which glinted and dimpled away to meet the Greek hills. We stopped to look at the acrobat and his crowd of admirers.

"I suppose he is an importation, too," said Kate. "I wonder if any one was ever born here? The people, and even the houses, all look as though they came from somewhere else."

"And so they did," said the tall Englishman. "It was a sad day for Corfu when England ceded her to poor, shiftless, little Greece. Her commerce departed then, never, I fear, to return. Have you noticed how many of the shops are empty?"

"If I owned Corfu, I'd die before I ceded her to any one," said Kate, in a burst of enthusiasm. "Think of having known and loved and lost all this beauty.

"I shouldn't care to own all her inhabitants," said the Madame, drawing her skirts about her. "Some of them look very dirty." Dinner at the St. George was all that the Captain had led us to expect, and so was the luncheon we enjoyed the next day. We felt quite tempted to desert the "Demarara," and winter in such delightful quarters. But that mystic "Somewhere" beckoned us on, and we could not resist the charm of the unknown. So we all watched Corfu fading behind us with ill concealed regret. Only the Madame ventured a shadow of criticism on our enchantress.

"Of course, it's all very beautiful," she said, "but it looks as though it had been fixed for show. I feel as if I were looking at a well-painted scene in a theatre. I suspect those forts and houses to be made out of pasteboard, and I half expect them to be all shoved back presently to make way for a comfortable interior, where the heroine and her lover will be having an affectionate tête á tête."

"Well, if it is so, the bell has rung, and the curtain is falling, and we will never see anything half so lovely again," said Kate regretfully. She was looking off at the fast receding island, and the widening gap of gleaming water. The tall Englishman was looking at her with his back to the scene, but he seemed to heartily agree with her words.

Patras was to be our next landing place, we were told, and next morning we awakened to find it nestled among the hills, and Mount Parnassus looking down upon its hiding place. We felt as though we had opened an illuminated volume of Grecian mythology, and were ready for the nonce to believe in Jove and all his companion gods. Only we did not believe he ever came down for a walk through the indescribable filth of Patras. The colonnaded streets were six inches deep in mud, and the whole town had a forlorn look of having just awakened from a thousand years' sleep, and not having washed its face yet. We had several hours to spend, and we wandered about aimlessly, until it was suggested that there was a monastery not far from Patras, and we might drive there. Anything was better than wading about in the mud, so we got into an antiquated vehicle, and drove over the hills, through a wild, desolate country, until we came to a high wall, surmounted by a pious and contemplative cat. Here we dismounted and entered a large dirty court, around three sides of which ran a dilapidated twostory building, and on the fourth stood a little church. Within this we found a few ordinary pictures, and a dim light, which pierced the gloom with dusty rays. From the court we climbed a rough flight of steps, crossed an unpainted porch, and met a portly, dark-bearded brother, who conducted us into a neat, bare little sitting-room with a plank floor. a plank floor. From the window of this. room we gained a beautiful view of the town and bay; and while we were admiring it, another brother, in a black robe and square black cap, brought in a tray on which were several glasses of water, a glass of quince jam, and a half dozen spoons. Our host dipped out a spoonful of jelly, and handed it to the Major with a glass of water; and finding that he, in perplexity, was about to put the spoon in the glass, he directed him to eat the jelly, and drink the water. poison," said one of the party in a ghastly whisper, at which we thought of banditti and our bereaved families, and felt very cheerful. It was ludicrously suggestive of Mrs.

"It's

Squeers's brimstone and treacle, to see him pass the dose around. We wondered if that corpulent old humbug wanted to delude us into the belief that he lived upon such nourishing diet as quince jam and water! Our repast being concluded, our courtly and silent entertainer led us back to the carriage, saw us mounted, then bowed us out of his quiet life forever; and pussy on the wall nodded and winked as though she knew a very amusing thing or two.

