Thousands of believing pilgrims (such is the efficacy of faith) had knelt before them and had their souls eased thereby and their bodies healed, and had gratefully bestowed their obolus on departing. But to the hard eye of the man of science and little faith the bones were not sacred, were not even Rosalia's. They are," said he, "the bones of a goat, not of a woman"-and the sanctuary doors were abruptly shut in his face, as Oxford doors would have been before had Gaisford and the rest had their way about it.

Before taking leave of Buckland let us quote his Johnsonian retort to a North Briton who "heckled" him during a lecture:

"It would seem,' queried a sceptical Caledonian during a lecture in North Britain, that your animals always walked in one direction?' 'Yes,' was the reply, Cheirotherium was a Scotchman, and he always travelled south.'”

What the initiative and persistence of Dr. Acland did for the establishment of Science and Art at Oxford is, or ought to be, well known. He settled there as a physician in 1844, and was made Lee's Reader of Anatomy at Christchurch. His lectures began in 1845, and a great impetus was at once given to the movement in favor of a Museum. It was felt that the old Ashmolean must be supplanted by a temple worthy of the University. Economists opposed the proposal on the ground of cost, the classicists fought it because it was novel, and the theologians condemned it as a subtle device of the evil one designed to sap the foundations of belief. Sewell of Exeter, "more Puseyite than Pusey," fulminated against it in a University sermon which was too bigoted even for the bigots, and which went far to convince sensible men that the hour for a determined stand against the bats and owls of the corporation councils was come. To the defenders of the Museum were soon joined men like Liddell and Professor Phillips; and early in the Fifties the money was voted, the design adopted, and the first stone of the new building laid by Lord Derby. Once begun, the edifice "rose like an exhalation," glorified by the genius of artists like Woodward, BurneJones, Skidmore, the brothers Shea, Rossetti, Prinsep, Monro, Morris.

The Museum's memorable welcome to the British Association was marked by the day of the great Darwin fight, when the opposing hosts, led respectively by Huxley and S. Wilberforce, did battle over the strange hypothesis from morn till dewy eve. The Darwinian dis

cussion was of course the event of the week. It took place in the large Library, which was packed with expectant humanity eager as always for a fray in which the blows were to be borne by somebody else. Professor Henslow presided, and by his side sat Huxley"hair jet black, slight whiskers, pale full fleshy face, the two strong lines of later years already marked, an ominous quiver in his mouth, and an arrow ready to come out of it." Professor Draper of New York, "eminent, serious, nasal," read a paper on Evolution; after which an irrelevant person rose to say that all theories as to the ascent of man were vitiated by the fact that, in the words of Pope, Great Homer died three thousand years ago. To this Professor Huxley sarcastically declined to reply; so the Bishop of Oxford, author of an article in the "Quarterly " denunciatory of Darwinism, and the accepted champion of Orthodoxy, took the floor. The Bishop, says our author, was "argumentative, rhetorical, amusing." He does not appear to have been dignified or profound.

He retraced the ground of his article, distinguished between a working and a causal hypothesis,' complimented Professor Huxley who is about to demolish me,' plagiarized from a mountebank sermon by Burgon, expressing the 'disquietude' he should feel were a 'venerable ape' to be shown to him as his ancestress in the Zoo: a piece of clever, diverting, unworthy claptrap."

In short, the Bishop of Oxford undertook to upset Darwinism by making fun of it; and the fun, being of a cheap and puerile order, had no effect beyond tickling the ears of the groundlings, and provoking a retort of unparliamentary severity.

66

·

Huxley rose, white with anger. I should be sorry to demolish so eminent a prelate, but for myself I would rather be descended from an ape than from a divine who employs authority to stifle truth.' A gasp and a shudder through the room, the scientists uneasy, the orthodox furious, the Bishop wearing that fat, provoking smile which once, as Osborne Gordon reminds us, impelled Lord Derby in the House of Lords to an 'I am unparliamentary quotation from Hamlet.' asked,' Huxley went on, if I accept Mr. Darwin's book as a complete causal hypothesis. Belated on a roadless common on a dark night, if a lantern were offered to me, should I refuse it because it shed an imperfect light? I think not I think not.'"

