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extremely high, sensationalism has never established itself in the press columns; and great dailies are produced in local centres, each of which has a character of its own. The newspapers of Paris are different from but not superior to, say, the 'Zeitung' of Frankfort, the 'Vossische' of Berlin, the Zeitung' of Cologne. The journals of Vienna, Neue Freie Presse' and 'Neues Wiener Journal,' are famous. The 'Corriere della Sera' of Milan has a European circulation. These and all the rest which enjoy an international reputation can be bought for a few cents at almost any kiosk in any city of Central or Western Europe. It is not the Great States only which have journals of reputation and literary quality. The Independance Belge' was one of the leading organs of continental liberalism in the 19th century. Swiss newspapers never achieved such a reputation outside their national frontier; but any one who takes up the 'Journal de Genève' or the 'Züricher Zeitung' will be impressed with the wide range of interest, the literary expression, and the quiet, restrained outlook of these papers.

·

While every Western European city has a journal worth reading, it has also a theatre and an opera. The educative influence of music and the drama, as well as their capacity for affording wholesome enjoyment depend upon several factors: the sanity of the tradition, the quality of the performers, the accessibility of the theatres. In Western Europe these three factors have been steadily nourished. The tradition of the classical drama, set by the great writers of the Age of Louis XIV, has been continuously developed. The profession of acting has been sedulously cultivated in the permanent companies, like the Théâtre Français at Paris, or any of the State theatres which have never been seriously interrupted since the enlightened autocrats of the 18th century established them. Accessibility is a feature of the European theatre, for, owing to the intensity of local life, whether in the provinces of the great States or in the capitals of the little States, grand opera and the classical drama are regular features of existence, whether it be in the famous centres of Paris, Munich, Vienna, or Milan, or in the smaller places, say Weimar or Brussels, where operas are presented with the same taste, if with less imposing grandeur. The once independent City

States preserve their tradition of independent artistic ep and literary life as carefully as do the great capitals. a The picture gallery of Bâle and the opera house at Frankfort are not imitations of the better-known egalleries or theatres of Europe: they make their own unique contribution to the common culture of the West. The German historian, Treitschke, wrote that Europe would always remain the centre of the world because it had its roots so deeply in the past. There have been many catastrophes and cataclysms in European history; and at one period, after the fall of the Roman Empire, there was a danger of Western civilisation disappearing under the tide of barbarian invasions. But although in everything except religion the Middle Ages were a great decline from the ancient civilisation, the heritage of Greece and Rome was never wholly lost; and after the Renaissance it was recovered, amplified, and in many respects improved. This is why Western Europe offers the spectacle of a balanced civilisation: religion, art, trade, and commerce have each an obvious and allotted space in the outward scheme of things. The great fabric of the medieval church overlooks the market-place. Saint Eustache casts a shadow across the Paris halles.

The last achievement of Western Europe should be the peace of the world. If history, since the fall of the Roman Empire, has been largely a record of wars, it has also been the story of an effort, steadily pursued by the best minds, to get back to the Roman ideal of a common law of equality for the whole world. Western Europe is the home of international law. On the shore of its lovely and famous lake of Geneva is the seat of the League of Nations. It has worked out to a logical conclusion the system of nationality. It now remains to reconcile nationalism, without sacrificing its virtues, with the wider scheme of internationalism.

The charm of life in Europe is due largely to its longestablished civilisation, to its inheritance not merely of beautiful things, but of social habit and manner which conduce to sweetness of living. The history of the relations of Europe and America are full of witness to this charm. Observant Americans, intelligent, critical, occasionally even unfriendly, cross the Atlantic, and sooner or later are conquered by the spell. Richard

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Rush, Edward Everett, John Lothrop Motley, John Hay, Walter Hines Page, all formed friendships in England or on the Continent and felt the attractiveness of European life. Most striking is the way in which Page was gradually drawn into the solidarity of society on this side of the Atlantic. He came almost with a contempt for old Europe, its aristocracies, its armies, its artificial conventions. Then the spell began to work: intellectual poise, ease of manner, the sense of justice, breadth of outlook were still found among the old nations, who were not yet worn out: of the British aristocracy, he wrote, 'They have the high art of living,' The same idea is expressed in many of Henry James's novels, perhaps nowhere more potently than in 'The Portrait of a Lady' with its haunting pervasiveness of European atmosphere.

Balzac has some interesting remarks in the opening paragraph of 'Honorine' on the pleasantness which he claims to be the especial characteristic of French life.