During these various excursions, the young man of the inquiring turn of mind had not been wasting his opportunities. He plied every one he met with questions, and when they did not understand him, he was none the less pleased, for he invariably assumed what the answers would have been had they been given, and went his way rejoicing. He collected specimens everywhere. A remarkable odor being perceptible from his stateroom, the steward instituted a search during his absence, and brought forth a collection of onions, leeks, sweet potatoes, plants, fossils, and a box full of snails. His pockets were the dread of the party, for they generally contained all the living relics of his day's search, such as toads, beetles, and lizards. He said, he "didn't care about Jove, and Pericles, and Phidias, and those dead old fellows, who hadn't even left any bones behind them; he liked living curiosities." And he seemed to be utterly unconscious that he was one himself.

And now we were winding in and out between the islands, headed for Kephalonia. We looked over the low coast line to Missolonghi, marked to every lover of freedom or poetry as the death-place of Byron and Bozzaris. We found the whereabouts of our destination on an atlas, and read that it was the largest of the Ionian Islands, and that Argostoli was its capital. We were getting very tired of prosaic little towns set in fairy

surroundings, and only one thing in Argostoli impressed our memories, and that was a guide. He did not seem to be a guide to anything in particular, but he was so sure that we needed his services that we submitted to his following us about, and talking what he considered very pure English. "Many people die in Argostoli," he said, after leading us to the cemetery. "I myself already dead two children, and I make my wife die soon "—a statement which struck us as being more trustworthy than any of his previous remarks.

A tiny steamer plied from Argostoli to a little town which we could see blinking its windows in the sunshine across the bay. Having gotten rid of our guide by deluding him into the belief that we were about to return to the "Demarara," we boarded this miniature craft, and paid six sous to be ferried across. We had a dozen fellow passengers, who eyed us curiously and left us little room to move. Two planks supported by poles stuck in the mud formed our landing-place. The little village, in common with Argostoli, had been almost destroyed by an earthquake a few years before, and ruins of buildings still stood upon the quiet streets. We looked into a school where twenty bright-eyed little girls were learning to sew, and then we wandered into a garden where oranges hung like globes of gold, and roses and ivy clustered over the stone walls.

"Isn't it delightful not to know where we are?" said Kate, sitting on the grass and fanning herself. "I feel as though we belonged in one of those charmingly vague stories which begin once upon a time.""

"I think I could find out the name of the place," said the Interrogation Point, stopping in his efforts to catch a butterfly.

"I wouldn't know for a fortune," said Kate; "this is Somewhere, and fairies live here."

Franklina Gray Bartlett.

ANCIENT ART means, for us, not all ancient art, but that which has entered as a prominent factor into our modern civilization. There is an ancient Chinese art, a Hindoo art, an Assyrian, an Egyptian; but these, save, perhaps, the last, are not to us ancestral. Greek art is ancestral. It is the progenitor of very many of the best ideas of the culture of today. How much the Greeks received from the Egyptians is an unsettled point. It could not have been much, compared with what they transmitted to later nations. The Romans are also, for us, an ancient and classical people; and we have received from them most important elements for our composite modern civilization. But Rome did not excel in what is commonly called Art. Independent in many ways, with a sturdy feeling of nationality surpassing that of the Greeks, the Romans were not ashamed to go to the Greeks for lessons in beauty. The Romans were eminently practical. Their watchword, as has been said, was not Beauty, but Duty. They knew how to carry on wars, how to subdue other peoples, how to consolidate a vast Empire. When the fortunes of Empire brought them into close acquaintance with Greece, they found there a wealth of art and culture which they were glad to appreciate. Greece, subdued, became the mistress of her conquerors. The Romans would never have deserved the name of practical men, if they had not recognized the artistic superiority of the Greeks, and thenceforth made the Greeks their models. There is, for us, no other classical nation of antiquity. And so we come to the special statement of fact, that, for us, ancient art is preeminently Greek art. The Greeks were the wonderful originators of a type of art which is still the admiration and despair of the artistic world. How came this one little people to excel, in this way, all the nations of ancient and modern civilization? Various answers have been given to the question. The Greeks

