THREE LITERARY PARALLELS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."( Sin,—Mon are never tired of saying that history repeats itself. and perhaps the three following literary parallels, which I have recently met with, may interest your readers. Pericles's descrip- tion of Athenian public life might in many ways be applied to ours. I quote one example from the Funeral Oration (Jewett's translation, II., 39) :- 'Our city is thrown open to the world, and we never expel a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might• profit him We rely not upon management or trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands."
Coleridge's " Fears in Solitude," written in 1798, during fear of invasion, is no less applicable to our condition prior to August,
1914 :— " All individual dignity and power Engulfed in courts, committees, institutions, Associations and soeieties,
A vain, speech-mouthing, speech-reporting guild, One benefit-club for mutual flattery,
We have drunk up, demure as at a grace, Pollutions from the brimming cup ,cf wealth r A selfish, lewd, effeminated race,
Contemptuous of all honourable rule, Yet bartering freedom and the poor man's life ...For gold, as at a market ! "
The whole passage is very suggestive.
Tennyson's Princess has now proved-quite prophetic, and its
delicate sarcasm at the " Woman's Movement" is strangely borne out in the work of nursing now so gallantly being per- formed by women in the Red Cross and other organizations, " their fair college turned to hospital " (Canto 7), and may we not say iia many women " finding themselves ". in a way once scorned add not anticipated ?—I am, Sir, 8re., 'S. P.' T. P.
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