MR. TYR1tELL'S BACCII2 E.* lifelike the more it departed from

the true ideal of Greek tragedy ;

With a reputation, both family and personal, to maintain, Mr. and this is in fact the substance in great part of the oavillings at Henry Kingsley should give, more time to the finishing of his work, Euripides with which the classically educated youth of England even if he decide that such a fragment of barbarous history is are encouraged to edify themselves in the Theatre of the Greeks worth rescuing from oblivion. Ho is careless pf the order of his and elsewhere. However, Mr. Paley some time ago spoke out events ; leaves them—however inconsistent with each other—unex- courageously in defence of the peculiarities of his favourite plained; repeats himself —(we are told, certainly three times, that in tragedian, which it had been the fashion to denounce as those days men went naked to their beds) —and is very careless about heretical ; and Mr. Tyrrell, who has now edited the Bacclue his grammar. He uses—like numbers of his fellow-authors to whom separately, shows not only by his remarks on this play, he should set a better example—the perfect for the participle and but by the tone of his whole work, that he appreciates the participle for the perfect with a delightful indifference, and the distinguishing merits of Euripides to the full extent. he will even use both in the very same construction, as " Spada His introduction proves, if proof were needed, that the scholar's sung a little Provençal song, and sang it very prettily too." Again, minute study of a work in detail, is no obstacle to the compreheu- he says, " Let us go and pick up Father Peter, and let we three go siva enjoyment or understanding of its artistic effect. What he round to all of them in turn," And inasmuch as Mr. Henry says of the general drift of the piece is just so much as is wanted Kingsley has assumed, and freely used, the right to make his per- in that place ; it is enough to stimulate and assist the reader's *reneges speak in very colloquial English—indeed to use English own thought, without being so elaborate as to leave no active part slang—he can scarcely excuse his use of the ancient " pled " for for him. Amongst the remarks which have an application beyond

the modern "pleaded." the limits of this particular play, those on the true meaning of the

But there is one character in the novel—for Margaret not only dens ex »ictehina in the Greek drama (p. xx.) may be mentioned as plays a very insignificant part, but does not approve herself to especially well put. The deity is more than a new power brought our feelings ; for whether it is that impulsiveness is not so much in in to disentangle the plot ; Horace's definition, which reduces him fashion as it was five hundred years ago, or that we do not believe to little more than what the French call a ficelle,is, to say the least, in its taking that particular form at any time, we certainly do not inadequate. As often as not the deity comes in after the luta,- -care particularly for a young lady who will kiss unasked an unmiti- strophe, and when the play, according to modern notions, would gated scoundrel, a common cut-throat—who will, for money, do be over. The tragic poets " did not merely consider when any manner of villany, from murder to eaves-dropping—because he the story was told, but rather aimed at rounding off the narrative, talks sentiment about the time when he was an innocent boy. and showing its relation to the whole circle of connected myths." There is, however, one character that we do love—a little grey dog, Mr, Tyrrell is uo doubt right in ascribing this chiefly to the fact a humble, faithful little Scotch terrier. How is it that many an that the plot was kuowa beforehand to the spectators as part of a author is interesting chiefly because he knows and understands continuous mythology. But on other artistic grounds, and apart and loves a dog ? The ninth chapter of the first volume of this from the nature of the story, there is a good deal to be said for the book is worth all the rest of the story. Greek practice of continuing the action a little beyond the cata- We wish that Messrs. Tinsley were as heartily sick as we are of strophe. After all, the contrary practice of breaking off the piece those little panels with which they imagine they ornament the the moment the plot is worked out is of very recent introduction, blank half-pages at the commencement of each chapter. Here, and is by no means uniformly followed even in modern plays. If the again, are those two ugly little girls, that we have been nervously change of dramatic interest in the course of a Greek tragedy were hoping to avoid, sitting uncomfortably dos-it-dosin an ogee mould- figured by a curve, the curve would not be unlike the trajectory of rug, with very naked shoulders, as disgusted with each other as a projectile iu its general form : it would rise with a long sweep to we are with them, and still endeavouring to drown their cares in a culminating point considerably beyond the centre of the distance hard study and fruitless authorship. And here are the two young traversed, and thence fall with a descent much sharper than its ladies—still inspecting is basket of flowers, which, judging from the rise, but still in an unbroken path, to the point of rest. The frightened expression of the one looking behind her, they have corresponding curve for a modern melodrama would go through possessed themselves of feloniously—one of whom we have consist- several twists and turn many corners and be broken short off at ently hated because she squints so frightfully and is nearly blind. the vortex ; and it may not be too fanciful to say that the satis- Next comes the well-known wreath of thick-stalked plants, and lastly, the lusty young gentleman who is delivering, with the * The Assam) of Euripides. With a Version of the Text and a Commentary. By Robert Yulvortuu Tyrrell, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Dublin.

