through one's mind the rather uncomfortable thought that as a nation our sympathies would probably have been with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.

Much in the same way, no doubt, many Englishmen have felt a kind of mental disturbance in admitting even to themselves that, take them all in all, they preferred the Germans to the French. The innkeeper in Nauplia, a Laconian from a village near Sparta, told us with pride how in his Doric dialect words and forms survived from 'le bon Gree' that had fallen into disuse elsewhere. His first triumphant example was that he would call a donkey onos. Even without this impressive instance of continuity, one would feel little hesitation in rejecting the too common view that the modern Greeks are a different race from the ancients. The ancients themselves were a product of migrations and much racial intermingling, and the significance of the history of the last two thousand years is merely that the same process has continued. Goths and Franks, Italians, Turks and Albanians, have left the trace of their sojourn or their passage on the people, as on the language, but they were powerless to destroy either the one or the other. On any night in Athens, Phaleron, or Kephisia, in any restaurant where they dance, you may see among many types several with that same perfection of form and feature that distinguished the models of Praxiteles. If there is no Praxiteles in Greece to-day, neither is there in England any school of dramatists comparable with the Elizabethans.

The guns on Lycabettus had been saluting the publication of the Constitution, and almost before their echoes had died away the town was set by the ears by the news that the Government had dissolved the Assembly. This was meat and drink to the poli

ticians of the cafés and the street corners, for the news had the unusual quality of being unsuspected. A political secret well kept is as rare in Greece as the dodo. The coup has raised the wind, and the orthodox political leaders abound in philippics. The man in the street wastes little sympathy on them or on the dismissed Assembly. He feels that the Government, in spite of its blunders, has done as well as any of its recent predecessors and better than some. As for the Assembly, he was heartily tired of it. It was elected two years ago to draft a Constitution, and, like all constituent bodies, neither finished its task nor showed any desire to finish it. The Parliamentary Commission, which came into being after the revolution in June, completed the draft, but with curious additions of its own, such as a provision that no prime minister should hold office for more than a year. Now that the Government has eliminated these idiosyncracies, the man in the street is prepared to welcome the Constitution as a document for which he had long been waiting and not to inquire too closely into its legality. His only concern is that fresh elections should be held after a reasonable interval. Your Athenian still has a regard for the observance of laws written and unwritten, and, while he will cheerfully pass a law to whitewash an illegality, he feels a strong dislike for an illegality not so redeemed.

The oracles say that, if he is wise, General Pangalos will satisfy this sentiment by proclaiming the date of the elections, and will trust for his majority to the continuance of his efforts to bring the Royalist parties back into active politics. He has realized that the division between Venizelists and Royalists is a false issue in Greek politics. It separates men who for years served together

under Mr. Venizelos, and it perpetuates the remembrance of those differences between the Crown and the Government which lost all meaning when the Republic was established. Neither the restoration of the Monarchy nor the return of Mr. Venizelos is a living issue, and the feud between doctrinaire Monarchists, many of whom were once Venizelists, and the rump of the Venizelist Party can only embitter all political relations. With these views General Pangalos has had the courage to conciliate the Royalists and to seek their support for a policy based rather on broad national needs than on the maintenance of old war-cries. Whether he will persist in this line or attempt to continue in office as a dictator rests with himself and the army. It would be a mistake to assume that the army naturally favors a dictatorship: its support will tend to be given to the régime that has most to offer to the League of Officers. That, at least, is a phenomenon not peculiar to Greece.

The 'satiable curiosity' of the Greek mind doubtless accounts for the remarkable vogue in Greece of the newspaper press. In Athens and Piræus alone there are more than thirty journals of the kind so appropriately called 'ephemeral.' The circulation of many of them is insignificant, and with a few honorable exceptions they live by blackmail. In that agreeable art, as in suppressio veri and suggestio falsi, Fleet Street would find nothing to teach them, but it might well view with envy and admiration the standing that these accomplishments have won for the journalist's profession. No Greek journalist is ever kept waiting; no question he may ask is ever left unanswered.

