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. Out of these _Lives of Philosophers_, this _Table-Talk_ of Athenæus, these _Attic Nights_, and this _Florilegium_ of satire and wit, the _Anthology_, what sort of sum-total does the harvestman gather in? But unless by a strange accident the best specimens of the Greek Muse in the present direction or department have unexceptionally disappeared, these must have constituted the staple material with which the Athenian Club of the _Sixty_ amused themselves and their correspondents. The story about Philip and his connection with this body perhaps sets the father of Alexander before some of us in a rather new light, and in a more favourable one than other anecdotes which are associated with his name. By the way, that where the poor woman is made to appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober, strikes us as having more than a jocular value--as betokening the primitive condition of judicial forms in Macedon at that period.