You've heard, I suppose, long ago,

How the snakes in a manner most antic

He marched to the County Mayo,

And trundled them into th' Atlantic.
Hence not to use water for drink

The people of Ireland determine;

With mighty good reason, I think,

Since St. Patrick had filled it with vermin,

And vipers, and other such stuff.

Oh, he was an elegant blade

As you'd meet from Fair Head to Kilcrumper;

And though under the sod he is laid,

Yet here goes his health in a bumper!

I wish he was here, that my glass

He might by art magic replenish;

But as he is not, why, alas!

My ditty must come to a finish-
Because all the liquor is out!

I'

SONG OF THE SEA

"Woe to us when we lose the watery wall!» — TIMOTHY TICKLER.

F E'ER that dreadful hour should come - but God avert the day!— When England's glorious flag must bend, and yield old Ocean's

sway;

When foreign ships shall o'er that deep, where she is empress, lord; When the cross of red from boltsprit-head is hewn by foreign sword; When foreign foot her quarter-deck with proud stride treads along; When her peaceful ships meet haughty check from hail of foreign tongue :

One prayer, one only prayer is mine,- that ere is seen that sight, Ere there be warning of that woe, I may be whelmed in night!

If ever other prince than ours wield sceptre o'er that main,
Where Howard, Blake, and Frobisher the Armada smote of Spain;
Where Blake, in Cromwell's iron sway, swept tempest-like the seas,
From North to South, from East to West, resistless as the breeze;
Where Russell bent great Louis's power, which bent before to none,
And crushed his arm of naval strength, and dimmed his Rising Sun:
One prayer, one only prayer is mine,- that ere is seen that sight,
Ere there be warning of that woe, I may be whelmed in night!

If ever other keel than ours triumphant plow that brine, [line;
Where Rodney met the Count de Grasse, and broke the Frenchman's
Where Howe upon the first of June met the Jacobins in fight,
And with old England's loud huzzas broke down their godless might;
Where Jervis at St. Vincent's felled the Spaniards' lofty tiers,
Where Duncan won at Camperdown, and Exmouth at Algiers:
One prayer, one only prayer is mine,-that ere is seen that sight,
Ere there be warning of that woe, I may be whelmed in night!

But oh! what agony it were, when we should think on thee,
The flower of all the Admirals that ever trod the sea!

I shall not name thy honored name; but if the white-cliffed Isle
Which reared the Lion of the deep, the Hero of the Nile,—
Him who 'neath Copenhagen's self o'erthrew the faithless Dane,
Who died at glorious Trafalgar, o'ervanquished France and Spain,-
Should yield her power, one prayer is mine,—that ere is seen that
sight,

Ere there be warning of that woe, I may be whelmed in night!

JOHN PENTLAND MAHAFFY

(1839-)

OHN PENTLAND MAHAFFY is conspicuous among contemporary

Greek scholars and historians for devoting himself less to the study of the golden age of the Greek intellect than to the post-Alexandrian period, when the union of Greece with the Orient produced the Hellenistic world. It is in this highly colored, essentially modern world of decadent Greek energy that Professor Mahaffy is most at home, and in which he finds the greatest number of parallels to the civilization of his own day. He is disposed indeed to link England and Ireland, through their political life, to the Athens and Sparta of the third century before Christ, and to find precedents in the Grecian republics for democratic conditions in the United States. In the opening chapter of his Greek Life and Thought,' after dwelling upon the hostile attitude of Sparta and Athens towards the Macedonian government, he adds, "But we are quite accustomed in our own day to this Home-Rule and Separatist spirit."

J. P. MAHAFFY

It is this intimate manner of approaching a far-off theme that gives to Professor Mahaffy's work much of its interest. He is continually translating ancient history into the terms of modern life. "Let us save ancient history," he writes, "from its dreary fate in the hands of the dry antiquarian, the narrow scholar; and while we utilize all his research and all his learning, let us make the acts and lives of older men speak across the chasm of centuries and claim kindred with the men and motives of to-day. For this and this only is to write history in the full and real sense.»

