CURRENT LITERAT URE.
GIFT-BOOKS.
Old Tales from Greece. By Alice Zimmern. (T. Fisher Unwin.) —This is a volume of the "Children's Study," and an excellent little book. Miss Zimniern gives, with due tact and reticence, the whole cycle of Greek legend from the Titanomachia down to the acquittal of Orestes by the Court of Areopagus. Her style is good, just in the happy mean that avoids modern commonplace on the one side and archaism on the other. Now and then she misses a point. She might have told us, for instance, that one of
Use two children of Alcestis is among the competitors in the °harlot race in the Iliad. This is the kind of thing that touches a boy's fancy. Chryseis is made, we see, to come from Thebe- nnder-Placus. Homer seems to say so, but the passage in which he says it was obelised by Aristarchus, as being plainly contra- dictory to the general story. Chryseis came from a town on the sea-coast, which Thebe certainly was not. The impression, too, left on the reader of Iliad I. is that the capture of Chryse had happened shortly before the opening of the story. Miss Zimmern seems to throw it too far back, putting it in the ninth year of the var.
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