vised, with a Translation into Corresponding
Metres, Introduction, and Commentary, by Benjamin Bickley Rogers. (Bell
and Sons.)

[10] Voltaire, by the way, was no admirer of Aristophanes. "Ce poete
comique," said he, "qui n'est ni comique ni poete, n'aurait pas ete
admis parmi nous a donner ses farces a la foire Saint-Laurent." But that
was not because he was indecent, but because to Voltaire, who said much
the same of Shakespeare, he seemed extravagantly incorrect.

[11] Of course this panegyric needs qualification. What panegyric does
not? The Athenians condemned Socrates. Yes ... yes. But, as a statement
of the general belief and, what is more, the practice of Athens, these
rather excited paragraphs may stand.

[12] _Note_: 1918. Though assuredly our satirists hide their light under
a bushel, the tiny flickers do not escape the eyes of our officials. Let
them beware. In 415, after the mutilation of the Hermae, there was a
panic at Athens and a reign of terror instigated by some of the
demagogues. Torture, though contrary to the laws of Athens and to all
Athenian sentiment, was proposed. The proposal was accepted; but when
the moment for execution came the _ecclesia_--the mass meeting of
citizens, that is to say--refused to allow it. Now Pericles would never
have proposed such a thing; neither would Mr. Asquith: but suppose in
these days some more popular and less responsible leader were to back
the project, I wonder whether the English people would decline to follow
him.

TRELAWNY'S LETTERS[13]

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Jan. 1911_]

Any one who has read Trelawny's recollections of Shelley and Byron must
know that their author was something much more considerable than a
friend of the great. Any one who, lured by that enchanting book, has
gone on to the "Adventures of a Younger Son" may be pardoned for
supposing, if we are really to take it for autobiography, that its
author was a stupendous liar. Just what he was--the man who wrote those
enthralling memoirs and that excellent romance--may now be pretty well
made out from this collection of old and new letters put together by Mr.
Buxton Forman.

"Vigour and directness," "transparent honesty and complete
fearlessness," are the qualities that impress this able editor as he
reads the letters of the man who, in his opinion, "was less tainted with
the sordid commercialism and ever-increasing snobbery of that century
[the nineteenth] than almost any man one cou