the conditions have been so greatly changed, but on the whole it may be said the change has not been beneficial. At first it was thought that nothing was left for quarter sessions to do, with the result that a number of justices ceased to attend, and this caused a decline both in their importance and in the interest in their proceedings. It became necessary to fill up vacancies and to increase the number of justices to get the work done; so, to secure persons who would attend, justices were appointed from a much lower class than was formerly the case. This led to more of the old justices staying away, as they objected to working with the new men, especially with the ex-officio justices under the Local Government Act, 1904. Some of the sons of the old justices, who would in the old order of things have become members of the bench as a matter of course, either did not care to be appointed, or, if they were appointed, never came to quarter sessions. Thus a gradual change has been going on, much greater in some counties than in others, with the result that a new generation of justices has arisen. In the last two years the change has been made greater. Up to 1906 no one could act as a county justice who was not qualified by the possession of an income of 1007. a year derived from lands. This has been now repealed, and any one can now be appointed a justice of the peace. This alteration in the law has entirely altered the character of justices. They represented, or were suppose to represent, the landed interest of the county, now they merely represent such persons as have sufficient influence to get their names brought before the Lord Chancellor for the appointment. What the effect will be sufficient time has not yet elapsed to say, but it is certainly a very hazardous experiment; and if the state of things in boroughs, where no qualification was ever needed for the bench, is to be taken as an example, it does not seem likely to be a success. Great as is this change, a more startling proposal was made last year. The custom has prevailed for many years that the persons to be appointed justices for counties should be nominated to the Lord Chancellor by the lord lieutenant of the county. There was no law to that effect, and from time to time appointments were made without any such nomination. As it is obvious that the Lord Chancellor must obtain some local knowledge of the fitness of persons for the post, the King's representative, his lieutenant, was the obvious source to which he applied for it. When the present Government came into office a loud outcry was raised by members of Parliament and others that a number of persons, because they were radicals and because they had rendered greater or less service at the election, should be made county justices. Lists were sent to the Lord Chancellor containing the names of persons whose only possible qualifications were either political opinions or political services. Fortunately the Lord Chancellor, in spite of great pressure and great outcry, refused to place on the bench persons who could show no better qualifications. Large additions were made to the magistracy in different counties, but much less than were demanded, and, thanks to the Lord Chancellor's sense of responsibility with regard to the administration of justice, the evil has been avoided for the time. It is most probable that, both on the administrative and the judicial sides, the present state of local government is one of transition. The commission that is now sitting on poor-law administration may be the death warrant of all the systems of local government that have arisen round boards of guardians, and may propose the transfer of all such powers to county councils, leaving to guardians nothing but the distribution of relief. Or we may see the setting up of some authority, with jurisdiction over a wider area than the county, who will relieve the county councils of much of their work. So, again, on the judicial side, we are continually threatened with the abolition of the great unpaid and the substitution of stipendiaries. This has been threatened so often that we shall not believe in it until we see it. Whatever may be the changes, either administrative or judicial or both, of one thing we are perfectly certain, that no system will work, nor will command the confidence of the English people, that does not in some way utilise the services of the English gentry and secure for that class a preponderance over the combined forces of the agitator, the faddist, and the man who becomes a member of a public body because he has an axe to grind. Art. III. GREEK PAPYRI AND RECENT DISCOVERIES. Cairo, 1907. 1. Fragments d'un manuscrit de Ménandre. Découverts et publiés par G. Lefebvre. 2. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt. Fund, 1898-1907. Parts I-V. Edited by B. P. London: Egypt Exploration 3. Archæological Reports of the Egypt Exploration Fund, 1891-1907. 4. The Flinders Petrie Papyri. (Royal Irish Academy, Cunningham Memoirs, VIII and XI.) By the Rev. J. P. Mahaffy and Prof. J. Gilbart Smyly. Dublin, 1891 1905. 5. Greek Papyri in the British Museum. Catalogue, with Texts and atlases of facsimiles. Vols I-III. By F. G. Kenyon and H. I. Bell. London: British Museum, 1893-1907. 6. Aegyptische Urkunden aus den koeniglichen Museen in Berlin: Griechische Urkunden. Vols I-III. By U. Wilcken, F. Krebs, P. Viereck, W. Schubart, and others. Berlin: Weidmann, 1892–1906. 