THE LADIES IN PARLIAMENT.* To our mind, the least significant

part in this collection of Mr. Trevelyan's fugitive pieces is that which gives its title to the whole. Perhaps it was chosen to be thus put forward as being more generally intelligible and more likely to excite curiosity than "Horace at Athens" or the "Cambridge Dionysia." But most of the real flavour in this volume, as in a sandwich, is to be found in the middle region, which is occupied by those " Cambridge squibs published for the most part eleven years ago," and now re-edited with a sort of apology. The success they have already commanded amply justifies the experiment of presenting them to a more extended audience, and thus testing their vitality independent of the medium in which they were produced.

To uninitiated readers they will probably cause a certain amount of perplexity, and often of a kind not to be remedied by annota- tions. As much information has been now supplied in occasional foot-notes as was reasonably practicable ; but there are no means of fully explaining the general tone and local colouring, except the unwritten commentary furnished by actual acquaintance with the scenes and characters of the drama. This is, however, no special fault of Mr. Trevelyan's, but a drawback inherent in the nature of his work. To a Cambridge reader, at any rate, " Horace at the University of Athens" is a singularly good specimen of modern burlesque. The frame on which it is constructed is best described in the words of the introduction :-

'• It lays claim to perfect historical accuracy; as it faithfully records the known occurrences in the life of Horace; his residence at Athens as a student; his enlistment in the Republican Army ; his behaviour at Philippi ; his pardon at the instance of Maacenas ; and his appointment to a post in the Roman Treasury. That it is accepted by undergraduates as a fair representation of undergraduate life and thought is testified by the local demand having brought it through three editions."

The hero of the piece is Horace, introduced as "the famous fresh- man from Venusia ;" and history being silent as to the men of his standing at Athens, Mr. Trevelyan supplies him with companions by resorting to Cahn and Balbus, those mysterious personages belonging to no known time or place in particular, who are indis- solubly associated with the rudiments of Latin in the minds of most English boys as the subjects of sentences without number in Henry's First Latin Book. In the opening scene it falls to Caius to make Horace and Balbus acquainted. His performance of this office may be taken as a fair specimen of the dialogue. Horace's merits are thus described :—

"Don't you know him? The same that got the Chancellor's Prize Poem ; Who wears six rings, and curly as a maid is ; Who's always humming songs about the ladies ; Who never comes inside the gates till four ; Who painted green the Senior Tutor's door."

For Balbus,-

" As to his antecedents, you must look

In the first page of Henry's Latin Book."

Horace's usual felicity does not desert him in welcoming his new friend :—

" Can this be Balbus, household word to all, Whose earliest exploit was to build a wall?

Who, with a frankness that I'm sure must charm ye,

Declared it was all over with the army.

" Can this be ho who feaste'd, as 'twas said,

The town at fifty sesterces a head?

Bat, while the thankless mob his bounty quaffed, Historians add—that there were some who laughed."

When we come to that part of the play which is concerned with the campaign of Philippi, we are not pleasantly surprised by find- ing that, besides the additions and annotations mentioned on the title-page, there has been a good deal of excision. Several of the most amusing passages have utterly disappeared. The explanation is partly given by the last verse, as it now stands, in Horace's song before the battle :—

" Though this should be a Federal firm, And that a hot Secesh,

We'd fondly still recall the term When you and I were fresh."

• The Ladies in Parliament, and other Pieces. By G. 0. Trevelyan. London Bell and Daldy. 1859.

These scenes as originally published were full of allusions, by no means from the author's present point of view, to the first cam- paign of the American civil war. And this gave occasion for some of the most pungent and effective hits in the piece, which are now almost without exception ruthlessly suppressed. We respect and sympathize with the feeling that has led Mr. Trevelyan to take this course, but there was hardly such malice in these passages as to justify a sentence of wholesale abolition. The sentence ham gone forth, however, and the result of its execution has been to make that which is left seem very bare and inconsequent. And we altogether fail to see any good reason why certain speeches of Brutus and Cassius, parodied from Julius Ciesar, have incurred the same fate. Either it must be because they are not considered worth retaining on their merits, or because Shakespeare is in the author's second thoughts considered altogether sacred from parody; neither of which grounds we are at all prepared to admit. Besides the material alterations in this part, we note in almost every page traces of a revision which has been now and then over-fastidious. The piece was composed and published, and attained success, no otherwise than as bold burlesque ; it is too late now, even if it were desirable, to soften its careless mood into such refined banter as may be presumed to accord better with the taste of London society. Happily, the episode of Quintus Russellus Maximus at the battle of Philippi is left substantially undisturbed. That person of the drama, as the troops of Brutus rush in confusedly after their defeat, makes his first and only appearance to rebuke them in this wise :—

" What means this most discreditable bustle ? I am the correspondent, Quintus Russell.

Describe the enemy, that I may draw him.

"So/.—We can't describe him, for we never saw him.

