or Herculaneum, the minutest portions of the Greek lyrists have their value. We must be thankful for any two words of Sappho that survive in authentic juxtaposition, for any hemistich that may be veritably styled a relic of "some tender-hearted scroll of pure Simonides." Chance has wrought fantastically with these relics. The lyrists, even in classical days, fell comparatively early into neglect. They were too condensed in language, too difficult in style, too sublime in imagination for the pedants of the later empire. Long before its close, Greek literature was oppressed with its own wealth; in the words of Livy, _magnitudine laboravit sua_. Taste, too, began to change; sophistic treatises, idyllic verses, novelettes in prose, neat epigrams, usurped upon the grander forms of composition. The stagnation, again, of civic life under imperial sway proved unfavorable to the composition of national odes and to choric celebrations in which whole peoples took a part. So disdainful in her alms-giving has Fortune been, that she has only flung to us the epinikian odes of Pindar; while his hymns to the gods, his processional chants, and his funeral dirges, are lost. Young Athens, Alexandria, and Byzantium cared, we may conceive, for poems which shed lustre on athletic sports and horse-racing. Trainers, boxers, riders, chariot-drivers--all the muscular section of the public--had some interest in by-gone Pythian or Olympian victories. But who sought to preserve the antiquated hymns to Phoebus and to Zeus, when the rites of Isis and Serapis and the Phrygian mother were in vogue? The outspoken boldness of the erotic and satiric lyrists stood them in bad stead. When Theodora was exhibiting her naked charms in the arena, who could commend the study of Anacreon in the school-room? Degeneracy of public morals and prudery of literary taste go not unfrequently together. Therefore, the Emperor Julian proscribed Archilochus; and what Julian proscribed, the Christians sought to extirpate. To destroy an ode of Sappho was a good work. Consequently, we possess no complete edition of even a section of the works of any lyrist except Pindar: what remains of the others has been preserved in the works of critics, anecdote-mongers, and grammarians; who cite tantalizing passages to prove a rule in syntax, to illustrate a legend or a custom, to exemplify a canon of taste. Imbedded in ponderous prose, these splintered jewels escaped the iconoclastic zeal of the monks. Thanks be to Athenæus above all men (the author of an imaginary dialogue in fifteen bulky books on every topic of Greek antiquity), to Longinus, to Philostratus, to Maximus Tyrius, to Plutarch the moralist, to Stobæus, to Hephæstion, to Herodian, and to the host of other Dryasdusts from whose heaps of shot rubbish Bergk and his predecessors have sorted out the fragments of extinguished stars! As a masterpiece of patient, self-denying, scientific, exhaustive investigation, the three volumes of Bergk are unrivalled.