Gobi, or Shamo. By C. G. A. Murray. (Longmans.)—This story
would have been, we think, vastly improved if Professor Murray had cut off, or at least materially shortened, the intro- duction and the ending. A certain enthusiastic young Greek conjectures the existence of a Greek colony somewhere in Central Asia that dates from the Ionian revolt against Darius, and goes with certain companions in search of it. He finds it, and finds also that he has been preceded by an Oxonian, " Trench of Balliol," who has been made by the Greeks the despot of a neighbouring tribe of barbarians. The actual journeying of the travellers till they get to the Hellenic colony, and their adventures and experiences while they are there, are excellent. If we are to criticise the account of these Hellenes seriously, we should say that there is nothing in what we know of actual Greek life to make us believe that it would ever reach so splendid and harmonious development as we find among these exiles of the remote East. But the author has had in his mind some such idea as that which has been attributed to Tacitus, as his motive for the composition of the "Germania." His ideal Greeks are an imaginative reproof to the brutalities and cruelties of modern civilisation. Professor Murray even takes occasion to instruct us in Home-rule principles, though it must be allowed that his Hellenes did not allow Home- rule to the Sanoi, when they put them under the sway of the autocrat Trench.
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