were a happily constituted race. They lived in a pure air, and in a beautiful environment. They had refining thoughts of extra-natural powers. They hit upon a fortunate style of physical training. Such reasons as these, and many more in number, have been assigned for the immense intellectual and æsthetic superiority of the Greeks. They are all inadequate. The only sufficient answer is, that this people was providentially appointed to teach the lessons of Beauty. But Providence adapts means to ends. There were favoring conditions and circumstances which helped the Greek race to work out its mission. Not all the Greeks were chosen. Sparta was the foremost State in power; but Sparta did little for the world's civilization. Athens was the center of light; the Ionians, in Greece proper, or in the Greece east of the Ægean, were the torch-bearers of philosophy and art. Athens was fortunate in its position and in its climatic conditions. It was peopled by that portion of the Greek race which showed itself most receptive of refined and noble thoughts. And when the divine afflatus was once felt, it passed from spirit to spirit. Phidias and Zeuxis begot a progeny of sculptors and painters, as Plato and Aristotle became the fathers of many philosophers. High thinking and refined feeling and noble acting are contagious. Enthusiasm is an onward-moving, self-perpetuating wave, dying at last on the shallows of poorer natures.

One special help to Greek art is found in the beautiful Greek mythology. This mythology was anthropomorphic. The Greek gods and goddesses were strong men and fair women, on a vastly greater scale than human, with natures far more exalted and admirable, but yet typified by the noble men and women of earth. Even the Olympian divinities might consort with these earthly men and women; and from the union sprang a race of demigods. This conception of the supe

rior powers ruled out all monstrosities of supernal representation. No Hindoo Vishnu, no Egyptian Osiris, no Phoenician Baal, was possible to the Greek mythology. The representation of the divine ones partook of the beauty and symmetry of the human person, and of that person in its best estate. Sculpture, one of the first and simplest of the fine arts, had thus a fixed and unalterable ideal, of a perfect and noble type. Painting could not allow a lower standard. Architecture, in like manner, became both simple and majestic. The same sentiments that prevailed in these arts wrought unconsciously to give poetry, also, a poise and symmetry, a grace and dignity, not surpassed in the sister arts. This influence was potent from the first. Homer was not preceded by the noblest sculptors and painters; but the genius of the race was as true to its type in its earlier as in its later productions.

The characteristics of Greek art have been indicated in the foregoing remarks. It is simple and severe, yet rich and full. It is, first of all, intellectual, and capable of analysis; but it is also inseparably wedded to beauty. Its sensuous conceptions are refined, and, for the most part, ennobling. It reaches toward the highest human ideal. Rejecting exaggeration and extravagance, it preserves an almost matchless proportion and harmony. The whole is not sacrificed to its parts; it is a whole clearly defined, recognizable and comprehensible, and nothing must interfere with the symmetry it demands, and the perfection to which it aspires. But we are not to discuss the character of Greek art in general. Our special province is art in literature: and this province is so wide that we can touch it only here and there. We find the same characteristics in Greek literature as in Greek sculpture or architecture. There is in it an unsurpassed energy, but also an exquisite sense of fitness; a manly robustness and vigor, coupled with a perfect delicacy of touch. The refined taste of the race showed itself first in its language. There is no tongue, ancient or modern, which has combined so much of strength and melody, none which has offered

so complete an instrument for the expression of human thought. Language goes before literature; and while literature reacts upon language, and gives it added richness and power, yet the race capabilities are quite as well seen in the prepared instrument as in the after product. Judged in this way, the disparaged Romans come nearer to the Greeks than they have the credit of coming. The Latin language is a signal monument of intellectual power. The Greek language is a still more wonderful monument of the genius of the Greek race.

