Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 17, 1906.djvu/395

Rh guesses, the part of Dionysus was played by the Archon Basileus himself, possibly (as he improves an earlier guess) wearing a bull's head. But in the field of Attic mythology I am frankly incompetent.

Mr. Gunnar Landtman's work does not bear directly on the problem of kingship. It is written in very good English, and, so far as I can judge, it is scholarly and sober. The only mistake I have observed in the English references is that Sir Alfred Lyall is called Sir John in the text, though his initials are correctly given in the list of authorities.

This book has already won authority as a survey of some of the scarcely-charted land that lies between literature and popular custom, two things that seldom find the same historian. Not from inability, Mr. Chambers has here stopped short of pure criticism, or the "analysis of genius." While studying the social and material conditions of our Renaissance drama, he was led to explore deeper down and further back, so that while his last chapter touches on the humanistic and popular plays preceding Marlowe, his first is a sketch of the fall of the old Roman theatre. The interval forms a continuous story, supported with signal learning. The battalions of references are drawn both from original sources and from a vast literature of monographs. It is safe to say that no other student knows his way so well over the whole journey, or has made it for the same peculiar purpose. The result is that Mr. Chambers has put several books into one, and that his title is imperfectly expressive; nor is this a matter for complaint, though we are often carried far out of sight of the drama. The thread of argument is several times clearly stated and resumed, and a passage on the connexion between the first two of the four