Happily the great Darwinian debate at the Museum was not without its humors. One ominous pause was broken by the important announcement of an elderly gentleman with a Roman nose that Mr. Darwin's book "had given him acutest pain." A roar of “ Question!" overwhelmed him, and he departed and

was seen no more. Another volunteer rose from the back benches during a lull in the storm, stepped smartly to the rostrum, and asked for a blackboard. This was produced, whereupon he, after deep thought, chalked two cabalistic crosses on opposite corners of it, opened his mouth to speak, lost his intellectual bearings, and stood vainly groping in the crypts of memory, until forced to his seat by inextinguishable laughter, the thought he had in him remaining, as Carlyle says, conjectural till this day.

Mr. Tuckwell's sense of humor and keen eye for personal peculiarities lend zest and freshness to his portraits of Oxford worthies, and of these sketches his book forms a varied and amusing, and we dare say in their kind pictorially faithful, gallery. The subjects range from genuine notabilities, as Pusey, Newman, the Arnolds, Clough, Jowett, Liddell, Max Müller, Mark Pattison, A. P. Stanley, etc., down to mere oddities, like "Horse" Kett and "Mo." Griffith, who were notable mainly because they were odd. Mr. Tuckwell has a good deal to say about Pusey, who, we suspect, attracted him more through his peculiarities than his intellectual gifts for there is a dash of caricature in his somewhat elaborate portrait of this spectral and mediævalizing divine:

"Two things impressed me when I first saw Dr. Pusey close: his exceeding slovenliness of person, and the almost artificial sweetness of his smile, contrasting as it did with the sombre gloom of his face when

in repose. He lived the life of a godly eremite; reading no newspapers, he was unacquainted with the commonest names and occurrences; and was looked upon with much alarm in the Berkshire neighborhood, where an old lady much respected as a deadly one for prophecy,' had identified him with one of the three frogs which were to come out of the dragon's mouth.

In con

trast with his disinclination for general talk was his morbid love of groping in the spiritual interiors of those with whom he found himself alone. He would ask of strangers questions which but for his sweet and courteous manner they must have deemed impertinent." Mr. Tuckwell goes on to relate the Doctor's attempts to play confessor with a surly groom who used to drive him in and out of Oxford. This man of Belial gruffly refused to have his "spiritual interior" vivisected, and was finally abandoned by the baffled Doctor as a "reprobate."

In Pusey's case the boy was certainly father of the man. When a boy (if such we may call him) he was once invited by his gratified father to select some valuable present commemorative of a prize-winning success at school.

He chose "a complete set of the Fathers"! His mother used to relate how in the Long Vacations he would sit for hours in a shady corner of the garden reading his folios, with a tub of cold water at hand into which he would plunge his head whenever study made it ache. The immersions must have been frequent.

But we must now take leave of Mr. Tuckwell's chatty and multifarious book, recommending it as an entertaining repository of familiar talk about old Oxford, its ways and worthies, from the pen of a shrewd and sympathetic observer whose sense of humor and appreciation of the original or the eccentric in conduct and character brightens his pages and freshens his descriptions. It would have been easy to make a dull book or a stale one about Oxford in the Thirties; but Mr. Tuckwell's impressions, being both lively and his own, are worth recording. There are sixteen illustrations, among them some quaint plates after old prints and portraits.

E. G. J.

A MODERN ADAM AND EVE.*

Whoever sits down to the perusal of Mrs. Albee's "Mountain Playmates" will rise refreshed and exhilarated. There has been a vivifying contact with a many-sided, cultivated personality, and what is more grateful than the privilege of such exceptional companionship? The subjects treated by the writer are life, now the deepest questions that stir an varied, now the external affairs of every-day earnest soul. A sparkling humor lends its fascination to the lighter matters, while the graver themes lose no shade of interest from the more serious manner with which they are discussed.

The Mountain Playmates are no other than Mrs. Albee and her husband, a "studious, inactive" and in their friends' account, "impractical pair," who throw their united energies into the work of transforming into a congenial summer home a long-abandoned farm in the Sandwich range of the White Mountains. Their means will permit of very slender outlay for the repair and equipment of their new possession, hence their wits are called into active employment for the supply of necessary requisites. It was inexpedient to rob their city residence of coveted rugs, chairs, draperies, etc., and search was instituted "in the garret,

*MOUNTAIN PLAYMATES. By Helen R. Albee. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

the tool-house, and the corn chamber for possible articles that could be made to serve a

needful purpose.

