"Mrs. Stevens's kind re rattling up to the door, and in came Nancy. gards to Mr. and Miss Freer: she had been at home all day, but Miss Louisa had not called." The lawyer was seriously disturbed now. "You may rely upon it, sir," interposed the clergyman, "that there is some misunderstanding, and they are gone." "Gone! who gone? gone where ?" said the host, in agitation. "Were your mind in a sane state, you should be brought to account for your vile insinuations." "You appear to take me for a madman, sir, but I think, if anybody's mad, it's yourself," retorted the clergyman, growing more perplexed with every sentence. "I have not insinuated a breath against your daughter. But what more natural than that she should leave town with her husband ?" "And pray, sir," Mr. Freer cried, with forced calmness, "as you say my daughter has got a husband, perhaps you will inform me when she was married, and who married her ?" "Why I married her, sir: married her this morning to Mr. Tom Elliot. Married them at your own request, sir." Lawyer Freer sat down in a chair, and broke out into a white heat. "What do you suppose, sir, brought me here to-night, in these kickshaw things," cried the unhappy parson, "but your own invitation to celebrate their marriage?" "Oh, papa," screamed Clara, "I see it all! Tom Elliot and Louisa are married." "Married, Miss Freer, what should hinder them? Here's your papa's note- Mr. Freer presents his compliments,' and so on-requesting me to perform the ceremony at ten this morning which I did," said Mr. Whistler, thrusting his hands into his pockets for the note. Alas! he was in momentary oblivion of having sported the uncomfortable tights: the note was in the pantaloons he had left at home. Clara Freer went off into strong hysterics, and the lawyer into an explosion of stronger expletives. The clergyman came in for his share of the latter. Mr. Freer insisting that he ought to have ascertained whether the note really came from him, before marrying a child like Louisa to a graceless medical student. "How could I suspect anything wrong?" humbly deprecated the Reverend Simon. "The handwriting was like a lawyer's, and of course I thought it was yours. I heard some time ago that Mr. Elliot was paying his addresses to one of your daughters, so that when the note came, it seemed a natural sequence. I am very sorry now, and would join in undoing the wedding if I could. Is it any use following them? I'll go in pursuit for one, if you like, sir. My hunter's as fresh as a daisy to-night." "Pursuit!" reiterated the irritated Lawyer Freer. "Eight o'clock at night, and ten hours' start! what use do you think pursuit would be, now? And I would advise you, sir, as a lawyer, not to countenance these clandestine matches in future, or your bishop may stop your power to perform them, in a way you won't like." "I wish he would," answered the browbeat parson I wish he'd unlicense St. Luke's for marriages. I'd rather do fifty funerals, all in a day, than one wedding. I would indeed." So Mr. Tom Elliot got clear off with his prize. Mingle-mangle by Monkshood. GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE.* THE twelfth and concluding volume of Mr. Grote's admirable History opens with the accession of Alexander the Great to the throne of Macedon. The History of Greece proper may be said to have closed before that event. Before the death of Philip, the Hellenic world, as Mr. Grote expresses it, has ceased to be autonomous; for though in Sicily the freedom revived by Timoleon has still a few years to run, all the Grecian cities south of Mount Olympus have descended into dependents of Macedonia, and each of them is enrolled as a separate unit in the list of subject-allies attached to the imperial headship of Philip. Hence the history of conquered Greece loses its separate course, and becomes merged in that of conquering Macedonia. Accordingly, the contents of this last volume indicate but too clearly that Greece as a separate subject of history no longer exists; for one half of it is employed in depicting Alexander and his conquests-"that Non-Hellenic conqueror into whose vast possessions the Greeks are absorbed, with their intellectual brightness bedimmed, their spirit broken, and half their virtue taken away by Zeus-the melancholy emasculation inflicted (according to Homert) upon victims overtaken by the day of slavery." The Greeks, we are reminded, to whom this History of Greece has been devoted-those of Homer, Archilochus, Solon, Eschylus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Demosthenes -present as their most marked characteristic a loose aggregation of autonomous tribes or communities, acting and reacting freely among themselves, with little or no pressure from foreigners. The main interest of the narrative, the narrator himself observes, has consisted in the spontaneous grouping of the different Hellenic fractionsin the self-prompted co-operations and conflicts the abortive attempts to bring about something like an effective federal organisation, or to maintain two permanent rival confederacies-the energetic ambition, and heroic endurance, of men to whom Hellas was the entire political world. But, as he goes on. to remark, the * History of Greece. By George Grote, Esq. Twelve Vols. John Murray. 