Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/413

 12 s. ix. OCT. 2 2, 192!.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 339 AUTHORS WANTED. (12 S. ix. 292.) The words " While Patience, waiting, did the work of all " doubtfully quoted by A. T., may be a hazy recollection of the last line of Coleridge's beautiful rhyme on ' Love, Hope and Patience in Education,' which begins : " O'er wayward childhood wouldst thou hold firm rule And sun thee in the light of happy faces," and ends : " Stands the mute sister, Patience, nothing loth, And both supporting does the work of both." ISAAC SHARP. (12 S. ix. 311.) ' Mimnermos in Church.' The correct title is ' Mimnermus in Church.' The verses are in ' lonica,' a new edition of which was published anonymously in 1891, but advertised in the Athenceum for Jan. 17, 1891, as by William Cory. He was formerly William Johnson, a well-known master at Eton. C. A. COOK. Sullingstead, Hascombe, Godalming. [Our correspondent C. C. B. reminds us that this poem is to be found in Sir Arthur Quiller- Couch's ' Oxford Book of English Verse.' Cory, as MR. WAINE WRIGHT remarks, has a place in the ' D.N.B.'] Jlotcs on Essays on the Latin Orient. By William Miller. (Cambridge University Press, 2 net.) THE histories of ancient Greece and Rome offer us an impressive demonstration of political principles, and the material, already elaborated, for political philosophy. The great men of those histories are more than merely heroes ; they represent divergent ideals of social life and of government ; rising or dwindling theories of the State ; the rights and wrongs, the victories and defeats of class opposed to class, the soldier opposed to the civilian, the tyrant or the aristo- crat opposed to the plebeian, the alien or the slave. Much the same may be said of the medieval and modern history of Western Europe. Events are big with consequence ; nations and individuals take their places and play their parts in an evolution which depends ultimately on a succession of dominant ideas. By their relation to such ideas and to systems embodying them both men and events are best remembered and most fruitfully studied. We find it far otherwise with the medieval history of Greece. This is full of great move- ments, remarkable characters, and splendid actions, all of which, like those in an epic or a romance, lead nowhither, but exist, so it seems, for themselves alone. The springs and causes of what happens lie, for the most part, beyond the horizon of Greece ; in many cases very far beyond. To seek them out and hold them in mind while considering Greece is to reduce her to a subordinate position and lose her as the main subject of study. Yet, concentrating oneself on her, one cannot fail-^ such is the natural human weakness to wish for some opportunity for generalization or the emergence of something in the way of a principle, or of what we may be allowed to call organic growth. Perhaps in this disconnectedness lies the reason for the comparative neglect of this side of Euro- pean history by serious students. What strange errors have crept in to add their darkness to the darkness of mere ignorance may be seen in the work of Fallmerayer, who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, maintained that the Greek race had been utterly rooted out, and its place taken by a population of Slavonic origin, while Athens was supposed to have stood deserted for nearly 400 years from the time of Justinian. Long since disproved, these wild opinions might stand not inaptly for current ideas in many people's minds, who look on the ancient Greeks as having left no descendants and Athens as virtually desolate and negligible till we come to modern days. Since the Olympians had to go it was, however, no bad fortune for the Parthenon to^be turned into the Cathedral of Our Lady. A popular history of that cathedral might serve as a beginning for the work of bringing the ro- mance of medieval Greece home to English readers. For brought home to them it certainly ought to be. It comprises stories of adventure and good fighting, strange fortunes, terrible tragedies, and curious things in the way of character and incident which may be rivalled in many other times and places yet hardly surpassed. There are, indeed, as yet no names of men and women to conjure with ; Achilles, Odysseus, Hector and Helen still await their Homer. But there are the old places to beckon and bewitch us, and some newer ones too, as, for instance, Monemvasia, which, even in the sober pages of this history, takes on an air of glory. We would, in fact, invite any poet, whether he writes prose or verse, to turn his eyes upon this rich treasure- house, so slightly used till now. It would mean much for the solution of the problems of the Near East if some fresh imaginative contact between Eastern and Western Europe could be brought about ; and, the character and history of the Eastern peoples concerned being what they are, the poet will achieve more in this than the historian. This book consists of essays contributed by Mr. Miller at different times since 1897 to several of the principal reviews. They have been revised and brought up to the level of present- day knowledge. It is rare that a collection of essays written, in the first instance, for publication in a journal, is not seen to be impaired by that circumstance when viewed as a whole. The public thus addressed by the writer is several removes nearer to him than the public one ad- dresses in a book, and the fo^us must correspond- ingly be affected. Here, however, the original form and focus suit the matter so admirably as to prove a positive advantage. Lavish of picturesque detail, and neglecting neither stray touches in the past which linked Byzantine or Frankish Greece directly with Northern Europe, nor the still extant relics of the times with which he deals, Mr. Miller's work is specially valuable where it brings out the