greatest authors must in the end suffer from the failure to appeal to a future very different from the present in which the author wrote. Greek literature was peculiarly sensitive to the spirit of the age, because the Greeks were a peculiarly sensitive race. Yet the most essential element in it, the language, owing to its excellence as a medium of expression, maintained a permanence of form which resisted the assaults of time, and thus provided later Greek writers with the means, if they chose to use them, of reproducing the spirit and the expression of the ages of the past. The vitality of Greek is in strong contrast to the rapid decay of Latin. Thus it came about that men could if they would, in the fifth century after Christ, reproduce the style and, to a certain extent, the spirit of the writers of the best age of Greek literature a thousand years before their time. The Greek of Simonides was not a dead language to the Byzantine writers of the first millennium of our era.

To this extraordinary vitality of the Greek language is due that prolonged resistance which a certain type of Greek verse, the epigram and the shorter lyric, made to whole centuries of change in taste and fashion among a people whose very quickness of wit tended to make it fickle in its allegiance to this or that particular form or style in poetry and prose. The Greek was an intellectual spendthrift. The intense keenness with which he pursued the interest of the moment was but too apt to exhaust his interest and the subject of it alike; and so the next generation would turn to other thoughts. Had the Greek mind survived till our own time, it might have exhausted the intellectual capital of the world. Yet amid all the chances and changes of its vivid life, there lived on one form of literature which was born with it and died with it-that type of poetry the most brilliant examples of which were collected in what is known as the Greek Anthology.

The strictness with which these poems adhered to a certain literary form, the elegiac couplet, is one of the most remarkable phenomena in Western literature. Still more remarkable, perhaps, is the fact that, despite the sameness of form, they never become wearisome. The versatility of the Greek mind found ever new modes of expression whose exquisiteness of finish made it possible

to insert new word-pictures within a frame which had served the purposes of artists of a previous age. The ordered rhythm and cadence may be likened to the mechanical framework of a kaleidoscope which gives regularity and design to all the bright colours of the Greek fancy. Yet form and fancy had been powerless to prolong the life of the epic and the drama; and the extraordinary duration of the type of poetry contained in the Anthology must be ascribed to some other cause. Perhaps it lies in the wide appeal to mankind made by any literature which gives expression to the pathos of the joys and sorrows of everyday life. Men read their lives in it and into it, and so are brought to turn to it again and again.

In this twentieth century the Anthology has a value as well as a charm. It gives a picture of the life of at least ten centuries more vivid than any which can be drawn from the other extant literature of those ages. We can follow thirty generations of men from their cradle to their grave, and can discern the thoughts which cheered them or depressed them at every step of their life's journey-simple thoughts they may be, of very ordinary things, but just the thoughts and the things which make up the greater part of the life of all of us. The life depicted is in many respects different from this which we now live, and yet it is surprisingly modern,' approximating perhaps more closely to our own than did that of the ages which intervene between us and the Ancient World.

One might almost evolve a type of life from the poems. There is a childhood, of which but little is disclosed, save that every now and then some epitaph on one who has met an all-too early death gives evidence of a family affection as deep as that which resides among ourselves. Every now and again there is reference to the playfulness and sweetness of child-life; but such references are noticeably rare. The care of childhood is largely the care of women; and but few women writers are represented in the Anthology. Admiration for Sappho and Erinna can hardly blind us to the fact that they cannot have been examples of middle-class domesticity. It is when childhood has passed into youth, and when youth is passing into manhood, that the fire of

the life of those ages sets poetry aflame. It is more of an animal life than any to which the present age dares confess, a life of fierce love and hate, but especially of a love wild and uncontrolled, and apt at times to take baser forms. But it is not always so; and despite its vehement passion, or, it may be, by reason of it, it produced under the hand of Meleager the most beautiful love-poems in Western literature. It was a time of life through which men lived with a consciousness that it could not last; that another would soon come when the pleasure of the present would be impossible or unattainable—and, after that, the end. 'Come on therefore, let us enjoy the good things that are present, and let us speedily use the creatures like as in youth,' was an exhortation not needed by generations determined to use every moment of youth in the knowledge that it could never come to them again. And so youth passed into the middle age, wherein some turned to literature or philosophy if they had not turned to them before, while some sought a continued but enfeebled enjoyment of the pleasures of the past. But it is noticeable that the shadows fall earlier on the lives of men in those days than in our own. Even at the outset of life's mid-term their looks tend backward. There is the sunlight of life's journey; in front of them the future seems to be plunging into an ever-deepening mist towards the darkness of the unknown; and Time, like a ghost, dogs their steps. It is all summed up in the verse of an unknown writer in the Anthology:

'The step of hoary Time is slow,

Yet upon us he ever gains,
And, once o'ertaken, we must go

To lands where silence always reigns;
Unseen himself, he hides from sight
The seen, the unseen brings to light.