1846-1856. Jove fix'd it certain, that whatever day Grote, XII. pp. 1, 2, 661-2. POPE. (xvii. 392.) freedom of Hellas, the life and soul of this history from its commencement, disappeared completely during the first years of Alexander's reign. During the eleven years of his Asiatic career, the history of Greece is almost a blank, except here and there a few scattered events-the Grecian cities dwindling into outlying appendages of a newly-grown Oriental empire-though at the death of Alexander they again awaken into active movement. Now, as regards the history of Greece, the first portion of Alexander's Asiatic campaigns (from his crossing the Hellespont, B.C. 334, to the conquest of Persis, B.C. 330), though not of direct bearing, is yet, Mr. Grote justly affirms, of material importance. The first year of the reign of "Philip's warlike son" had sufficed to subjugate the Hellenic world. By these subsequent campaigns he had really accomplished what the traditional policy of the Great King had laboured, with tremendous and repeated efforts, but all in vain, to effect, the incorporation of Greece with the Persian monarchy, the absorption of it as one little component part, as a "small fraction into the vast Persian empire, renovated under his [Alexander's] imperial sceptre." So long, indeed, as Greece could receive help from the native Persian kings, who flirted with her, and with whom she coquetted, perilously for her peace, when the rough wooing she suffered from Macedon was going on,—so long as Greece could hope to play off the East against her too obtrusive northern neighbour, there remained a chance for her, as a person of quality," of reduced circumstances, indeed, or of one who had seen better days, and was now on the shabby-genteel list, un peu passée and all that sort of thing, but still of independent means, and, thanks to her connexions across the water, safe from too aggravated assault and battery, much more from the extreme case of rape and ravishment, on the part of that chartered libertine, the Macedonian king. But when Persia became, to all intents and purposes, the fee simple of that irresistible prince,-when the East at large bowed and did obeisance before him,-then, at last, and at once, vanished every chance for Hellas as such; then was lost any surviving hope, founded on foreign alliances, of Greece for the Greeks. "All hope for Greece from without was extinguished, when Babylon, Susa, and Persepolis became subject to the same ruler as Pella and Amphipolis-and that ruler too, the ablest general, and most insatiate aggressor, of his age; to whose name was attached the prestige of success almost superhuman."* The narrative, therefore, of Alexander's successes against Babylon, Susa, and Persepolis, is of immediate importance in regard to the history of Greece. Moreover; though the expedition against Asia was, as Mr. Grote describes it, really a scheme of Macedonian appetite and for Macedonian aggrandisement, it enters into the series of Grecian events * Ibid. pp. 528, 242 sqq. under the Pan-hellenic pretence of retaliation for the long past insults of Xerxes. Ages had rolled on since Great Xerxes came to seize the certain prey, and anything like "Pan-hellenic" resentment, and thirst for revenge, was by this time a sort of make-believe, or at best a vanishing quantity. But as a pretence it would answer the purpose; the purpose of Alexander, if not of Greece. It is not to be forgotten, nor does Mr. Grote forget to notice, that a deliberate scheme of vengeance on Persia for the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, had been cherished by the Spartan Agesilaus and by the Pheraan Jason; "with hopes grounded on the memorable expedition and safe return of the Ten Thousand." The strange daring of that anabasis, the stranger darings and endurances of that hatabasis, had shown what the free spirit of Hellas might do, and where the weak side of despotised Persia might suffer. Isocrates