"Rus,—You never saw the foe ! This is indeed A most confused, unsoldierlike stampede ; I never met with such a shameful scene, As daily correspondent though I've been (At least, I doubt if you will find a dailyer) In every fight from Munda to Pharsalia."

But why does the spokesman of the routed forces no longer address the correspondent as he did in the days when Horace walked abroad in the freedom of a paper cover, untrammelled with bind- ing and gilt edges ? There was something Aristophanic in the ring of his mock-tragic announcement :-

" Stranger, I calculate we're whipped, that's flat, Into the compass of a small cocked-hat."

Perhaps we do wrong in quoting a couplet which has been deliber- ately banished by the author ; but we cannot refrain from giving readers who have not the original recension in their hands some evidence of the injustice he has now done to himself.

The "Cambridge Dionysia" is of a much more esoteric nature than " Horace at Athens," having been produced with the single definite object of attacking a certain University magazine called the Lion. It is closely modelled on the Ilinsps of Aristophanes, and aims at reproducing, as far as may be in the nineteenth century, the reckless invective of the old comedy. And we find it, in fact, much more like Aristophanes than any of the serious attempts at rendering his actual text in English, except always the marvellously good translation of a few plays by Frere. So excellent is that achievement of combined vit and scholarship, that we must pause, though somewhat irrelevantly, to bear witness of our unbounded admiration for it. Mr. Trevelyan's verse has often a movement and impetus not unlike Frere's ; but it is no disparagement to him to say that he has not the richness of fancy and the exquisite wit which give such a charm to all Frere's productions, and are best known to the world through the Anti-Jacobin. The following execration from the " Cambridge Dionysia " represents, however, very faithfully in its general manner the high-flown burlesque of Attic comedy :—

" 0 may the curses of the Gods light on you! And may you wallow in the lowest Hades, Along with all the men who've struck their Tutor, Or laid against the boat-club of their college, Or caught a crab just opposite the Plough ; In that sad place of punishment and woe Where lectures last from early dawn till noon, And where the gate-fines rival those at Christ's, And there's a change of Proctors every week ! Then you'll repent of having used me thus."

Taken simply as an imitation of Aristophanes, this deserves con- siderable applause. But whether an ephemeral satire whose object is by this time almost forgotten at Cambridge, and was

never known elsewhere, is likely to be otherwise generally appre- ciated, and whether readers are likely to take the trouble to master the allusions in detail, are questions on which we suspend

our judgment till they shall be practically decided by the fortune of this volume..

We cannot make much of the Ladies in Parliament. It is explained to be " a fragment after the manner of an old Athenian comedy," and its style is very similar to that of the pieces already noticed ; but its theme is more ambitious, and it touches on matters of more varied and wider interest. But we are compelled, partly for that very reason, to pronounce it a failure. Athenian comedy has here fared little better than the modern French drama usually does when transplanted to the British stage. Aristophanes is put into a frock-coat and kid gloves, and becomes very decent, very polite, and decidedly dull. The task was in fact an impossible one. Not only is London society too large, as Mr. Trevelyan himself remarks, for that minuteness of allusion which was possible in Athens, but our present manners will not tolerate anything approaching to the unbridled force of the old comedy ; and it would require a very rare fineness and precision of touch to com- pensate for the absence of the stronger effects. Accordingly this fragment, though not without brilliant lines, is on the whole painfully disjointed and purposeless. The writer is cramped and ill at ease, whether he attempts light raillery or serious invective, and breaks off at last, not because any end has been reached, but because his part is too hopelessly difficult to sustain any longer.

The remaining contents of the book are "The Dawk Bunga- low," and "A Holiday Among some Old Friends." The former is a dramatic sketch combining, in rapid succession, sundry ludicrous incidents of Anglo-Indian life. We are not competent to judge of its correctness in respect either of the manners depicted, or of the Hindustani phrases which are introduced to an extent hardly fair to the British public. As a light drawing-room burlesque it is amusing enough. Mr. Trevelyan's impression as to the character of 'native converts seems to be as unfavourable as that of most other observers. " Yes, Sahib," says Abdool, a Madras servant, "I Christian boy. Plenty poojah do Sunday time, Never no work do. Plenty wrong that." And afterwards in an aside, "I got no caste. I plenty good Christian. Drink plenty rum. Do no work Sunday. Them my Thirty-Nine The " Old Friends " among whom we are invited to take a holiday turn out to be the Athenians. Mr. Trevelyan revisits them in spirit with the enthusiasm of real friendship. In a pointed and vigorous discourse he tells us of their city, their ways and habits, the incidents of their domestic and military life; and by force of his own interest in the subject, and by a judicious use of illustrations taken from analogies of familiar things and places, as well as some graphic passages from the Attic writers, he has given within a moderate compass a very true and lively picture of Greek manners in the time of the Peloponnesian war. It will be seen that the compositions bound together in this volume are rather hetero- geneous, and that our estimate of their merits is by no means uniform ; for the present we accept them, whatever rank they may ultimately take, as an agreeable contribution to the light literature ' of the present season.