'It is excessively difficult,' he writes,' to find again far from France, the charms of France. Other countries offer admirable landscapes; they often present a comfort superior to that of France, they sometimes display an astounding magnificence, grandeur, luxury; they are not wanting in grace and noble fashions'

but what they do want, he adds, is 'intellectual life, activity of ideas, atticism.' Balzac goes too far in his panegyric, whether it be taken as referring to France or to all Western Europe. Intellectual life exists in a high degree outside Europe. But he is correct in saying that Europe excels by its atticism, its continuously cherished classical tradition. There is a European atmosphere,' wrote Sorel, in L'Europe et la Révolution française.' He hastens to add that the atmosphere is French. Actually, it is classical, it comes from the ancient civilisation of Greece and Rome. Under Imperial Rome Western Europe was a unity, with a common law, language, and economic system, as well as a common religion. The Middle Ages never completely lost this tradition of unity; the Reformation destroyed the religious unity, but in other respects the cultural affinities of the peoples remain, and will doubtless, at some future time, produce a United States of Europe.

R. B. MoWAT.

OPIA

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Art. 4.-MUSARUM NUGÆ.

1. Primitia et Reliquiæ (a collection of the verse of the Marquess Wellesley). London, 1841.

2. Leviora. By Henry Broadbent. Spottiswoode; Eton,

1924.

3. Ros Rosarum. By A. B. Ramsay. Cambridge, 1925. And other collections of verse.

THE habit of trifling with the Classical Muse is an ancient one; and although to her immature worshipper in the Fourth Form, as he stumbles laboriously and sometimes painfully up the first steps to Parnassus, she appears as an austere and unapproachable divinity, she will sometimes, later on, if he perseveres in a spirit of due humility, reward him not only with her smile but with something remarkably like a wink. In the end the scholar, so long as he does not make the mistake of fancying that he is one of the great poets and men of genius for whom the peaks of the Muse's mountain are reserved, may find himself very much at ease on the middle slopes. He will have discovered that his goddess is a lady of such wide sympathies that there is little if anything in his daily life that cannot be expressed in language which he may flatter himself will be acceptable to her, and that she is indulgent enough not to resent a good deal of impertinence from her admirers.

The matter may be illustrated by the old story of Kennedy who, having boasted that there was nothing in English which could not be rendered into Latin elegiacs, and being confronted with a printed circular summoning a meeting of the bridges committee of a Local Authority, reeled off the well-known verses beginning:

'Concilio pontis cui tradita cura tuendi';

or by the similar story of Shillito, who had made the same claim for Greek iambics. He was asked how he would deal with the enquiry,

'Well, old Stick-in-the-mud, how's your chump?'

and riposted unhesitatingly with

ἐν βορβόρῳ στηρικτέ, πῶς ἔχεις κάρα ;

Kennedy and Shillito were great scholars of a former age. The mention of their names might lead our minds

back to a still earlier day when a familiarity with Latin authors, or at least with Virgil and Horace, was an accomplishment to be confessed rather than concealed among the busiest men of affairs, and such distinguished persons as Prime Ministers quoted these poets in the House of Commons as a matter of course.

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Those were the days of the Marquess Wellesley, whose collected verse is still extant in a rare and precious little book, printed in 1841 under the title Primitiæ et Reliquiæ,' from which a single quotation must suffice. This is an epigram composed by Wellesley when a Sixth Form boy at Eton, in 1778, upon The Deluge, Servatus Noah.' 'Optima Aqua est; probet hoc tibi Pindarus; at male scribit (Si qua Cratine* fides sit tibi) Potor aquæ;

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Litem igitur solvit, placiturus utrique, Poeta

Qui describit aquam carmine, vina bibit.'

Wellesley has here anticipated by well-nigh a century and a half a modern poet's † praise of the patriarch who planted the vine:

'The cataract of the cliff of Heaven fell blinding off the brink, As if it would wash the stars away, as suds go down a sink, The seven heavens came roaring down for the throats of hell

to drink,

And Noah he cocked his eye and said, "It looks like rain, I think;

The water has drowned the Matterhorn as deep as a Mendip mine,

But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."

'Primitiæ et Reliquiæ' has had countless worthy successors from 'Sabrina Corolla,' 'The Hawarden Horace,' 'Arundines Cami,' and a host of others down to 'The Odes of Horace, Book V' (which was hailed by at least one journal of the highest standing as a genuine classic), 'Leviora,' by Mr H. Broadbent, 'Inter Lilia' and 'Ros Rosarum,' by Mr A. B. Ramsay, both of Eton College; and Wellesley has been followed by a multitude which no man may number of those who have sported with

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