across the fashionable game of the race-course. The first catching of your boy is in itself a work of no small intricacy, for the Act prescribes that the committing judge or magistrate, at ten minutes' notice (or, if the boy pleads guilty, at one), shall decide not only that he is a fit subject for a reformatory school, but that he shall be sent to school A, school B, or school C, while, on the other hand, the managers of A, B, and C, are clearly informed that they need not take any given boy unless they choose. The result may be, that the boy is sentenced to school A, that the managers refuse him, the school perhaps being full, and that the sentence fails altogether, though B and C may both have vacancies and be ready to accept the offender. This anomaly was pointed out last session, and Mr. Adderley introduced a bill to correct it, which the Government refused to support, apparently because they could not bring themselves to believe that such a dead lock really existed in the law. They will probably have discovered the truth by the coming session. Another matter, which should be attended to, is, the giving greater facilities to school committees to exchange boys. If two schools be equally licensed, it cannot signify to the Government whether the weekly allowance for the convict John Smith be paid to the one or to the other. It is true that an exchange may be accomplished by means of an appeal to the Secretary of State; but the occasions for these steps arise sometimes suddenly, and the three or four weeks' delay, which the reference to the Home Office involves, may make the whole difference. a case within our knowledge, a boy, who was about to be removed from a school which had not the means of controlling him, to another where much more efficient control could have been exercised, ran away two days before the order of exchange arrived, and succeeded in concealing himself for a considerable time. In Lastly, it seems reasonable that if the schools are to be left on the present footing, the weekly allowance (of 5s. a-head) should be somewhat increased. While the private system is continued, the Government cannot be expected to grant public money for the erection of buildings or other purposes which involve the sinking of capital; but when we see that these institutions have become a recognised appendage to our criminal code, it seems. only just that the current expenses should be mainly defrayed by the public instead of by individuals. Five shillings a-week at present prices is not quite sufficient to pay for the board and clothing of a boy in establishments conducted on a small scale; and we believe that, in order to make a school thoroughly efficient, very nearly as much more will have to be laid out in salaries of masters, and other current expenses. The cost per head in little schools is of course much greater than in large ones, and the comparative economy of the latter may perhaps lead in due time to their general adoption by the State, and to the introduction of Government management: but while the present system is under trial, it is bad policy to starve it, and we believe that it would be well worth the while of the Government to increase the present allowance (say) to 7s. a-week for each boy, which would pretty satisfactorily meet the exigencies of the case. These are, we believe, the chief points upon which the managers of reformatories are likely to require aid; but there still remains one, which, though not directly affecting them, is of paramount importance to the success of the whole system, and which has hitherto been but imperfectly attended to. We allude to the provision for compelling parents to pay something towards their children's maintenance. It cannot be denied by the most ardent supporters of the reformatory cause, that there is considerable force in the objection that the advantages which the schools offer to young offenders are such as to render it probable that parents may be encouraged to neglect their children, and to allow them to run into mischief, in the hope that they will ultimately be taken off their hands. We do not say they would deliberately encourage them to commit serious crimes, but, as the law now stands, a simple act of vagrancy may be made to serve as a basis for commitment to school, and a benevolent pair of magistrates who see John Stokes' children running wild, never going to school, and often getting into scrapes, are likely enough to take advantage of some trifling peccadillo to send one or two of them to an establishment where they will be clothed, fed, and instructed in industrial arts as well as in book-learning, at no expense whatever to John Stokes himself, and much to the benefit of their own parish or neighbourhood: whereas if the committal of the children to the school were accompanied by an order on John Stokes to pay a couple of shillings a-week for their maintenance, and if that order were punctually enforced, other parents in the neighbourhood would calculate whether it would not be cheaper after all to send their own boys to the National School, and keep them from becoming chargeable in so unpleasant a way; and if this be so in country districts, still more would it be the case in London and the large towns, where wages are higher and children more neglected. Mettray and its system have done great good in France; but, for want of such a provision as this, the number of committals of young offenders has undoubtedly increased since its establish ment. ment.* There are but two ways of checking this tendency. The one is to afford to the children of the honest poor the same advantages of industrial training, &c., as we afford to our young thieves, without compelling them to serve an apprenticeship in crime for the purpose of obtaining them. This plan, we fear, is greatly in advance of the opinion of the day. The other is to enforce parental responsibility by enforcing the law with regard to the contributions of the parents; and this, as the more feasible of the two, we hope to see carried into effect without loss of time, and in a thoroughly earnest manner. ART. III.