tures and foreign matter would place the paper above reproach.

Pictorial Standards. Fancy the Telegraph's leaders illustrated, and the Standard adding It will be interesting to note the difference bitterness to its articles, during times of between the borrowed cuts which appear in excitement, with political cartoons. Imagthe European papers. In England, France, ine a flood of illustrated replies morning and Germany there is a system of purchase and evening, together with fierce general or exchange of illustrations. The Illustrat- controversies, carried on by means of pen ed London News has long been in the habit and pencil. Fancy the Echo's semi-leaders, of selling electrotypes, or duplicates of each with a picture; and the Globe's political some of its illustrations, to French journals. essays adorned with fancy portraits of the Nearly all the pictures in the Illustrated opposition. Imagine the Superfine Review Times are French electrotypes. It is the cutting in with Girl of the Period sketches; duty of an agent in Paris to select these and the Rock with pictures of ritualistic each week, and send them over to London. parsons. And then picture the provincial They are not old blocks, as some people press teeming with the works of native talimagine; they cannot be old, because they ent-Potts, with an artist at his elbow. illustrate current events. Take, for ex- We mean no offence to the country press. ample, some of the foreign pictures that We know that Potts only exists in a few have appeared in the Illustrated Midland insignificant towns. We pause to shut out News. By an arrangement with a leading from our mental vision this dreadful flood paper in Paris, the proprietors of this paper of illustrated possibilities. The reader will shared the expense of producing certain be glad to take breath also. Permit it, O pictures which on being engraved were elec-worthy printer - successor of the immortal trotyped, and became the English copy- Cave! Take up the next contributor's right of the English paper. There is some copy; and pray goodness his theme little prejudice, however, in this country carry him not into such exciting chances! even against legitimate treaties of this kind; for we observe the Midland paper is gradually making its way out of the arrangement which was evidently a feature in its original plan.

66

From The Spectator, Mar. 10. THE SPANISH TRAGEDY.

The illustrated papers in the colonies are mostly too far away from contemporary THE news that the Duke de Montpensier publications to obtain the assistance of had slain his cousin, Henry of Bourbon, in cliches; but for all that the illustrated mania a duel at Alcorcon sent up Spanish funds in is spreading even in the colonies. Australia Madrid rather more than one per cent. and New Zealand have produced very cred- Astute speculators in that capital have long itable illustrated papers. A new one has since decided that the Duke is of all candirecently appeared, illustrated with litho- dates for the Throne the one most likely to graphic pictures, which means two print- prove a good housewife to the Treasury, ings, the first on a lithographic machine, and they are well aware that one serious the second on a letterpress machine. This obstacle to his election is a vague impresmay be suitable for a paper with a small cir- sion current among Spaniards that he is culation, but it would be hardly applicable wanting in personal courage. This, it was where large numbers are required. Now felt, would be dissipated by the circumis the time for the oft-threatened revolution sances of the duel, and consequently his in wood engraving. Every substitute for chance of the Throne improved, and conthe wood block has failed so far. The man sequently the funds rose, a curiously who could hit upon an invention for making cynical revelation of the depth of religious a drawing on wood which could be printed, feeling in Spain. Nevertheless, we doubt with ordinary type, without the tedious and if the Duke has increased his favour either expensive process of engraving, would with his own caste or with sensible politicians make his fortune in a month. He would by challenging his cousin. He has, in the ruin a most industrious and exemplary class first place, helped to break down one of the of men, it is true; but Progress stops at nei- very few remaining barriers against the ther coaches, hand-weavers, nor engravers. spread of duelling on the Continent. The The latter need have no fear, however, at law is powerless everywhere against this present; the signs of the revolution are form of crime, neither the Catholic nor the further off than the perfection of the type- Protestant faiths have on this point the setting machine. When the day of inex- smallest influence on their most fervent dispensive picture-printing comes, we may ciples, but still it could be alleged that look for illustrated Daily Telegraphs and duelling was the only vice from which the