Whatever the merits of his scholarship, Professor Mahaffy has adhered closely to his ideal of a historian. He has a thorough grasp upon the spirit of that period for which he has the keenest appreciation, and which he is able to present to his readers with the greatest clearness and vividness of color and outline. It is true, doubtless, as he says, that the exclusive attention paid by modern scholars to the

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age of spotless Atticism has overshadowed that Oriental-Hellenistic world which rose after Alexander sank. The majority of persons know little of that rich life of decaying arts and flourishing philosophies, and strangely modern political and social conditions, which had its centres in Alexandria and Antioch. It is of this that Professor Mahaffy writes familiarly in his 'Greek Life and Thought,' and in his 'Greek World under Roman Sway.' He succeeds in throwing a great deal of light upon this period of history; less perhaps through sheer force of scholarship than through his happy faculty of finding a family relationship in the poets, philosophers, statesmen, and kings of a long-dead world. What he may lose as a "pure scholar» he thus gains as a historian.

In his classical researches, he has profited greatly by his acquaintance with German investigations in this field. Although of Irish parentage, he was born in Switzerland in 1839, and the roots of his education were fixed in the soil of German scholarship. His subsequent residence at Trinity College, Dublin, as professor of ancient history, has by no means weaned him from his earlier educational influences. He attaches the utmost importance to the thorough-going spirit of the German Grecians. He makes constant use of their discoveries. Nevertheless Professor Mahaffy is more of a sympathetic Irish historian or historical essayist than a strict Greek scholar after the German pattern. He is at his best when he is writing of the social side of Hellenistic life. His 'Greek Life and Thought,' his 'Greek World under Roman Sway,' his 'Survey of Greek Civilization,' his 'Social Life in Greece,' show keen insight into the conditions which governed the surface appearances of a world whose colors have not yet faded. This world of Oriental sensuousness wedded to Greek intelligence, this world which began with Demosthenes and Alexander and ended with Nero and St. John, seems to Professor Mahaffy a more perfect prototype of the modern world than the purer Attic civilization which preceded it, or the civilization of Imperial Rome which followed it.

Like the majority of modern Greek scholars, Professor Mahaffy has engaged in antiquarian research upon the soil of Greece itself. His 'Rambles and Studies in Greece,' a work of conversational charm, shows not a little poetical feeling for the memories that haunt the living sepulchre of a great dead race.

Other works of Professor Mahaffy include 'Problems in Greek History, Prolegomena to Ancient History,' 'Lectures on Primitive Civilization,' 'The Story of Alexander's Empire,' 'Old Greek Life,' and the History of Classical Greek Literature.' His value as a historian and student of Greek life lies mainly in his power of suggestion, and in his original and fearless treatment of subjects usually

approached with the dreary deference of self-conscious scholarship. His revelation of the same human nature linking the world of two thousand years ago to the world of the present day, has earned for his Greek studies deserved popularity.

W*

CHILDHOOD IN ANCIENT LIFE

From Old Greek Education'

FIND in Homer, especially in the Iliad, indications of the plainest kind that Greek babies were like the babies of modern Europe: equally troublesome, equally delightful to their parents, equally uninteresting to the rest of society. The famous scene in the sixth book of the Iliad, when Hector's infant, Astyanax, screams at the sight of his father's waving crest, and the hero lays his helmet on the ground that he may laugh and weep over the child; the love and tenderness of Andromache, and her pathetic laments in the twenty-second book,-are familiar to all. She foresees the hardships and unkindnesses to her orphan boy, "who was wont upon his father's knees to eat the purest marrow and the rich fat of sheep, and when sleep came upon him, and he ceased his childish play, he would lie in the arms of his nurse, on a soft cushion, satisfied with every comfort." So again, a protecting goddess is compared to a mother keeping the flies from her sleeping infant; and a pertinacious friend, to a little girl who, running beside her mother, begs to be taken up, holding her mother's dress and delaying her, and with tearful eyes keeps looking up till the mother denies her no longer. These are only stray references, and yet they speak no less clearly. than if we had asked for an express answer to a direct inquiry. So we have the hesitation of the murderers sent to make away with the infant Cypselus, who had been foretold to portend danger to the Corinthian Herods of that day. The smile of the baby unmans or should we rather say unbrutes?- the first ruffian, and so the task is passed on from man to man. This story in Herodotus is a sort of natural Greek parallel to the great Shakespearean scene, where another child sways his intended torturer with an eloquence more conscious and explicit, but not perhaps more powerful, than the radiant smile of the Greek baby. Thus Euripides, the great master of pathos, represents Iphigenia bringing her infant brother Orestes to plead for her. with that