mail routes of more than 30,000 miles in active operation, and 691 post-offices, besides 124 receiving agencies, 836 stamp agencies, and 703 street letter-boxes. The number of letters forwarded in 1876 was 30,000,000, being an increase of 94 per cent. over that of 1874, according to Mr. Mounsey's "Report on the Finance of Japan." The postage of an ordinary letter in the large towns is one cent (d.), and two cents (1d.) for the rest of the empire. Post-cards are carried for one-half these charges. And in 1875 a money-order system was adopted, and within two years there were 310 post-offices where orders could be obtained and cashed. And this is the country where, but ten years before, the chief thought was how foreigners could best be expelled or exterminated, and all their pestilent innovations sent after them!

The lighthouses they have established with the aid of British engineers, and, despite all the difficulties incident to a country of earthquakes, provided with the newest and best illuminating appliances at an enormous outlay, should not be forgotten. The achievements, in a single decade since the termination of the civil war, speak of an amount of constructive talent and administrative energy which, I believe, has rarely been equalled by any Western people.

The sites of the lighthouses, which had been decided on with the assistance of the foreign naval commanders on the spot, were spread over 1,500 miles of coast, and there were no means of internal communication. Admiral Sir Henry Keppel, then in command on the station, was induced to grant the use of H.M.S. Manilla for a voyage of inspection and survey for lighting, in addition, the inland sea and the approaches to Kobé and Osako. This inland or Suonada Sea separates the main island from Kiusin and Shikoku, and is about 250 miles long, and at some places 50 miles wide, filled with innumerable small islands, through recognized channels between which an intricate navigation is conducted.

The number of lighthouses, lightships, buoys, and beacons on the coast of Japan under these arrangements, at the date of this report (Nov. 1876), is given as follows:-Lighthouses, 34; lightships, 2; buoys, 13; beacons, 3. A lighthouse establishment, with offices, also exists, and includes, for repairs, workshops, store-rooms, &c., covering four acres of ground, at Yokohama, and is provided with every appliance, with a stone jetty, alongside of which boats can lie, at a cost of $66,237.

The total cost of construction of all the lighthouses, &c., is given as $1,003,889, while the purchase of steam tender, her maintenance, and payments of all salaries to both European and Japanese officials, and other miscellaneous expenses, amount to $1,050,000; while the main service of the various lighthouses amounts to $189,889: making a grand total of $2,242,889, or about £450,000, up to the end of 1875.

VIII.

So much must in justice be said of the progress made in many important directions, with a view to the material and intellectual advancement of the nation and the development of its resources.

Sir E. Reed and Miss Bird have both given the public further means of judging to what extent a real advance has been made, and how far the results are likely to be permanent, and such as the best friends of the nation could desire. In comparing the opinions formed by these two contemporaneous travellers, and the evidence they adduce in support of their judgments, great differences of opinion will be found. While Sir E. Reed sees little to blame, except in the policy of his own Government, and much to admire on the other side, Miss Bird cannot shut her eyes to many and grievous shortcomings, and comes to the conclusion "that the work of making Japan a really great empire is only in the beginning. For what she has already done, she claims from Western nations hearty sympathy, cordial co-operation, and freedom to consolidate and originate internal reforms, and to be aided by friendly criticism rather than retarded by indiscriminate praise." Whoever will consult her last chapter on "Japanese Public Affairs" will very certainly adopt this view, besides obtaining a great deal of valuable information on the present state and the future prospects of the Japanese empire.

RUTHERFORD ALCOCK.

GALILEO AND THE ROMAN INQUISITION.

Owing to a miscarriage of proof sheets the article on the above subject published in our last No. was printed without the corrections of the author, Professor Reusch. Unfortu nately, some errors, especially in proper names and quotations, appear in it in consequence. -EDITOR, C. R.

CONTEMPORARY BOOKS.

I.-CLASSICAL LITERATURE.

