plagues you say? And why do you take such care of us, And keep us so safe at home, And are never easy a moment If ever we chance to roam? When you ought to be thanking heaven That your Plague is out of the way, You all keep fussing and fretting-- "Where is _my_ Plague to-day?" If a Plague peeps out of the window, Up go the eyes of men; If she hides, then they all keep staring Until she looks out again.

CHORUS OF MYSTÆ IN HADES

From 'The Frogs': Frere's Translation

CHORUS [_shouting and singing_']

Iacchus! Iacchus! Ho!

Iacchus! Iacchus! Ho!

_Xanthias_--There, master, there they are, the initiated All sporting about as he told us we should find 'em. They're singing in praise of Bacchus like Diagoras.

_Bacchus_--Indeed, and so they are; but we'll keep quiet Till we make them out a little more distinctly.

CHORUS _[song]_

Mighty Bacchus! Holy Power! Hither at the wonted hour Come away, Come away, With the wanton holiday, Where the revel uproar leads To the mystic holy meads, Where the frolic votaries fly, With a tipsy shout and cry; Flourishing the Thyrsus high, Flinging forth, alert and airy, To the sacred old vagary, The tumultuous dance and song, Sacred from the vulgar throng; Mystic orgies that are known To the votaries alone-- To the mystic chorus solely-- Secret unrevealed--and holy. _Xan_.--O glorious virgin, daughter of the Goddess! What a scent of roasted griskin reached my senses!

_Bac_.--Keep quiet--and watch for a chance of a piece of the haslets.

CHORUS _[song]_

Raise the fiery torches high! Bacchus is approaching nigh, Like the planet of the morn Breaking with the hoary dawn On the dark solemnity-- There they flash upon the sight; All the plain is blazing bright, Flushed and overflown with light: Age has cast his years away, And the cares of many a day, Sporting to the lively lay-- Mighty Bacchus! march and lead (Torch in hand toward the mead) Thy devoted humble Chorus; Mighty Bacchus--move before us! Keep silence--keep peace--and let all the profane From our holy solemnity duly refrain; Whose souls, unenlightened by taste, are obscure; Whose poetical notions are dark and impure; Whose theatrical conscience Is sullied by nonsense; Who never were trained by the mighty Cratinus In mystical orgies, poetic and vinous; Who delight in buffooning and jests out of season; Who promote the designs of oppression and treason; Who foster sedition and strife and debate; All traitors, in short, to the Stage and the State: Who surrender a fort, or in private export To places and harbors of hostile resort Clandestine consignments of cables and pitch,-- In the way that Thorycion grew to be rich From a scoundrelly dirty collector of tribute: All such we reject and severely prohibit; All statesmen retrenching the fees and the salaries Of theatrical bards, in revenge for the railleries And jests and lampoons of this holy solemnity, Profanely pursuing their personal enmity, For having been flouted and scoffed and scorned-- All such are admonished and heartily warned; We warn them once, We warn them twice, We warn and admonish--we warn them thrice, To conform to the law, To retire and withdraw; While the Chorus again with the formal saw, (Fixt and assign'd to the festive day) Move to the measure and march away.

SEMI-CHORUS

March! march! lead forth, Lead forth manfully, March in order all; Bustling, hustling, justling, As it may befall; Flocking, shouting, laughing, Mocking, flouting, quaffing, One and all; All have had a belly-full Of breakfast brave and plentiful; Therefore Evermore With your voices and your bodies Serve the goddess, And raise Songs of praise; She shall save the country still, And save it against the traitor's will; So she says.

SEMI-CHORUS

Now let us raise in a different strain The praise of the goddess, the giver of grain; Imploring her favor With other behavior, In measures more sober, submissive, and graver.

SEMI-CHORUS

Ceres, holy patroness, Condescend to mark and bless, With benevolent regard, Both the Chorus and the Bard; Grant them for the present day Many things to sing and say, Follies intermixed with sense; Folly, but without offense. Grant them with the present play To bear the prize of verse away.

SEMI-CHORUS

Now call again, and with a different measure, The power of mirth and pleasure; The florid, active Bacchus, bright and gay, To journey forth and join us on the way.