faction a geometrically trained eye would find in the simplicity and completeness of the one figure, and the uneasiness it would feel at the vagaries and abruptness of the other, correspond pretty closely to the diverse effects of the two kinds of dramatic art on a culti- vated taste. But pleasant as it would be to follow out this and others of the trains of thought suggested by Mr. Tyrrell's intro- ductory critique, we must not allow it to detain our attention from the main body of his work.

In addition to its exceeding literary interest, the Bacchte presents to the critical editor a rich field which previous labourers have by no means exhausted. Mr. Tyrrell's book, though he by no means neglects the office of an expounder in his pursuit of textual criticism, is eminently a critical edition, and must be judged chiefly by its merits in this respect. The editor has formed an independent recension by the exercise of his own judgment, and has not scrupled to admit new conjectures where nothing heretofore pro- posed seemed satisfactory : and on the whole, the result of his labour must be pronounced excellent. The critical notes bear the mark of thoroughly sound and careful work. Mr. Tyrrell walks in the difficult places, of which no small number lie in the path of the scholar undertaking to deal with this play, with the firm fearlessness of a man who treads familiar ground. The changes he has made on his own responsibility, if not always convincing, are never capricious. Perhaps the best of these is the reading of v. 1060:-

Oiix

knooi/Atai ,ccallaWP goon Muni (for &tot Yoko).

This is much better both in form and in sense than any of the attempts of former editors, made as these were on the authority of supposed MS. readings invented by Stephanus ; and we agree with Mr. Tyrrell in preferring it to his own former

conjecture, Otreoty vaeant. There is something attractive, too, in the suggestion made, but not worked into the text on the corresponding lines, 983-1002, in the difficult chorus which

precedes the catastrophe. The use of sre.0.04, for a tree is at least suspicious, and Mr. Tyrrell's idea that cocAleroe was foisted in here by some one who misunderstood Terpa; is not unlikely in itself, and gains much weight when it is considered that if these words are omitted an awkward superfluity may be got

rid of in the antistrophe. It might be difficult to say whether v. 1002 was tinkered to match the interpolated line of the strophe, or contrariwise the strangely placed grou in 1002 was first thrown in out of mistaken charity by a transcriber who thought the sentence was perishing from want of a finite verb, and then 983 lengthened to balance that ; but Mr. Tyrrell seems to have fairly caught a pair of trespassers who should be turned out, and justice is not bound to decide as between the wrong-doers which of them dragged in the other. In v. 1166 teipf/exci. r gercexlie, Ahlav for vciphxdc re Irterrby AMces does the slightest possible violence to the MS. reading, which is accounted for by the confusion, a natural and not unfrequent one in uncial writing, of K with IC. Although previous editors have acquiesced, Mr. Tyrrell's laconic censure "meth Aiclav, certain death, is certainly bad Greek," shows quite sufficient ground for the change. In v. 506 the restoration of etderr from the Christ asPatiensis a bold measure, but there are good critical grounds to support it, and it has the effect of making a verse clear lind pointed which was formerly lame and confused. Mr. Tyrrell has recourse to the same means in v. 1352 to fill up the gap with apanp, which occurs in a very similar passage of the pseudo- Gregory, rather than with any of the commoner words which have been proposed. A very slight change in one word brings about a great improvement in v. 101, where Mr. Tyrrell adopts Mr. S. Allen's conjecture of Onperpoito for Onporpopot, and so avoids the necessity for an extremely harsh construction. In v. 209 the cor- rection aieupZi for Sr' apoz, is very ingenious ; but we cannot quite persuade ourselves, in spite of Mr. Tyrrell's assertion that the ordinary reading " nihili est," and the reasons he gives for it, that anything is really amiss in the text. It is true that Sr' clpeOpc;:w cannot have the meaning Mr. Tyrrell ex- cepts to—" at the hands of mere numbers, the common herd." But it may well enough stand in the sense of piecemeal, or by instalments ; and the immediate neighbourhood of brim' O eebe in v. 206 makes against Stalpt:o. The meaning is not that the god will not " deign to count his countless votaries" (Dean Milman's translation), but that he expects to be honoured with a whole heart and not by halves. On the other hand, Mr. Tyrrell has in several places vindicated MS. readings of which alterations had been pretty generally accepted. He is decidedly averse to changes, however slight, being made on grounds of mere taste. Of course it is in each case a task for the editor's judgment and artistic feeling, and often a very delicate one, to determine what

