and demanding a botanical dissection; the full colours blend into each other perfectly. Perhaps we have little reason to give for our delight; we cannot produce one fact learned on our ramble; it is enough for us to have been filled with dreamy thoughts, and come home refreshed in heart. And so it

is in its way with "Wives and Daughters;" its plot is nothing grand and startling; the delight of it is its gentle, even progress. The persons belong to no higher sphere than the family of a country doctor, but then they are real men and women, "with hands and feet." It is a pleasure to know them, for they have power and character of their own. We must not expect to read them right off at once, and be able to say, This is the villain, and that the heroine. Watch them: they have their own natures to unfold, and they will require much sympathy before they will unfold them rightly. There is many a surprise for the reader: not till the end of the book will he see his way to understand Cynthia; probably not then. Not till he has watched her in real life: then the picture will help the original, and the original the picture. In a word, the interest of this book is that it is so faithfully what it gives itself out to be, a picture of every-day life. That is never made insipid by routine, neither is this story; that is full of simple action and complicated motive, so is this. There comes to the little county town some one who is a puzzle to all the ordinary folk,-no disguised count, -a bright girl fresh from a boarding-school in France, quite innocent of being a mystery. Her portrait is the delight of the book. It shows a wonderful power of sympathy in a woman of Mrs. Gaskell's advanced years that she could enter so lovingly into the trials and struggles of this young girl. Poor Cynthia, hers was not a very deep, passionate nature perhaps, but wonderfully true at the bottom, below the little paltry surface-deceits. All her life, she had been starved for the want of a little mother's love; if she had only had that, she might have become anything. We doubt whether Molly's nature could have borne the want so well. Molly is very charming; almost an ideal of a true, honest English girl, full of love and trust, with depths of strength and self-reliance-witness her trying intercession with Mr. Preston on Cynthia's behalf. There is no weakness there : strong courage of innocence; but then she had happily never known Cynthia's temptations. At first it seems strange that Cynthia, hungering as she was for love, ready to lavish tenderness on Molly and even on Mr. Gibson, should have cared so little for the passion of an honest, loving heart like Roger Hamley's. But when we are let into the secrets of things, and see all Mrs. Gibson's intrigues to entrap the probable heir of Hamley Hall, as she, speculating on Osborne's death, believed Roger to be, we can well imagine how to Cynthia the pure bloom must have been rubbed off her engagement, and can sympathize with her "half disgust at love, life, all things." It is very sad, but we are ready to hope it was for the best, and should dearly like to know a little more about Mr. Henderson. The little we do hear is not very promising. A mere gentlemanly young man surely, for Cynthia's credit, there would have been found more in him than that. Also one would have liked to know a little how Mr. and Mrs. Gibson got on when Molly was married and gone. That perpetual tête-a-tête of two such uncongenial people must have been terrible. Surely in mercy Mrs. Gaskell would have devised some way of escape. And this strikes us as the great fault of the book. It seems hardly possible that a man like Mr. Gibson, so refined and sensitive, and withal so shrewd and keen an observer, could have failed to see through the palpable vulgarity of Mrs. Kirkpatrick. Such things do happen, we suppose, sometimes in every-day life, but, let us hope, not often.

Philoctetes. By M. A. London: Alfred W. Bennett.

AN unknown writer who chooses as the subject of a "metrical drama, after the antique," the sufferings and deliverance of Philoctetes, and so challenges comparison with all but the noblest of the extant works of Sophocles, enters on a task of no common magnitude. For the most part the feeling of mankind sets in strongly against those who re-write old poems. and re-handle old themes. They are unwilling that the impression made by the consummate skill of a great master should be interfered with, and prefer to recognise something like a patent right in one who has either been the first discoverer of a subject, or has made it his own by the mastery of a great mind.

