by sweeping aside the swarm of petty aspirants to fame, who obstructed the march of the greater poets of the generation. It is well known that the author of 'Endymion' was dying of slow consumption long before that review was written, and that he went to Italy for the benefit of his health. However this may be, it does not affect what we have affirmed, namely, that an 'In Memoriam' not only affords a good example by which we may test the powers of a poet, but also presents to view all his leading characteristics, and discloses what we would call the indoles animi, for in his confessions of sorrow the writer cannot help removing the conventional robe which wraps him as an individual. It is perhaps a useful exercise, therefore, in a critical point of view, to compare these several productions with one another. We think that such an examination tends to throw additional light on the idiosyncrasies of the writers, and if we would really know them, it is there that we should look. It will be observed from the casual and sparing quotations we have given, that Tennyson mainly differs from Shelley-who, be it remembered, was almost a contemporary-in that, if he starts doubts, he at once proceeds to exorcise them by reason and religion; while the other scatters at his wild will a dangerous seed, which in some breasts may ripen into the same species of suffering as he himself experienced throughout his short but fitful existence. Yet Shelley, as we all know, could be tender and even harmlessly playful when his good dæmon was by his side. What more artless image can be found in the whole realm of poetry, than that by which he so gently reproaches the lady whose attractions were too powerful for him?

Sweet lamp! my moth-like muse hath burnt his wings!" So, Shelley is all nature-nature's very selt-indeed. He never shuts himself up in the unexpansive embodiment of his own self-worship; but, like a true son of antiquity, manifests by endless evolutions his far-stretching kinship with humanityerring spirit though he be. The tear which he drops upon the bier of Keats at the close of the 'Adonais' is at once sincere, generous, and affectionate, though terribly ominous of his own. impending fate:

"Go thou to Rome-at once the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness

Thy footsteps to a slope of green access,
Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead,
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread.'

Here rests Keats, contemplated by the starlight smile of children,' in the tomb which this brother-poet and others had raised as a tribute to his memory. But Shelley had unconsciously constructed a monument for himself, and within one short year he found almost the same grave as his friend, near'One keen pyramid with wedge sublime’—

the tomb of Caius Cestius, in that spot which the Roman Church, jealous of all encroachment on its own 'God's Acre,' has set apart as the last resting-place for those pilgrims of our race whom the hand of death may have struck down while contemplating the wonders of this Classic land. But if there was no tragic ending in the subject of the Adonais,' as in the 'Lycidas,' Shelley made it so by the accident of his own sudden and unforeseen death in the stormy Bay of Spezzia where he was snatched away literally

'Unhousel'd, disappointed, unaneal'd,

With all his imperfections on his head.'

A weariness of life, akin to a sickness unto death, is painfully visible in the latter part of the 'Adonais.' The poet invites all to seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb, and asks:

'What Adonais is, why fear we to become?

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink my heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here

They have departed: thou shouldst now depart!'

We are inclined to think that, when men's speeches shall have become more charitable, and they have learned to forgive, but not to forget, and when the 'next ages' shall have arrived,although the full vindication can never be-the fame of Shelley as a poet will enlarge into a riper maturity and become in a measure purified by time. It is to him, rather than to Milton, that we would prefer to attach the description of a poet's placea soul which, as a star, might fittingly dwell apart. In any case, whatever his faults, England must ever be proud of his genius, and proud too of having produced three poems In Memoriam,' unmatched either in ancient or modern times. The subject chosen is indeed a fitting one, for England is the land of relics: nowhere are effusions more generously accorded to the memory of departed friendship, and nowhere are monuments more venerated or better preserved.

ART. VII.- -1. The Parthenon; an Essay on the Mode by which Light was introduced into the Greek and Roman Temples. By James Fergusson, C.I.E., D.C.L., LL.D., &c. London, 1883. 2. The Temple of Diana at Ephesus, with special reference to Mr. Wood's Discoveries of its Remains. By James Fergusson, &c. &c. Extracted from the Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects. London, 1883. 3. The Cambridge Chronicle and

1884.

University Journal, May 9th,

HE opening of the archeological branch of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, on the 6th of May, with the speeches delivered by Lord Houghton, Mr. Russell Lowell, and Sir Frederick Leighton, Professors Newton, Jebb, Freeman, and Tylor, marks an epoch in the study of antiquity; though to us, at least, hardly so novel as was represented by some of the distinguished speakers. The work of the day, which they naturally magnified, was a climax, and not the only one, of a movement long since in progress. In the debate on the essential place of classical learning in a liberal education, complete as the case is from a linguistic point of view, we have always maintained that the wide and deep knowledge of antiquity, the fountain and foundation of all later arts and learning, is more important even than the unspeakable benefits of the philological training; and such has always been the character of the best scholarship, both of our own country and the Continent. The subject-matter of these studies, as distinguished from the mere language, resolves itself into two branches, the thoughts embodied in Literature, and what the Germans so happily express by the word Real in composition, all the things that make up external life, which are specially and technically included under the title of Archæology. As all science asserts its unity by the interpenetration of its several branches, so of the three departments of antiquity, the words, the thoughts, the things, none can say to the other, I have no need of thee; and all unite to reproduce the life of the people who are influencing our own life to this day.

