Venetian rule in
Greece.

Morosini, who blew up the Parthenon.

Prehistoric and
Hellenic Andros.

Island's natural resources.

other day at Naxos I was hobnobbing with the last of the lordly Sommaripasa rusty notary whose marble dwelling stands on the citadel where Lygdamis and Sanudo reigned.

It is common to characterize the Venetian rule in Greece as an unrelieved affliction. I think there may be something to say on the other side. If Venice ate up Greece, she was so far assimilated by the diet as to be fitted for royal compensations. Not long before Dandolo raised the standard of St. Mark here, the rosy finger of a new dawn for Greek letters had faintly flushed the east. The tongue that had never been quite hushed began to sing again with some far-off echo of its ancient sweetness, and the Latin conquerors found Greek worth learning for more reasons than one. It was doubtless due to three centuries of such Hellenizing that Aldus could gather at Venice an army of Greek scholars and compositors to carry through his great task of rescuing the still extant literature of old Greece from further peril; and we know that Andros contributed at least one librarian of the Vatican to help on that work. Venice held on to Andros more than a hundred years after the Turk had intrenched himself on the Athenian Acropolis, possibly doing somewhat to keep letters alive here at a time when Athens seems to have been lost from the world's map if not from its memory; but we cannot close the account between Venetian and Greek without adding one lurid debit. It was in the last desperate struggle to recover her empire of the Ægean that Venice, the savior of Greek literature, wrecked the one matchless monument of Greek art. It was Morosini, bearing a name we meet among the lords of Andros in the fifteenth century, who in 1687 blew up the Parthenon.

You have but to cross the island ridge—no easy task even with a surefooted mule under you and you are in prehistoric and Hellenic Andros. There, swung up far below you and yet a thousand feet above the water's edge, is a strong-walled acropolis which Themistocles and Alcibiades stormed at in vain, and which King Attalos mastered only by treason within the gates; and on the rugged slopes below, now occupied by a paltry fishing hamlet, you shall see the ruins of the ancient city-its temple and town hall with their fascinating marble archives still littering the ground, and the very spot where the Andrian Hermes was dug up by a peasant in his own garden sixty years ago. A few miles north of this old Andros (now known as Palæopolis), is another fishing hamlet, Batsi, once my summer residence, where I would fain give the reader a glimpse of the actual life of a Greek island today.

When after Salamis Themistocles bore down upon Andros with his fleet and demanded untold indemnity for her weakness in giving earth and water to the Mede, adding that he had brought with him two mighty Athenian gods (namely, Persuasion and Necessity) to enforce the claim, the poor Andrians referred him to their own mightier gods, Poverty and Helplessness, who proved indeed too much for even him, and sent him. packing empty-handed. On the spot the parable speaks for itself; and the marvel is that from this naked island rock, twenty-one by eight miles in area, twenty-five thousand souls should wring not only a living but comfort and independence. Yet such is the fact. To begin with they are well housed, though there is neither forest nor saw-mill on the island. For the island itself is a great lumber yard — of slate. To get foundations you simply quarry out a section of rock-slope till your horizontal and perpendicular meet, and you have a fine rock-shelf with floor and back wall that will never need repairing. In fact, you may sometimes economize your end walls out of nature in the same way. Then you lay up your remaining walls—it may be out of your quarry chips-two or three feet thick and well joined. Putting on the roof is a more complicated process: beams of cypress are laid across from wall to wall, on these transversely a close bed of reeds covered in turn by another matting of rushes, and then over all is spread the clayey earth which is wetted down

and trampled and rolled smooth. This is the very roof in fashion at Mycena 1500 B. C. or thereabouts, and at Troy five hundred years earlier still, as it continues the invariable style in the Troad to this day. The material inspires the artist-Paros had her marble to awake the genius of her Skopas; and Andrian slate has exercised a school of masons who are in great request at Athens and Constantinople as well as at home.

