class="i1">To rock the green trees.

But no more can be said

Of what was transacted

And what was enacted

In the heaving abodes

Of the great sea-gods."

THE IMPOSSIBILITIES OF HISTORY.

In The Tablet of June 18 is a leading article on the proposed erection of Baron Marochetti's statue of Richard Cœur de Lion. Theology and history are mixed: of course I shall carefully exclude the former. I have tried to trace the statements to their sources; and where I have failed, perhaps some of your readers may be able to help me.

"When the physicians told him that they could do nothing more for him, and when his confessor had done his duty faithfully and with all honesty, the stern old soldier commanded his attendants to take him off the bed, and lay him naked on the bare floor. When this was done, he then bade them take a discipline and scourge him with all their might. This was the last command of their royal master; and in this he was obeyed with more zeal than he found displayed when at the head of his troops in Palestine."

I find no record that "the stern old soldier," who was then forty-two years of age, and whom the writer oddly calls Richard II., had any reason to complain of want of zeal in his troops. They fought well, and flogged well—if they flogged at all. Richard died of gangrene in the shoulder; and I have the authority of an eminent physician for saying, that gangrene, so near the vital parts, would produce such mental and bodily prostration, that it is highly improbable that the patient, unless in delirium, should give such an order, and impossible that he should live through its execution.

Hume and Lingard do not allude to the "discipline;" and the silence of the latter is important. Henry says:

"Having expressed great penitence for his vices, and having undergone a very severe discipline from the hands of the clergy, who attended him in his last moments," &c.—Vol. iii. p. 161. ed. 1777.

He cites Brompton, and there I find the penance given much stronger than in The Tablet:

"Præcepitque pedes sibi ligari, et in altum suspendi nudumque corpus flagellis cædi et lacerari, donec ipse præciperat ut silerent. Cumque diu cæderetur, ex præcepto, ad modicum siluerunt. Et spiritu iterum reassumpto, hoc idem secundo ac tertio in abundantiâ sanguinis compleverunt. Tamdiu in se revertens, afferri viaticum sibi jussit et se velut proditorem et hostem, contra dominum suum ligatis pedibus fune trahi."

This is taken from Brompton's Chronicle in Decem Scriptores Historiæ Anglicanæ, 1652, p. 1279., edited by Selden. As Brompton lived in the reign of Edward III., he is not a high authority upon any matter in that of Richard I. I cannot find any other. Hoveden and Knyghton are silent. Is the fact stated elsewhere? Hoveden states, and the modern historians follow him, that after the king's death, Marchader seized the archer, flayed him alive, and then hanged him. My medical authority says, that no man could be flayed alive: and that the most skilful operator could not remove the skin of one arm from the elbow to the wrist, before the patient would die from the shock to his system.

Mr. Riley, in a note on the passage in Hoveden, cites from the Winchester Chronicle a possible account of Gurdum being tortured to death. The historian of The Tablet, in the same article, says:

"We are far from attributing absolute perfection to the son of Henry II., one of that awful race popularly believed to be descended from the devil. When Henry, as a boy, practising Whiggery by revolting against his father, was presented to St. Bernard at the Court of the King of France, the saint looked at him with a sort of terror, and said, 'From the Devil you came, and to the Devil you will go.'"

The fact that Henry II. rebelled against his father is not given in any history which I have

read; and the popular belief in the remarkable descent of Henry, and consequently of our present royal family, is quite new to me, and to all of whom I have inquired. Still, finding that the writer had an authority for the "discipline," he may have one for the Devil. If so, I should like to know it; for I contemplate something after the example of Lucian's Quomodo Historia sit conscribenda.

H. B. C.

U. U. Club.

"QUEM DEUS VULT PERDERE PRIUS DEMENTAT."

Having disposed of the allegation that the Greek Iambic,

was from Euripides, by denying the assertion, I am also, on farther investigation, compelled to deny to him also the authorship of the cited passage,—

"ὅταν δε Δαίμων ἀνδρὶ πορσύνῃ κακὰ, τὸν νοῦν ἔβλαψε πρὼτον."

Its first appearance is in Barnes, who quotes it from Athenagoras "sine auctoris nomine." Carmeli includes it with others, to which he prefixes the observation,—

"A me piacque come al Barnesio di porle per disteso, ed a canto mettervi la traduzione in nostra favella, senza entrare tratto tratto in quistioni inutili, se alcuni versi appartengano a Tragedia di Euripide, o no."

There is, then, no positive evidence of this passage having ever been attributed, by any competent scholar, to Euripides. Indirect proof that it could not have been written by him is thus shown:—In the Antigone of Sophocles (v. 620.) the chorus sings, according to Brunck,—

"For a splendid saying has been revealed by the wisdom of some one: That evil appears to be good to him whose mind God leads to destruction; but that he (God) practises this a short time without destroying such a one."

Now, had Barnes referred to the scholiast on the Antigone, or remembered at the time the above-cited passage, he would either not have omitted the conclusion of his distich, or he would at once have seen that a passage quoted as "ἔκ του, of some one," by Sophocles, seventeen years the senior of Euripides, could not have been the original composition of his junior competitor. The conclusion of the distich is thus given by the old scholiast: