BROWSING IN THE CLASSICS.
The publisher has grown aware of the desire of the classical student, now rude dwuttus, to renew his acquaintance with the haunts of his youth, and we have him making concession to our infirmities of memory by providing us with little editions of the text bearing a translation in the vulgar tongue upon the opposite page. Tho editors, for example, of the " Loeb Library " are set, it seems, like John Wesley, on making all the (classical) world their parish, and would fain tempt us to loiter through the centuries from the days of Homer to those of Procopius. But the browser, as he gazes on those serried ranks in the bookshop of his affections, observes to himself that the half is more than the whole, and, while breathing a benediction upon the publisher for his generosity, reflects within himself that there is little provender to his taste in the Thebaid. And further, he would fain find one who, whilst offering him in this friendly guise the Greek tragedians and the Latin elegiac poets, would also, besides these vast Port Meadows of pasture, enclose for him some small paddocks, provide some excerpts from those authors who have but a ha'porth of sack to offer amidst their vast, their intolerable, stores of bread ; would, in short, give him not merely one but several volumes of such selections as would never cheat his appetite.
The joy of browsing in the Classics, as has been already suggested, lies largely in the fact that it is a re1entegr2tio amoris. When one lights upon a well-known passage, a vision of the old School Form Room flashes before the eye of the mind. The figures of three members of a particular Sixth Form rise to the surface of memory, boys who are credibly reported to have become, the one a famous General, another a distinguished member of the Judicial Bench, the third an energetic Bishop. The end paper of a copy of the Classic through which we were then making our way records how many times each of these in his distress invoked the aid of Er—not of him whose vision Plato narrates at the close of the Republic ; no, but of that cabalistic syllable which is the resource of the tongue-tied speaker, and still more of the coy construer. The Judge and the General, so the flyleaf testifies, ran each other close in their recourse to the talismanic monosyllable—evidence of a hesitation of which, we freely confess, their decisions at the present time show no manner of trace.
Ye ir First Class man who becomes in the fullness of time a Fellow of his College does not browse—he only reads. He knows the editions, the commentators : his fine brain is stored with " the doctrine of the enclitic " and with every other grammatical doctrine too. Well ! may he long live to enjoy the emoluments of his Professorship 1 But editions—have they no charm for the browser ? Ah I yes. The Baskerville Catullus smiles invitingly upon him, though probably it is from his friend's shelves, not his own. He may himself possess an odd Elzevir—Erasrni Colloquia it may be, that toothsome grazing-ground ; the Colloquies, which have been known to furnish fodder for a browser, unrecking of sandwiches, throughout the whole journey from London to Edinburgh. He may have a momentary access of kleptomania as he stands amidst the Aldines which fill the shelves of a certain little room in one of our great libraries. But it is only a momentary access. For he tells himself that a Baskerville quarto cannot be thrust into a coat-pocket ; that an Aldine could never be left out on the grass—still less be exposed to casual madefaction in a boat ; above all, you could never make notes in it. And one of the chief joys of the browser is to note when and where, and perchance with whom, he has enjoyed this passage or that, and to compile his own index rerurn on the blank pages at the end. There is a man whose days have been permanently embittered by the loss of a little pocket Dante in which were recorded the date and place of the browsings of many years in many lands. Such a volume as that can never be replaced. It is more valuable—to the browser—than The true Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters or The Game and Play of Chess. It is his extra-illustrated book, his edition de lure, his Graingerized copy. A volume which has become mellowed in this way is like an old wine, it has an aroma ; nay, the comparison falls short !—it has acquired a personality of its own, and, should you ever be so ill-advised as to lend it to a friend, you will be inclined to cry, oven as you place it in his hands :— " Give it me back ! The thing's restorative I' the touch and sight."