"Was there a dissipated wreck of a table, I took it firmly in hand and said Brace up; I intend to set you on your feet again, and shall put new life into you: there is a happy future awaiting those who behave themselves.' Was there a chair with an amputated leg or disintegrated vitals; a little surgical attention, a few stitches and supports, an iron tonic in the form of nails and screws, made another creature of it. . . . With such good-will and purpose did I apply myself to reformatory work that the lame and halt stood without a limp, the infirm and decrepit assumed a jaunty air of youth, the tramps of the corn chamber became useful and reliable members of our household."

The final strokes being applied to the interior, the outer walls of the old house demanded attention. It was decided to shingle them. Adam early took a hand in order to hasten the slow progress of the carpenters. Then Eve, who always wanted to do whatever he did, joined in without delay. It proved such good fun the carpenters were dismissed, and the two "had beautiful hours together, each seeing who could do the best work in the quickest time." It was with reluctance that they gave themselves a respite when both were tired out.

.

"Just hand me a few of those shingles,' he pleaded, and in about three minutes more I shall have completed my half of this course.' During the brief reprieve, I became so engrossed with my own end of the line that we came nearer and nearer together, until we had not only finished the whole course, but had completed several more. We did tear ourselves away at length, and I got eggnog, or fruit and wafers, generally the thing that would take longest to eat, and we sat in the shade while we chattered and laughed; and then we began the shingling again, which was only play, interspersed with discussions on philology and Celtic lit

The masculine partner in the firm of the "Playmates," whom his companion individualizes by the name of Adam, doubted the prudence of some of the lady's desperate aims at resurrection, and there arose lively controversies waxing at times into actual opposition on his part. She scored a victory in every instance, as courage and invention deserve to do, and flaunted defiantly his own vindicated principle that economy is the handmaid of the art of living." After skimming "off a coating of household articles, enough, if spread thin, to cover the bareness of the cottage" with the help of the long-buried pieces ingeniously brought back to life, the couple proceeded to set up their penates in the new habitation in the wilderness.

And now had they been ever so "inactive" in the past they were so no longer. A second tenet in Adam's complex creed was borrowed from Emerson: "Labor is God's education." The busy pair toiled with delightful earnestness from this time on.

"The handmaid as an advance guard preceded us with soap and mop, we following at her heels with paint buckets and carpenter's tools. We painted floors, papered walls, whitewashed ceilings. We repainted and covered the furniture, adding curtains, portières, and rugs to the cottage."

The dilapidated old farm-house speedily assumed a picturesque aspect under the touch of such informed and determined fingers. The neighborhood was alive with interest as a rational consequence. Visitors would say on entering the house:

"Have you done anything new since we were here last? We must see it.' Mark the wording; it was never 'Have you bought anything new?' We made it a principle never to buy the smallest thing we could construct, and in consequence our talents in that direction became enormously developed. . . . I, who had known only the ennui of city life and social amusements, had never conceived of the pure joy this fresh plaything brought."

erature between the strokes of the hammers."

Was it not all a pure idyl? It was bringing the ideal into the real. It was making poetry out of the prose of life. It was spiritualizing the material, an achievement constantly in view of the "Playmates," who strove to conform in thought and deed to the third prime article in Adam's creed to make each day and each event as picturesque as possible.

The cottage brought into harmony with æsthetic tastes inside and out, the diligent pair set to work in the garden, which experienced a similar glorification through the instrumentality of seeds from the florist, and wild vines and ornamental trees and shrubs from the adjacent forest. Everything grew with wonderful luxuriance, because they put of their own heart and soul into it. "A miserable little thread of a Virginia creeper," for example, which had been barely able to keep hold on the breath of life in its struggle against thwarting circumstances, under their fostering care threw out stems and branches to the length of fifty feet or more in less than two years, covering the front and sides of the cottage with a rich green mantle.

"What a beautiful vine!' people would exclaim. 'What do you do to it? We have a vine that we have tended for years and can't make grow.' 'We love it,' would be my reply; and then they would look at me with an incredulous smile, not understanding the truth. But really there was no further explanation to give, for that was all there was to it."