In the present instance the writer may plead that this choice of a familiar subject was almost a condition of success in a drama "after the antique;" that the three great dramatic poets of Athens handled and re-handled the same old stories; that within the comparatively narrow cycle of the history of

"Thebes, or Pelops' line, Or the fall of Troy divine,"

they found what has made their names immortal, and did not shrink from inviting comparison with each other in their treatment of the selfsame incidents, as e. g., in the case of the murder of Clytemnestra. We may add to that plea that the enterprise, bold as it undoubtedly was, has issued not in failure but success. The modern Philoctetes will be read with pleasure by those who have loved and admired the old. It deserves to the full as high a place in the literature of our time as Mr. Arnold's "Merope," or Mr. Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon."

Some change in the treatment of the theme was at once legitimate and necessary, and the writer has found it in mitigating one element of the intense sufferings of the hero. The Philoctetes of Sophocles dwells alone; Lemnos is "by men untrod," "without inhabitant;" again and again he speaks of this terrible solitude as the hardest to bear of all his many woes. The chorus of the sailors who come with Odyseus and Neoptolemos, dwell on it with pity and amazement :

"Wonder holds my soul, How he, still nearing in his loneliness, Endured still to live

A life all lamentable,

Where he alone was neighbour to himself,
Powerless to move a limb,

And having no man dwelling on this isle
Companion in his grief."

Here the chorus consists of Lemnian fishermen, who have known and sympathized with him all along. There is a friend and counsellor, Phimachus. In striking contrast with the older drama, in which alone of all the extant tragedies of Sophocles, there is no female character (the play of feminine emotions, pity, reverence, affection, blending with the more masculine courage, ambition, subtlety, in Neoptolemos), we have in Ægle, a girl of Lemnos, one who has pitied the sufferings of the hero, till pity passes into love, and who becomes at last (here we get the reflection of modern and Christian feeling upon the old life of Greece) his one great consoler. With these new elements, chosen with happy insight, and handled with great skill, the difference between the old and the new is enough to remove any sense of a mere reproduction of the ancient story.

The merit of such a work as this can be shown very imperfectly by ex

tracts; and if we give a few, as indicating the power of the author over
imagery and language, it is only in the belief that those who read these will
be tempted to read more. As more separable than most passages of any
length, we give part of the hero's narrative of the death of Heracles :-
"All day long

We toiled up Eta, and the evening fell,
One red, great ball of sun, and flared and split
The radiance and he ever moaning clomb,
Moaning and shuddering, and huge agonies
Of sweat were on the muscles of his limbs,
And in his eyes a terrible dumb pain.
And now he clomb, and now in torment sat,
With set teeth, on some boulder, swaying slow
His head and rugged beard; and all his breast
Lay heaving, and the volumes of its breath
Went up in dry, hot vapour. Or he sat
Staring as in amazement.

And I went

And touched him, and he moved not, and again
I touched him. Suddenly the whole man leapt,
Straightened on the instant, and addressed himself
To the sheer hill, and leaning clomb. At length
It ceased into a level, desolate

As death, a summit platform: the near clouds
Racked over us, until the hill itself

Seemed giddy with their motion. Cruel winds
Flapt icily at our heated limbs, and seemed
To bite away in very cruelty

The few blank shivering grasses in the peat,

Or tugged the fangs of heath long dead in cold."

This picture of acute agony bravely borne, and of the utter desolation of the scene of the final sacrifice, will, we think, bear comparison even with the terrible description of the earlier stage of the same sufferings in the "Trachiniæ," 760-802.

Nor is there less power to compress into a few lines, or words, at once the whole impression of a scene, and the subtlest shades of emotion. Ægle thinks of the time when Philoctetes will have left Lemnos

"But somehow, always in those after-times

The old way of sitting here would come on me,
May-be at spring the saddest; for they say
Old thoughts grow most unruly when the first
Bird calls out to the wood."

The chorus describes the dwelling of Pan :

"No cloudy ruler in the delicate air-belts:
But in the ripening slips and tangles

Of cork-woods; in the bull-rush pits, where oxen

Lie soaking chin-deep;

In the mulberry orchard,

With milky kexes, and marrowy hemlocks,

Among the floating, silken under-darnels."

Or paints the manifold delights and sympathies of the same great Power :

"Pan too will watch in the open glaring

Shadeless quarry, quiet locusts
Scathing in the blaze on vine-leaves.

