Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/428

 396 Reviews.

help a priest in his field work, which is not what the author wishes to tell us. Unfortunate too is her attachment to the adjective "chiefly," e.g. "this suicidal custom was more or less restricted to the chiefly class."

There are, however, more culpable errors than mere errors of ear. Internal evidence makes it fairly clear that the author has not the advantage of a first-hand knowledge of classical literature. But surely she could have obtained the services of some proof reader who might have spared us the forms te/oos ya/oos or yXfios (not once is the phrase correctly spelled), or on p. 195 the puzzling transliterations jPeifoc and Gr. Evpustep7ws. Again, when quoting a very familiar passage from Chaucer it is careless to leave out the not unimportant word " ne." I suggest by the way that "limitour " would be better represented by " mendicant friar " than by " jjious beggar." Whenever Spenser is quoted, he is always referred to as op. cit. or lb., and on p. 118 there is the curious reference "<?/. ^/V., iii, vi, 5-7 {lb., Bk. viii, Ch. xix.)." Now it may seem that these strictures are a mere picking of holes and unessential to the book, but I feel that the same want of careful mastery of detail and lack of self criticism affect the matter, as well as the manner, of the work. In many places the author shows signs of not having mastered in detail the data with which she is dealing. The rhetorical question too often attempts to gloze over a petitio principii. For instance, there is the frequent assumption, in many of her cases quite unwarranted, that a virgin priestess is necessarily regarded as a wife of the God she serves.

On classical matters she is poorly equipped. Certainly scholars will be reluctant to tread in the wake of some of her inroads. On p. 41 the statement "the suttee was not unknown among the Greeks" is untrue. Her few stories of the heart-broken fidelity of wives are no evidence at all for the existence of the custom of the suttee, and she herself notes the difficulty of Uiodorus in accounting for a practice so alien to classical manners. The conclusion drawn from a passage in Pausanias on p. 175 is not so much due to a misunderstanding of the original as to want of clear thinking. Of course it is a prerogative of divinity to have temples and priestesses in Greece as in most other places. The statement on p. 98 that " Frey, like Appollo, a phallic god of