It is easier to build a house than to build a farm in Andros, but An- Terracing and drian industry has achieved this latter task. It has through patient ages irrigation. turned the bleak mountains into smiling gardens. Terracing and irrigation have worked wonders. God gives the rock and the rigorous winters and sweeping summer winds. Where a thousand shiftless souls would starve, twenty thousand and more by toil and thrift have enough and to spare. Nature's capital, the rock, is richer than it looks. In other parts of Greece the limestone drinks up the rain and leaves the land thirsty; the slate sucks it in like a sponge, but only to pour it out again in multitudinous mountain springs which are the life of the land. The chalk burns up vegetation, the slate weathers into fruitful soil. So the Andrian rocks pay their tribute of earth and water, and the Andrian husbandman lays up his terrace and leads his little aqueduct to water it. When he has got his footing, so to speak, in one little shelf of soil or a dozen of them, he plants his olive, fig, and vine, his bit of barley or wheat, his patch of onions, potatoes, and beans. Against the north wind he sets his brake of cypress trees with intertwining vines or of tall reeds in triple ranks. He keeps half a dozen goats and sheep for wool, milk, Glimpses of and cheese; a family pig (untaxed); a donkey for transportation (I have peasant life. yet to see a cart or carriage on the island); possibly a cow or two of the best stock in the Ægean. In due season you shall see him winnowing his barley on his hill-top threshing floor, and the Andrian girls treading the wine press with blushing feet or gathered to the unique Andrian festival of the Fig-Stringing. There is, too, the hill-top monastery where you may quench your thirst at the hidden spring that used to flow wine instead of water on Dionysos's holiday; and the Round Tower which may have looked down on Agamemnon when he put in at Gavrion harbor on his way home from Troy. And within a stone's throw of that tower, you may see a peasant wife knitting silk stockings for her peasant husband, while silken fishing nets drape the rude walls - all her own handiwork from the rearing of the cocoon through all the stages to these finished products. Forty years ago Andros was a great silk producer, but the blight fell upon that beautiful industry, and it continues now only in domestic hands. Instead the lemon has become the chief staple, and on the south and east of the island every glen and slope is beautiful with its tender green and gold. Andrian life today has all the simplicity of the antique; and one who would escape the modern world could hardly do so more completely than with the brethren of Hagia Monê or with my friend Demetrius Zaraphonides and his American wife on their twelve-story farm at Katakoilo.

But it is time to be getting out of Gavrion harbor, and our next port is Euboea. Euboean Karystos. There we may leave the poor village on the shore and climb up through glens that are a dream of beauty to one of the finest Frankish fortresses in Greece-although Boniface of Aragon sold it to Venice in 1365 for a bagatelle of six thousand ducats. High above the medieval castle rises Mt. Ochê, traditional scene of Zeus and Hera's nuptials, on which there remains still under roof a stone building long supposed to be Hera's temple and the oldest sanctuary in the Greek world, but now taken by the learned for an ancient signal station. Euboea scarcely belongs to the island realm, so narrow is the strait that severs it from the Main; but one of its great cities, Eretria, we have in a manner annexed. There the American spade has laid bare one of the most interesting of old Greek theaters to say nothing of other remains of the stronghold which the Persian mastered on his way to Marathon.

End of the Ægean cruise.

Review Questions.

Search Questions.

Bibliography.

Last of the Cyclades in our course lies Keos, with her fair town pitched upon the mountain top in full view. It occupies the site of ancient Iulis where Simonides was born to be the trumpet voice of Greek freedom, and his nephew Bacchylides no less sweet and true a singer than any of the nine, as we know now that Egypt has given us back his songs. For the archæologist scarcely less interest attaches to the ruins of Karthaia where Simonides had his choristry and where Brondsted the Dane made his brilliant excavations ninety years ago.

We have yet to look on Helen's Isle, where the fair runaway paused to keep her guilty honeymoon with Paris; to sail under "Sunium's marbled steep," where within two years (thanks to Staes's spade) Athene has been ousted and Poseidon restored to his own as rightful lord of the foreland fane; to catch a glimpse of Athene's own temple, once usurped by Panhellenian Zeus, on the piney heights of Ægina; to peruse the shores of Salamis; and then our anchor drops in Piræus harbor and our Ægean cruise is done.