SEMI-CHORUS

O Bacchus, attend! the customary patron of every lively lay; Go forth without delay Thy wonted annual way, To meet the ceremonious holy matron: Her grave procession gracing, Thine airy footsteps tracing With unlaborious, light, celestial motion; And here at thy devotion Behold thy faithful choir In pitiful attire: All overworn and ragged, This jerkin old and jagged, These buskins torn and burst, Though sufferers in the fray, May serve us at the worst To sport throughout the day; And then within the shades I spy some lovely maids With whom we romped and reveled, Dismantled and disheveled, With their bosoms open,-- With whom we might be coping. _Xan_.--Well, I was always hearty, Disposed to mirth and ease: I'm ready to join the party. _Bac_.--And I will if you please.

A PARODY OF EURIPIDES'S LYRIC VERSE

From 'The Frogs'

Halcyons ye by the flowing sea Waves that warble twitteringly, Circling over the tumbling blue, Dipping your down in its briny dew, Spi-i-iders in corners dim Spi-spi-spinning your fairy film, Shuttles echoing round the room Silver notes of the whistling loom, Where the light-footed dolphin skips Down the wake of the dark-prowed ships, Over the course of the racing steed Where the clustering tendrils breed Grapes to drown dull care in delight, Oh! mother make me a child again just for to-night! I don't exactly see how that last line is to scan, But that's a consideration I leave to our musical man.

THE PROLOGUES OF EURIPIDES

From 'The Frogs'

[The point of the following selection lies in the monotony of both narrative style and metre in Euripides's prologues, and especially his regular cæsura after the fifth syllable of a line. The burlesque tag used by Aristophanes to demonstrate this effect could not be applied in the same way to any of the fourteen extant plays of Sophocles and Æschylus.]

_Æschylus_--And by Jove, I'll not stop to cut up your verses word by word, but if the gods are propitious I'll spoil all your prologues with a little flask of smelling-salts.

_Euripides_--With a flask of smelling-salts?

_Æsch_.--With a single one. For you build your verses so that anything will fit into the metre,--a leathern sack, or eider-down, or smelling-salts. I'll show you.

_Eur_.--So, you'll show me, will you?

_Æsch_.--I will that.

_Dionysus_--Pronounce.

_Eur_. [_declaiming_]-- Ægyptus, as broad-bruited fame reports, With fifty children voyaging the main To Argos came, and

_Æsch_.--lost his smelling-salts.

_Dion_.--What the mischief have the smelling-salts got to do with it? Recite another prologue to him and let me see.

_Eur_.-- Dionysus, thyrsus-armed and faun-skin-clad, Amid the torchlights on Parnassus's slope Dancing and prancing

_Æsch_.--lost his smelling-salts.

_Dion_.--Caught out again by the smelling-salts.

_Eur_.--No matter. Here's a prologue that he can't fit 'em to.

No lot of mortal man is wholly blest: The high-born youth hath lacked the means of life, The lowly lout hath

_Æsch_.--lost his smelling-salts.

_Dion_.--Euripides--

_Eur_.--Well, what?

_Dion_.--Best take in sail. These smelling-salts, methinks, will blow a gale.

_Eur_.--What do I care? I'll fix him next time.

_Dion_.--Well, recite another, and steer clear of the smelling-salts.

_Eur_.-- Cadmus departing from the town of Tyre, Son of Agenor

_Æsch_.--lost his smelling-salts.

_Dion_.--My dear fellow, buy those smelling-salts, or there won't be a rag left of all your prologues.

_Eur_.--What? I buy 'em of him?

_Dion_.--If you'll be advised by me.

_Eur_.--Not a bit of it. I've lots of prologues where he can't work 'em in.

Pelops the Tantalid to Pisa coming With speedy coursers

_Æsch_.--lost his smelling-salts.

_Dion_.--There they are again, you see. Do let him have 'em, my good Æschylus. You can replace 'em for a nickel.

_Eur_.--Never. I've not run out yet.

Oeneus from broad fields

_Æsch_.--lost his smelling-salts.

_Eur_.--Let me say the whole verse, won't you?

