Athens. He thought, however, that his mere ipse dixit might not carry sufficient weight against popular belief. He therefore felt bound to strengthen his case by some sort of argument or other; but he could unluckily find none better than those which he has inserted, and which are among the few weak things in his history. And now for a word on Colonel Mure's translation. That certainly favours his own view, that the point of connection is the "tampering of religious ceremonial" alike by the tyrannicides and by the Hermokopids. But not so the text of Thucydides. Colonel Mure says that the Athenians "had ever been, on occasions of this kind, peculiarly open to suspicion and alarm." "Occasions of this kind" doubtless means "occasions of tampering with religious ceremonial." But Thucydides, like Aristophanes, goes much farther, and accuses them, truly or falsely, of being open to suspicion and alarm, not only on occasions of this kind, but on all occasions: ¿poßeîтo ȧeì kai πάντα ὑπόπτως ἐλάμβανε.* Similarly the second passage given in inverted commas by Colonel Mure in no way represents the corresponding passage of Thucydides. It stands thus: ὧν ἐνθυμούμενος ὁ δῆμος ὁ τῶν ̓Αθηναίων, καὶ μιμνησκόμενος ὅσα ἀκοῇ περὶ αὐτῶν ἠπίστατο, χαλεπὸς ἦν τότε καὶ ὑπόπτης ἐς τοὺς περὶ τῶν μυστικῶν τὴν αἰτίαν λαβόντας, καὶ πάντα αὐτοῖς ἐδόκει ἐπὶ ξυνωμοσίᾳ ολιγαρχικῇ καὶ τυραννικῇ πεπράχθαι. How Colonel Mure can get his English out of the above piece of Greek, we are quite at a loss to conjecture. Nor are these by any means the only, though they are perhaps the most important, instances in which Colonel Mure altogether fails to reproduce either the substance or the manner of Thucydides in the passages which he selects for translation. Thus, with regard to Peisistratus and his sons in this very episode, Thucydides says that the latter τὴν πόλιν αὐτῶν καλῶς διεκόσ unoav, as Herodotus, in the parallel passage,§ had spoken of their father as one who ἐπὶ τοῖς κατεστεῶσι ἔνεμε τὴν πόλιν, KOOμÉWV KAλWS TE Kaì ev. Colonel Mure,|| in both places, translates diexóo uno av and Kooμéwv by "adorned the city beautifully." Surely the verb has nothing to do with the unfinished temple of Olympian Zeus, but with the general character of the Peisistratid government. Surely it means, as Liddell and Scott support us in holding that it means, not that they adorned the city beautifully, but that they ruled the city well. And when he is not thus positively inaccurate, his translations never re† vi. 60. § i. 59. *vi. 53. vi. 54. v. 31. produce in the least degree the style and spirit of the author. Yet it is more especially important that they should do so in a work like the present, in which they are cited directly as literary specimens, and not merely for the sake of the information which they contain. Colonel Mure is particularly careless about those little technicalities of the age, which it is every where desirable to retain. When a modern writer, dealing with a medieval chronicler, translates "Rex Francorum" by "King of France;" when he talks of an emperor of Germany, or converts the 'Papaio of a Byzantine author into Greeks; he is destroying so many touches which express the diplomacy of the age. Colonel Mure is guilty of nearly the same fault when he translates the Mndioμós of Thucydides by "traitorous intercourse with the Persian king. Herodotus and Xenophon, both of them oriental antiquaries, correctly call the dominant Asiatic tribe Persians; Thucydides retains the common phrase of the general Greek public, and speaks of the Medes. A little lower† Thucydides speaks of Пúdvav τὴν ̓Αλεξάνδρου;-Colonel Mure obliterates this characteristic designation, by translating "the Macedonian port of Pydna." Probably the Athenians of the age of Themistokles talked of Alexander and his country much as we now talk of Scindiah and Holkar, or in the same way that "Baldwines land" is the common designation of Flanders in the Saxon Chronicle. Two chapters on, we find in Thucydides the phrase, Mayνnoia τŷ 'Ariavy;-Colonel Mure renders it "Magnesia in Asia Minor." Now here is a twofold error. First of all, Asia Minor is a designation not in use for ages after the time of Thucydides; secondly, this rendering obliterates the accurate geographical precision of the historian. Colonel Mure can hardly need to be told that there are two cities equally answering to his description of Magnesia in Asia Minor," only one of which answers to that of Thucydides, Μαγνησία ἡ ̓Ασιανή. Thucydides means Magnesia in Asia, in the very narrowest sense of that last word, the district near Ephesos. Colonel Mure's description would equally suit the more northern city of Magnesia by Sipylos, from which Thucydides wishes to distinguish it. There are numerous other points in which Colonel Mure, as it seems to us, misunderstands or fails to appreciate either Thucydides or his subject. He is the first writer that we know of who has tried to disparage either the funeral oration of Perikles, or the narrative of the battles in the harbour of Syracuse. Colonel Mure makes himself quite merry+ over the latter, and patches up his case by translating EuvaπoveÚOVTESS by the undignified phrases of "bobbing" or "ducking"! As for the fune§ Thục. vii. 71. v. 155. † Thue. i. 137. pp. 176, 177. ral oration, our sense of Nemesis receives some satisfaction when we find that Colonel Mure, after attacking the opposition between "deeds" and "words" in the oration as a mere vagary of Thucydides, is obliged, in his "Additions and Corrections" to confess that, after all, it is probably really Periklean. We have dwelt so long upon Colonel Mure's treatment of Thucydides, that we have but little space to give to his criticisms on the historical works of Xenophon. But, if we had more, we could do little else than affix a strong stamp of our general approval. The thorough unfairness, and, if the suppressio veri constitutes falsehood, the thorough falsehood of the Xenophontean narrative have never been better set forth than by Colonel Mure. But we must confess that we do not perceive in his Hellenics that vein of Attic patriotism which Colonel Mure recognises, especially in the earlier books. The cold and heartless way in which he