courage, was notoriously a scatterbrain, a man whose abuse signified as little as any ordinary Admiral's oaths, who said and wrote anything that came into an impulsive mind; and he was, moreover, the man of all others with whom a son of Louis Philippe should not have fought. According to a belief which at the time was universal, the atrocious intrigue known as the Spanish marriages broke a career which otherwise might have been a splendid one. The bright, handsome, head-strong sailor was the choice of Queen Isabella; he was just the man to have swayed such a wife, and had she been allowed her own way, she might now have been Queen, and he the virtual Premier of the country which has

has shot him. A little extra bitterness against the House of Orleans might be excused in a man with such a history; a little extra forbearance would not have misbeseemed one so well aware of, and so largely profiting by, the worst transaction in which his family were engaged. In shooting Henry of Bourbon the Duke de Montpensier killed the man whom of all others he should have spared, to avenge insults which of all others would least have injured him, through a breach of an etiquette which among the etiquettes of his caste is, perhaps, the only one good men feel heartily inclined to respect.

Royal Houses as a rule abstained. Their abstinence was due, no doubt, in part to the pride of rank, the feeling that as they could find no equals they could also recognize no adversaries; that insult to them was as impossible as insult by an animal to a man, but it was also due in part to a much subtler and nobler sentiment. They are all in their own eyes possible Kings, and Kings have universally disapproved of duelling. The most cynically aristocratie of monarchs, Frederick of Prussia, who never gave a commission to a commoner and never sympathized with any form of suffering, still made duelling capital and executed the law. Napoleon, brutal soldier as he was, strove hard to put it down, and the legitimate monarchs have always held it a first-class just sent up its funds, because his cousin offence in any prominent servant of the Crown. An Ambassador, for example, must resign in order to send a challenge; and among Princes, Napoleon Jerome is, we believe, in our day the only one who has sent a challenge, and he did not fight. The feeling seems to be that a subject in fighting a duel risks in his private quarrel a life which belongs to his sovereign, and if we take the Sovereign to be the representative of the State, the feeling is not only just, but one of the highest political value. If duelling is defensible, so also is private war, and the sanctity of the State as the sole entity for which a man may justifiably surrender his life finally disappears. The Duke in fighting his cousin has barred himself from ever expressing one of the most noble as well as most useful of the ideas of his caste. Even to sign a general order deprecating duels will in him appear a mere concession to a political necessity. Moreover he is something more than a mere Prince of a royal house, he is himself a prominent candidate for a throne, who bases his claim not on descent, but on his probable usefulness to the people. Yet he risks a life which he declares, by the fact of candidature, to be of such enormous value to his country, risks a succession which on his own theory would be of incalculable advantage to seventeen millions of people, in order to avenge a private affront. Better Spain be left in anarchy than Antoine d'Orleans, who says he is the hope of Spain, be called foolish names. Supposing the Duke in the smallest degree to believe in himself and most men do believe in themselves in a greater or less degree- no conduct more profoundly immoral can be imagined, and the provocation received was just the kind to add to the gravity of the offence. His adversary, Henry of Bourbon, though a man of considerable parts and

But we shall be told the opinion of the Continent, and more especially of Spain, demanded the duel, and demanded, moreover, that it should be à la mort. It did not. Nothing can show the absurdity of such a statement better than the fact that if the Duke had been a victor in battle, or if the insulter had been of any blood but the Bourbon, the duel would never have come off. No doubt the slur cast by accident on the Duke's reputation for courage made it the more difficult for him to decline the combat, but he would not have felt the difficulty had his assailant been of lower birth. Charges almost precisely similar were made by S. Castelar without even a remonstrance, and the privilege of free speech conceded to a member of the Cortes might have been fairly enough conceded to a Bourbon with a history like that of Prince Henry. The rank of the assailant no doubt removed a barrier of etiquette, but then it also created a motive for insult which made insult innocuous. As to the form in which those charges were conveyed, it was precisely that which deprived them of their sting. To be accused of treason, intrigue, and bribery may be serious, but when the accuser calls his own relative and a Prince of the blood "