Oeneus from broad fields reaped a mighty crop And offering first-fruits

_Æsch_.--lost his smelling-salts.

_Dion_.--While sacrificing? Who filched them?

_Eur_.--Oh, never mind him. Let him try it on this verse:--

Zeus, as the word of sooth declared of old--

_Dion_.--It's no use, he'll say Zeus lost his smelling-salts. For those smelling-salts fit your prologues like a kid glove. But go on and turn your attention to his lyrics.

ARISTOTLE

(B.C. 384-322)

BY THOMAS DAVIDSON

The "Stagirite," called by Eusebius "Nature's private secretary," and by Dante "the master of those that know,"--the greatest thinker of the ancient world, and the most influential of all time,--was born of Greek parents at Stagira, in the mountains of Macedonia, in B.C. 384. Of his mother, Phæstis, almost nothing is known. His father, Nicomachus, belonged to a medical family, and acted as private physician to Amyntas, grandfather of Alexander the Great; whence it is probable that Aristotle's boyhood was passed at or near the Macedonian court. Losing both his parents while a mere boy, he was taken charge of by a relative, Proxenus Atarneus, and sent, at the age of seventeen, to Athens to study. Here he entered the school of Plato, where he remained twenty years, as pupil and as teacher. During this time he made the acquaintance of the leading contemporary thinkers, read omnivorously, amassed an amount of knowledge that seems almost fabulous, schooled himself in systematic thought, and (being well off) collected a library, perhaps the first considerable private library in the world. Having toward the end felt obliged to assume an independent attitude in thought, he was not at the death of Plato (347) appointed his successor in the Academy, as might have been expected. Not wishing at that time to set up a rival school, he retired to the court of a former fellow-pupil, Hermias, then king of Assos and Atarneus, whom he greatly respected, and whose adopted daughter, Pythias, he later married. Here he remained, pursuing his studies, for three years; and left only when his patron was treacherously murdered by the Persians.

Having retired to Mitylene, he soon afterward received an invitation from Philip of Macedonia to undertake the education of his son Alexander, then thirteen years old. Aristotle willingly obeyed this summons; and retiring with his royal pupil to Mieza, a town southwest of Pella, imparted his instruction in the Nymphæum, which he had arranged in imitation of Plato's garden school. Alexander remained with him three years, and was then called by his father to assume important State duties. Whether Aristotle's instruction continued after that is uncertain; but the two men remained fast friends, and there can be no doubt that much of the nobility, self-control, largeness of purpose, and enthusiasm for culture, which characterized Alexander's subsequent career, were due to the teaching of the philosopher. What Aristotle was in the world of thought, Alexander became in the world of action.

[Illustration: ARISTOTLE.]

Aristotle remained in Macedonia ten years, giving instruction to young Macedonians and continuing his own studies. He then returned to Athens, and opened a school in the _peripatos_, or promenade, of the Lyceum, the gymnasium of the foreign residents, a school which from its location was called the Peripatetic. Here he developed a manifold activity. He pursued all kinds of studies, logical, rhetorical, physical, metaphysical, ethical, political, and aesthetic, gave public (exoteric) and private (esoteric) instruction, and composed the bulk of the treatises which have made his name famous. These treatises were composed slowly, in connection with his lectures, and subjected to frequent revision. He likewise endeavored to lead an ideal social life with his friends and pupils, whom he gathered under a common roof to share meals and elevated converse in common.

Thus affairs went on for twelve fruitful years, and might have gone on longer, but for the sudden death of Alexander, his friend and patron. Then the hatred of the Athenians to the conqueror showed itself in hostility to his old master, and sought for means to put him out of the way. How hard it was to find a pretext for so doing is shown by the fact that they had to fix upon the poem which he had written on the death of his friend Hermias many years before, and base upon it--as having the form of the paean, sacred to Apollo--a charge of impiety. Aristotle, recognizing the utter flimsiness of the charge, and being unwilling, as he said, to allow the Athenians to sin a second time against philosophy, retired beyond their reach to his villa at Chalcis in Euboea, where he died of stomach disease the year after (322). In the later years of his life, the friendship between him and his illustrious pupil had, owing to certain outward circumstances, become somewhat cooled; but there never was any serious breach. His body was carried to Stagira, which he had induced Philip to restore after it had been destroyed, and whose inhabitants therefore looked upon him as the founder of the city. As such he received the religious honors accorded to heroes: an altar was erected to him, at which an annual festival was celebrated in the month named after him.

