religious sense, we are quite indifferent as to the solution of these critical questions. Our interest in them is purely intellectual,-to ascertain, if possible, what result is yielded by accessible evidence, and what view best meets the acknowledged difficulties of the case. Whatever that view and that result may be, religion, we are perfectly certain, will remain uninjured. We think it will even be an advantage to religion, that the theology of the Bible should be delivered, by the unavoidable effect of these inquiries, from too servile a dependence on the assumed history of the Bible. With all that the venerable author of the present work has so well said on this subject, we find ourselves in perfect harmony; and we heartily wish his own enlightened and catholic spirit were more widely diffused through the We church of which he has long been so distinguished an ornament. cannot do better than close this article in his own beautiful words (Preface, p. xxii.):

"For the perpetuity of religion, of the true religion,—that of Christ, -I have no misgivings. So long as there are women and sorrow in this mortal world, so long there will be the religion of the emotions, the religion of the affections. Sorrow will have consolation, which it can only find in the Gospel. So long as there is the sense of goodness, the sense of the misery and degradation of evil, there will be the religion of what we may call the moral necessities of our nature, the yearning for rescue from sin, for reconciliation with an All-holy God. So long as the spiritual wants of our higher being require an authoritative answer; so long as the human mind cannot but conceive its imaginative, discursive, creative, inventive thought to be something more than a mere faculty or innate or acquired power of the material body;' so long as there are aspirations towards immortality; so long as man has a conscious soul, and feels that soul to be his real self, his imperishable self, so long there will be the religion of reason. As it was the moral and religious superiority of Christianity,-in other words, the love of God, diffused by Christ, by God in Christ,'-which mainly subdued and won the world, so that same power will retain it in willing and perpetual subjection. The strength of Christianity will rest not, in the excited imagination, but in the heart, the conscience, the understanding of man."

VI. The Plain of Troy described, &c. By Charles Maclaren, F.R.S.E. Edinburgh Black, 1863.

Mr. Maclaren published in 1822 a Dissertation on the Topography of the Plain of Troy. Since that period so much light has been thrown upon the geography of Homer, especially by the publication of Dr. Forchammer's Memoir in 1842, and the Admiralty map in 1844, that Mr. Maclaren, having himself visited the Troad in 1847, has been induced to re-write his essay with considerable additions. Some of these, more particularly the reproduction of the Admiralty map, are important.

Never have the merits of a good map been more strikingly illus

trated than in the case of the Troad. Kauffer's map was published somewhere about 1800: it is far from a scientific performance, and yet from Clarke's copy of Kauffer, engraved in 1803, have been derived almost all the maps of the Troad down to a very recent period. We cannot be surprised, therefore, that the Admiralty survey was an epoch in the history of Homeric topography. It did much to establish the geographical reality of Homer; but above all it confirmed the substantial accuracy of Strabo.

Sinking minor details, it is surprising how well Strabo has described the Trojan plain. If we take the Admiralty map, and fix our attention upon its more salient features, we get unmistakably the three ridges of the ancient geographer. These are the Rhotean or Northern, the Chiblak or Central, and the Udjek or Southern ridge. Starting from Ida, and running in the direction of the Hellespont, very nearly parallel to each other, but with a perceptible inclination of the two outer ridges towards the inner, these perfectly unpretending hills enclose two valleys, each with its river-course. Between the Rhotean and Chiblak ridge we have the Dombrek, between the Chiblak and Udjek the Menderé. It is upon the slopes of these hills and in the recesses of these valleys that all students of Homer, with few exceptions, have agreed to search for the site of wind-swept Troy. The field of investigation is thus narrowed to an area some ten miles by seven ; and within these limits three principal points have been selected: the Novum Ilium of Strabo at Hissarlik, a village just upon the Western end of the Central ridge; Strabo's Ancient Ilium, near the Eastern extremity of the same ridge; and the village of Bunarbashi, on the Menderé, in the fork between the Central and the Southern ridge. Mr. Maclaren defends the claims of the first. The second, in some one or other of its modifications, has been adopted by several eminent geographers, particularly by Major Rennell. The third has perhaps found more friends than any other claimant, and was first suggested by M. Lechevalier in 1785.

