Translated and edited
by Her Royal Highness Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, Princess
of Great Britain and Ireland. (David Stott.)

(2) Women's Voices: An Anthology of the most Characteristic Poems by
English, Scotch, and Irish Women. Selected, edited, and arranged by Mrs.
William Sharp. (Walter Scott.)

(3) A Village Tragedy. By Margaret L. Woods. (Bentley and Son.)

MR. MAHAFFY'S NEW BOOK

(Pall Mall Gazette, November 9, 1887.)

Mr. Mahaffy's new book will be a great disappointment to everybody except
the Paper-Unionists and the members of the Primrose League. His subject,
the history of Greek Life and Thought: from the Age of Alexander to the
Roman Conquest, is extremely interesting, but the manner in which the
subject is treated is quite unworthy of a scholar, nor can there be
anything more depressing than Mr. Mahaffy's continual efforts to degrade
history to the level of the ordinary political pamphlet of contemporary
party warfare. There is, of course, no reason why Mr. Mahaffy should be
called upon to express any sympathy with the aspirations of the old Greek
cities for freedom and autonomy. The personal preferences of modern
historians on these points are matters of no import whatsoever. But in
his attempts to treat the Hellenic world as 'Tipperary writ large,' to
use Alexander the Great as a means of whitewashing Mr. Smith, and to
finish the battle of Chaeronea on the plains of Mitchelstown, Mr. Mahaffy
shows an amount of political bias and literary blindness that is quite
extraordinary. He might have made his book a work of solid and enduring
interest, but he has chosen to give it a merely ephemeral value and to
substitute for the scientific temper of the true historian the prejudice,
the flippancy, and the violence of the platform partisan. For the
flippancy parallels can, no doubt, be found in some of Mr. Mahaffy's
earlier books, but the prejudice and the violence are new, and their
appearance is very much to be regretted. There is always something
peculiarly impotent about the violence of a literary man. It seems to
bear no reference to facts, for it is never kept in check by action. It
is simply a question of adjectives and rhetoric, of exaggeration and over-
emphasis. Mr. Balfour is very anxious that Mr. William O'Brien should
wear prison clothes, sleep on a plank bed, and be subjected to other
indignities, but Mr.