(Under the Direction of the Rev. Prebendary J. DAVIES, M.A.)

NDIRECTLY, if not directly, Classical Literature is breaking out freely and fairly in the various enterprises of our University professors and publishers, whether in Oxford and Cambridge, or the sister seminaries of sound learning in the North. And this is an encouraging circumstance at a period when, though trade is admittedly looking up, it has not yet so far recovered its quondam healthy vigour as to have much energy to spare for much fosterage of book-learning or favour for book-buying, scopes apt to be missed and neglected and overlooked in bad times. Still it is matter of thankfulness that we have men of busy and active brain at the educational helm for the most part, and no less encouraging that our best publishers have lent their ear to the projects with which they sympathize, or which they have gone far to initiate. We may call the Hellenic Society to wit, and remember the endeavours of the lovers of Greek literature and antiquities in Cambridge, Oxford, and the metropolis to establish lectures, lecturers, and in due course classical travelling fellows, and local museums amidst the timehallowed scenes of Athens, the Peloponnese, Rome, the Campagna, the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum. No sooner, it seems to us, does inquiry and research bear fruit in one direction, than it bursts out also in another. One need suggests another. No sooner has a general insight indicated the advisability of following up collateral sources of information, than these are purveyed with a helpfulness, forethought, and practical averaging of the student's needs such as would have been looked for in vain a quarter of a century ago. Thus already at the close of last year scholars were attracted by an unerring confidence and interest to a scheme of Professor Jebb, who adorns the chair of Greek at Glasgow, in the form of a simple brochure, consisting of the Third Book of the Anabasis of Xenophon, counterpaged by the Modern Greek version of Constantine Bardalachos, an eminent teacher until as late as fifty years ago in the Greek schools of Bucharest, Chios, and Odessa. When that patriot teacher suffered shipwreck off Cythnos, his translation of Xenophon was, with other papers, recovered from the wreck; and it is from a copy of Bardalachos's version, as published in 1845 by Joannes Donmas, that Professor Jebb's handy and helpful aid to ascertaining the points of practical contact between normal Classical Greek and Modern Greek arises. The Professor does not profess to enable the student of Classical Greek, by the fact of learning it, to write or speak Modern Greek; but he does propose (and the present success of his Modern Greek classes at Glasgow are a cogent earnest of his proposal meeting fulfilment) to make clear and patent the differences of grammar and of vocabulary between the old and the new. The first must be by practice in reading and writing and speaking Modern Greek: the second,-viz., differences of grammar,-by collateral tuition in the two languages. Thus the student will not indeed learn Modern Greek, but at all events be put on the road to do so; his interest in Classical Greek being strengthened step by step-"not only or chiefly by occasional light on special points, but still more by the sense of a true continuity in the history of the language." Professor Jebb's printed apparatus in help of his parallel texts consists but of a few pages of elementary points of difference, but is none the less valuable for its brief force. It

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is published at Glasgow by Mr. Maclehose, the University Publisher; and we can mention with assurance of help, which we have derived from it for the same purpose, A Handbook to Modern Greek, by Edgar Vincent and T. G. Dickson (Macmillan & Co.: 1879).