records the subjugation of his own country is a strange contrast to the hearty sympathy which he shows for Laconia invaded by Epaminondas. And though we cannot enter upon the question, we adhere to Mr. Grote's view as to the banishment of Xenophon. Colonel Mure makes him out to have been banished while in Asia, without any apparent cause. Mr. Grote holds, and the historian's own text to our mind best confirms his view, that he was not banished till he had been guilty of manifest treason, till he had returned with Agesilaos and fought against his country at Koroneia. But Colonel Mure has opened an important field for consideration with regard to the trustworthiness of the Anabasis. He pointedly asks whether, as Xenophon is universally condemned as unfair in the Hellenics, where he sacrifices truth to the exaltation of his friend, he may not equally in the Anabasis have sacrificed truth to the exaltation of himself? And it is certainly a singular fact that Diodorus, in his succinct narrative of the Return, mentions several other Greck captains by name, but never once mentions Xenophon. Now Diodorus, though extremely stupid, is thoroughly honest, and he had before him many authors whom we have not. If the general testimony of his authorities assigned to Xenophon that prominent place in the Return which he occupies in his own narrative, it seems utterly impossible that his name could have escaped insertion in the Universal History of the laborious Sicilian. We differ from Colonel Mure on many points both critical and historical, and we think that in this particular volume he has undertaken a subject for which he is less qualified than for some others. In so vast a field as Hellenic literature, no one man can be equally at home in every corner. But even where we think Colonel Mure least successful, there is always much to be learned from his suggestive and invariably independent criticisms. His present volume is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the Greek historians; even though we think he has failed to do full justice to the greatest among them. We shall be delighted to meet him again on the neutral ground of lyric and dramatic poetry, as a commentator on Pindar and Eschylus and Aristophanes, possibly as the reviver of Korinna and Phrynichos, of Eupolis and Kratinos. ART. IV.-HASHISH. The Chemistry of Common Life. By J. F. W. Johnston. 1856. 8vo. Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain; or, the Lands of the Saracen. By Bayard Taylor. London, 1855. 8vo. Thèse pour le Doctorat en Médecine: Du Haschisch, son Histoire, ses Effets physiologiques et thérapeutiques. Par J. M. E. Berthault. Paris, 1854. 4to. The Elements of Materia Medica and Therapeutics. By J. Pereira. Fourth Edition. London, 1855. 8vo. The Travels of Marco Polo. Edited by H. Murray. New York, 1845. 8vo. Du Haschisch, et de l'Aliénation mentale. Par J. Moreau. Paris, 1845. 8vo. GOETHE says, "They are not shadows which produce a dream: The phenomena of the human mind, in transient and abnormal states, derive a startling interest from the reflection, that under certain conditions these states may possibly become normal and permanent. At all events, dreams, insanities, opium-visions, moments of poetic and religious ecstasy, and so forth, are revelations of the capacity of the soul for degrees of pain, bliss, and spiritual activity, which life in its ordinary course gives no conception of; and as such, these exaltations and perturbations of the spirit have a significance which no one, who is not wholly absorbed in secular interests, will be disposed to disregard. An apprehension of this significance has, with some nations, surrounded the madman with a divine awe; and has at all times, and with all people, produced a curiosity in the observation of such phenomena, which the ridicule of a material philosophy has not been able to subdue. There are few persons who have not received, in dreams, in moments of religious contemplation, or during some passing gust of unaccountable emotion, such revelations of what they are capable of, for good or evil, as, if they are wise, will be treasured up in their memory as the pearls of their experience. But the higher or deeper these revelations are, the more difficult does it become to retain any effectual impression of them. The poet says of such experiences: "What's that, which, ere I ask'd, was gone So joyful and intense a spark, That, whilst o'er head the wonder shone, That, had the splendour liv'd a year, Did see could not be now more clear. And nothing transient be desired; Has neither memory nor tongue." Very nearly resembling these, for the most part unaccountable and indescribable moods of the spirit, are the states of mind which are sometimes produced in persons of highly intellectual and imaginative constitution, like Coleridge and De Quincey, by the use of narcotics. The states so produced seem generally to have been of a lower, and therefore more communicable, nature than those which arise involuntarily; and we have several brilliantly written records of the "happiness which may be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat-pocket; the portable ecstasies that may be had corked-up in a pint bottle; and the peace of mind that can be sent down in gallons by the mail-coach.” The interest attaching to these states, though inferior, is, however, of the same class and kind; and no one can read the accounts of Coleridge, De Quincey, Bayard Taylor, Dr. Madden, Dr. Moreau, M. Berthault, and others, without an increased sense of the mysteries and capabilities of his spiritual being. The temperament which is susceptible of exaltation by narcotics into a rapturous or vision-beholding condition, seems happily to be rare in northern climates. A predisposing warmth and activity of imagination—a common quality with eastern races, but a rare one with us-is absolutely necessary to enable a man to become an opium-eater" to any purpose. The ordinary effect of the more powerful narcotics upon an Englishman, when they do not make him simply very ill, "is," says Dr. Christison, in his Treatise on Poisons, "merely to remove torpor and sluggishness, and to make him, in the eyes of his friends, an |