The first is from the Conversation between Lord Brooke and Sir Philip Sidney, who are walking together in the woods at Penshurst:

Brooke :

What a hum of satisfaction in God's creatures! How is it, Sidney, the smallest do seem the happiest ?

Sidney: Compensation for their weaknesses and their fears; compensation for the shortness of their existence. Their spirits mount upon the sunbeam above the eagle; and they have more enjoyment in their one summer than the elephant in his century.

Brooke Are not also the little and lowly in our species the most happy?

Sidney: I would not willingly try nor over-curiously examine it. We, Greville, are happy in these parks and forests ; we were happy in my close winter-walk of box and laurustine. In our earlier days did we not emboss our bosoms with the daffodils, and shake them almost unto shedding with our transport? Ay, my friend, there is a greater difference, both in the stages of life and in the seasons of the year, than in the conditions of men; yet the healthy pass through the seasons, from the clement to the inclement, not only reluctantly but rejoicingly, knowing that the worst will soon finish, and the best begin anew; and we are desirous of pushing forward into every stage of life, excepting that alone which ought reasonably to allure us most, as opening to us the Via Sacra, along which we move in triumph to our eternal country.

The second is from the Conversation between Aesop and Rhodope:

Rhodope:

that is untrue.

Aesop, you should never say the thing

Aesop: We say and do and look no other all our lives.
Rhodope: Do we never know better?

Aesop: Yes; when we cease to please, and to wish it; when death is settling the features, and the cerements are ready to render them unchangeable.

Rhodope: Alas! alas!

Aesop Breathe, Rhodope! Breathe again those painless

sighs; they belong to thy vernal season. May thy summer of life be calm, thy autumn calmer, and thy winter never come!

Rhodope: I must die then earlier.

Aesop Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of

Jupiter, went before. It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late; better than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under us, and to protract an inevitable fall. We may enjoy the present while we are insensible of infirmity and decay: but the present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come. There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave; there are no voices, O Rhodope, that are not soon mute, however tuneful; there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.

The last is the praise of trees of which I spoke just Landor is speaking:

now.

66

Ah, Don Pepino! old trees in their living state are the only things that money cannot command. Rivers leave their beds, run into cities, and traverse mountains for it; obelisks and arches, palaces and temples, amphitheatres and pyramids, rise up like exhalations at its bidding; even the free spirit of Man, the only thing great on earth, crouches

and cowers in its presence. It passes away and vanishes

before venerable trees. What a sweet odor is here!—whence comes it ?-sweeter it appears to me and stronger than of the pine itself."

"I imagine," said he, "from the linden; yes, certainly." "Is that a linden? It is the largest, and I should imagine

the oldest upon earth, if I could perceive that it had lost any of its branches."

66

'Pity that it hides half the row of yon houses from the palace! It will be carried off with the two pines in the autumn."

"O Don Pepino!" cried I; "the French, who abhor whatever is old and whatever is great, have spared it; the Austrians, who sell their fortresses and their armies, nay, sometimes their daughters, have not sold it: must it fall? How many fond and how many lively thoughts have been nurtured under this tree! How many kind hearts have beaten here! Its branches are not so numerous as the couples they have invited to sit beside it, nor its blossoms and leaves as the expressions of tenderness it has witnessed. What appeals to the pure all-seeing heavens, what similitudes to the everlasting mountains, what protestations of eternal truth and constancy, from those who now are earth-they, and their shrouds, and their coffins. The caper and fig-tree have split the monument. Emblems of past loves and future hopes, severed names which the holiest rites united, broken letters of brief happiness, bestrew the road, and speak to the passer-by in vain.”

THE OLD AND NEW IN LITERATURE.

BY JOHN BUCHAN, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S.L.

[Read January 28th, 1925.]

IN the ancient foundation of Queen's College in Oxford every Christmas Day a dinner is held, at which choristers sing antique carols, and a boar's head, crowned with laurel and rosemary, is brought in in stately procession. The ceremony commemorates, it is said, the adventures of a scholar of the College who, walking one afternoon in a glade of Shotover Forest, reading a work of Aristotle, was suddenly attacked by a boar. The scholar was a man of action; he thrust his book down the boar's throat, crying "Graecum est," and the beast curled up and died. What is the moral of the tale? Perhaps that a boar might have digested a translation, but could not swallow the original text-in which case it is an encouragement to read a work in the language in which it was written. Perhaps it teaches the value of books as defensive weapons, and is therefore a propaganda point for booksellers. But on the whole I am inclined to think that it points to the compelling power of the classics. The latest contemporary work of, say, St. Thomas Aquinas or Roger Bacon would not have been so effective. It was because the book was Aristotle and in Greek that the scholar triumphed. Wherefore, if we are attacked