But a more direct and perhaps wider-reaching impetus to Hellenic sympathies and culture has been stirred up still later by Prof. Jebb's publication of Two Lectures on Modern Greece, delivered before the Philosophical Institution of Ediuburgh, last winter, and published in May, by Messrs. Macmillan, along with two kindred papers from Macmillan's Magazine on the Progress of Greece, and Byron in Greece. The four combined make up, if it be needed, the healthy stimulus to a proper insight into Greece, present and past, literary, social, and political; and while we can acquit Professor Jebb's telling and forceful little book of a party origin or political drift, no modern scholar could so well have served the cause of Greece, present or future, as the sparkling writer who has so acutely and observantly sketched her past. His first lecture is a much-needed sketch or skeleton of the story of the It notes the two types of Hellenic Greek nation from the time of Alexander the Great till our own, evincing throughout the unbroken history of the Greek nationality. nationality which sprung from Alexander's Asiatic conquests, the Greeks of Greece and the Isles, the truer and nobler stock and the mixed and more cunning proper After the Romans had conquered Macedon, in a century and Asiatic race. a half after Alexander, they extended their conquests to Greece, and thenceforward the Professor traces Greek subjection through three great chapters-Roman, Byzantine, Turkish,—the first lasting eight centuries and a half, from 146 B.C. to 716 A.d., Of each of these several periods the the second nearly seven centuries and a half, till 1453 A.D., the third a shorter term of not four centuries, from 1453 to 1821. salient points and features are shrewdly scanned; the boon of Hadrian's reign to public works and the codification of local usages in Greek cities on Roman principles; the picture of the Greek in Greece, when Plutarch toured and table-talked there in the first century; and three centuries later that of Lucian contrasting the tranquil elegance of Athens with Rome's extravagant luxury; the transfer of the seat of Government to Constantinople (A.D. 330), a turning-point in the destiny of the Greek race, though Constantine's reforms made Roman yoke little, if at all, less burdensome to Greek national life and institutions. Prof. Jebb finds space to show that Greece enjoyed fair material prosperity in the space between Constantine and Justinian, whose reign was resplendent with war, legislation, architecture, but blotted by the monarch's confiscation of the Schools of Athens, after nine hundred years' existence, in A.D. 529. With Leo, the Isaurian, we pass to the Byzantine period, and are sensible of a master-hand explaining the course, the transition. Of the Byzantine Empire, as a traveller would have found it between 900 and 1100 a.d., Mediæval Thebes and Athens these pages can afford no space for the graphic and able summary in pp. 19-25. The secret of its prosperity lay in its commerce. flourished by the manufacture of silk, almost as Manchester has flourished by cotton. If the stranger visited the southern port of Monemvasia-whence Malmsey took its name-or the harbour of the Peiræus, he would be in the midst of a scene as busy as the Rialto of Venice in the later days. The Greek marine, mercantile and naval, was the largest in the world. They had in their hands almost all the commerce with The Byzantine Currency" is another token of the the Black Sea and the West." wealth of the Byzantine world in this chapter of Greek subjection, from which we are drawn anon to a graphic sketch of the court, camp, and field in the stages of decadence; a glimpse at the Greek Empire of the Palæologi; and the gallant end made by Constantine XI. on the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453. Professor Jebb attributes to the empire of the East, Roman and Byzantine, two strong claims on the gratitude of mankind. (1.) Efficient administration of justice from the eighth to the eleventh century; the preservation of a middle-class, and of a literary tradition. (2.) The maintenance of the Gates of Europe, so as to be a safeAs he picturesquely puts this-in a classical analogy-" The guard of the West. Eastern Empire has been too often judged as if it resembled that effeminate son of Priam who carried away the light and charm of Hellas to a new and uncongenial home; but in truth it was less a Paris than a Hector, the champion who alone saved the European Troy. Thrice a strong enemy came up against it: with each of the three, that trusty warden of our march waged a combat of 400 years; it beat back the Persian; it beat back the Saracen; and after a third struggle of four centuries it was only in death that it yielded to the Turk" (p. 35). There is intense interest in the third division of this lecture-Greek life under Turkey, Greece in the throes of her degradation; and our Professor makes the contemplation of this sad period

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interesting through the tokens of vitality which have surmounted the ordeal of Turkish rule, and the ties of race, character, and language, which connect Greece of to-day with ancient Greece.

