of its clergy, and the communism of its monastic orders; exclusive devotion to the purposes of their institution. Whatever else may be justly said against this Platonic conception, it deserves any name rather than that of a toleration of licentiousness; for it leaves less to individual inclination than any existing practice, the public authorities deciding (within the age appointed for producing children for the city) who should be united with whom. Mr. Grote truly remarks, that with the customs of the Platonic commonwealth, and the Platonic physical and mental education common to both sexes, the passion between them would be likely to be reduced to its very lowest degree of power; a result decidedly intended and calculated on by Plato in the Leges.

Though not expressly remarked, it is continually visible in Mr. Grote's book, as well as in the works themselves, how strong a hold the idea of the Division of Labour had taken on Plato's mind. He propounds it as explicitly as Adam Smith, at the beginning of his delineation of the natural constitution and growth of a State; and it governs all the arrangements of his ideal Republic. To use his own phrase, there shall be no double or triple men in the commonwealth; each does one thing, and one only; in order that every one may have that to do for which he has greatest natural aptitude, and that each thing may be done by the person who has most studied and practised it. Civil justice in a commonwealth, which furnishes him with the type and illustrative exemplar of justice in an individual mind, consists in every person's doing his own appointed business, and not meddling with that of another.* An artificer must not usurp the occupation of another artificer; rulers alone must rule, guardians alone fight, producers alone produce and have the ownership of the produce. When these limits are observed, and no one interferes in the legitimate business of some one else, the community is prosperous and harmonious; if not, everybody has something which concerns him more nearly than the true discharge of his own function; the

It must be noted as one more of the contradictions between different dialogues, that when this same requisite, the exclusive attention of every person to the thing which he knows, is suggested in the Charmides as the essence or definition of owoporurn, Sokrates not only objects to it as such, but doubts whether this restriction is of any great benefit, since it does not bestow that which is the real condition and constituent of well-being, the knowledge of good and evil. (See Grote, vol. i. p. 489.) Mr. Grote's remarks on the Platonic Republic are perhaps the most striking and admirable part of his whole work-full of important matter for study.

energies of the different classes are distracted by contests for power, and the State declines into some one of the successive gradations of bad government, which a considerable portion of the Republic is employed in characterising. The demand for a Scientific Governor, not responsible for any part of his conduct to his unscientific fellow-citizens, is part of this general conception of Division of Labour, and errs only by a too exclusive clinging to that one principle.

It is necessary to conclude; though volumes might easily be occupied with the topics on which Plato's compositions throw light, either by the truths he has reached, by the mode of his reaching them, or by his often equally instructive errors. We would gladly also have quoted more copiously from Mr. Grote, having said little or nothing of the important discussions, on all the principal topics of Plato, which he has incidentally contributed to the philosophy of the age from the stores of his richly endowed mind. The point of view from which these topics are treated, as all acquainted with Mr. Grote's writings would expect, is that of the Experience philosophy, as distinguished from the Intuitive or Transcendental; and readers will esteem the discussions more or less highly, according to their estimation of that philosophy; but few, we think, will dispute that Mr. Grote, by this work, has placed himself in a distinguished rank among its defenders, in an age in which it has been more powerfully and discriminatingly defended than at any former time. For further knowledge we must refer to the work itself, which will not only be the inseparable companion of Plato's writings, but which no student, of whatever school of thought, can read without instruction, and no one who knows anything of philosophy or the history of philosophy, without admiration and gratitude.

ART. II.-1. Miltoni Comus. Græcè reddidit GEORGIUS, Baro LYTTELTON. Cantabrigiæ et Londini: 1863.

2. Translations. By Lord LYTTELTON and The Right Hon. W. E. GLADSTONE. London: 1861.

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3. Tennyson's In Memoriam.' Translated into Latin Elegiac Verse. By OSWALD A. SMITH, Esq. [Printed for private circulation only.] 1864.

4. Folia Silvula, sive Eclogæ Pöetarum Anglicorum in Latinum et Græcum conversæ, quas disposuit HUBERTUS A. HOLDEN, LL.D., Collegi SS. Trinitatis quondam Socius, Scholæ Regiæ Gippesvicensis Magister Informator. Volumen prius continens fasciculos I. II. Cantabrigiæ:

1865.

5. The Agamemnon of Eschylus and the Bacchanals of Euripides, with passages from the Lyric and Later Poets of Greece. Translated by HENRY HART MILMAN, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's. London: 1865.

