to them. It may be safely said that between 1621 and 1648 there were many and very many scholars in Great Britain quite competent to produce the verses in Nova Solyma. But Milton, judging from what he has left us, was not. Of the metres employed in the Romance which are also employed by Milton he has, it may be added, left no examples distinguished by analogous characteristics, while of at least fourteen of them he has left no examples at all. And what applies to the verse applies to the prose. If Milton wrote Nova Solyma he must by Mr. Begley's own admission have written it at, or shortly after, the time he composed the Prolusiones Oratoriae. Whoever will take the trouble to compare the Latinity and prose style of these exercises with the Latinity and prose style of the Romance, even where the similar exercises in it invite comparison, will at once recognize not merely the improbability, but the impossibility of supposing that they could have come from the same pen.

Nor are the poems in the Nova Solyma, as Mr. Begley contends, in any way original or Miltonic compositions. The Philippica is plainly modelled on Fletcher's Locustae; the Hymn to the higher love as well as the Canticum Sacrum quoted on p. 296 of vol. ii are simply echoes of the many expanded imitations of Virgil's Sabian hymn to Hercules, to be found in Vida and many other Christian Latin poets. Indeed, they are plainly modelled on Vida's Hymni De Rebus Divinis. The numerous lyrics are modelled partly on Buchanan's and partly on the Poemata Sacra of Georgius Fabricius, who has, if I am not mistaken, anticipated almost every variety of metre

employed in the Romance, and with the influence of whose lyrics its lyrics are simply saturated.

Mr. Begley's case, indeed, breaks down on every point. The metrical peculiarities which he cites as instances of Milton's careful study of Virgil find, without exception, far more striking illustration in the hexameters of Vida and Sannazarius and of innumerable other Latin poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the parallels and analogies with which his volumes are loaded, he confounds what are mere commonplaces in the writings of Milton's contemporaries with what was peculiar to Milton himself, and as corroborative testimony they simply amount to nothing.

How, then, stands the case? While there is not an iota of external evidence to warrant the ascription of the Romance to Milton, the internal evidence is as conclusive as it is possible for such evidence to be against any such assumption. The author, whoever he was, was a young man of the Puritan persuasion, who was an excellent classical scholar, conversant with the Latin and English romances current in his time, well read in divinity and philosophy, with not much originality, and saturated with the Latin poetry and prose of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And can we doubt, nay, have we not testimony, that many such young men were to to be found both in Scotland and in England at the time this Romance was written?

I repeat, we are indebted to Mr. Begley both for the discovery of a work of singular interest as well as for having presented it in a most attractive shape. His translation, whatever exception may sometimes

be taken to its renderings of the original, is lively and pleasing. His prolegomena, dissertations and notes, are full of curious and entertaining information. What is to be regretted is that so much allowance should have to be made for defects, probably due to the necessity for a sophistical defence of a preconceived theory absolutely untenable.

LONGINUS AND GREEK CRITICISM 1

I

N all the history of literature, there is surely nothing so extraordinary as the fortunes of this treatise. The silence of antiquity about a work so brilliant, so original, and so essentially unlike anything in extant Greek criticism, and about a writer who produced, as he himself tells us, other treatises, presumably of a similar kind, and who must, therefore, have been a man of note among his contemporaries; the difficulty involved in ascribing it to him; the difficulty involved in ascribing it to anyone else; the homage paid so unsuspiciously for upwards of two centuries and a half to the critic to whom it had been so confidently assigned; his sudden dethronement at the beginning of the present century, and the relegation of the treatise to anonymity; the strange vicissitudes through which its reputation has passed; its enormous popularity between about 1674 and 1790; the comparative oblivion into which it seems to have fallen during the revolutionary

1

(1) Longinus on the Sublime. The Greek Text, edited after the Paris Manuscript, with introduction, translation, facsimiles, and appendices. By W. Rhys Roberts, M.A., Cambridge: at the University Press.

(2) Longinus on the Sublime. Translated into English by H. L. Havell, B.A. With an introduction by Andrew Lang. London, Macmillan and Co.

period; the increasing favour with which it is beginning to be regarded now; the voluminous critical literature which has gathered round it, not merely in the form of editorial exegesis and commentary, but in the form of independent disquisitions, monographs, and translations; the extraordinary influence which it has, in different degrees and at different periods, exercised on men of letters and on popular belles lettres; the not less extraordinary indifference with which, though the delight of scholars, it has been, and still is, treated by the Universities and by those who regulate liberal education in England all this gives the Treatise on the Sublime a unique place in literary history and invests it with curious. interest. And its importance is equal to its interest. With the single exception of the Poetics it has probably had more influence on criticism, both directly and indirectly, than any work in the world.

The high appreciation in which it has been held by every civilized country in Europe is sufficiently indicated by the number of editions and translations through which it has passed.

The editio princeps appeared at Basle in 1554; in the following year Paulus Manutius issued a second edition at Venice; then came a third with a Latin version at Geneva, and in 1612 a fourth at the same place. An English scholar of some distinction, whose name is well-known to students of our drama, Gerald Langbaine, followed with an edition printed in 1636 at Oxford, and twice reprinted before 1651. Then came, between 1643 and 1694, editions at Venice, at Bonn, at Saumur, at Utrecht, among them