But we must find space for a few lines anent the Professor's second Lecture. A livelier account of a summer trip to Greece, entered by way of the Morea, and round it into the Egean, and left by the other route through Corfu and Brindisi. From first to last our traveller is brisk, observant, wide-awake. For example, he testifies to the growing handsomeness and prosperity of Athens, indicated in some degree by the growing number of Greek merchants who return and settle there to spend their fortunes, and as much, perhaps, by the clean and neat aspect of the whole city, except the Albanian quarter, known as Plaka, whence comes by night the braying of donkeys, nicknamed "the Nightingales of Plaka." He notes the sore need to Athens of shade, and ascribes the dwindled traditions of the classic groves of Ilissus and the haunts of the nightingale by the Cephisus, partly to the ravages of war, partly to the nomad shepherds and their flocks of goats, the one no more scrupulous in pursuit of fuel than the other of what English rustics in some counties call "browse." Professor Jebb commends the little Greek horses at the expense of the wretched Greek roads, and notes, with much humour, as the worst tract he had to experience on horseback, the very road from Tegea to Sparta, along which Pheidippedes (truly the son of a sparer of horses) ran at such a pace to ask for help for Athens before the battle of Marathon. He endorses Thackeray's truthful image of the Attic Plain surrounded by a "chorus of hills;" presents to his fellow-scholars an intensely lively presentment of "The Branching Roads," and the place where those three roads meet, where the path from Daulia meets the road to Delphi and another to the south. Can one abstain from drawing our "Edipus the King" from its shelf to realize the situation as compared by one of the tragedian's ablest editors and exponents? Another sketch of Greek topography, wherein Jebb's impressions are more pleasant than its eldest native's, Hesiod, is Ascra. It looked pleasant; it was prosperous in the produce that would have rejoiced Hesiod's soul. It had picturesque views of "the steep grey crags of Helicon, rising in a double line of ramparts with dark pine-woods on the upper heights." At Mycena the Professor fell in with Mr. Stamatakes, the archæologist employed by the Greek Government to complete Dr. Schliemann's excavations, and was privileged to see Dr. Schliemann's "veritable Agamemnon,' " in a wooden box on the ground floor in Mr. Stamatakes' house. Schliemann's theory that the graves in the oval precinct were those of Agamemnon and his dynasty, is opposed by his successor in the excavations, who believes them to be much older than the age at which this hill of Mycenae became a seat of a Greek dynasty, and that Greek princes would not have buried their dead so close to their dwelling-house. Of the body, Professor Jebb adds a long post-mortem examination, adding that "he (Agamemnon) was then in a state critically near to evaporation; but his name will live. The new hotel at Nauplia, hard by, is the Agamemnon" (p. 95). Passing to Sparta and the banks of the Eurotas, our travellers are invited to walk in and see the silkworms, silk-mills, and chief seats of the silk trade, and make their way to Olympia, just before the German excavators closed their third fruitful campaign. They enjoyed a résumé of the finds of the season, and above all saw the exquisite fragment of the Flying Niké, an undoubted work of Pæonius. Incidentally the Professor varies his topographical details with curious vestiges of patriarchal usage sanctioned by the Greek Church. We learn, for instance, that the name need not be given to the child at baptism; the choice of the name is the special prerogative of the father, and he is allowed to keep this state-secret in petto as long as he pleases. The third paper of this most instructive and fascinating volume is calculated to post up the political Philhellenist in all the statistics of Greek progress, and to suggest to those in authority the aim of a proper balance between an educated and ambitious and an industrial population. The fourth goes far towards rendering tardy justice to Byron's share in the War of Independence, as no mere poet's dream, but the result of matured views and insight into national character. We hope to see this book on "Modern Greece" conduce to wider interest and fruit.

From Messrs. Sampson Low, Marston and Co. we have received, some months ago, we are sorry to confess, a kindred volume, adapted to be a pioneer or incentive to a study of another and far later period of classical literature, Mr. Alfred Corning Clark's authorized translation of Roman Days, from the Swedish of Viktor Rydberg. We take blame to ourselves for not having till now drawn attention to one of the brightest works of a class we might characterize as "History in marble,"