bloated French pastrycook," the accusation | ishment for a vulgar libel. That is the degenerates into abuse as worthy of answer plain truth of the matter, and the fact that or of punishment as the slang of a cabby Republicans cannot see it, that they will be disappointed of an excess fare. Kings do more impressed by our argument drawn not fight their traducers, and the Duke de from the Duke's rank as Pretender, than by Montpensier is trying to be a king, and the argument that libel does not deserve should have manifested with the ambition death, shows how far mankind still are from of royalty some sense of the self-restraint any coherent ideas as to the morality of which royalty always demands, and usually, punishment. The first article of the contiwe are bound to say, secures. To the nental Republican creed is that no political minds of men who can think he will never libel is an offence, and the second, that to have seemed so unworthy of a Crown as at kill the libeller is decidedly meritorious. the moment when he swept away the principal obstacle to its attainment. Louis Philippe's was not a character which the world will ever cordially admire; but if there could be a character less kingly, it would be Louis Philippe without his habit ANCIENT CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READof self-restraint.

ERS.*

From St. Pauls.

THE Messrs. Blackwood have announced

and Rome as may open to those who have not received a classical education, or in whose case it has been incomplete and fragmentary, a fair acquaintance with the contents of their writings, and the leading features of their style." Homer has of course been put in the van, and the Iliad and the Odyssey have already been "done" by the Rev. W. Lucas Collins. Herodotus is to be next given to us. And after the Herodotus we are promised Virgil and Horace, the Greek tragedians and Aristophanes, Cicero and Juvenal. Others, we are told, will follow. We now notice the enterprise because we think that if it be well done, it will afford an easy means of removing very common and very dense ignorance as to authors whose names are common in our mouths; and also because Mr. Collins has been remarkably successful with the two great poems attributed to the ancient bard.

We do not care to test the propriety of a duel like this by the ordinary moral law, their intention of bringing out a series of because we know perfectly well that the small volumes with the view of explaining words would fall as dead on our readers' to those who do not read Latin and Greek ears as the words of a clergyman when he what the classics are. "It is proposed," answers a proposition in politics by a text they say in their opening advertisement, from the Sermon on the Mount. They" to give in these little volumes some such would be considered eminently proper, introduction to the great writers of Greece slightly feeble, and entirely beside the point. Everybody would agree that the Duke de Montpensier had contemplated suicide and committed murder, and slightly admire him for the undaunted coolness with which he had contrived to combine in one and the same incident both those offences, offences of which his own conscience was fully aware, for immediately after their perpetration he fainted away from remorse. His moral nerve was proof against everything except the success of the enterprise which he had so carefully prepared, for which he had written a challenge, chosen seconds, written his will, done a hundred acts inconsistent with sudden passion. But we should like to ask how it happens that Continental Radicals so readily condone and even approve these summary executions. Suppose the Duke had been elected, and as Antony of Spain had arrested Prince Henry for his libel, tried him, condemned him to death, and executed him with his own hand, what would have been the result? A yell of execration throughout the Continent, and half-a-dozen attempts to slay the murderer as a justifiable revenge; yet because he has done all this without the trial, there is a roar of applause. What is the moral difference? That the Duke risked his own life all the while? That is the only one, and it just amounts to this that personal courage is an excuse for tyranny, whenever the tyrant is not within his legal right. The Duke illegally inflicted a capital sentence as pun

Mr. Collins, however, under whose superintendence the whole series is to be brought out, has no doubt had his pick and choice, and has chosen well. In describing the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, he has had a tale to tell, and, in each case, a tale which, from its marvellous incidents, can be made almost as interesting in prose to the ordinary reader of English, as it has been in verse, first to those who heard it repeated to them in their vernacular language, and in

by the Rev. W. L. Collins. Messrs. Blackwood and • Ancient Classics for English Readers. Edited Sons, Edinburgh.