*

He will watch some bloom of a maiden
From the shrine-porch slow descending,

With her flashing silver sandals,

Bound on service to the image,

Leaning hold by the myrtle bushes,

Raising from the lowest marble

Stair her sacrificial urnlet."

It will be seen from the last extracts that the author of "Philoctetes' follows Mr. Arnold and Mr. Plumptre in their preference for unrhymed English verse, as the best equivalent for the subtle melody of Greek choral odes; and the power which he has shown in varying the rhythm to suit varying themes, with no loss of sweetness or richness, makes us wish that he would apply it to the marvellous choruses of the "Agamemnon," which, excellent as are the versions of Dean Milman and Miss Swanwick in the styles which they have chosen for themselves, still remain, we believe, open to the enterprise of a new translator. We must add, however, that we think the writer has erred in not recognising in his work the characteristic symmetry of the strophe and antistrophe, which in the Greek choral odes gives both to sight and hearing the impression of law, art, self-control, in the midst of the most overflowing feeling or loftiest flights of thought. Mr. Plumptre, it is true, in his translation of Sophocles, has set an example of this disregard, and has ventured on a formal vindication of it in his preface; but the tone in which he speaks is far from being that of strong conviction, and we are mistaken if, in any future revision of his work, he will not deal with this as one of the blemishes to be removed.

If we were to note any graver defect in the "Philoctetes" of this new writer, it would be that he has allowed himself, consciously or unconsciously, to be unduly influenced by Mr. Swinburne's "Atalanta," and has followed him in exaggerating the tone in which the great dramatists of Greece speak of the misery of man's life and the stern despotism of the gods. That, as has been often pointed out, is for the most part but one phase of feeling,—the treading the grapes, out of which flows the clear wine; the storm, after which comes the serene and open sky. The thought of an ultimate reconciliation of the discords and perplexities of life is never entirely absent. The "Eumenides" came as the close of the long history of crimes in the house of Pelops. The "Edipus at Colonus" shows that even the most terrible sufferings and crimes conceivable might end, if only the will was not tainted with evil, in a tranquil and blessed death. Even the binding of Prometheus was followed by and itself suggests the thought of liberation. The complaints and accusations of those who differ do not go beyond those of Asaph, or Job, or the Preacher, and like them they are not final.

It is right to add that the author of the modern "Philoctetes" follows Sophocles in making Heracles appear as in part, at least, reconciling the sufferer to his lot; but there is even then an absence of the Sophoclean serenity, and the ultimate impression is that of submission to a capricious despotism rather than to a righteous order.

We trust that before long we shall be able to welcome by name a writer so capable of noble work, giving to those who read him so true and healthy a pleasure. Whether as translator, or creator, or adapter, there can be no reason why he should shelter himself under the veil of the anonymous.

MR. MOZLEY'S BAMPTON LECTURES.

Eight Lectures on Miracles; being the Bampton Lectures for 1865. By the Rev. J. B. MOZLEY, B.D., Vicar of Old Shoreham. London: Rivingtons.

THAT is the true position of a miracle? Is it the anomaly of one world or the intervention of another? Is it so strange a variation from a settled system that we instinctively set it aside as either fraud, or mistake, or at best an exception which only awaits its legitimate solution; or is it simply the intersection of a foreign element; an effect appropriate to the world of grace, which only surprises us by its unexpected appearance in the world of nature? This question may be resolved into another which lies beyond it. Can we reduce all phenomena to a single principle, so that even acts of will, when properly analysed, are found to obey the sovereignty of law; or must we classify all things that lie beneath the unity of the Divine nature under the independent heads of law and will, assigning to each of these its appropriate operations, which may cross in action, but are always distinguishable in thought? Those who maintain the first view are quite consistent in rejecting miracles; but their theory binds them to reject a great deal more,-all moral responsibility, all spiritual life, and all that gives the will its distinctive character in either man or God. Those who maintain the second view have no difficulty in finding a proper place for miracles, as perfectly credible within the world of matter, because that world is everywhere penetrated by the influence of the world of spirit.

It is a mere game of cross-purposes, then, to argue for or against