“A boy was crowning the monument of his stepmother, thinking that her temper had been changed. But the stone, falling, killed the child, while he leaned on the grave. Shun, ye children, even the grave of a stepmother.”
There is an epigram on a miser, who calculated, while he was ill in bed, that it would cost a drachma more to live than to die, and refused to see a physician; and a second on a bad poet and a clumsy surgeon, of whom it is said that they had destroyed more persons than “the waters in the time of Deucalion, or than Phaeton, who burned up those upon the earth.”
The Anthology is of a mingled yarn, like our own Miscellanies, in which the most delicate wit and the broadest fun so frequently find themselves next neighbours. The pair which I subjoin belongs to the former and higher category:—
“The Muses, seeking for a shrine,
Whose glories ne’er should cease,
Found, as they stray’d, the soul divine
Of Aristophanes.”
“Three are the Graces. Thou wert born to be
The Grace that serves to grace the other three.”
The first of these is ascribed to Plato, who was better prepared to relish, than we can be reasonably asked to do, the faithful and diverting reflections of contemporary life and Greek human nature from the pens of the dramatists of his country. The value of such masterpieces as literary compositions and pictures of manners remains unaltered and unalterable; but upon us the comic strokes and the byplay are almost lost. Nor would it be possible to fill a small volume with bons-mots from the Greek Theatre, likely to appeal with success to the existing market. For the elements of popularity are clearly and naturally hostile to its endurance; and the narrow extent of the exceptions proves the rule. The bulk of our own popular literature of all kinds is feuille-morte; and no artificial reproduction can make it otherwise than archæologically instructive. To reprint a book which is dead is to make it die twice.