Happy in her children, her only sorrow, as she writes in 1786, was the loss of friends.

'Outliving those we love is what gives the principal gloom to long protracted life. There was never anything very tremendous to me in the prospect of old age, the loss of friends excepted, but this loss I have keenly felt. This is all the terror that the Spectre with the Scythe and Hourglass ever exhibited to my view, Nor since the arrival of this formidable period have I had anything else to deplore from it. I regret no pleasures that I can't enjoy, and I enjoy some that I could not have had at an early season. I now see my children grown up, and, blessed be God! see them such as I hoped. What is there in youthful enjoyment preferable to this?'

Mrs. Pinckney died in May 1793, happy in the knowledge that her two sons had done good service to the United States. Her letters reveal a charming character, and we are grateful to her biographer for giving us the pleasure of making her acquaintance. It is when we read her biography, which is chiefly based on her own letters, that we most regret, for the sake of our descendants, the decay of letter-writing. Novels in abundance the present generation will leave behind them; but we are inclined to think that, a hundred years hence, English men and women would sacrifice them all for a bundle of the simple letters, never intended for the public eye, which our ancestresses used to write in the leisured eighteenth century.

ART.

ART. III.-1. Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Asia Minor, &c. Edited by Major-General Sir Charles Wilson, R.E., K.C.B. London, 1895.

2. A Wandering Scholar in the Levant. By D. G. Hogarth, M.A. London, 1896.

3. St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen. By Professor W. M. Ramsay, D.C.L., LL.D. London, 1896.

4. The Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia. By Professor W. M. Ramsay, D.C.L., LL.D. Vol. I., Oxford, 1895; Vol. I. Pt. II., Oxford, 1897.

THE present is not a time to tempt travellers into distant

parts of Asia Minor, in the footsteps of Sir Charles Wilson, Professor Ramsay, and Mr. Hogarth. We even hesitate to recall the ancient glories of that land, lest we should seem to aggravate its present misery, than which, says Dante, there is nessun maggior dolore. But much short of those distant scenes there is a wide tract along the western coast of Asia Minor which not only presents no danger, but is in fact the very part of Asia Minor which best repays a visit. It is a low-lying district, in character quite distinct from the high plateau which occupies the interior of the country. Its rivers and harbours, its innumerable bays, its great natural wealth had from early times attracted crowds of Greek settlers, who, while Greece proper was still lagging behind, throve in commerce, held their own in war, and acquired an imperishable fame by their poetic gifts. It was there subsequently that the inhabitants learned to accept the widely-different civilization of Rome, and there that Christianity planted one of her earliest outposts. From first to last it has been a land open to new movements, whether good or bad. The good it has fostered richly and benignantly; the bad it has fought against, but not always successfully.

It is in regard to this western fringe, as it has been called, of Asia Minor that we wish to know more; and now that Professor Ramsay has given us in his recent books those masterly sketches of the attitude of the Roman Government and of the people in general towards the spread of Christianity, we may hope that he will next return to his first researches in this country, and fill in amply what was then but an outline of the early relations between Asia Minor and the Peloponnesus, not in legend and tradition only, but most strikingly in the artistic remains. In this last direction he made an excellent beginning. But not a little of what was then vague and speculative has since been confirmed, as, for instance, by the excavations at Troy in

1893, which indicate with sufficient clearness that the Troy besieged by Agamemnon had been, as a town, twin sister to Mycena. Apparently it is not here a question of a common degree of civilization extending to two different races. The result points rather to an identity of race between the Trojans and the Achæans, as some of the Trojan genealogies expressly show, not to mention the existence of the tomb of Hector in Boeotia and the recognition of him there as a national hero.

On this early and very important period in the history of Asia Minor no one is more qualified to speak with authority than Professor Ramsay. He knows the whole ground. His acute critical faculty will serve him in good stead. His happy gift of discovering leading principles will have abundant scope. But the difficulties are enormous; and by the time that he has carried his history from the earliest obtainable date down to about B.C. 600, he will deserve our best congratulations.

Towards the end of the seventh century B.C., the history of Asia Minor begins to become fascinating in the highest degree. Melody was in the air, new forms of song and verse burst into being, and in that sweet company the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture took up their own particular parable. How intense and how manifold had been the artistic activity of those times may be gathered in some measure from the poetic remains. What we possess of Archilochus, Sappho, Alcæus, Hipponax, to take only the best known names, are mere fragments, just enough to show the splendid qualities and the great extent of what is lost. It is different with the formative arts. Not many years ago the early school of painting in Asia Minor was unknown except in literary tradition, and that of a very slight kind. Now, however, thanks to the discovery from time to time of painted terra-cotta sarcophagi at Clazomenæ, we are beginning to realize the characteristics of that school, and to be reminded that there is no fable at all, as was once supposed, in the statements of Pliny, that an Asia Minor painter, Bularchus, had painted a picture of a battle (or destruction) of the Magnesians, and sold it for its weight in gold to Candaules, the king of Lydia,—a contemporary of Romulus, adds Pliny. These painted sarcophagi, with their many figures and the singular effect which they often present of response and intervals in the composition, convey the impression of an indebtedness to melody. The same groups, the same figures are repeated or inverted as in a dance, till we begin to wonder out of how few elements an apparently elaborate design has been composed. The scenes of battle recall the incident of Helena embroidering the incidents of the Trojan war as they Vol. 186.-No. 37 1. transpired