A chief characteristic of the Greek literature is its simplicity, its severe self-restraint. A favorite motto with the Greeks was, mēden agan, "nothing too much." In the Latin garb, ne quid nimis, it was a rule scarcely less potent. The imagination of the poet holds us under his spell: but it must find an answering imagination in the hearer or reader, like in kind, even if infinitely less in degree. Something must be left for this responsive imagination to supply. The Greek author knew how to leave a great deal unsaid. All perfect art, as previous discussions have shown us, looks toward an ideal. It does not content itself with an actual and servile reproduction of what is seen in the world about us. Imagination is selective. Art is "articulation," a joining together, a combination of elementary materials. The rubbish must be thrown away; that only is to be used which will build up a noble and symmetrical whole. There is in Greek literature an unrivaled grace of proportion, resulting from this severe simplicity of the truest and highest imagination. It is more than fancy; for fancy, as Mr. Ruskin says, sees only the outside, while imagination sees the heart and inner nature. Imagination works on the only true lines of representa tion; and in doing this it disregards most of what is apparent at first sight, and seizes only vital characteristics. Margaret Fuller remarks, "This is the poetic gift, to penetrate to the truth beneath the fact." The Greeks expected this from their poet; they named him poet, or maker, as one possessed of rare and divine insight.

This quality of self-restraint, of severe simplicity, might be illustrated from the several departments of Greek poetry. We have space only for two or three examples from the Epic field. And here, of course, we turn to Homer. Whoever Homer was, or was not, the Homeric poems stand unrivaled in their province; they are all the more wonderful because they come out of the prehistoric ages. Of these poems Matthew Arnold says, Homer "is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it "; and "he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas." "Homer always deals with every subject in the plainest and most straight-forward style." Let our first example of this simplicity be the meeting between Hector and Andromache, in the 6th Book of the Iliad. We are under the great disadvantage of using a translation; and the translator of Homer has, as Mr. Arnold has shown, a peculiarly difficult task. Mr. Bryant will do for us, as well as any one, what all must despair of doing perfectly. (VI, 472-640. For a different measure, compare Mr. Arnold's version, in lieu of lines 595-596.) A shorter passage, also from Bryant's translation, is from the close of the 8th book of the Iliad. (VIII, 610 -688. For the last few lines, compare again

Mr. Arnold.)

This is too much like offering a brick (as in the old story) for a sample of a house; yet in these extracts, even as seen in the imperfect dress of a translation, what sim: plicity and modest self restraint! There is nothing far-fetched, nothing strained, nothing sensational. There is no exceedingly striking effect in any single sentence or paragraph. This is what Professor Le Conte set before us as a characteristic of the highest art; the permanency of the delight it affords, rather than the strength of its first impression. With this agrees the remark of Professor Howison, that too much interest would indicate inferior power. When classical purity deteriorated, symmetry and simplicity gave place to audacious and striking effects. Tricks of expression were sought, and the

hearer's attention was boldly challenged. Thus, in Latin poetry the Silver Age writers were more quotable than Virgil, and this was what they aimed at. Horace ridiculed the "cyclic writer" whose pompous beginning was, "I will sing the fortune of Priam and a war renowned," and adds, "How much better the poet whose work is always apt : 'Tell me, O Muse, the man who after the times of captured Troy saw the manners and cities of many men.'' (This, of course, refers to the beginning of the Odyssey.) And Horace's criticism reminds us of Mr. Ruskin's remark, that "the first test of a truly great man is his humility."

But it must not be thought that the true classical simplicity was a bald simplicity. Homer was never prosaic nor low, and Mr. Arnold justly castigates one of the transla tors for using these descriptive terms. To recur a moment to the Greek mythology: as the Greek artist pictured his deities in human form with no oriental distortion, so he filled out every line to the fullness of more than human beauty. The anthropomorphic deity must have the simplicity of the human figure; but he must also have the ideal completeness which is wanting to the sons of men. In like manner, the best Greek poets were copious and ample. Their creative imagination had a wide sweep, up and down the earth, through the dark underworld, along the starry heights of Olympus. Their mythology was inexhaustible, full of kaleidoscopic possibilities. Their humanity was abundant and genial. It has been said that ancient literary art is more perfect than modern, because ancient life was simple, and modern life is complex; and therefore the old Greek or Roman poet had all his material within easy command. The saying is hardly more than half true. There were, indeed, in ancient times fewer objects of wide-reaching interest than in our times. The Athenian did not read two daily newspapers, with telegrams from the Ganges and from the Pillars of Hercules. But his life was full of human interest. the great theater, and listen all day long to the sublime tragedies of Eschylus or the

He could go to