had urged such a scheme, as one of mark and likelihood, as feasible, eligible, and pregnant with promise, not only on Greece, while Greece was represented by the free cities of Athens and Sparta, but on Philip of Macedon, when his prowess had made him "master of the situation." Philip was not the man to give the go-by to any such proposition. To be hailed as chieftain in the gathering of the clans, in this enterprise against Asia, was quite to his mind. And though he was cut off before it could be put into practice, the scheme lost nothing by his death-taken up as it was, with yet heartier emphasis, and carried out as it was, with yet larger powers, by the most immediate to his throne, the world-wandering, worldsubduing Alexander the Great. Granting, then, that the "Pan-hellenic" excitement in favour of avenging on Persia her long-ago insults to Greece, had long ago died away, and was now virtually a factitious feeling, or an artful pretence, such a pretence answered nevertheless two desirable. ends, in Alexander's policy as captain-general of the invading force: first, in Mr. Grote's own words, "to ennoble the undertaking in the eyes of Alexander himself, whose mind was very accessible to religious and legendary sentiment, and who willingly identified himself with Agamemnon or Achilles, immortalised as executors of the collective vengeance of Greece for Asiatic insult -next, to assist in keeping the Greeks quiet during his absence. *Johnson: "Vanity of Human Wishes." So again Somerville, in "The Chase :" Nor was that host More numerous of old, which the great king Pour'd out on Greece from all the unpeopled East, That bridged the Hellespont from shore to shore, VOL. XXXIX. 2 N 536 He was himself aware that the real sympathies of the Greeks were rather adverse than favourable to his success.” The Greeks were, in fact, aware that Alexander's success in this eastern expedition, nominally undertaken in their name and as their cause, would redound to his glory, not theirs, and would secure fresh material guarantees for his supremacy, and against their independence. The historian compares their position, in reference to Alexander's Asiatic conquests, to that of the German contingents, especially those of the Confederation of the Rhine, who served in the grand army with which the Emperor Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812: they had no public interest in the victory of the invader, which could end only by reducing them to still greater prostration. Yet was it the habit of both the Macedonian king and the French emperor, to assume the perfect identity of interests, on the part of their several contingents, Greek and German, with those of their self-elected leader. Napoleon "drawing the same pointed distinction between the RusAnd we find sian and the German prisoners taken, as Alexander made between Asiatic and Grecian prisoners. These Grecian prisoners the Macedonian prince reproached as guilty of treason against the proclaimed statute of collective Hellas, whereby he had been declared general, and the Persian king a public enemy."* On the first four years, therefore, of Alexander's Asiatic expedition, as involving results of momentous bearing on the state and prospects of the Grecian cities, Mr. Grote bestows considerable space in this his concluding volume. The last seven he touches far more lightly, for the analogous reason that with the events therein comprised, the Grecian cities were interested scarcely at all. "The stupendous marches to the rivers Jaxartes, Indus, and Hyphasis, which carried his victorious arms over so wide a space of Central Asia, not only added nothing to his power over the Greeks, but even withdrew him from all dealings with them, and placed him almost beyond their cognizance."+ These latter campaigns do indeed deserve to be recorded, as examples of military skill and energy, and as illustrating the "character of the most illustrious general of antiquity-one who, though not a Greek, had become the master of all Greeks;" but it is rather from their intrinsic interest absolutely, than from their relative claim upon a writer of Grecian history, that place ought to be found and will be allowed for them. We have just seen Alexander deliberately styled by Mr. Grote, "the most illustrious general of antiquity." The historian gives all due prominence to the deeds of arms, the strategic skill and original resources, upon which Alexander's title to such a distinction is based. He shows that it is not merely in soldier-like qualities in the most forward and even adventurous bravery-in † Ibid. P. 243. * Grote, XII. pp. 69, 70. |