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transpired under her eyes; and this is particularly the case when we come across an actual picture of one of these historical inroads of the Cimmerians, Homer's children of the mist,' which took place at various times between the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. These barbarians, accurately represented in costume and armour, sweep across the field on horseback, hewing down their enemies with enormous swords, accompanied by dogs of war.

With an increase such as inay reasonably be expected of materials for study in this direction, it may in time be found possible to form some definite conception of how far this early pictorial art of Asia Minor had influenced the first of the great fresco-painters in Greece proper. When that happens, it will hardly be reasonable any longer to treat it as merely a branch of Greek painting. It will then be time to recognise its separate existence, and to bear in mind that in later ages also the greatest of the panel-painters-Zeuxis, Parrhasius, Apelles, Protogenes were all natives of the coast of Asia Minor and practised their art there. Meantime, there is no question as to the charm which these early Ionian paintings possess. Extraordinary skill and facility in drawing, fearlessness in composition, afford ample proof that the artists had left far behind those early efforts which interest us more from an historical point of view than from beauty in themselves. Here we have actual beauty, notwithstanding the archaic strain which still lingers over the whole.

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In architecture, for all that has been written, we are still almost as far as ever from learning the origin of the Ionic column. We speculate often enough as to where this or that element of it may have come from, whence the capital with its graceful volutes, which seem to mock the idea of strength or burden; but we get little nearer to the spirit which ultimately fused the various elements of the capital into one. Hardly less attractive and almost as obscure in its origin is the Ionic base. bulging mass at the foot of a column is, no doubt, a source of greater stability when the column stands by itself. The effect is then impressive and convincing. But in a long colonnade this impression is lost. We are more struck in that case with the strength and stability of the Doric column, rising as it does without any base at all. Altogether, when we compare the Doric with the Ionic, the result on our minds is that the Doric fulfils its functions best when it is employed in a long row to support a great horizontal mass; while the Ionic, being more complete in itself, appears to lose something of its proper force when set in a row with others to support a roof. Nor is

it in any way improbable that the Ionic column, with its exquisite charms of capital and base, had been evolved in Asia Minor as a thing by itself, to serve in the first instance as an isolated pillar on a tomb; or otherwise, to fulfil a decorative rather than an architectural function, like the pillar between the two lions above the gate of Mycena. We do not say that the Mycena pillar, with its kindred on the contemporary engraved gems, contains any special element of the future Ionic. All we mean is, that they are instances of a column employed for decorative purposes. Comparing the two rampant lions of Mycena with those discovered by Prof. Ramsay on the front of tombs in Phrygia, we are inclined to believe that the origin of this motive is to be sought in the decoration of tombs, and that the primary element in it is the column, representing a pillar placed on a tomb.

But be this speculation well founded or the reverse, there can be no doubt that the more our materials of study increase, the more does it appear that, towards the end of the seventh and during the sixth century B.C., the architects and sculptors of lonia, like the poets among whom they lived, were possessed of an extraordinary gift of spontaneously enriching and beautifying whatever they touched. It would help us perhaps to understand this condition of artistic temperament and genius, could we find in the future historian of Asia Minor a true account of what was being done at the same time in those other fields in which the spirit of a great age manifests itself. As a rule, it is safest to make works of art speak for themselves; to trace the growth of art from evidence within itself, and not to risk mistakes by approaching the study with prejudices drawn from contemporary realms of action or of thought. But in this instance, and at all events until we have a greater extent of artistic material at our disposal, it would, we think, be a convenience if we could see in one comprehensive view the various fields of activity in which the Ionians of the sixth century B.C. and the end of the seventh distinguished themselves, their distant enterprises by sea, their wealth and luxury, their rulers, their religion, their political organization, their wars, and, above all, their music and poetry. The artistic remains would in their turn contribute to the general result, showing us in early as in later times a people gifted with an exuberance of artistic talent, a fertile imagination and a desire for novelty, or perhaps rather for experiment.

Meantime a step of the first importance was taken some years ago, when Sir Charles Wilson was instructed to combine with his other duties in Asia Minor the preparation of an authorita

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