We may sum up the character of Aristotle by saying that he was one of the sanest and most rounded men that ever lived. As a philosopher, he stands in the front rank. "No time," says Hegel, "has a man to place by his side." Nor was his moral character inferior to his intellect. No one can read his 'Ethics,' or his will (the text of which is extant), without feeling the nobleness, simplicity, purity, and modernness of his nature. In his family relations, especially, he seems to have stood far above his contemporaries. The depth of his aesthetic perception is attested by his poems and his 'Poetics.'

The unsatisfactory and fragmentary condition in which Aristotle's works have come down to us makes it difficult to judge of his style. Many of them seem mere collections of notes and jottings for lectures, without any attempt at style. The rest are distinguished by brevity, terseness, and scientific precision. No other man ever enriched philosophic language with so many original expressions. We know, from the testimony of most competent judges, such as Cicero, that his popular writings, dialogues, etc., were written in an elegant style, casting even that of Plato into the shade; and this is borne fully out by some extant fragments.

Greek philosophy culminates in Aristotle. Setting out with a naïve acceptance of the world as being what it seemed, and trying to reduce this Being to some material principle, such as water, air, etc., it was gradually driven, by force of logic, to distinguish Being from Seeming, and to see that while the latter was dependent on the thinking subject, the former could not be anything material. This result was reached by both the materialistic and spiritualistic schools, and was only carried one step further by the Sophists, who maintained that even the being of things depended on the thinker. This necessarily led to skepticism, individualism, and disruption of the old social and religious order.

Then arose Socrates, greatest of the Sophists, who, seeing that the outer world had been shown to depend on the inner, adopted as his motto, "Know Thyself," and devoted himself to the study of mind. By his dialectic method he showed that skepticism and individualism, so far as anarchic, can be overcome by carrying out thought to its implications; when it proves to be the same for all, and to bring with it an authority binding on all, and replacing that of the old external gods. Thus Socrates discovered the principle of human liberty, a principle necessarily hostile to the ancient State, which absorbed the man in the citizen. Socrates was accordingly put to death as an atheist; and then Plato, with good intentions but prejudiced insight, set to work to restore the old tyranny of the State. This he did by placing truth, or reality (which Socrates had found in complete thought, internal to the mind), outside of both thought and nature, and making it consist of a group of eternal schemes, or forms, of which natural things are merely transient phantoms, and which can be reached by only a few aristocratic souls, born to rule the rest. On the basis of this distortion he constructed his Republic, in which complete despotism is exercised by the philosophers through the military; man is reduced to a machine, his affections and will being disregarded; community of women and of property is the law; and science is scouted.

Aristotle's philosophy may be said to be a protest against this view, and an attempt to show that reality is embodied in nature, which depends on a supreme intelligence, and may be realized in other intelligences, or thought-centres, such as the human mind. In other words, according to Aristotle, truth is actual in the world and potential in all minds, which may by experience put on its forms. Thus the individualism of the Sophists and the despotism of Plato are overcome, while an important place is made for experience, or science.

Aristotle, accepting the world of common-sense, tried to rationalize it; that is, to realize it in himself. First among the Greeks he believed it to be unique, uncreated, and eternal, and gave his reasons. Recognizing that the phenomenal world exists in change, he investigated the principle and method of this. Change he conceives as a transition from potentiality to actuality, and as always due to something actualized, communicating its form to something potential. Looking at the "world" as a whole, and picturing it as limited, globular, and constructed like an onion, with the earth in the centre, and round about it nine concentric spheres carrying the planets and stars, he concludes that there must be at one end something purely actual and therefore unchanging,--that is, pure form or energy; and at the other, something purely potential and therefore changing,--that is, pure matter or latency. The pure actuality is at the circumference, pure matter at the centre. Matter, however, never exists without some form. Thus, nature is an eternal circular process between the actual and the potential. The supreme Intelligence, God, being pure energy, changelessly thinks himself, and through the love inspired by his perfection moves the outmost sphere; which would move all the rest were it not for inferior intelligences, fifty-six in number, who, by giving them different directions, diversify the divine

## action and produce the variety of the world. The celestial world is

composed of eternal matter, or aether, whose only change is circular motion; the sublunary world is composed of changing matter, in four different but mutually transmutable forms--fire, air, water, earth--movable in two opposite directions, in straight lines, under the ever-varying influence of the celestial spheres.