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THE present age may, without hyperbole, be called an age of translations, both in and from the classical and the modern languages. In spite of all that has been said of the alleged decline of classical studies, because classical attainments have ceased to be the sole test of literary culture, never has scholarship more sound and varied prevailed in our Universities and schools; never have more accomplished scholars entered annually into the academical arena. The study of language has assumed a broader and more scientific character; and our sense of the beauties of the great masterpieces of classical literature has been rendered more acute by more extendea knowledge of their spirit and significance. Many of the problems of interpretation which had been confined in former times to the higher ranks of scholarship, are now brought down, by good editions of the classics and careful instruction, to the capacity of every fifth-form schoolboy.* And whilst it appears

* For example, Mr. Hayman's elaborate edition of the first six books of the 'Odyssey'-a work of great critical scholarship and complete knowledge of the Homeric poem. But although Mr. Hayman is described as 'late Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford,' and headmaster of a well-known English school, we doubt whether he can be reckoned among English scholars, so strange and inaccurate is his use of the English language. In the very first page he speaks of the moral sense of the poetas not benumbed by any overruling agency, 'coercive from without, to evacuate the will of its freedom;' in the

to us that the study of the languages of antiquity has lost nothing in precision, it has certainly gained largely in its scope and purview. To this cause may be attributed the numerous efforts of the present time, not only to popularise Homer and Virgil by English translations, but to throw into Greek or Latin forms some of the most cherished productions of our own literature. To these last translations we are about more especially to direct our attention. The general improvement in exact scholarship which has marked the last half century in England, commenced with the discoveries made by Porson in the structure of the Greek Iambic measure, and has kept pace with the attention paid to the art of Greek versification. This is a fact, which not even the stoutest assailants of Greek Tambics will venture to deny, although they may ascribe to fortuitous coincidence, what we assign to a subtle relation of cause and effect. The very trammels of metre necessitate the exertion of a great deal of mental ingenuity, and repeated trials of various words and constructions, before the desired end can be attained, a process which reacts upon the converse process of interpretation.

It deserves to be remarked that the study and practice of Greek verse composition in this country has been mainly confined to the imitation of the Attic writers. Homer, certainly the greatest Greek poet, and, in the estimation of many, the greatest poet that ever lived, is studied rather as an author to be read and enjoyed, than with a view to the imitation of his language. Nothing is to him aut simile aut secundum. Still the imitation of the grand Homeric verse would not, like the imitation of the Attic writers, materially conduce to a more exact acquaintance with the niceties of the Greek language. These must be sought for in the literature of a more cultivated age, and it is from the poets, philosophers, and orators of the most advanced period of Greek civilisation, that we derive the critical acquaintance we now possess with the language of the New Testament. It was, no doubt, one of the errors and eccentricities of Walter Savage Landor, to suppose that his own pure Latinity would hand his fame down to future ages, uncorrupted by time, long after his writings in fifth page he says, 'Greek scholarship is first uninterruptedly luminous among us from the almost yesterday period of Porson;' and, in his postscript, I should have preferred making the entire 'work one of two volumes. This is the sort of English which might be written at Göttingen by a German Professor, but it is deplorable if it really proceeds from the pen of a scholar educated at Oxford.

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the vulgar English tongue should be forgotten. But it was not less the error of Petrarch, who conceived that his Africa' would survive his sonnets. The truth is that even the original compositions of modern writers in the ancient languages have the defects of copies. They are modelled on old shapes. They want the instinctive power which at once suggests and evolves idea into expression; and they are read and remembered as curious or pleasing exercises, rather than as creations. The same remark applies, of course, à fortiori, to translations. In the preface to Mr. Dayman's elaborate translation of the Divina Commedia' which has recently been completed with success, that gentleman quotes, with approval, the distinctions. originally drawn by A. W. Schlegel between the mechanical form, which may be given from without, and the organical form which is innate and unfolds itself from within. Translations like those before us, from the living into the dead languages, are triumphs of mechanical skill, but it would be vain to seek in them that vital power which stamps an original work of genius in its native growth. The greatness of Milton's English poetry procures a perusal for his Latin poems, which they undoubtedly deserve, but which they would rarely obtain, were it not for this adventitious support. Original modern Latin is in fact at the present day but the shadow of its former self, while translations into and from both Latin and Greek are the mark of the scholar, the amusement of learned leisure, the relaxation of the statesman and the philosopher, and one of the best methods of drilling and exercising the minds of the young for any intellectual exertion requiring acuteness, ingenuity, neatness, or versatility.

Such being our views as to the merit of these exercises, we should have pardoned Lord Lyttelton, if he had occasionally stolen a few hours from the graver duties of life to devote them to the Grecian Muses, instead of informing us, in the elegant preface to his translation of Milton's Comus' into Greek verse, that he had composed the latter half of it in the course of his rides and walks about the classic groves of Hagley. And we doubt not that in the wide circle of our readers a certain number will be found grateful to us for placing before them some of the well-known beauties of the English Masque in their Greek form. Comus,' though essentially a romantic drama in its plot and its diction, is cast in the form of the Greek drama. It is evident that it could only have been written by a poet familiar as Milton was with classical tragedy of which, indeed, he has given us a still nobler monument in the Samson Agonistes.' The dialogue is somewhat cold and