An infallible rule for those who seek an audience of the great is to waste no time on private secretaries but to

follow in the wake of a journalist. One will do as well as another; but if you know him, so much the better. From his daily peregrinations the journalist returns with copy enough to fill his paper. Twice a day ministers, ex-ministers, and would-be ministers are interviewed or make pronouncements. The favorite topic is the political situation - or, in other words, what your opponent said yesterday or you yourself did not say the day before. To-day for once there is a respite, all available space being taken up with the end of Yangoulas and his band of brigands. After three years of outlawry, twenty-two murders, and innumerable highway robberies, the bandits were tracked by a resolute troop of gendarmerie to a fastness on the heights of Mount Olympus and after a siege were killed or dispersed. A 'close-up' of their heads, as they are exposed in the nearest town, appears in the evening paper-two common criminals, and a young man with the fanatical face of a revolutionary, curiously like a portrait of Saint-Just. Brigandage, one is told, has diminished, but it survives and is most difficult to suppress near the frontiers. There, in a sort of no man's land, congregate hardened criminals and those who have a grudge against society and those who in a drunken quarrel or a fit of passion have killed their man and escaped the clutches of the law. They are a menace not only to honest travelers but to international peace, since in the feuds of rival bands no restraint of frontiers is known.

It is natural that Europe should still look to the Balkans as to an area in which war is endemic, and from which it may spread at any moment to the outside world. But here in Athens, without being allowed for a moment to forget that the Balkans are a storm-centre, one is reminded

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that in many ways conditions have changed. Temporarily the Balkan peoples are exhausted. Greece and Yugoslavia have to consolidate their rule over vast new territories, to restore their finances, to rebuild their armaments; Bulgaria remains in sullen subjection, without any army, torn by political dissensions. Far more important is the new outlook in Turkey. That Turkey will come again, no one here doubts, but the expectation is universal that the effort will be made, not in Europe, but in Asia, not against Greece or Bulgaria, but in Mesopotamia and Syria.

The other new factor-and it is vital is Italy. Italian ambitions in the Mediterranean are not of recent birth; the novelty lies in the method and the persistence with which they are developed. The bombardment of Corfu was an indiscretion, which warned the victim and alarmed Europe. It has been followed by the more subtle plan of commercial penetration on the German model, with subsidized shipping, subsidized air services, subsidized trade, and an unceasing propaganda to encourage the belief that Rome's 'great age begins anew.' Greece cannot hope to stand alone against Italian ambitions, and her efforts to obtain a renewal of the old alliance with Yugoslavia, her suggestion of a Balkan pact, are a recognition of the new orientation of Mediterranean politics. Amid many manifestations of a nationalist mentality, there is a genuine belief in the League, and also a regard for Great Britain that is very rare in Europe. For that sentiment the British Army can claim much credit, and among the simple peasantry of Macedonia the memory of the British Tommy survives as of a friend who was always cheerful and considerate and whose chief pleasure was to play with the children.

In a democracy run riot, political effort must often seem 'th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame.' One is driven to ask whether a form of government based even remotely on the expression of the popular will can be maintained in the conditions of modern Greece. Probably few of us would hesitate to give a negative answer if it were not for the recollection that Mr. Venizelos governed Greece after the manner of Pericles for two periods of almost six years each. That, no doubt, is a measure of the exceptional mental power and the acute political instinct of Mr. Venizelos. But Greece has rarely been without remarkable men, and at a time when political feuds are becoming less embittered, when an economic renaissance is in sight, and when new blood has been introduced into the nation, a certain optimism is not unwarranted. It is barely a hundred years since Byron found nothing left for the poet but

For Greeks a blush-for Greece a tear. The Athens Byron knew was a great squalid village of ten thousand people; Piræus was deserted except for a night watchman and two customs officers. The two towns to-day support a million people, and that growth has sprung from Greek enterprise and commercial acumen under a national government.

It is an experience common to most travelers in Greece that the written word, however eloquent, fails in some way to convey more than a point of view, sometimes interesting, more often not. There has been no lack of attempts to communicate the charm and beauty of the Greek landscape or of the remains of the earliest European civilization that adorn it. We are out of touch with the emotions of the romantic era, and there is something almost repulsive in the effusions of

a Byron or a Chateaubriand. The scholars who followed them were, with rare exceptions, too technical and wrote in terms more appropriate to the description of a post mortem on the victim of some mysterious disease. Three of the most distinguished writers of our own day have founded a more humane tradition, and in the notes of Charles Maurras, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Maurice Hewlett there is much that must appeal to anyone, who follows in their footsteps, as both true and suggestive. But the difficulty will always remain of committing to the universality of any linguistic form impressions that are primarily sensuous. The view from 'Sunium's marbled

steep' over the Ægean to the islands; the Saronic Gulf and the mountains of the Peloponnese from the cliffs above Megara; the path of the full moon on the waters of the Bay at Phaleron; the first glimpse of the Parthenon and the sudden realization that its proportions were more perfect than those of any building one had ever seen; an hour at sunset in an English garden in Kephisia, looking over fields to the noble contours of Pentelikon and the ghostly scar on its face where the marble for the Acropolis was quarried

these are the moments that 'vibrate in the memory' and have the power to banish the turpitudes of politics and to bridge the gulf of centuries.

