18 MAY 1867, Page 21

Greece, Ancient and Modern. Lectures delivered before the Lowell Institute.

By C. C. Felton, LL.D., late President of Harvard University. Two vols. (Boston, Ticknor and Fields ; London. Triibner.)—Those two volumes contain four wanes of lectures ; the first on the Greek language and poetry, the second on the life of ancient Greece, the third on the constitutions and the orators of Greene, and the fourth on modern Greece. All of them are singularly interesting, clearly put together, and expressed with much felicity. As a popular treatment of a learned subject, the second course is perhaps the most remarkable, dealing with the most minute details of Greek life, in the spirit of a traveller writing of a strange country, bat of a philosophic traveller, like the French one who wrote of Democracy in America. What Dr. Felton is as a traveller we see in the fourth course of lectures, where he relates some of his own experiences among the modern Greeks. He tells of the way in which he tried to write out an Attic washing list for his washerwoman, and having used a very superior word as old as the Platonic vocabulary for his under-shirts, was amazed to hear the waiter call them flans/la. A friend of his went into a shop and asked for an umbrella, under the scholastic name aX4r13poxE7ov. The shopman could not understand him, but on the article being pointed out in the window exclaimed in great relief, tt (;),2.[3pi?Acc, 61.430XX.a!" In like manner Dr. Felton noticed over a wine shop the sign of zaij,,nstwe, tic ,,rpc,Irns. criornros.," meaning champagne of the first quality. We are reminded of Lord Strangford's modern Greek equivalents for the English cricketing phrases. Perhaps it is hardly fair to Dr. Felton

t o dwell on these lighter parts of his valuable lectures. We certainly do not mean to imply that the serious parts are not more worthy of consideration.