latter years to the comparatively few in only they will be careful not to imagine or number who have read Greek, or the hardly to lead others to imagine that because they more numerous class who have made them- have got the little thing, they are therefore selves acquainted with the poems by means in possession also of that which is great. of translation. Both the Iliad and the We may presume that the great world of Odyssey are singularly well adapted for English readers does not read Greek and such work as Mr. Collins has done. The Latin. To find a lady that reads either of stories of Herodotus also, which we call them is rare. May we not almost say, after history, and in which the true and the fab- all that our public schools and universities ulous are delightfully mingled, will afford are supposed to do for us, after the many scope for a narrative, though hardly for one years devoted by so large a number of our so continued as those which Mr. Collins has youths to the learning of Greek and Latin, been able to produce from the long poems that it is not common to find even educated of Homer. But we doubt whether Horace, men who really read the classics. But as and Cicero, and Juvenal, can be reproduced the English world grows older and proand made intelligible in volumes that shall gresses and is improved, thousands of real be as readable as those which we have now readers are every year added to our cusin our hands. The story of the Eneid we tomers for books, who have never gone shall be glad to have. The family woes of through, shall we say the farce or the fact? Edipus, the horrors of Agamemnon and his of learning the two great dead languages. family, the wrongs of Prometheus, and the To all these,—whether they have ever atother old sources of Greek tragedy, may be tempted to learn and yet do not know, or made familiar to many to whom Antigone do not know because they have never atand Ismene, Clytemnestra and Orestes, are tempted to learn, the names of the classic at present merely names. When there is a authors become almost painfully familiar. story to tell, such a volume may be made Homer, Virgil, and Horace, the Greek tragecharming reading. When there is none,- dians, Herodotus, Cicero, and Cæsar,-Horas there will be none in regard to such poets ace and Cicero, perhaps more generally than as Horace and Juvenal, or in treating of any others,-are spoken of in their hearing as the works of a thinker such a Aristotle, authors with whom all the world is acquaintthe description of the authors may be equal-ed. Now we do not agree with the common ly valuable to those who will read it, but acceptation of the proverb which tells us the number of readers will probably be that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. much less. The name of Aristotle has not To read Homer in the original, and to have yet been inserted in the list; but in treat-read it till the grandeur and simplicity of the ing of ancient classics for English readers who do not read Greek or Latin, we presume that Mr. Collins will not omit the works of the philosopher whose thoughts have had more influence on our ways of thinking than have those of any other classic

that has come down to us.

poems have developed themselves, is a very fine thing; but it is not given to every one to get to Corinth. When you cannot see Corinth, it is something to know what Corinth is like, if at the period in which you live Corinth be in much repute. Read some account of Corinth, so that you may understand others when they talk of the fair city,

We do not believe in royal roads to learning, or indeed in royal roads to any great only be careful not to leave suggestions aims. Mr. Collins with his little books will that you have been there, while in truth not teach men and women Greek and Latin, you have not made a journey. Most of us nor will he make them acquainted with the take our Bacon and our Newton, many of poetry or the history or the philosophy of us our Locke and even our Adam Smith, the Greek and Latin writers. Such knowl- second-hand; but we are glad to know, even edge can be obtained only in the old-fash- though it be after a hazy fashion, what it ioned way, by study, till from long study was that those great men did for us. In enjoyment and knowledge will come. But the same way we may be glad to learn,the attainment of such a royal road is not, and to learn, not in a hazy way, but with we imagine, the object intended by these little books. To know what Homer did, to be really acquainted with his work, and to know what it was that he did, are two different things. To have acquired the former knowledge is a great thing. To obtain the latter is but a little thing; but the little thing is worth obtaining, and may be of much value to readers of English,-if VOL. XVII. 744

LIVING AGE.

much perspicuity, the nature and purport and extent of some of the best-known of the old Greek and Latin writers. Of the Greek poets there are no doubt great translations. Homer has been treated magnificently by the translators, and very much has been done to give in English versions the peculiar sweetness and terse happiness of the prince of lyric poets. But the translations