these posthumously published cantos were written is not
known, but they almost certainly belong to that period of
trouble and disorder in which the poet's closing years were
spent, and were inspired by the apprehension of that
calamitous rising in which the Munster plantation was over-
whelmed and his own fortunes ruined. So read, and it is
impossible for anyone who knows the historical facts to read
them otherwise, they are full of a melancholy personal
significance from the commencement to the close. The
metrical argument prefixed to each canto indicates not
obscurely the motive of the allegory and its application to
the ills of Ireland, while the fact that the scenery of
both cantos is laid in Munster, and that the machinery
moves in the solitudes of the Galtee mountains, is even
more clearly indicative of the poet's meaning and purpose.
'Proud change (not pleased in mortall things
Beneath the moon to reign)
Pretends as well of gods as men
To be the sovereign.'

"Pealing from Jove to Nature's bar
Bold alteration pleads

Large evidence; but Nature soon

Her righteous doom areads.'

The first stanza of Canto VI., with the two stanzas which have alone reached us of the 'unperfite' eighth canto, plainly bespeak the pessimism of the poet in his latter days. Convinced of the ultimate triumph of the principle of constancy in the moral and spiritual world, he yet despairs of witnessing the effective assertion in the actual world in which he moved of the principle of unswerving consistency of purpose and action. These cantos are the dirge of the system of selfish, unprincipled and purposeless methods of government which had lasted through the poet's Irish career, and which were to be replaced, as a result of the anarchy which they inevitably produced, by the very different scheme of administration and of settlement which Spenser did not live to see.

'What man that sees the ever-whirling wheel

Of Change, the which all mortal things doth sway,
But that thereby shall find, and plainly feel

How Mutability in them doth play

Her cruel sports to many men's decay.*

* Canto vi. Stanza i.

When I bethink me of that speech whileare
Of Mutability, and well it way!

Me seems that though she all unworthy were
Of the heavens' rule; yet very sooth to say,
In all things else she bears the greatest sway;
Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle,
And love of things so vain to cast away;
Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle,

Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.

Then 'gin I think on that which Nature said,

Of that same time when no more change shall be,

But steadfast rest of all things, firmly stayed
Upon the pillars of Eternity,

That is contrayr to Mutability:

For all that moveth doth in change delight:
But thenceforth all shall rest eternally

With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight,

O! thou great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabaoth's sight.'

As the larger moral of this concluding portion of Spenser's great poem is plainly to assert the faultiness of the methods of government employed by English statesmen in their dealings with Ireland, so the machinery of the allegory is utilised to indicate its effects in producing or helping to produce the desolation which the resulting anarchy in the Irish provinces had wrought in Munster and in the near neighbourhood of his own home. Of the affection he had grown to feel for Kilcolman and his surroundings abundant references throughout the poem are eloquent. But nowhere is this trait more apparent, though his language in the later reference is charged with melancholy and foreboding, than in the first of these cantos of Mutability,' the scene of which is laid amid the hill and vale of Arlo. After adverting to the old days

'When Ireland flourished in fame Of wealth and goodness far above the rest

Of all that bear the British islands' name, '†

the poet narrates how Cynthia, as 'sovereign queen professed ' of woods and forests,' had chosen Arlo for her home:

'But mongst them all as fittest for her game
(Either for chase of beasts with hound or bow
Or for to shroud in shade from Phoebus flame
Or bathe in fountains that do freshly flow
Or from high hills, or from the dales below)
She chose this Arlo.'‡

Canto viii. Stanzas 1, 2. † Canto vi. Stanza 38.

Stanza 39.

Then after explaining by what offence against her modesty Diana was driven from her loved resort, he gives the picture of its modern desolation:

'Natheless Diana full of indignation,

Thenceforth abandoned her delicious brook,

In whose sweet stream, before that bad occasion,
So much delight to bathe her limbs she took;
Ne only her, but also quite forsook

All those fair forests about Arlo hid;

And all that mountain which doth overlook
The richest champain that may else be rid,

And the fair Shure in which are thousand salmons bred.