7. Berliner Klassikertexte. Parts I-V. By U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, H. Diels, W. Schubart, and others. Berlin: Weidmann, 1904-1907. 8. Papyri Greco-egizii pubblicati dalla R. Accademia dei Lincei. Vol. 1: Papiri Fiorentini. By G. Vitelli. Milan Hoepli, 1906. 9. Archiv für Papyrusforschung. Vols I-IV. Edited by U. Wilcken. Leipzig: Teubner, 1899-1907. GREEK scholars of the present generation have enjoyed, and are still enjoying, an unique experience. Their good fortune in the recovery of so many works long supposed to be hopelessly lost, so many of which the names had been barely known or little noticed, has often been compared to that of the Italian scholars of the Renaissance. But the conditions are far from being the same. The contemporaries of Petrarch and Poggio were engaged, not so much in discovering lost manuscripts, as in recovering the lost taste for a whole literature. The manuscripts of the great Greek authors had been extant in the East and in a few Western libraries, but there had been none to appreciate them till, at the psychological moment, the men of the Renaissance discovered these springs of living water, and refreshed themselves and humanity from their stores. This is not a description which could be applied to the present generation. Modern scholars could not justly be charged either with ignorance of Greek or with want of appreciation of it. The uniqueness of their experience lies in the fact that to them, and to them alone, has it been vouchsafed to recover from the sands of Egypt a rapid succession of Greek works which no human eye had seen for perhaps a millennium and a half. It is true that there have been anticipations and partial realisations of such a resurrection in the past. The men of the Renaissance, in their new-born enthusiasm for classical literature, unearthed from monastic libraries, where they were as completely buried as in Egyptian rubbish heaps, certain authors (such as Catullus and Tacitus) of whom the memory had well-nigh perished. In 1752 the discovery of a library of charred papyrus rolls at Herculaneum raised hopes which were considerably dashed when it appeared that their contents were exclusively philosophical, and for the most part in such a state that little could be extracted in the form of continuous texts. It was during the publication of these (largely promoted -be it remembered to the credit of one for whom a good word is seldom said nowadays-by the Prince Regent) that Wordsworth wrote his well-known lines: "O ye, who patiently explore Wordsworth's aspirations were a century too early. A 'Theban fragment' of no little interest has come to light within the last few months. For Simonides we still wait; but his nephew, Bacchylides, was recovered ten years ago, and is one of the principal trophies, from the literary point of view, of the present age of discovery. This, however, is to anticipate. In the early part of the last century a fresh flutter of excitement was raised by the recovery of the work of the great jurist, Gaius, from a palimpsest at Verona, and for a time there were confident hopes of accessions to the extant remains of classical literature from such MSS., in which the text originally inscribed on the vellum had been but partially effaced when the material was used again for some later writing. Fragments of Cicero's 'De Republica' and other less important works were actually recovered in this way; but the total harvest was not great. In 1847 a truer foretaste of the joys to come was vouchsafed. Egypt had already, since 1778, yielded some discoveries of writings on papyrus; but, with the exception of one manuscript of a book of the Iliad,' all these were nonliterary documents. In 1847, however, a large roll containing three of the lost orations of Hyperides, the great contemporary of Demosthenes, came to light; and in the course of the next nine years another oration of Hyperides and an important fragment of the lyric poet Alcman were added to the list of recovered Greek classics. The promising vein thus tapped proved, however, to be disappointing. No important discoveries came from Egypt for another generation. It is true that in 1877 a vast mass of papyrus documents was discovered in the Fayum, which has since been the most prolific source of Greek papyri; but the literary fragments among them were few in number, small in extent, much mutilated, and slowly and inadequately edited. It was not until fourteen years later that the new era of literary discovery was fairly established. The year 1891 may indeed be said, without the exaggeration which usually attends the phrase, to have been epoch-making, for it marked the beginning of a new period, the importance of which in the history of Greek literature cannot be denied. In that year Prof. Mahaffy published the first part of the Petrie Papyri (so called after their discoverer, Prof. Flinders Petrie), which included portions of the 'Phædo' of Plato and the lost 'Antiope' of Euripides, together with smaller fragments of Homer and other authors, written upon papyrus in the early part of the third century B.C., 600 years earlier than the earliest Biblical MSS. then known, and 1300 years earlier than the generality of Greek classical Mss. In the same year the Trustees of the British Museum published the lost 'Constitution of Athens' of Aristotle, |