amount of difficulty or oddity in the MS. reading gives fair ground for suspicion ; and no more precise general rule can be laid down than that the text must not be looked upon as a pupil's exercise, to be touched up according to the reviser's fancy. We observe, by the way, that Mr. Tyrrell seems inclined to do battle for the practice of Greek verse-writing as part

of a classical education. He intimates that if Elmsley had been accustomed to it, he could never have mistaken the quantity of the r in actikpog. Now it may be doubted whether the most absolute certainty as to the quantity of the r in tieia4p0; is worth attaining at the cost of devoting several hours a week at the time of life when hours are of most value to composing verses in what is to us an artificial language with wholly artificial rules of metre ; for wholly artificial they are to us, who so far from being able to talk or think in Greek do not even know how to reed it. And at Cambridge the process is made doubly artificial by the tyranny of a peculiar Shrewsbury dialect of Attic Greek, created within. the present century ; this however may not have found its way to Dublin, so there perhaps they do honestly try to write real Greek. Again, the present writer knows by experience that it is quite possible to make a false quantity in Greek, and in the vowel r in particular, after assiduously writing iambics for four or five years. We verily believe that all the benefits which are supposed to be ensured by verse composition would be much more simply and cheaply got by abolishing our present barbarous manner of pro- nouncing Greek and Latin, which utterly ruins all sense of quantity or musical effect ; only the reform must be a thorough one, and must be carried out without flinching. We barely indi- cate another curious little remark of Mr. Tyrrell's in the note to v. 1830 on Kirchhoff's attempt at reconstructing Agave's lost speech.

In the matter of explanatory notes recent English editions of the classics have shown some tendency to needless prolixity ; Mr. Tyrrell's commentary is quite free from this fault, and explains no more than really wants explanation. Even then lie aims rather at giving suggestions, hints, and warnings, than at leaving nothing for the reader to find out. The interpretation of o5r' ayeu roLroo yoesi6 in v. 327, by calling in the double sense of pcipthaxoy, strikes us as very good. Without this the antithesis is both forced and feeble ; "you can hardly be cured by any remedies, and yet your disease is not without a remedy" (meaning Pentheus' coming end). is barely tolerable, whereas " you will not be cured by any remedy (or charm), and yet there is a charm at work in it," (i.e., the divine anger by which the speaker accounts for Pentheus infatua- tion), is natural, and quite in harmony with the tone of irony in this part of the tragedy.

Mr. Tyrrell thinks the Bacchte, on the whole, the finest of Euripides' plays ; and in this he is borne out by the high authority of the late Dean Milman, who expressed the same opinion in the introduction to his translation of the piece. With the exception of that translation, we do not know that the Bacchte has been in any way made accessible to a modern public. It would be a magnificent subject for an opera ; we can imagine an artist like Mlle. Tietjens making the character of Agave a worthy companion to her own' Medea, or M. Faure gaining a new triumph as Diony- sus. But supposing the music and the singers to be found, where is the audience ? This is a country where taste is free, if not en- lightened, and where the public can in its high discretion give doubtful praise to Beethoven, and laugh Wagner to scorn, and clamour for Verdi; and as for classical subjects, it is more profitable to make burlesques of them.