A unique variation in the Playmates' diver

sified experiences was the uplifting and removal of huge rocks which spotted their lawn at too frequent intervals. "The gentle game of bouldering," the lady pronounces it, and it began in this wise:

"One says to another, My dear, will you come out just a moment? I want you to keep your hand on a bar; I have a boulder in the garden that I cannot manage alone.' The uninitiated partner thinks on the way out, 'This is a queer thing to ask a woman to do; this is a man's work,' which idea shows that she knows nothing about the game. She acquiesces, and acting under directions, with very little expenditure of power on her lever, she takes advantage of every slight gain he makes with his pry, and in less than half a minute they have laid bare to the sunshine that which is older, and has lain longer buried, than the oldest mummy in Egypt. This first triumph having been so easily won, the newly admitted member of the Society for Excavation becomes eager for another bout. A wily master will play upon the vanity of the neophyte, and will render unstinted praise of her skill and dexterity. By a proper stirring of her ambition she will ever be ready to lend a hand in an emergency. I know one such teacher, who by dint of encouragement secured the services of an ambitious pupil to exhume fifty boulders, some of them weighing a ton."

It was after much studying of the ways of plants and trees in the woods and fields that the chronicler of the "Playmates" settled to her private satisfaction the great problem of the warfare of good and evil in the world. While Adam transplanted young cabbages in the garden, she unfolded to him the interpretation of life to which the inequality in conditions and the tragic struggle for existence in the vegetable kingdom, had conducted her. It fills one of the most interesting chapters in the volume. As she finds seeming injustice and real suffering present in the lower ranks of being, she is reconciled to their prevalence among mankind. It is the law of Nature which she robs of cruelty by the supposition that the germ of the vital principle of life, that which in man we call soul, exists primordially in the plant. It rises through ascending grades of the organic world in pursuance of the process of evolution until it is fit to inhabit the human frame. It then chooses the parentage and the environments that will best conduce to its continued development. Its destiny from the beginning is to go on and on by successive reincarnations, each new form starting on a level with the highest point attained in its last existence.

"To my mind, this accounts for Nature's apparent indifference to the universal death and wanton destruction of life in the world. Death is a token of growth the means by which spirit escapes and makes its ascent from one form to another. Knowing that

when a thing dies, death does not involve annihilation of the spirit within, but merely facilitates its progress, Nature calmly sees one prey upon another, assured that the time will come, and it is only a question of time, when it will have less maw and more spirit. Remember, I do not offer this as final truth, but I do claim that it interprets the seeming warfare of good and evil, that it gives me increasing peace of mind and happiness, and helps me to see a world not suffering, but growing."

One may smile at the insufficiency of the argument, but the force and earnestness with which it is presented command respect.

That Adam and Eve are gifted with the artistic sense is early divined, but it is not until close to the end of her story that she discloses her identity with the inventor of the Abnákee rug, the manufacture of which forms an industry for the comfort and profit of women shut away in the lone farmhouses of New England. Her account of the studious experiments which resulted in dyes and designs appropriate to the exaltation of the original crude hooked rug is as piquant and clever as everything else she relates.

SONGS OF MODERN GREECE.*

One of the leading British reviews, in commenting on Mr. Abbott's "Songs of Modern Greece," cites his rendering of "The Woman of Chios" as proof of the allegation that the translator must have done his work poorly. The writer for the review in question is evidently a layman with opinions of his own. The truth is that Mr. Abbott's translations are remarkably accurate and sympathetic. They show evidence of his own familiarity with the Modern Greek, and they have been touched up by the hand of Mr. Gennadius, for years Greek Minister to London, beyond whom there is no appeal.

In reading these translations, one must remember that the soul of poetry is rather association than meaning of words, and that when

*SONGS OF MODERN GREECE. By G. F. Abbott, B.A. New York: The Macmillan Co.

the association does not exist, the effect is lost. "The Woman of Chios" calls up a picture of girls washing clothing by the sea shore, a familiar sight in Greece from the times of Nausicaa down, and when a Greek hears it, who knows what image it may bring up before his mind? A little village perhaps, his happy youth, the fishing boats drifting by, the saucy maidens with their lithe bodies and their swinging paddles flashing in the sunlight as they beat the clothes.

