This cheese-epic is a rather unsavoury production
and the style is at times so monstrous and so realistic that the author
should be called the Gorgon-Zola of literature.

(1) Salome. By J. C. Heywood. (Kegan Paul.)

(2) Sonnets and Other Poems. By William Griffiths. (Digby and Long.)

(3) Fires of Green Wood. By Francis Prevost. (Kegan Paul.)

(4) Vanclin and Other Verses. By John Cameron Grant. (E. W. Allen.)

(5) Caesar Borgia. By W. Evans, M.A. (William Maxwell and Son.)

(6) The Cross and the Grail. (Women's Temperance Association, Chicago.)

(7) Juvenal in Piccadilly. By Oxoniensis. (Vizetelly and Co.)

(8) The Excellent Mystery: A Matrimonial Satire. By Lord Pimlico.
(Vizetelly and Co.)

(9) The Chronicle of Mites. By James Aitchison. (Kegan Paul.)

VENUS OR VICTORY

(Pall Mall Gazette, February 24, 1888.)

There are certain problems in archaeology that seem to possess a real
romantic interest, and foremost among these is the question of the so-
called Venus of Melos. Who is she, this marble mutilated goddess whom
Gautier loved, to whom Heine bent his knee? What sculptor wrought her,
and for what shrine? Whose hands walled her up in that rude niche where
the Melian peasant found her? What symbol of her divinity did she carry?
Was it apple of gold or shield of bronze? Where is her city and what was
her name among gods and men? The last writer on this fascinating subject
is Mr. Stillman, who in a most interesting book recently published in
America, claims that the work of art in question is no sea-born and foam-
born Aphrodite, but the very Victory Without Wings that once stood in the
little chapel outside the gates of the Acropolis at Athens. So long ago
as 1826, that is to say six years after the discovery of the statue, the
Venus hypothesis was violently attacked by Millingen, and from that time
to this the battle of the archaeologists has never ceased. Mr. Stillman,
who fights, of course, under Millingen's banner, points out that the
statue is not of the Venus type at all, being far too heroic in character
to correspond to the Greek conception of Aphrodite at any period of their
artistic development, but that it agrees distinctly with certain well-
known statues of Victory, such as the celebrated 'Victory of Brescia.'
The latter is in bronze, is later, and has the wings, but the type is
unmistakable, and though not a reproduction it is certainly a
recollection of the Melian statue. The representation of Victory on the
coin of Agathocles is also obviously of the Melian type, and in the
museum of Naples is a terra-cotta Victory in almost the identical action
and drapery. As for Dumont d'Urville's statement that, when the statue
was discovered, one hand held an apple and the other a fold of the
drapery, the latter is obviously a mistake, and the whole evidence on the
subject is so contradictory that no reliance can be placed on the
statement made by the French Consul and the French naval officers, none
of whom seems to have taken the trouble to ascertain whether the arm and
hand now in the Louvre were really found in the same niche as the statue
at all.