were so lost to shame that they actually preached to the parasitic mob of Athens the doctrine of autonomy—­’not now extinct,’ Mr. Mahaffy adds regretfully—­and propounded, as a principle of political economy, the curious idea that people should be allowed to manage their own affairs!  As for the personal character of the despots, Mr. Mahaffy admits that if he had to judge by the accounts in the Greek historians, from Herodotus downwards, he ’would certainly have said that the ineffaceable passion for autonomy, which marks every epoch of Greek history, and every canton within its limits, must have arisen from the excesses committed by the officers of foreign potentates, or local tyrants,’ but a careful study of the cartoons published in United Ireland has convinced him ’that a ruler may be the soberest, the most conscientious, the most considerate, and yet have terrible things said of him by mere political malcontents.’  In fact, since Mr. Balfour has been caricatured, Greek history must be entirely rewritten!  This is the pass to which the distinguished professor of a distinguished university has been brought.  Nor can anything equal Mr. Mahaffy’s prejudice against the Greek patriots, unless it be his contempt for those few fine Romans who, sympathising with Hellenic civilisation and culture, recognised the political value of autonomy and the intellectual importance of a healthy national life.  He mocks at what he calls their ’vulgar mawkishness about Greek liberties, their anxiety to redress historical wrongs,’ and congratulates his readers that this feeling was not intensified by the remorse that their own forefathers had been the oppressors.  Luckily, says Mr. Mahaffy, the old Greeks had conquered Troy, and so the pangs of conscience which now so deeply afflict a Gladstone and a Morley for the sins of their ancestors could hardly affect a Marcius or a Quinctius!  It is quite unnecessary to comment on the silliness and bad taste of passages of this kind, but it is interesting to note that the facts of history are too strong even for Mr. Mahaffy.  In spite of his sneers at the provinciality of national feeling and his vague panegyrics on cosmopolitan culture, he is compelled to admit that ’however patriotism may be superseded in stray individuals by larger benevolence, bodies of men who abandon it will only replace it by meaner motives,’ and cannot help expressing his regret that the better classes among the Greek communities were so entirely devoid of public spirit that they squandered ’as idle absentees, or still idler residents, the time and means given them to benefit their country,’ and failed to recognise their opportunity of founding a Hellenic Federal Empire.  Even when he comes to deal with art, he cannot help admitting that the noblest sculpture of the time was that which expressed the spirit of the first great national struggle, the repulse of the Gallic hordes which overran Greece in 278 B.C., and that to the patriotic feeling evoked at this crisis we owe