Them all, and all that she so dear did way,
Thenceforth she left; and, parting from the place,
Thereon a heavy, hapless curse did lay;

To weet, that wolves, where she was wont to space
Should harboured be, and all those woods deface,
And thieves should rob and spoil that coast around,
Since which, those woods, and all that goodly chase
Doth to this day with wolves and thieves abound:

Which too-too true that lands indwellers since have found.'*

Such and so melancholy are the last references to Ireland to be found in Spenser's verse. It is significant that they are also the last lines of all his poetry that have reached us.

* Stanzas 54-55.

ART. VIII.-HOMER AND HIS COMMENTATORS: A REVIEW OF MODERN RESEARCHES IN THE PREHISTORIC MEDITERRANEAN.

1. Homeri Ilias. BEKKER.

Berol.: 8vo. 1843.

2. The Iliad of Homer. Done into English prose by A. LANG, W. LEAF, and E. MYERS. London: Macmillan. 1883. 3. The Iliad. Edited by W. LEAF. Second edition, 2 vols. London: Macmillan. 1900-1902.

4. Homeri Odyssea. BEKKER. Berol.: 8vo. 1843.

5. The Odyssey of Homer. Done into English prose by S. H. BUTCHER and A. LANG. London: Macmillan. 1888.

6. Homer's Odyssey, XIII-XXIV. Edited by D. B. MONRO. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1901.

7. Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée. 2 vols. By Victor Bérard. VICTOR Paris: Armand Colin. 1902-1903.

8. The Annual of the British School at Athens. No. IX. AT a time when the attention of the English public has

just been rightly called to the successful explorations of Cnossus by Mr. Arthur Evans and his comrades, it may be well to consider the general value and extent of our present knowledge about the Mediterranean in prehistoric ages, and about the Homeric poems which are our chief literary source of information concerning it. The results of some such survey of the position of modern scholarship, however brief it be, should be twofold: for it will appear that no really valuable advance can be registered until we co-ordinate the labours of many various workers and the contributions made by several nations; and it will also become evident that if, in one direction, our conceptions of historic developement must be very widely extended in time, so, in another direction, our criticism of various Homeric descriptions must be radically modified in space. The work of the archæologist, in fact, must be appreciated in its true relation to that of the historian, the geographer, and the literary critic. For any logical unity of interpretation, either of sites or texts, the whole of the materials now before us must be utilised. It will also probably be admitted that destructive methods of criticism are growing out of date, and out of place, in connexion with the Odyssey at any rate. Not only is the poet literally exact

in his description of his hero's wanderings, but every bit of knowledge provided by the antiquarian, by the traveller, by the excavator, can now be added to the proofs of Homer's

accuracy.

There is a note of modern criticism which has been heard almost as much in classical scholarship as in Italian art, and which may roughly be summarised in the question : 'Who among all known or unknown painters may have painted this picture, hitherto universally attributed to N. ?' It seems that as soon as one of these critics observes the more cultivated section of the general public confronted by a literary or artistic masterpiece, undoubtedly ancient, he delights in picking that treasure-trove to pieces, in demonstrating its inferiority, in questioning its authenticity, in belittling its value. The innocent spectator has hitherto been humbly struggling to imagine what manner of man its maker was, and to realise what things he loved to do or sing; but he is forthwith smothered in the trivial pessimism of Slawkenbergius his tribe, who plunge him in a very mist of tortuous verbal commentary, while he longs to breathe the free air of Homer's poetry, or to sail the open seas with Odysseus for his comrade. This does not mean either that all destructive criticism is invariably wrong, or that any criticism which is fruitful must necessarily be constructive. Textual emendation cannot be abolished, nor can it be ever held, again, that the digging and delving of the archæologist is a barren labour. But we think the time has come when broader views of such literary matters as the Homeric Question may be taken with advantage to everyone who cares for poetry or for the ancient civilisations; and therefore we welcome any man who is bold enough to believe his Homer, and to say so, to study him in the open air that inspired him, and to tell us about the Mediterranean he knew.

When Schliemann found what he imagined to be the relics of a historic Agamemnon, he was in reality in much the same position as were Cuvier and his immediate disciples when they dug up the fossils of unknown animals that once had lived. The discoveries of both were, in their way, of great and incontestable value. But those huge and fragmentary vertebras and femurs would alone have taught us little of what they now imply, had not the geologist stepped in to insist that nothing which was found upon or beneath the earth could be explained without some knowledge of the earth itself. Based as they were