-1. Ménandre: Étude Historique et Littéraire. Par 2. Essai Historique et Littéraire sur la Comédie de Ménandre. Par Ch. Benoît. Ouvrage couronné par l'Académie Française. Paris, 1854. SOME OME forty or fifty years ago, if in a company of scholars and accomplished readers it had been put to the vote what work of all the lost treasures of ancient letters they would most rejoice to see retrieved from oblivion, the general acclamation would have been for a comedy of Menander. Now perhaps, besides those who would at once give their suffrage for the later books of Livy or of Tacitus, or the writings of some of the Greek philosophers known to us but by fame, there would be some who have studied Greek poetry with more intimate knowledge and finer perceptions of its excellence, who might prefer the remains of the tender-hearted Simonides; those Dithyrambics of Pindar, to which the odes which we possess were esteemed but feeble and lifeless lyrics; something more of Archilochus or of Sappho ; or the rest of the Promethean trilogy, or the Niobe or Bacchic tragedies of Eschylus. Yet Menander would still have many voices. The fame of the last of the Attic poets, the crowning glory of the Grecian stage, in his own day contested by more successful rivals, cut short by premature death (he was drowned while bathing in the Piræus at the age of fifty-two, though not before he had produced above a hundred plays), went on increasing in lustre, and has left an unbroken tradition of his transcendent excellence. All the later Greek writers might seem to vie with each other in This appears from the Criminal Returns. It does not prove an increase in juvenile crime so much as in juvenile commitments, many children being now brought to justice who would formerly have been allowed to go free; but even so, the result is unsatisfactory. extolling extolling his name. Plutarch wrote a feeble and singularly unintelligent comparison of Menander with Aristophanes, asserting decidedly the superiority of Menander, and Plutarch was long held of high authority even in such matters. The Roman comedy seemed to be excellent, almost in proportion as it was avowedly borrowed or translated from Menander. Plautus, with his genuine and original humour, when he leaned towards the Sicilian comedy of Epicharmus, more kindred perhaps to the native Italian farce, was heard with less favour, and held more rude and barbarous than when he followed Menander. Terence, who did hardly more than transpose or mould up two plays of Menander into one, whom throughout the lower Latin period, and deep into the middle ages, the Christian writers, churchmen, monks, and even holy abbesses (witness the theatre of Hroswitha), attempted to exorcise from the study of their disciples, with but feeble success-Terence could not but keep alive the fame of his lost prototype. The Greek Fathers (though it was Aristophanes who was said, from his pure Atticism, to have been cherished upon the pillow of St. Chrysostom) could not suppress their regret at the stern proscription with which themselves had doomed to oblivion what should have been, and but for their fatal influence had been, the imperishable works of the great comic writer. No one is ignorant how much more powerful was their proscription than their lingering respect; no scholar but knows how scanty, mutilated, and imperfect are the few fragments which survive of the hundred comedies of Menander. Yet why they have so entirely perished may seem almost unaccountable. By what caprice of what we must confess to esteem good fortune have we eleven plays of the coarser, no doubt, but we scruple not to say more truly great comic poet, Aristophanes-of all later writers of Attic comedy not one? Aristophanes, it might have been supposed, would have been doomed to inevitable oblivion, for the very reasons which-in addition to his wild fancy, his boundless fun, his broad but exquisite satire, his true Athenian democratic boldness, his language of such infinite pliancy, yet such perfect purity, the unrivalled harmony of his verse—make his works invaluable to us,-for the fullness, namely, of local and temporary allusion, and his almost utter incomprehensibility to those unacquainted, or not intimately acquainted, with Athenian laws, institutions, and manners. How did Aristophanes survive, and not merely himself, but with him his satellites the Scholiasts, who alone shed light on his dark places? The later Greek Fathers can hardly have had the courage or the taste attributed to Chrysostom. Who can appreciate or understand Aristophanes, who knows little ог or nothing of Pericles, Cleon, Nicias; of Æschylus and Euripides; of Socrates and the Sophists? But Menander wrote from common universal nature, of hard or doting fathers, gay and dissolute sons, misers, self-tormenters, parasites, sycophants, crafty and unprincipled slaves; even if his more questionable characters, his Hetæræ, his lenones, were more peculiar to Athenian society, and to the manners of his own day. In him there was little which could become of necessity obsolete, and require the elucidating commentary. His plays seem to have been acted to the time of Plutarch; at convivial banquets they were held to be as indispensable as wine. But whatever may be the truth in the tradition preserved by a late writer (Alcyonius de Exilio) who had heard from Demetrius Chalcondyles that the Greek priests prevailed on the Byzantine Emperors to order the poems of Menander, Philemon, Sappho, Mimnermus, Alcæus, and other poets, to be burned, and that the poems of Gregory of Nazianzum should be substituted in their place in the schools, we fear, notwithstanding the prophecy of Ovid as to the perpetuity of Menander's poetry— 'Cum fallax servus, durus pater, improba lena, Vixerit, et meretrix blanda, Menander erit'— that roguish slaves and harsh fathers, to say nothing of those of worse repute, subsisted in Constantinople long after Menander had ceased to fill the theatre and amuse the banquet. As to the theatre, it was not, perhaps, so much religious, austere, and chaste Christianity which closed the stage against the lofty tragedy and the gay comedy of the ancients, as the rivalry of more turbulent, exciting, and sensual amusementsthe chariot-races, with their blue and green factions, whose victories shook the throne of Justinian; and those more coarse and voluptuous exhibitions, the mimes and pantomimes, in which the Empress Theodora is said, in her youth, to have attained such infamous celebrity. How long the written Menander survived the acted Menander it is impossible to determine; the few fragments which survive by no means prove the existence of his works at the time of the writers who cite them. There was a long and constant tradition of these collectors of gnomæ, or striking and proverbial sentences; of grammarians who chronicled remarkable words; of Christian writers who handed down to each other lines of moral beauty in which they were pleased to Aristophanis et Menandri Comparatio,' edit. Reiske, iv. p. 391. † · ὡς μᾶλλον ἂν οἴνου χωρὶς ἢ Μενάνδρου διακυβερνῆσαι τὸν πότον.—Sympos. viii. 3. One of these, it must be remembered, was a grammarian of the XVth, the other a printer of the XVIth century. F 2 find |