in which the writer speaks of the αστυ Κωρύκιον and the αμφιρύτη Ἐλεοῦσα,” both of which were in Cilicia, as ἡμετέρης πάτρης. On the other hand, there is a passage in the "Kunegetica" which would appear to be conclusive as to the identity of authorship. It is that in which the poet (v. 77 to 80) makes his excuses to Nereus, Amphitrite and the Dryads, that quitting them—that is, quitting the subjects of fishing and fowling--he is now about to devote himself to the hunting deities, δαίμοσι θηροφόνοισι ηαλίντροπος. Schneider meets this apparently conclusive evidence by the ingenious suggestion-for which, however, he adduces no authority-that the "Halieutica," having been first written by the Cilician Oppian, the other author, on taking up the cognate subjects, adopted his name; or, if of the same name, sought to represent himself as the same writer. Schneider further supports his view as to the non-identity of the author of the one poem with that of the other by reference to the style of the two; that of the "Kunegetica" being in his view vastly inferior to that of the other poem. Indeed, while he describes the "Halieutica" 66 as elegans et concinnum, et satis puro sermone conscriptum," the other poem, in his estimation, is "durum, inconcinnum, forma tota incompositum, sæpissima ab ingenio, usu, et analogia Græcia sermonis abhorrens." On this point again modern critics are divided. Some, though they may not go so far as Schneider in depreciating the merits of the "Kunegetica," agree in thinking the style of this poem inferior to that of the "Halieutica." Others, as is done by a learned writer in an able analysis of the "Kunegetica," in the Metropolitan Magazine, extol the work as a poem, and refer to passages not wholly devoid of poetical beauty. As if to make the matter still more perplexing, the author of the anonymous life of Oppian, treating, as has just been said, the "Kunegetica" as the work of the Cilician Oppiaus, tells a story-on what authority we know not-that the author having been admitted to read his poems before the Emperor Severus and his son Antoninus, better known as Caracalla, to whom (then just nominated Cæsar) the poems were addressed, the emperor was so pleased with them that he, at the poet's request, recalled his father from banishment to which he had been condemned, and ordered him to receive a golden stater (about 15s. 6d.) for every verse. If the fact really happened, which of the two poets was it to whom this bit of luck occurred?— the Cilician, who was not the author of the "Kunegetica," or the author of the "Kunegetica," who was not the Cilician? Some learned critics, however, treat this story as unworthy of belief, contending that the Γαίης υπατου κρατος Αυτωνίνεto whom the poem is addressed, is not Caracalla, but Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, and that the several allusions in the poem to the son of the person addressed refer to Commodus, and not to Caracalla, which is the more probable from the fact that Caracalla had, so far as is known, no son. The learning on this somewhat curious and controverted subject is to be found well condensed in an article on Oppianus in that abundant and admirable repository of classical knowledge, Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, to which every lover of classical literature and lore is under great and enduring obligation. An argument in favor of the identity of authorship, and which deserves to be mentioned here, may be found in the extraordinary admixture of fable with fact which characterizes both poems. But it occurs to us that the argument founded on this coincidence is met by the fact that the fabulous matter in both poems is in all probability derived from the same sources, namely, the works on Natural History which existed at this period, the principal ones being-at least of those which have come down to us-first, the "Indica" of Ctesias, who, of all the writers whom "Græcia mendax" has produced, may safely be pronounced to be among the most "audacious," seeing that he declares the outrageous absurdities he narrates as having come within his own personal knowledge when in the East, or as having been communicated to him by persons who had seen what he describes; secondly, the Natural History of Pliny, who, in his chapters on zoology, has mixed up with zoological facts a series of idle stories and statements revolting to common sense, which it is astonishing that a man who enjoyed the reputation of being the most learned of the Romans could possibly have entertained; and thirdly, the "De Natura Animalium" of Elian, who wrote some half century later, and for whose power of intellectual deglutition nothing appears to have been too gross, and who, though he professes to be a philosopher, and ¿paorns aanias, exhibits, if we are to give him credit for intended truthfulness, a degree of credulity as wonderful as some of his own stories. We have not included Aristotle in this category of authors, his work being a treatise on the anatomy and physiology of animals and as such, a prodigy of knowledge and research, if looked at with reference to the time at which it was composed, and the then state of science on such subjects rather than as professing to enumerato the various kinds of animals, or to give a description of animals or their habits. Nor does the great philosopher condescend to indulge in fable, citing the mendacious Ctesias only twice or thrice, and then either throwing the whole responsibility of the statement on the latter by the introductory words, "if we are to believe Ctesias," or declaring Ctesias to be untrustworthy-ουκ αξιοπιστος ων.* *Neither have we included Solinus, probably the greatest gobemouche of all these authors-partly because, though the time at which he wrote is uncertain, there is every reason to think it must have been considerably later than the epoch at which we have arrived; partly because we look on him for the most part as only the servile copyist of Pliny, whose statements he constantly repeats, ipsissimis cerbis, without any acknowledgement. It would not be just to impute to Pliny, or perhaps even to Ælian, the invention of the monstrous things they tell us of. Between the time of Ctesias and that of Pliny, Megasthenes and many other authors, both Greek and Roman, whose works have not come down to us, had written on the history or the geography of Africa and the East, and it seems to have been the practice of all these authors to endeavor to make their works attractive by the introduction of the marvelous, sometimes of their own invention, sometimes existing in popular tradition. sometimes told them by the natives, who, there can be little doubt, amused themselves by imposing on the easy belief of the credulous foreigner. Pliny frequently makes a point of citing the writer on whose authority he makes a statement, leaving the reader to form his own judgment. But it appears pretty plain that, in most instances, his own belief goes along with the story, however repugnant to common sense. As there can be little doubt that the authors on hunting derived their ideas as to the nature of the wild animals, the pursuit of which they were describing, from the works of the natural historians who had preceded them, it becomes matter of some interest, not only with reference to the subject we are dealing with, but also in a scientific point of view, to see what were the notions of the zoologists of those times on the subject. But we have already exceeded our limit, and must reserve this matter to our next.