(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. Mahaffy goes far beyond such mild measures as these, and begins his history by frankly expressing his regret that Demosthenes was not summarily put to death for his attempt to keep the spirit of patriotism alive among the citizens of Athens!  Indeed, he has no patience with what he calls ’the foolish and senseless opposition to Macedonia’; regards the revolt of the Spartans against ’Alexander’s Lord Lieutenant for Greece’ as an example of ‘parochial politics’; indulges in Primrose League platitudes against a low franchise and the iniquity of allowing ‘every pauper’ to have a vote; and tells us that the ‘demagogues’ and ‘pretended patriots’