Thus the world is an organism, making no progress as a whole, but continually changing in its various parts. In it all real things are individuals, not universals, as Plato thought. And forms pass from individual to individual only. Peleus, not humanity, is the parent of Achilles; the learned man only can teach the ignorant. In the world-process there are several distinct stages, to each of which Aristotle devotes a special work, or series of works. Beginning with the "four elements" and their changes, he works up through the mineral, vegetable, and animal worlds, to man, and thence through the spheral intelligences to the supreme, divine intelligence, on which the Whole depends. Man stands on the dividing line between the temporal and the eternal; belonging with his animal part to the former, with his intelligence (which "enters from without") to the latter. He is an intelligence, of the same nature as the sphere-movers, but individuated by mutable matter in the form of a body, matter being in all cases the principle of individuation. As intelligence, he becomes free; takes the guidance of his life into his own hand; and, first through ethics, politics, and aesthetics, the forms of his sensible or practical

## activity, and second through logic, science, and philosophy, the forms

of his intellectual activity, he rises to divine heights and "plays the immortal." His supreme activity is contemplation. This, the eternal energy of God, is possible for man only at rare intervals.

Aristotle, by placing his eternal forms in sensible things as their meaning, made science possible and necessary. Not only is he the father of scientific method, inductive and deductive, but his actual contributions to science place him in the front rank of scientists. His Zoölogy, Psychology, Logic, Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics, are still highly esteemed and extensively studied. At the same time, by failing to overcome the dualism and supernaturalism of Plato, by adopting the popular notions about spheres and sphere-movers, by separating intelligence from sense, by conceiving matter as independent and the principle of individuation, and by making science relate only to the universal, he paved the way for astrology, alchemy, magic, and all the forms of superstition, retarding the advance of several sciences, as for example astronomy and chemistry, for many hundred years.

After Aristotle's death, his school was continued by a succession of studious and learned men, but did not for many centuries deeply affect contemporary life. At last, in the fifth century A.D., his thought found its way into the Christian schools, giving birth to rationalism and historical criticism. At various times its adherents were condemned as heretics and banished, mostly to Syria. Here, at Edessa and Nisibis, they established schools of learning which for several centuries were the most famous in the world. The entire works of Aristotle were turned into Syriac; among them several spurious ones of Neo-Platonic origin, notably the famous 'Liber de Causis' and the 'Theology of Aristotle.' Thus a Neo-Platonic Aristotle came to rule Eastern learning. On the rise of Islâm, this Aristotle was borrowed by the Muslims, and became ruler of their schools at Bagdad, Basra, and other places,--schools which produced many remarkable men. On the decay of these, he passed in the twelfth century into the schools of Spain, and here ruled supreme until Arab philosophy was suppressed, shortly before 1200. From the Arabs he passed into the Christian Church about this date; and though at first resisted, was finally accepted, and became "the philosopher" of the schools, and the inspirer of Dante. The Reformers, though decrying him, were forced to have recourse to him; but his credit was not re-established until the present century, when, thanks to Hegel, Trendelenburg, Brandis, and the Berlin Academy, his true value was recognized and his permanent influence insured.

The extant works of Aristotle, covering the whole field of science, may be classified as follows:--

A. _Logical or Formal_, dealing with the form rather than the matter of science:--'Categories,' treating of Being and its determination, which, being regarded ontologically, bring the work into the metaphysical sphere; 'On Interpretation,' dealing with the proposition; 'Former Analytics,' theory of the syllogism; 'Later Analytics,' theory of proof; 'Topics,' probable proofs; 'Sophistical proofs,' fallacies. These works were later united by the Stoics under the title 'Organon,' or Instrument (of science).