Mr. Maclaren does not principally rely upon authorities. If he did, we do not think he would be badly off; for with the exception of Strabo, or rather Demetrius of Skepsis, from whom Strabo derived his information, the uniform testimony of antiquity is with him; and as to modern writers we can heartily enter into the honest pride with which he refers to the favourable opinion of Mr. Grote. But authorities are by no means Mr. Maclaren's sheet-anchor. His reliance is much more on facts and figures, in handling which he is evidently a veteran. His method is simple enough. He endeavours to establish two propositions: first, that the Novum Ilium of Strabo is the modern Hissarlik; secondly, that Ilium Novum was really the Ilium Vetus of Homer.

The identity of Ilium Novum with Hissarlik was first discovered by Dr. Clarke; but for the final settlement of this question we are indebted to the Admiralty map, and the indefatigable rule and compass of Mr. Maclaren. Not that Mr. Maclaren is without his difficulties. Strabo's figures look obstinate at first, but no figures are invincible.

Strabo places Ilium Novum 20 stadia from Sigeum, and 12 from Rhoteum. Now, if lines starting from these points be produced until they meet towards Hissarlik, the one will measure 33, the other 22 stadia. At this crisis Mr. Maclaren calls in Scylax. Scylax wrote about 400 years before Strabo; he gives 25 stadia between Ilium and the Hellespont, and this is actually the distance, as shown on the Admiralty map, between the bottom of the hill at Hissarlik and a point about midway between the mouth of the Menderé and that of the Dombrek. But is Strabo wrong? It does not follow for an instant. Mr. Maclaren propounds a theory which bids fair to be the true one, and which certainly reconciles the apparent discrepancy. It is briefly this. Scylax describes Troy before, Strabo after, its enlargement under the Romans. This enlargement would naturally be towards the coast, and thus the distance would become less. But, however this may be, the first proposition is proved to satiety, and we must accept Hissarlik as the Ilium Novum of Strabo.

But was this Ilium Novum the Ilium of Homer? Strabo says not. Here Mr. Maclaren divides his argument. First, there is the question of magnitude: is the hill of Hissarlik large enough to have been the site of Homer's Troy? Secondly, there is the question of distance from the shore and relation to the rivers: does the Iliad suppose an interval of some 6 or 8 miles between Troy and the Greek camp; or would the conditions of the poem be better satisfied by a distance of some 3 or 3 miles? Again, is the Simois the prominent river in the battle-scenes, or is it not rather the Scamander? The area of the hill at Hissarlik is about half a square English mile; the area of that portion which Mr. Maclaren would identify with the Pergamus is about 11 English acres. Now we know that Tyre, with its 45,000 inhabitants, covered only about one-sixth part of a square mile; that East London has a population of 290 to the acre; and, as regards the Pergamus, that the acropolis of Argos, and also that of Athens, present areas of not more than eight acres. We do not see, then, how Mr. Maclaren can be blamed for inferring that the question of size is not against the claims of Hissarlik to be considered the site of ancient "wide-streeted" Troy.

The question of distance is a question to be determined by the Iliad itself; and here we think that Mr. Maclaren has it all his own way. Whether we read the details of the first, the second, or the third battle, it seems impossible to resist the conviction that the poet had in his mind a comparatively brief interval between the city and the camp of the Greeks. In fact, the evidence on this point has always seemed to us perfectly irresistible; and we think that Mr. Maclaren might fairly have been excused if he had treated it less fully than he has done. Now Hissarlik is 3 miles, Strabo's Ilium Vetus 6 miles, and Bunarbashi 9 miles, from the Dardanelles. Strabo felt this difficulty, and therefore proposed to abridge the space between his Ilium Vetus and the Hellespont by supposing the shore to have been advanced seaward by the detritus of the Scamander.

This theory has been adopted to a certain extent by Major Rennell;

and of course it has been eagerly grasped at by Major Leake and other patrons of M. Lechevalier, whose maps exhibit a deep bay at the mouth of the Dombrek. Mr. Maclaren has convincingly shown that there is no river in the Troad which could produce such a change in the shore-line; and even Major Rennell admits that "to attribute the addition supposed [by the Lechevalier school], amounting to three feet per annum on the low shore of the Rhotean bay, to a river like the Menderé, which is only occasionally full enough to make any deposits, is to ascribe to it an effective power of deposition proportionally greater than the Ganges possesses, with all its floods, with its perpetual great stream, and its never-ceasing load of sediment." The testimony of Scylax has a material bearing on this point; and, as his 25 stadia are something very like 25 stadia still, it seems evident that no considerable projection of the shore can have taken place between his time and ours.

