a bare-footed Dane treading on a thistle at the battle of Largs (or the moat at Slains Castle), and uttering an involuntary cry of pain which gave the alarm to his enemies and saved the day for Scotland.

The mottoes, which are the necessary adjunct of a coat of arms, are in most instances commonplace truisms or sentimental maxims which appear to have been taken hap-hazard from the Latin Grammar or the headings of the nearest copy-book. They even descend to some punning reference to the surname of the bearer, as in the "Ver non semper viret" of the Vernons and the "Ne vile velis" of the Nevilles, or the "Forte scutum salus ducum," of the Fortescues, borne in allusion to their ancestor Sir Richard Forte, who protected his chief with his shield at Hastings. Sometimes they are appropriate and sometimes the reverse. The motto of the Cavendishes, "Cavendo tutus," applies to the present Duke of Devonshire; but that of the Drummonds, Earls of Perth,-"Gang warily," is singularly unsuitable to a family that lost their estates in the '45. Occasionally, however, these mottoes strike a higher note. Lord Kimberley's motto, "Frappe fort, Agincourt," recalls the prowess of his illustrious ancestor Sir John Wodehouse at that famous battle; and that of Dakyus, "Strike, Dakyus, the devil is in the hemp!" is stirring, if not explicit. As a pendant to the Wodehouse motto may be mentioned the proud device of the Chateaubriand family, who bear the royal fleur-de-lis of France, which was granted to their ancestor by St. Louis after the battle at Mansourah in 1250, with the motto "Mon sang teint les banières de France." The motto of the Montmorencies asserts their claim to be the oldest family in Christendom,-"Dieu aide au Premier Chrétien." The "Nemo me impune lacessit" of the Order of the Thistle is full of significance; and

They saye: Quhat say they:

Latt them saye.

So

This motto was placed there by George Keith, fifth Earl Marischal, a great the diplomatist and statesman, and richest and most powerful Scottish nobleman of the sixteenth century. extensive were his estates that it was said (probably with some exaggeration) that he could cross the Border at Berwick and travel to John-o'-Groat's without ever eating a meal or taking a In an night's rest off his own lands. evil hour for himself and his family he had added the temporalities of the Cistercian Abbey of Deir to his already vast possessions, and this in spite of public disapproval and of the warnings of his own wife. Like Pilate's wife, she had suffered many things from a dream in which the monks of Deir appeared to hack away the foundations of Dunnottar Castle (the seat of the Keiths in Kincardineshire) with their penknives until the majestic fabric toppled over and sank in the waters." But 13 The Scottish Regalia was hidden at Dunnot

the earl, in defiance of all warnings and public clamor, annexed the abbey and placed the haughty inscription we have mentioned on one of the towers of Dunnottar as well as on the magnificent college which still bears his name. But in little more than a century (after the Rebellion of 1715) his castle was in ruins, the family estates were confiscated, and his descendants were exiles. The two last Earls Marischal died in the service of Frederic the Great of Prussia. A pendant to the haughty motto of the Earls Marischal is the inscription on the Castle of St. Malo, which Anne of Brittany erected in deBlackwood's Magazine.

fiance of the townspeople: "Qui qu'en grogne; ainsi sera; c'est mon plaisir." We may conclude this somewhat lengthy list of historical illustrations with the melancholy motto of the Courtenays, one of the most illustrious families in Europe,-so eloquent of their undeserved misfortunes: "Ubi lapsus? Quid feci?""Whither have I fallen? What have I done?" Three Earls perished on the scaffold during the Wars of the Roses; a fourth was beheaded by Henry VIII.; and his son, the last direct heir of his race, died in poverty and in exile.

The good old English principle that classics should be the basis of a liberal education is one to which we heartily assent and which we grieve to see impugned, as it often is of late. But from one point of view the great authors of antiquity have suffered from being made school-books, and from having been forced on the young who have not yet attained the years that bring the critical-not to speak of the philosophic-mind. Byron gives expression to a feeling which is almost universal among boys, and which often survives boyhood, when in a fit of half-laughing spleen, he writes

Now, farewell, Horace, whom I hated

So,

Not for thy faults but mine.