1. What little island is the ideal center of the Grecian Archipelago? 2. As one leaves the Hellespont what three islands connect that region with the shore of Thrace? For what is each famous? 3. What connection had Agamemnon with Lemnos? What had Hephæstus? 4. What incidents of the Peloponnesian war centered at Lesbos? What poets have also given fame to the island? 5. What connection has Chios with Homer? What Italian merchants had possession of this island and when? What events of the Greek war for independence took place here? 6. What present political position does Samos hold? What event is connected with the neighboring promontory of Mycale? What did Herodotus say of the island in his day? How has his story proved true? 7. Who was Icarus for whom the island was named? What places on Patmos are still associated with St. John? 8. What twin deities were born on Delos? What fame had the sanctuary of Delos? Describe the growth of the temple. What is the character of the view from Mt. Cynthus? 9. What connection has Mykonos with Delos? What associations are connected with Naxos, Paros, and Syra? How is the modern commerce of Seriphos connected with the mythology of the island? 10. What is the relation of the group of islands called Cyclades to the mainland? 11. Describe the present-day pilgrimages to Tenos. How has the church influenced the town? What patriotic aspect has this celebration? 12. What was the duchy of Naxos? How did the Egean islands come into the hands of Venice? How did Venice help to bring in the revival of learning? What famous Greek building was destroyed by a Venetian bomb? 13. Describe present-day life in Andros. What island was the home of Simonides and of his nephew Bacchylides?

2. What was the city of Where in Homer does the

1. What places claim to be the birthplace of Homer? Dædalus? 3. Who was Eumæus? 4. What is an icon? 5. debate at Lesbos between Nestor and Menelaus occur? 6. What allusion to Samothrace occurs in the New Testament?

The most valuable book is Tozer's Islands of the Egean (1890), but it does not touch Andros, Keos, or Melos. Bent's The Cyclades: or, Life Among the Insular Greeks (1885), is rich in folk-lore. Of older books Tournefort's Voyage in the Levant gives quaint and charming pictures of the islands at the opening of the eighteenth century; and Clarke's Travels in Greece, etc. (Vols. III. and IV.) affords glimpses of some of the islands a century ago. For Delos, Jebb in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. I., 7-62, is excellent; as is the chapter in Diehl's Excursions in Greece. For Keos: Manatt's "Bacchylides and his Native Isle" in The Atlantic Monthly for March, 1898; and his article on the same poet in the Review of Reviews for April, 1898.

CRITICAL STUDIES IN FRENCH LITERATURE.*

VII. ALEXANDRE DUMAS AND "THE THREE MUSKETEERS."

BY BENJAMIN W. WELLS.

(Formerly Professor of Modern Languages in the University of the South.)

HERE is not a spot on this earth," said the rather cool-blooded critic Nisard, critic Nisard, "where Dumas's gifts as a story-teller have not excited admiration for his inexhaustible fund of diverting inventions, his sparkling and characteristically French dialogue, his facile, natural flow of words, even his very defects which, to be sure, one hardly has time to notice, so completely does he carry you away A critic's comment. at his own sweet will." But perhaps it is something more to arouse the enthusiasm of one's fellow novelists than of the critics. Let us listen then to Thackeray, who writes playfully to his rival in popular favor: "It made me quite happy when, having read eight volumes of The Three Musketeers,' I saw Mr. Roland bring me ten more under the title 'Twenty Years After.' May you make Athos, Porthos, and Aramis live an hundred years, and treat us to twelve volumes more of their adven tures." And if we wish still further testimony to the merit of this story that the world has instinctively chosen as typical of its author and of the historical romance in its apotheosis, let the old man judge the young. Broken down in health, a dependent on the care of his son, Dumas was found two years before his death reading "The Three Musketeers" again. "It is good," said the aged romancer, with feeling, to the author of "The Prodigal Father," "Monte Cristo' is not up to The Musketeers.'" And he was quite right. If we want to know what the French romantic school means in fiction, we cannot do better than concentrate our attention on this novel. All of Dumas is here. We shall not advance a step in the comprehension of his genius, though, indeed, we may add greatly to our enjoyment, if to this story we add the whole series of the Chronicles of France to which it belongs, or even if we supplement these well-nigh hundred volumes by the other two hundred that the catalogue of his alleged works contains.

A book like this to be thoroughly understood must be studied not alone How to study the in itself but in its environment. We must ask ourselves not only what it story. is that we enjoy, what its qualities are, and its defects; but we must ask how they came to be, why it was that that generation produced novels of this kind, for this is only the best among many that have not since had their like. And then we must ask ourselves what it was in the man as well as in the time that gave him this unique place, even in his own generation. It might be more logical to proceed from the book to the environment, and from that to the author, but it is more perspicuous, and, on the whole, more helpful to reverse the order, and to consider first the man, then the public for which he wrote, and finally the work itself; for we shall hardly understand how completely he succeeded till we know something of his readers, nor shall we quite understand why he could so wholly satisfy them till we know something of the man himself.