He

The relation of the city to the rivers brings Mr. Maclaren into still sharper collision with M. Lechevalier. M. Lechevalier explored the Troad in 1785-1786, and read the results of his investigations before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1791. Lechevalier was neither an engineer nor a geographer, but simply a volatile Frenchman, with all the reckless positivism and pseudo-sentimentalism of his race. surveyed with a graphometer, and made blunders innumerable, and yet his theories have found a host of supporters. They cannot, however, stand before the Admiralty map, and the fierce onslaught of Mr. Maclaren. Never was there a more hapless stream than the Kirk Jos. From being exalted to the high dignity of the Homeric Scamander, it has been degraded by Mr. Maclaren successively into a brook, a rivulet, a drain, and a quagmire. That the Scamander is the Menderé we think there can be no doubt whatever a glance at the map shows this at once. Unless we give up Homer's geography as desperate, the Scamander must certainly have been the largest river of the Troad. It must have flowed in such a direction that the Greeks in marching against the city would cross it, and it only, and cross it once, not twice. These are the conditions; and no river fulfils them but the Menderé, nor fulfils them with reference to any site but that of Ilium Novum, or Ilium Vetus, both on the Chiblak ridge. In the face of any thing like an accurate map, the Kirk Jos must be given up. It is neither the Scamander nor the Simois, but in all probability a canal of comparatively recent construction.

It

The next question is, where are we to find the Simois? Mr. Maclaren determines it to be the Dombrek. But there are difficulties connected with this hypothesis. The Scamander and the Simois, as late as the time of Pliny, became one river before entering the sea. Ptolemy separates their embouchures, and they are separate now. is true the Kalifatli Asmak, which is after all little more than a muddy ditch, communicates both with the Menderé and the Dombrek, and thus forms a kind of junction. But on the whole Mr. Maclaren is not quite so satisfactory upon this point as upon some others. Indeed, if our topographer can be supposed capable of any thing like special pleading, we venture to think that he has yielded to that weakness here.

The fact is, that the appetite for identification is always in great danger of becoming morbid; the broad, general features of resemblance come at last to lose their piquancy; and the very gravest of archæological mouths may at times be observed to water for a titbit of special discovery. Mr. Maclaren is no exception to this rule.

There is yet one great difficulty which stands between Mr. Maclaren and the goal of triumphant identification. This is the present course of the Scamander. Running close under Sigeum, it leaves a space on its western bank utterly inadequate for the position of the Greek camp. This is a difficulty which besets all theories as to the site of Troy; and Mr. Maclaren has been quite as successful as any of his predecessors in attaining that prime necessity of Homeric realists, a more easterly channel for the lower Scamander. Here again the Admiralty map is used with effect. From the peculiar projection towards the north-east of the line of three-fathom soundings, Mr. Maclaren infers a deposit which suggests two successive channels: one, and that probably the older, at En Tepe Asmak, or the mouth of the Dombrek ; the other at a lagoon rather more to the west. We need hardly say that either of these channels, but especially the former, would leave a very considerable space on its west bank for the Naustathmos.

Mr. Maclaren has done good service to all students of Homer: he has written a book which promises to be the book on the subject of which it treats. But we really never saw such Greek quotations. Mr. Maclaren has published a table of errata. Can he possibly be aware of the portents which still disfigure almost every page? In the earlier part of the book we have copious extracts from Dr. Clarke's Latin translation: it might perhaps have been as well if this pis aller had been adhered to throughout. We have one other complaint to make. Possibly we may be pardoned if we venture to submit that the tone of some passages in this work is slightly in excess of that vigorous warmth which is only just admissible in questions of archæology. There is a quasi-Bentleian ferocity in one or two of the assaults upon poor M. Lechevalier which might well have been spared. Nor do we think that Mr. Maclaren will be angry with us if we suggest that it has long ceased to be the habit of accomplished authors, even though they be sprung from the perfervidum genus, to call each other hard

names.

VII. The Polish Captivity. By Sutherland Edwards. W. H. Allen and Co.

Any body who has lived much on the Continent must be aware that in every European country there exists a pro-English party of more or less importance. As a rule, the influence of English opinion on the masses of a Continental nation is very small compared with that of France. To what cause this fact is due, whether to our language, our insular position, or our peculiar state policy, is a question too wide for us to enter on. The fact, however, is, that the party which studies English literature, and copies English manners, and admires English