Mr. Abbott has very wisely refrained from rendering these songs into rhymed verse. He has used prose in most instances and has thus been able to keep closely to the original. He has rendered a distinct service to the student, as many of the words of vulgar vernacular, which cannot be found in any of the wretched dictionaries in existence, are thus defined, and their actual use exemplified.

This is by no means a complete collection, but it gives, on the whole, admirably selected examples in the various departments of Modern Greek folk song, which is, in its entirety, a very rich and interesting field. Several omissions are scarcely accounted for by the author's explanation that he has "avoided including any poems previously published in Western Europe." The previous collections (Passow, Fauriel, Legrand, Marcellus) are either out of print or difficult of access. Lucy Garnett's work is next to useless from the fact that the Greek text does not accompany the renderings.

A large amount of space is given over to the distiches, those rhymed couplets of which every Greek peasant knows a hundred or more. These are extremely typical, but they would be more worthy of the space occupied if a little more care had been used in their selection. A prose translation gives a poor idea of a rhymed distich. In this case, perhaps the original spirit could have been better conveyed by means of two metrical lines. Here are a few of Mr. Abbott's renderings of these pithy poems which are so useful to the Greek swains when courting:

"Even if thou wert a queen thou couldst not be more graceful: a flower among maidens, the pride of the neighborhood." "Mountains bloom not; birds sing not; for my love has deserted me: mourn ye all."

"School-mistress, please permit my Helen to come out, that I may see her for one instant; for my life is ebbing out." "I want the sky for paper, the sea for ink to write to thee, my graceful one, all that passes through my mind." The dance songs being intended for occasions of unrestrained mirth are often risqué, sometimes quite coarse. Among the idyls and love songs, so dear to the heart of the common

people, are many that are worthy to be translated by a poet. Are there not sweet possibilities in this, entitled "Maria"?

The star of Morn was just beginning to shine sweetly, the air to pour forth its perfume on the fair first of Maybefore the songs, the sports, and the dances commenced, when thou, Maria, camest forward first, first of all. "Thy hair fell in profusion o'er thy milk-white throat, and a fair maidenly rose adorned thy breast.

66

A year later I went the same way again, Maria; I passed by the desolate church where I saw thee for the first time. But, instead of meeting a pretty form, a heavenly, lovely glance, my eyes met a white stone with a cross upon it. "Alone in the desert I knelt close by thy grave, Maria, and kissed it gently. From among the scattered flowers I picked one alone-a white, pure, and, like thee, virgin blossom-and matched it to the one which thou hadst given me from the garden of lilies for cruel remembrance: the one an emblem of death, the other, of youth and beauty, and of joy which, here below, is ever sister to sorrow."

Mr. Abbott's accompanying text is remarkably clear and clean, and he has adopted the sensible method of representing elisions by style in such words as means of apostrophes, following the English "'tis" and "aren't.” The comprehension of the foreign reader is thus facilitated.

An introduction and some quite searching notes, with numerous classical references, complete a book that must be a joy to all earnest students of that true dialect of Greek which is known as "Modern Greek."

GEORGE HORTON.

ESSAYS ON MUSIC AND MUSIC CULTURE.*

66

Lyric song is the most accessible and widely prevalent form of music, since it needs for performance no expensive orchestra, stage, or chorus, like symphony, opera, and oratoria; yet, notwithstanding that the genius preeminent in this sphere must rank with the highest of composers, it is a branch of musical art that critics. has always been inadequately treated by musical Songs and Song Writers," by Mr. written with a view to providing a guide for Henry T. Finck, is perhaps the first book ever amateurs and professionals in the choice of the best songs; and the author has embodied his ideas, theories, and investigations in such a manner as to make his volume a very useful abstracta sort of omnium gatherum - of matters pertaining to the Lied.

*SONGS AND SONG WRITERS. By Henry T. Finck. Illustrated. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

MUSICAL STUDIES AND SILHOUETTES. By Camille Bellaigue. Translated from the French by Ellen Orr. Illustrated. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.

FOR MY MUSICAL FRIEND. By Aubertine Woodward Moore. Illustrated. New York: Dodge Publishing Co.