You take it down, and it opens—for it knows your habits— at the very place you want, and in a moment you are knee-deep in the scented herbage. Who is it that you have pulled out of your shelf ? There are some of your books that you cannot take these liberties with. You could not, for example, browse in Pindar. It is told of Macaulay that he would read Thucydides with his feet on the mantelpiece. But one would wager that he took his feet down when he came to the Funeral Oration. Nor does Aeschylus suggest the possibility of such friendly and familiar treatment, least of all the Agamemnon. Yet the opening speech of the Watchman on the look out for the beacon-fires is pleasant feeding. And when you (some to Sophocles, and still more to Euripides, the choruses, yes ! the choruses, now that you need not think about emendations nor trouble your head overmuch about constructions, may be delicately savoured—the Colonus chorus, the Last Night of Troy in the Hecuba, the ,maid TeL hard in the Antigone, the Span chorus in the Oedipus Tyrannus, the many little vignettes of Athens and the Athenians, the " feminist " choruses in Euripides, and plenty more besides. Aristophanes, on the other hand, shares with Rabelais, apart from other resemblances, each a copious vocabulary, when he comes to talk of food and drink and the like, that one finds rather too many thistles in
the grass for quite satisfactory browsing.
There is still, it may be, a gentleman here and there who does not consider himself quite fully dressed without a Horace in his pocket, albeit he no longer desires to quote him in the House of Commons. And the Odes are, as ever, peculiarly pleasant to roam about in, even though the award may have been nibbled uncommonly short by the thousands who have roamed there before you. But Catullus !—the Manlius and Julia Epithalamium, the Elegy on his brother, the fascinating ecazons about his home and those inimitable hendecasyllabics of his ! Now Lucretius, magnificent as he is, is rather too sombre and awful for casual divagations. The browser, indeed, might
well take his suave marl magno for his own motto. Others, or he himself in different mood, may launch a bark on his perilous seas, but in the case of such a one as Lucretius, his- instinct is rather to stand at the magic casement and gaze out over them. It is something of the same feeling, a certain agpag, or possibly merely an unfortunate idiosyncrasy, which keeps one
browser at least from often tasting Virgil. Whatever be the cause, he must confess to the sad truth that neither Eclogues nor Georgics nor Aeneid often tempts his perverse footsteps. No ! Virgil, like Lucretius, calls for another mood : you must needs read him, not browse in him.
There can be no question that familiar correspondence, when the letters are real letters, forms the most delicious of diet. Yet, when one comes to look round, how few classical letters have been preserved to us ! But letters are, in the nature of things, amongst the most evanescent of- literary growths, and we can only lament the loss of thousands of them which must have proved the most agreeable of reading. AR1/4 it is, we are left, with Landor, to invent for ourselves " Imaginary Conversations " between the great figures who trod the Via. Sacra or climbed up through the Propylaea to watch the Panathenaic procession. Conversations we have : there are Plato's Dialogues, of course, and who is there but loves the talk of those lively ladies, Gorgo and Praxinoe ? But there are not so many classical letters. One who has to confess that Cicero's Epistles to Atticus leave him cold, on the other hand pleads guilty to a perhaps unreasonable delight in Pliny's letters. Still, there is nothing to tempt the appetite like the letters of Keats or Stevenson or FitzGerald. There is little left us of the gossip of Rome or of Athens.
Talking of gossip makes one think of Herodotus. Who can fail to have something like a personal affection for Herodotus ? For he is the story-teller—oh ! yes, the great historian too, but we are not thinking about that—and it is the story-teller who, after all, smiles most winningly on the browser. But why make any more bones about it ? It is Homer, who but he ? (no ! not they), that calls loudest to him; inexhaustible, ever-fresh, great, comfortable Homer. The Iliad--ah ! but still more, even much more, the Odyssey, How often have you drawn down your black ship to the sea and set up the blast in it and spread the white sails, first seeing to it that the skins of barley-meal and sweet wine were safely stowed, and then gone off over the broad back of the ocean and landed at Calypso's isle, and strolled in the gardens of Antinous, and
crouched in the cave while Polyphemus milked the ewes and talked to his ram. And how you adore Nausicaa as she mounts her mule-wagon and cracks her whip and the mules clatter over the rocky ways down to the seashore, where she presently finds the sea-battered Odysseus and brings him home, the delightful girl, to the palace ! How you would like to chat with Eumaeus up/Uri-vs and see the dog Argos recognize his master, and then let Eurycleia bring out the purple rugs and spread them in the echoing corridor and tuck you up in bed !
" So," sniffs the Fellow, as he casts these ingenuous confessions aside, " you put the Odyssey before the Mad, and you like Pliny's Letters, and you talk irreverently of Virgil." And
the browser slowly lifts his head from the asphodel meadow, and, as he meditatively chews the cud, murmurs in reply : Ot fiSpOYth '111-701:Xdan. For, in good sooth, like that repre- hensible character, he too does not care a jot.
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