Any one who has been much engaged in examining cannot fail to have observed that the average school-boy suspects a rendering which seems to him tar Castle during the Civil War in 1652-"the last strong place in Britain on which the royal flag floated."' Thence it was secretly carried

too natural and sensible. He is accustomed to think of the Greek and Latin writers as dealing mainly in what he would call "rot." It is true that such a view was more likely to present itself to the youthful mind a generation ago, when great scholars-like Hamlet's statists, who thought it "a baseness to write fair"-despised the art of translation and presented the great thoughts of the ancients in the vile attire of modern journalese. The late Mr. Paley put into the mouth of the Awful Goddesses (Esch. Eum. 154) "there is present for me to feel the severe, the very severe, chill (smart) of a hostile public executioner"; and the same excellent scholar admonishes us on Choëph. 175 that it matters little whether we translate "heart-surge of bile" or "bile-surge of heart." The recent and very striking reform in the art of translating, due mainly to Professor Jebb, will do much to mitigate the contempt of the school

off and buried in the church of Kinneff. (See an interesting letter from Walter Scott to Croker, February 1818.)

The same picturesque epithet is applied to the sea by Eschylus in the Agememnon (1408) by the consent of the MSS., but the editors from Stanley to the last editor in the Clarendon Press series give the colorless vrâs "flowing," and regard the picturesque évoâs "wrinkled" as an obvious error of the copyists. The difference in quantity in the first syllable of the two words gives no reason for believing that the vigorous epithet is spurious; why then should not the poet here show an eye for nature, when it is he who has given us that jewelled phrase "the myriad-rippling laughter of the sea" (Prom. 90), and "the brooding crag" (óóþршv Téтpa) in the Supplices (795)? Again Virgil describes the ships of Æneas making their way up the Tiber in the words:

viridesque secant placido æquore silvas;

but the commentators are very unwilling to ascribe to the poet the meaning that the prows cleave the mimic groves reflected in the stream. One cannot help wondering whether the time will ever come when some literary compatriot of Macaulay's New Zealander will emend out of the text of Tennyson his "netted sunbeam," his "sands marbled with moon and cloud," and his "blasts that blow the poplar white." Is not this, by the way, the idea that underlies Horace's epithet of alba for the poplar?

Now, the truth of the matter seems to be that literature is after all one whole, and that the same features re

cur in widely diverse periods and places. It is curious to observe how often a familiar modern sentiment can be traced to a very ancient Greek source. Shelley was not the first poet' who "learned in suffering what he taught in song." An ancient grammarian Aristides tells that Alcman "being himself greatly under the tender passion became the inventor of love-poetry." Tennyson's "Northern Farmer" maintained that "the poor in a loomp is bad"; Alcæus declares that "money makes the man, and no pauper is good or honorable." The sentiment of the beautiful North Country ballad in which the mother says to her child

The wild wind is ravin', thy minnie's heart's sair,

The wild wind is ravin', but ye dinna

care

has its exact counterpart in the exquisite fragment of Simonides, where Danaë sings over the infant Perseus, "The salt spume that is blown o'er thy locks thou heedest not nor the roar of the gale; sleep, babe, sleep the sea, and sleep my sea of trouble. Bacchylides has anticipated a well known song of Burns when he says that a man well advanced in his cups "straightway is a warrior laying topless towers low, and soon will be king of the world." Literary criticism would seem to be essentially a modern art, but we have not only the admirable parodies of Aristophanes in the Frogs and Thesmophoriazusa, but even we find Timocreon, a very early poet, travestying a rival bard, who had a certain mannerism, which seemed to him absurd. des had written

Simoni

Be this the song of Alcmena's son, Of Alcmena's son be this the song.

