HOMERIC GAMES AT AN ANCIENT ST. ANDREWS.
Homeric Games at an Ancient St. Andrews. By Alexander Shewan. (Edinburgh : James Thin. 5s. net.)—Some months ago we reviewed a volume in which Mr. Shewan assailed the destruc- tive criticism which has been doing its best of late years to destroy the "indivisible supremacy" of the Homeric poems. It was an edition of the Doloneia, the eleventh book of the Iliad, one on which some of the fiercest attacks of the critics have been made. Now he tries another method. He writes a comic poem, a sort of Batrachomyomachia, only that the Mice are an eleven from St. Leonard's School for Girls and the Frogs an eleven of University Seniors, gaerasa, as they are called. This poem he takes to pieces more critico. So when the girl spectators are described, and the epithet iStryAws is found, the commentator remarks that it is used of Pan in the Hymns, and so is " not very complimentary to the girls." Moreover, Pan was little heard of before the Persian wars, and the epithet therefore is "a sign of lateness." " Nearly everything is," he adds. Later on they are described as chaffing each other—axpas 8' baiXvinv happorrov poXec wokkdr. This is pro- nounced to be unintelligible. " Possibly the description of a game, axvivba ` chaff-throwing,' may come to light." Then the seniors' eleven is introduced with one Melanippus (a "dark horse," and, as some one says of Memnon, "a MIrchen prince from top to toe "). The line which describes his pretensions as a cricketer, Okerpor 1'7ip wicrrcry b N OCIAEVECICEY al4.0430S—" he was a safe bat and a change bowler"—is pronounced a "shameless interpolation," 13coXe&owev in particular being " an Ionism of a flagrant type." So it goes on in a very amusing way. Then come the Prolegomena, put in the orthodox fashion at the end of the volume, in which critical ways and methods in general are dealt with.
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