B. _Scientific or Philosophical_, dealing with the matter of science. These may be subdivided into three classes: (_a_) Theoretical, (_b_) Practical, (_c_) Creative.

(_a_) The _Theoretical_ has further subdivisions: (_a_) Metaphysical, (_b_) Physical, (_c_) Mathematical.--(_a_) The Metaphysical works include the incomplete collection under the name 'Metaphysics,'--(_b_) The Physical works include 'Physics,' 'On the Heavens,' 'On Generation and Decay,' 'On the Soul,' with eight supplementary tracts on actions of the soul as combined with the body; viz., 'On Sense and Sensibles,' 'On Memory and Reminiscence,' 'On Sleep and Waking,' 'On Dreams,' 'On Divination from Dreams,' 'On Length and Shortness of Life,' 'On Life and Death,' 'On Respiration,' 'Meteorologics,' 'Histories of Animals' (Zoögraphy). 'On the Parts of Animals,' 'On the Generation of Animals,' 'On the Motion of Animals,' 'Problems' (largely spurious). 'On the Cosmos,' 'Physiognomies,' 'On Wonderful Auditions,' 'On Colors.'--The Mathematical works include 'On Indivisible Lines,' 'Mechanics.'

(_b_) The _Practical_ works are 'Nicomachean Ethics,' 'Endemean Ethics,' 'Great Ethics' ('Magna Moralia'), really different forms of the same work; 'Politics,' 'Constitutions' (originally one hundred and fifty-eight in number; now represented only by the recently discovered 'Constitution of Athens'), 'On Virtues and Vices,' 'Rhetoric to Alexander,' 'Oeconomics.'

(_c_) Of _Creative_ works we have only the fragmentary 'Poetics.' To these may be added a few poems, one of which is given here.

Besides the extant works of Aristotle, we have titles, fragments, and some knowledge of the contents of a large number more. Among these are the whole of the "exoteric" works, including nineteen Dialogues. A list of his works, as arranged in the Alexandrian Library (apparently), is given by Diogenes Laërtius in his 'Life of Aristotle' (printed in the Berlin and Paris editions of 'Aristotle'); a list in which it is not easy to identify the whole of the extant works. The 'Fragments' appear in both the editions just named. Some of the works named above are almost certainly spurious; _e.g._, the 'Rhetoric to Alexander,' the 'Oeconomics,' etc.

The chief editions of Aristotle's works, exclusive of the 'Constitution of Athens,' are that of the Berlin Academy (Im. Bekker), containing text, scholia, Latin translation, and Index in Greek (5 vols., square 4to); and the Paris or Didot (Dübner, Bussemaker, Heitz), containing text, Latin translation, and very complete Index in Latin (5 vols., 4to). Of the chief works the best editions are:--'Organon,' Waitz; 'Metaphysics,' Schwegler, Bonitz; 'Physics,' Prantl; 'Meteorologies,' Ideler; 'On the Generation of Animals,' Aubert and Wimmer; 'Psychology,' Trendelenburg, Torstrik, Wallace (with English translation); 'Nicomachean Ethics,' Grant, Ramsauer, Susemihl; 'Politics,' Stahr, Susemihl; 'Constitution of Athens,' Kenyon, Sandys; 'Poetics,' Susemihl, Vahlen, Butcher (with English translation). There are few good English translations of Aristotle's works; but among these may be mentioned Peter's 'Nicomachean Ethics,' Jowett's and Welldon's 'Politics,' and Poste's 'Constitution of Athens.' There is a fair French translation of the principal works by Barthélemy St.-Hilaire. The Berlin Academy is now (1896) publishing the ancient Greek commentaries on Aristotle in thirty-five quarto volumes. The best work on Aristotle is that by E. Zeller, in Vol. iii. of his 'Philosophie der Griechen.' The English works by Lewes and Grote are inferior. For Bibliography, the student may consult Ueberweg, 'Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophic,' Vol. i., pages 196 _seq_.

[Illustration: Signature: THOMAS DAVIDSON]

THE NATURE OF THE SOUL

From 'On the Soul,' Book iii.,