For of all the cant and claptrap which has been arrayed on one side of the discussion, against all the argument on the other, there is none more senseless than that which designates the Greek and Latin languages as dead, and the thoughts and works of the people as having long since passed away. It was in the

true spirit of a poet that the American Minister spoke at Cambridge of the vital connection between archæology and Greek

literature. 'It seems to me (he added) that what one feels always when brought into contact with any work of Grecian hands or any production of Grecian brains, is its powerful vitality; and by powerful vitality I do not mean simply the life which it has in itself, but I inean the vitality which it communicates.' True, that life may be crushed out by a perverse mode of study, like the ingenuity of the villagers who asked to have their altar-piece representing St. Sebastian alive, so that, if they pleased, they might put him to death afterwards; and, in a case with which we have presently to deal, we shall see how the theories of architects and antiquaries have converted the living glory of the Greek temple into a dead-alive monument of doubt and darkness. But true scholarship regards both the mental and material remains of antiquity, in Lord Houghton's happy phrase as a gracious company of the present and the past, a union of intelligence and sympathy.' Even those trained in the straitest sect of grammatical pharisaism are often led on insensibly to the stage at which the living spirit bursts the husk of the dead letter; and a long course of dry book-learning is sud denly illumined by the discovery, that those of old were not only men of like passions with ourselves, but that they had the same common sense and used it in like fashion, practically as well as intellectually. For example, we still find some who are surprised to hear that the ancients knew the figure, and even the magnitude, of the earth on which they lived, and that they could make water-pipes and fountains according to the laws of hydrostatic pressure; and now, according to Mr. Fergusson, we are even to credit them, in spite of general opinion to the contrary, with the ability to light their temples by true windows, instead of holes open to storms of rain and snow!

But, as we have already hinted, it is going too far to speak of this regard for the subject-matter in the study of antiquity as a sudden revelation in the latter days of the passing century. It needs but moderate familiarity with the works of continental scholars since the revival of learning, to call to mind their splendid contributions to the knowledge of all that we now include under the name of classical archæology,- the artists and their works in architecture, sculpture, and painting; the coins and inscriptions; the arms, ships, and tactics; the labours of the field, the loom, the workshop; the houses, dress, and ornaments; and other varied details of the public and domestic life of the Greeks and Romans. Nor does English scholarship deserve the sweeping charge of narrow addiction to the dry letter; it has never been fairly represented by the re-ye-and-dè men,' if indeed the phrase ever had any meaning but a silly sneer at accurate philo

logy. Our great public schools and Oxford have always been distinguished for cultivating a wide knowledge of classical literature; and Professor Jebb had a right to say, at the recent meeting, that the type of scholarship which had been so long cherished by the University of Cambridge had never been in any narrow or exclusive sense a verbal scholarship. Rather was this its characteristic, that it had ever insisted upon a sound knowledge of language as the indispensable condition of an accurate comprehension of literature, and probably there were few who would maintain that the attention to the meaning of words was a necessary disqualification for the understanding of thoughts.' And he justly described the wider conception of classical scholarship now in progress as not a change in the sense of shifting the basis, but of enlarging the domain.'

It was perhaps but natural for so eminent a scholar, still in the prime of life, to define that change as having come about 'during the last twenty-five years,' a period nearly corresponding to his own career. But a Cambridge man who remembers the early work of Hare and Thirlwall, or an Oxford contemporary of Arnold and Lewis, will claim an earlier origin for the movement, of which some of the first-fruits were seen in such works as the translations of Niebuhr's History,' Müller's 'Dorians,' Boeckh's 'Public Economy of Athens,' and so forth, in the too short-lived Philological Museum,' and in Arnold's Thucydides.' It would detain us too long to describe, more than by one word of full and grateful acknowledgment, the impulse received at that time from Germany; but, if any attempt is to be made to fix a precise epoch at which our own recent scholarship began to assume a more decidedly archæological character, we must nearly double Mr. Jebb's quarter of a century, and go back to the publication of the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities' in 1840. It is not for us, as our readers know, to speak of the merits of that work, on which the public judgment has been long since passed; we only cite it for the comprehensiveness of its plan, as embracing the whole subject matter of classical archæology in the widest sense. That work, and its following 'Dictionaries of Biography and Geography' the former giving special attention to the history of Greek and Roman art-have long been in the hands of successive generations of teachers and students, helping to train them to the wider ideas which are now bearing full fruit. When Professor Newton, at Cambridge, traced back his own experience through four and a half successive decades, and characterized the first (between 1840 and 1850) as a period of vain effort to awaken scholars to a wider conception, we could