'O Melicerta, Ino's child, And thou, dear queen of ocean wild, Come, O ye nymphs, Poseidon come; A.P., 6-349. Most of the adventures he records in verse are adventures of the heart. Whether the humour of some of these sufficiently excuses their impropriety is perhaps a matter of taste rather than of morals. Philodemus, who stands midway between Meleager and Strato, is not impeccable on either count. But he is a poet of moods, and as a contrast to his 'vers galants' we may take the graceful lines addressed to the young Lysidice : 'Your virgin clusters still are green, But even now young Cupid takes Fly, hapless lovers, fly ere yet The arrow on the string be set. That burning-I the future know Will yet more fierce and fiercer grow.' A.P., 5-124. Even more charming, and almost worthy of Meleager himself, is the invocation to the moon, Endymion's lover : 'Shine hornéd moon upon our revels bright, We grudge thee naught: that bright immortal eye But Philodemus, even more than Meleager, is an inconstant lover, and his amours, like his verses, are light as air. He deserts one mistress after another and flits like a butterfly from flower to flower. Now it is a married woman he is courting, now a maiden; at one time he sings the charms of the haughty Flora, the darling of the gilded youth of Rome; at another time he descends to an ancillary amour with the waiting woman, Philænis. But he makes a proviso 'I cannot say that she is tall, Her skin is dark, her body small; Sweet is her voice, its magic charm So as she is I'll love her yet A.P., 5-121. In another piece we find Demo and Thermion contesting his vagrant affections and he hesitates to whom to throw his glove. 'By Venus, I can scarcely tell Which is the more desirable.' Yet, when an unnamed mistress ventures to challenge his whims, he is filled with righteous indignation. 'Once I did cry and cry again- Tempt not the anger of my Muse, Nor hate instead of kisses choose. You weep in lonely misery.' A.P., 5-107. He really has no excuse for these vagrant fancies, and so, writing in true Jacobean style, he tries to shelter himself by the example of the divine amorists. 'Fie upon you (people cry), So they say and yet we know If the gods must yield to Love A.P., 5-99. Only the four poems written to Xanthippe show any real feeling, and this perhaps was his final excursion into the ' pays du ' tendre.' 'Full thirty years have passed and gone- Of wisdom's age it warning brings; Come, Muses, quick a finish make, The end of all my madness be.' A.P., 11-41. With this go the charming lines 'To Xanthippe singing': 'When fair Xanthippe strikes the lyre Responsive to the melody. Whence, where, and how my passion came But that it burns with Love's fierce flame A.P., 5-131. Most beautiful of all, with its wonderful accumulation of epithets and its dramatic change of speaker are the verses which now appear in the Anthology among the rhetorical epigrams. 'White waxen cheeks, soft scented breast, " Close shut within a bed of stone Too soon the music ends. Again, A.P., 9-570. Every man deserves to be judged upon his best, not upon his worst performance; and however frivolous Philodemus in some moods may be we surely owe him a debt of gratitude for this exquisite poem. It is usually the custom to speak of him as a licentious and immoral fellow, and certainly he falls very far short of the puritan standard. But his verses in their essence are rather frivolous than corrupt, rather of the school of Suckling than of Congreve, and the virtue that would be injured by a perusal of them must be originally of a rather frail nature. F. A. WRIGHT SEA SURGEONS The Annals of the Barber Surgeons of London. By SIDNEY YOUNG. Blades, East and Blades. 1890. THOSE HOSE who read the fascinating narratives of the voyages of the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, undertaken for purposes of exploration, trade, warfare, or buccaneering-though frequently combining all these objects— must have noticed how often these stories were written by the surgeon of the ship. Occasionally references to the author's duties as ship's surgeon will be met with, but there is little or nothing in such books to tell us what were the professional qualifications, nor what the origin, of these modest writers. In attempting to discover more about these sea-faring surgeons we are met by a woeful silence. But the writer of these lines has been able to glean a little useful information from the annals of the Barber-Surgeons Company, which were printed in a rare and cumbersome volume by Mr. Sidney Young. Possibly if search could be made in the records of the Admiralty many other useful and interesting facts would be forthcoming. The earliest mention of military or naval affairs occurs in the minute book of the court of the Company of Barber-Surgeons for the year 1556 when on March 26th Thomas Knot, master of the Company, made humble suit to the Lord Mayor, praying for exemption of the company from having to supply soldiers and sailors in time of war 'fforasmoche as the same Company are always at every such tyme and tymes very sore burdened and chardged' as 'the same Company doe always prepare and send 'furthe for every one houndreth of suche Souldyers, one Surgeon ' and a man attending him.' The man to attend the surgeon was of course his mate, or orderly, who assisted him at his operations, besides undertaking the services, when required, of a barber. This ratio of surgeons to soldiers seems to be a high one when we remember that at the present day an infantry battalion of, say, a thousand men, has but one medical officer attached to it, even when on active service. But in France (at the time of the great activity of the corsairs) a century later, the law demanded that no privateersman carrying a crew of more than eighteen should leave a French port on any expedition |