Timocreon produced a rival ode beginning

A silly song came to my ears willynilly,

Willy-nilly it came this song so silly.

There is nothing new under the sunnot even the modern nursery invocation of fair weather. The primitive

Greek child chanted ἔξεχ ̓ ὦ φίλ' ἥλις, just as the modern child cries, "rain, rain, go to Spain," and we have in the songs of the children's games, preserved among the early melic fragments, all the true notes of nursery literature. Among the most interesting is the formula in the ritual of blindman's buff, perhaps the most ancient of existing games. The boy who is blindfold is to say (in anapæstic verse), "I go a-hunting a brassy fly," to which the others are to reply in the same measure "A-hunting thou goest but shalt not come nigh."

be

!

The same coincidences could shown between early Latin literature and modern poets who certainly were not borrowers. Space forbids more than a couple of examples. Shakespeare wrote

When

rule there are striking exceptions. every one will recall the μ) φῦναι τὸν ἅπαντα νικῇ λόγον of Sophocles, and there are many such reflections in Eschylus, notably one in the Agamemnon where sickness is said to be "nextdoor neighbor of buoyant health."

It has often been alleged that ancient literature is in one point sharply contrasted with modern. It has been said that the ancients did not commune with Nature as the moderns do, and Matthew Arnold traces to a Celtic source the modern sympathy with the magic and mystery of Nature. Professor Hardie's Lectures on Classical Subjects, briefly reviewed in The Pilot on December 26th, 1903, include a very instructive and charming essay on this subject, in which he shows that the "Pathetic Fallacy," as Ruskin calls it, which seeks in Nature moods answering to the moods of mankind, was present to the minds of the ancient poets. Theocritus claims for his own fellowpoets a communion with Nature, "we are not the first to whom beauty reveals itself as beauty, we men of women born who see not what to-morrow may bring forth." Communion with Nature does not necessarily demand detailed descriptions or minute study of phenomena, and on the other hand the minutest descriptions do not show sympathy with Nature unless they subserve the pathetic fallacy. Nature must be personified

T

Ye banks and braes of Bonny Doon, How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?

is not a clearer example of the pathetic fallacy than the Eschylean "brooding crag," the Catullian "insentient winds that cannot speak to us nor hear our cries," or the Lucretian "greedy hills" that have usurped their share of the fair earth. When Homer says that the arrows fell like snowflakes he does not thereby show any sympathy with Na

ton's

The day comes up above the roofs, All sallow from a night of rain

is as mournful as Tennyson's

On the bald street breaks the blank day.

But Meleager's

Why dress yourselves with smiles, ye meads, in vain?

has not any pathos because the question is put for the frivolous reason that the meads are so much less radiant than Zenophilé.

From one point of view the ancient and the modern world are indeed sharply contrasted in their attitude towards Nature, and herein the ancients seem to us to have shown a wise discretion. They both agree in drawing from the external world illustrations of mental states. Sometimes, indeed, in ancient poetry these analogies are almost grotesque, as when Apollonius Rhodius compares the fluttering heart

The Pilot.

of Medea to rays of light reflected from the troubled surface of a tub of water, or Virgil likens the frenzied Amata's fierce unrest to the gyrations of a top whipped by boys, but boys (be it observed) of high position, for the top is whipped "round great empty halls." But the process is never inverted in ancient poetry, unless we take into account phrases like "quick as thought." Now in modern poetry such an inverted comparison is quite common. Shelley compares a rock clinging to the side of a ravine to "a wretched soul" whichhour after hour

Clings to the mass of life.

To Browning the black thorn boughs, dark in the shade "but bright in the sunshine with coming buds, are like the bright side of a sorrow." And in the "Princess" of Tennyson there is a very striking figure of this essentially modern kind

Let the wild Lean-headed eagles yelp alone, and leave

The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,

That, like a broken purpose, waste in air.

R. Y. Tyrrell.