It might have been hard to find in all France a man with such an Dumas's ancestry. ancestry. He was the son of a gallant general who had served Napoleon

味香

No. 1, "The Song of Roland," appeared in the October CHAUTAUQUAN; No. 2, "Montaigne and Essay Writing in France," in the November CHAUTAUQUAN; No. 3, "Tartuffe : a Typical Comedy of Molière," in the December CHAUTAUQUAN; No. 4, " Lyrists and Lyrics of Old France," in the January CHAUTAUQUAN; No. 5, "Victor Hugo's Ninety-Three," in the February CHAUTAUQUAN; No. 6, "The Short Story in France," in the March CHAU

TAUQUAN.

[Review questions on this "Critical Study" appear at the bottom of page 80.]

Influence of early environment.

A writer of dramas.

Turns to fiction.

with distinction in Egypt and the Tyrol, but had fallen into disfavor and died in neglect when the future novelist was four years old. The general's father was the Marquis de la Pailleterie. Whether his mother was the marchioness is not altogether clear. Certain it is that Dumas was the name of a full-blooded negress of San Domingo, whom the marquis is said to have married in 1760, and it was in San Domingo that General Dumas lived until about 1780 when we find him estranged from the marquis, who persisted in a foolish marriage with a woman from the servants' hall, so that his son in disgust enlisted in the Queen's Guards under his mother's name. He was a man of remarkable courage, impetuosity, and physical strength. He imitated the marital vagaries of his parent by marrying an innkeeper's daughter at Villers-Cotterets, and it was in the first five years of restless inaction after his retirement from the service that his son Alexandre was born to an inheritance of his negress grandmother's appearance and nature, and of the aristocratic spirit of his marquis grandfather. Few things in literature are more curious than the working of this contrasted combination in his novels.

But to heredity we have to add the influence of infant environment. His birth is in the year of the Peace of Amiens; he is thirteen at Waterloo; his first impressions are of his soldierly father; wars and rumors of wars fill his childhood. Then the disaster of Leipsic brings the Cossack invaders to his home. And then over this restless nature the Restoration comes with its piping time of peace against which the whole romantic generation chafes, and in which it gasps for air. His parents now had the happy inspiration to educate him for the church, that being the career then most open to ambition, as one sees so clearly in Stendhal's "Chartreuse of Palma," but it needed no prophet to see that nothing would come of this. His ebullient energy needed only the suggestion of a vent. That came to him from seeing "Hamlet." In 1823 he set about writing a play, and would not rest till he had found his way to Paris.

For the moment he found a livelihood in the household of the future king, Louis Philippe, and with an instinct, wiser often than all the reason of the critics, he saw that the drama offered the best opportunity to impress his originality upon the public. All the romantic sap was stirring in him. He needed no teacher or model. To him Hugo's preface to "Cromwell" was already ancient history, and he rang the tocsin of dramatic revolt from classical tradition before even the first skirmish of the "Battle of Hernani." Before the Revolution of 1830 he might have been wealthy, but he was as gloriously careless of money as were his musketeers, and seldom waited to win before he spent. The theater was not a wide enough stage for him. The Revolution afforded him occasion for a frolicsome run in the political field. He tells of adventures in those bustling days of July as incredible as those of his D'Artagnan,-how, like Daudet's Tartarin born before his time, he made a desperate march on Soissons, where he had once been a notary's clerk, and captured, with unaided but resistless courage, a powder magazine. And there really seems to be some grain of truth in the story, for when political calm came again he had somehow earned the distrust and forfeited the favor of Louis Philippe, and presently found fiction a more favorable field for his work than the drama, because it was less under the control of the political police. So with "Isabelle of Bavaria" he began that remarkable series of the Chronicles of France, historical novels, extending to some hundred volumes, of which "The Three Musketeers" is the chief. It may not be without interest to give the titles of them in their historical order. First "The Bastard of Mauléon," then "Duguesclin," then Isabelle of Bavaria," telling of the years that precede the coming of the Maid of Orleans and degrade the French crown till it owes its very survival to a shepherd girl; next "Queen Margot" and the St. Bartholomew Massacre; then The Lady of Monsoreau;" after which "The

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