-A. E. COCKBURN, in The Nineteenth Century. The sudden and lamented death of Sir GEORGE ELIOT'S ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. WE return to the novels of "George Eliot" with the old fascination, softened and deepened by the thought that we have read the last line that will even be written by this extraordinary novelist Such minds are rare growths. We shall never see, we certainly have never yet seen, her equal in the analysis of motives by means of fiction. In "unraveling certain human lots and seeing how they aro woven and interwoven" she has done what no other novelist has done, or could have done. Her novels are without precedent or parallel as studies in motives. If you say the telling of a story is her forte you put her below Wilkie Collins or Mrs. Oliphant; if you say her object is to give a picture of English society, she is surpassed by Bulwer and Trollope; if she be called a satirist of society, Thackeray is her superior; if she intends to illustrate the absurdity of behavior, she is eclipsed by Dickens; but, if the analysis of human motives be her forte and art, she stands first, and it is very doubtful whether any artist in fiction is entitled to stand second. She reaches clear in and touches the most secret and the most delicate spring of human action. She has done this so well, so apart from the doing of everything else, and so, in spite of doing some other things indifferently, that she works on a line quite her own, and quite alone, as a creative artist in fiction. Others have done this incidentally and occasionally, as Charlotte Bronté and Walter Scott, but George Eliot does it elaborately, with laborious painstaking, with purpose aforethought. Scott said of Richardson: "In his survey of the heart he left neither head, bay, nor inlet behind him, until he had traced its soundings, and laid it down in his chart with all its minute sinuosities, its depths and its shallows." This is too much to say of Richardson, but it is not too much to say of George Eliot. She has sounded depths and explored sinuosities of the human heart which were utterly unknown to the author of "Clarissa Harlowe." It is like looking into the translucent brook-you see the wriggling tad, the darting minnie, the leisurely trout, the motionless pike, while in the bays and inlets you see the infusoria and animalcula as well. George Eliot belongs to, and is the greatest of the school of artists in fiction who write fiction as a means to an end, instead of as an end. And, while she may not be a first-class story-teller, considered simply as a story-teller, her novels are a striking illustration of the power of fiction as a means to an end. They remind us as few other stories do of the fact that however inferior the story may be considered simply as a story, it is indispensable to the delineation of character. No other form of composition, no discourse, or essay, or series of independent sketches, however successful, could succeed in bringing out character equal to the novel. Herein is at once the justification of the power of fiction. "He spake a parable,' with an "end" in view which could not be so expeditiously attained by any other form of address. A story of the first-class with the story as end in itself, and a story of the first-class told as a means to an end, has never been, and it is not likely ever will be, found together. The novel with a purpose is fatal to the novel written simply to excite by a plot, or divert by pictures of scenery, or entertain by a panorama of social life. So intense is George Eliot's desire to dissect the human heart and dis cover its motives, that plot, diction, situations, and even consistency in the vocabulary of the characters, are all made subservient to it. With her it is not so much that the characters do thus and so, but why they do thus and so. Dickens portrays the behavior, George Eliot dissects the motive of the behavior. Here comes the human creature, says Dickens, now let us see how he will behave. Here comes the human creature, says George Eliot, now let us see why he behaves. 'Suppose," she says, "suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder with keener interest what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings, with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors, and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which may one day be too heavy for him and bring his heart to a final pause.' The outside estimate is the work of Dickens and Thackeray and Walter Scott, the inside estimate is the work of George Eliot. 66 Observe in the opening pages of the great novel of "Middlemarch how soon we pass from the outside dress to the inside reasons for it, from the costume to the motives which control it and color it. It was "only to close observers that Celia's dress differed from her sister's, and had "a shade of coquetry in its arrangements." Dorothea's plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared." They were both influenced by "the pride of being ladies," of belonging to a stock not exactly aristocratic, but unquestionably "good." The very quotation of the word good is significant and suggestive. There were "no parcel-tying forefathers" in the Brooke pedigree. A Puritan forefather, "who served under Cromwell, but afterward conformed and managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate," had a hand in Dorothea's "plain" wardrobe. 'She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery," but Celia "had that common sense which is able to accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation." Both were examples of "reversion." Then, as an instance of heredity working itself out in character "in Mr. Brooke, the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly in abeyance, but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults and virtues." Could anything be more natural than for a woman with this passion for, and skill in, "unraveling certain human lots," to lay herself out upon the human lot of woman, with all her "passionate patience of genius?" One would say this was inevitable. And, for a delineation of what that lot of woman really is, as made for her, there is nothing in all literature equal to what we find in "Middlemarch," ,""Daniel Deronda," and "Janet's Repentance." Romola," 66 She was a woman, and could not make her own lot." Never before, indee 1, was so much got out of the word "lot." Never was the little word |