And we, subservient to his power,
We travel onward day by day
Towards the dark, nor know the hour
When comes the ending of the way.'

Now and again we meet with a happier note in middle life, the utterance of a man who has taken refuge in intellectual pursuits and found happiness therein. But more often the tone is one of sadness and regret, not as

a rule the regret of one who would live a better life if he had to live it again, but of one who misses the wild physical enjoyment of the past, and feels that he might have had more of it. The feeling acts differently on different natures. Some become pessimistic. They decide that men and women are wholly bad, especially women who have become old and ugly. But others, less spoilt by contact with the world, give most touching proof of the lastingness of affection formed in youth.

Of the old age of men of those times the reality is almost too painful to reproduce. Sorrow, regret, despair -all the feelings, indeed, that go to form the sum of human unhappiness-are the keynotes of their verse. They are, for the most part, men who sorrow without hope. Their sole consolation is in an assumed recklessness as to the future. A more hopeful note is sung at times even in pagan days. The Mysteries, Philosophy, or, it may be, the Mithraic cult has offered a fairer prospect in which some men try to believe. But it was, after all, left to Christianity to dispel the dread despondency of later life. That despondency was not moral; it was of regret, not of contrition. And, when it is all over, the dead man's friends write his epitaph, unless he has anticipated them by doing so himself. Sometimes, if he has been great in literature or life, a literary epitaph is written for him years after his death, often a composition of extreme beauty, but sometimes a bitter tribute to his defects.

It is not strange that English scholars have at times sought to render some of these exquisite verses into their own language. The majority of the renderings which survive in printed form are in rhyming verse. Blank verse has been seldom used, probably from a sense of its unfitness for the interpretation of the epigram or the short lyric. Prose has also been employed, and is used by Mr Mackail in his translation of a large selection from the Anthology. If any man could make the Anthology live in English prose, it is probably Mr Mackail, whose keen poetic appreciation is well known to all those who have read his works. But the hard truth is that his prose versions leave the reader cold; and if he is to be warmed by Mr Mackail's book, it must be at the fire of

the original Greek. The fact that so fine a scholar has failed might well deter others from attempting to present such poetry in prose translation.

The technical difficulties of verse translation are still greater; but, if these be overcome, the appeal to the heart and mind of the reader is not made in vain. He wants the swing of the rhythm and the cadence of word and sound. After all, poetry has its form as well as its matter. The inevitable loss of beauty in translation should be reduced to the smallest dimensions. In the case of the Anthology the loss is peculiarly inevitable for at least two reasons. It seems certain that the humour, whether grave or light, of some of the poems is lost to us, because it is founded on the catch-words or expressions of a passing age. In other instances it can only be reproduced by paraphrase, a method which has at times to be resorted to in the interpretation of that play upon words which is so common in the poems. No one has yet succeeded in reproducing the last lines of Simonides' epigram on those who fell at the Eurymedon:

μνημεῖα θανόντων

ἄψυχ ̓ εὐψύχων ἄδε κέκευθε κόνις.

Various collections of English versions have been made in the past, of which the most complete are the 'Anthologia Polyglotta,' which Wellesley compiled in the middle of the last century, and the volume in Bohn's Classical Library edited by Burges. These illustrate how impossible it is even for a writer who has rendered certain pieces with marked success to maintain this level of excellence throughout all his versions. Since the publication of these collections various scholars have published, either separately or in combination with other literature, verse translations of some of the poems; and these again are distinguished by very varying grades of excellence.

Judging from the number of remnant copies of the 'Anthologia Polyglotta' which are to be found in the book-market, this work did not meet with the success it deserved. It contains a number of versions, especially by Wellesley himself, and by the two Merivales, the historian and his brother, which are admirable as repro