[THE introductory note is by Julius Clausen, Librarian of the Royal Library of Copenhagen.]

is

IN the Collected Works of Hans Christian Andersen almost everything our world-famous poet has written included even the most insignificant topical verses. Great was the surprise, therefore, when a beautiful little story for children that had never been published was discovered among the Andersen manuscripts in the Collin Autograph Collection.

The name of this story is 'King, Queen, and Jack'; in other words, it is a fairy tale based on a pack of playingcards. It was hidden away as a little

1 From Berlingske Tidende (Copenhagen Conservative daily), December 20

manuscript booklet of sixteen small pages, with a gray paper cover, evidently of Andersen's own manufacture. We know that he was handy with thread and needle, and he himself had evidently stitched the pages together.

This fairy tale was written during the summer of 1868, for with it was found a little personal memorandum called 'Traveling,' and, in parenthesis, 'In the Hotel.' The latter shows that the sensitive poet tried to turn an irritating experience into something poetic. He was then on his way home from Ems, where he had taken the cure, and stopped at Cologne for a few days in June 1868. The story was apparently written in the room of his hotel there, or at Altona.

We have an explanation of why this

story was never published. On reaching home Andersen read it to the critical Hoedt, who jokingly exclaimed: 'But what do you mean, Andersen! Why, you have written a positively revolutionary fairy tale! Don't you see, all the kings are burned up!'

Andersen was so pained to think that such a misconstruction might be placed upon his innocent composition, and so fearful that his loyalty might be doubted, that he never allowed the tale to be printed, although he was careful to preserve it among his papers.

How many nice things we can make from paper and paste together! There was William, for instance, who had a castle so big that it filled the whole table. And how finely it was painted! It looked as if it were built of real red bricks, and it had a roof that shone like genuine copper. And there was a tower, and a real drawbridge, and water in the moat. Why, the castle was reflected from the water just as if in a mirror; well, it was a mirror.

On the tower stood a watchman, at the very highest point, and he was made from wood. And he had a trumpet to blow, but he did not blow it. The little boy could himself raise and lower the drawbridge. And he could make his tin soldiers march across the bridge, and he could open the castle gate and look right into the great knights' hall, and there on the walls were hanging pictures cut out of a pack of cardsregular playing-cards, with hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades, the kings with crowns and sceptres, the queens with veils reaching their shoulders and flowers in their hands, the jacks thrusting out their halberds and wearing swaying feathers in their hats.

One evening the little boy was lying before his castle, looking through the open gate into the great hall where the playing-cards were hanging on the walls like real old pictures in a real knights' hall.

Then it seemed to him as if the kings sent him greetings with their sceptres, that the Queen of Spades moved the

golden tulip in her hand, and that the Queen of Hearts raised her fan. All four queens graciously let him know that they had seen him.

He moved still closer to see better, but struck his head against the castle so that it shook, and now all four jacks, clubs, spades, diamonds, and hearts. thrust their halberds toward him to warn him against getting too close, for he was too big to enter.

Thereupon the little boy nodded; and he nodded once more, and then he said: 'Say something!' But the pictures said not a word. But when he nodded a third time toward the Jack of Hearts, the latter sprang right out of the picture, which remained hanging like a piece of white linen on the wall. Right in the centre of the floor stood the Jack of Hearts, the feather in his cap dancing merrily, while in his hand he held his great iron-studded lance.

'What's your name?' he asked the little boy. 'You have nice bright eyes and good thoughts, but you don't wash your hands often enough.'

Now, he did n't say that any too kindly.

'My name is William,' replied the little boy, 'and this is my castle, and you are the Knight of my Heart.'

'I am the knight of my King and of my Queen, and not your knight,' said the Jack of Hearts. 'I can step out of the picture, right out of the castle, and my lord and my lady can do still more. We can go out into the wide