plainly bears upon and sustains the ethnological doctrine of a Phoenician infusion into the composite formation known in history as the Greek nation; and the ethnological theory in like manner supports the ethnographical picture. And both combine to show with what solid and careful interlacing of the particular parts Homer has built up the magnificent structure of his Poems. They represent not the casual union of the thoughts of many, not even the wayward, careless effusions of the fancy of one: they were wrought upon a system, and with an aim, or with many aims woven into one, and they exhibit the consummate effort of a brain never excelled in its marvellous combination of discursive, constructive, and creative power. POSTSCRIPT. W. E. GLADSTONE. Although the question respecting the keeping of swine, and the use of pork, is by no means disposed of, either by the authorities quoted in the text, or by Wilkinson, I venture at this stage to offer the following conjectures, as somewhat probable in themselves, and not inconsistent with the evidence as a whole. 1. That, in the warm climates of Egypt and Phoenicia, the use of pork was, on sanitary grounds, repressed by prohibitions, or restricted to particular occasions. 2. That the great thrift, resulting from the rearing and consumption of the animal, may have kept the practice extensively alive, notwithstanding restrictive laws; especially among the classes to whom thrift was an important object. 3. That, as the pig is useless to man during life, it is very difficult to account for its being bred and kept, as it evidently was, except upon the supposition that it was wanted for food. 4. That if the animal, as domesticated, was brought into Greece. by Phoenician ships, its consumption for food may have spread there, in a cooler climate, and a society free from sumptuary restraints, and yet in Homer's day may not have wholly ceased to be a distinctive mark of south-eastern origin and associations. 5. That the sialos, the carefully and delicately fatted pig, was served as a luxury at the tables of the rich; while the use of commoner pork was reserved, as in the cottage of Eumaios, for the poorer class. Such is the evidence of the Odyssey.-W. E. G. THE FRENCH IN GERMANY. In the beginning of May, M. St.-Genest published two very sensible articles in the Figaro against the cry for revenge. He plainly informed his countrymen that only such people were speaking of war who risked nothing because they had nothing to lose; the French liked to be considered a warlike people, and to be told that their enemies were afraid of them, but as to a real war for reconquering Alsace and Lorraine, all the propertied classes would be against it, because they would suffer most by it after the introduction of universal service. The old accounts of Jena had been settled once for all by Frankfort, so the French had better keep silent. There is a good deal of truth in this; the fear of the Germans is much stronger than the hatred which Frenchmen entertain against them, but the danger lies in the passiveness of the masses, which may be carried away by noisy demagogues, and the Parisian populace, who have nothing to lose. We have had a foretaste of this in the insult offered to the late King of Spain, as well as in the outcry of the French press when a visit of the Emperor William the Second and the King of Italy to Strasburg seemed imminent. That visit was undoubtedly planned, the horses of the Emperor were on their way to Alsace, and bills were posted at Strasburg for his reception, when Bismarck and Crispi interfered, and prevented what they justly considered an unnecessary provocation; so the matter was allowed to drop, and General Menabrea informed M. Spuller that his sovereign never thought of returning by way of Strasburg. Nevertheless, the fact is that, whilst the Emperor had a clear right to visit his Alsatian capital and show it to his royal guest, the exercise of this right was considered by the French press as an unwarrantable outrage. The danger, therefore, remains that some unforeseen incident may produce a conflict, however it may be abhorred by both nations at large, the more so as the political air of Europe is charged with electricity. In this condition of things it may not be without interest to show, by a retrospective glance on the relations of France and Germany, that M. St.-Genest was not only right in maintaining that the peace of Frankfort should be considered as a final settlement of the disputes of the two countries, and as the end of the French intermeddling with internal German politics, but how immeasurably more Germany has suffered by France in the course of the last centuries than vice versâ. I. That era of intervention began when King Francis the First, by a lavish outlay for buying up the votes of the Electoral princes, tried for the German Imperial Crown. He was beaten by his rival, Charles the First of Spain, who outbid him,' who was supported by the Pope and by the influential Frederic of Saxony, and by his German origin was more welcome to the Electors, afraid that the French King would reduce their dependence to the level of his nobles. Charles the Fifth, uniting the Crowns of Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain, might have been the most powerful sovereign of his age if he had understood the signs of the time; but he ardently hated the religious reform 2 which was the great moving force of those days, and that brought him into conflict with the German Lutheran princes. The wily Francis the First, religiously indifferent, persecuting the reformed creed in his country with a zeal worthy of the praise of Leo the Tenth, lost no opportunity in supporting the Protestant League of Schmalkalden against the Emperor, and at the same time, to the horror of the whole Christian world, made a covenant with Sultan Soliman, inciting him to attack the Emperor in his Austrian hereditary estates. In the long struggle between Charles and Francis were many ups and downs, military as well as diplomatic, and it cannot be doubted that the Emperor's perverse hatred against the Protestant creed, the unscrupulous means by which he tried to suppress it in Germany, as he had done in the Netherlands, Spain and Austria, and to establish his own absolute power, forced the German princes to avail themselves of his enemy's support in order to escape annihilation; but the foundation for French intervention in German affairs was thus laid, which has continued up to our days. When after Francis's death the Emperor threatened to become all powerful, the German princes, under the leadership of Maurice of Saxony, applied for help to Henry the Second, and accepted the King's condition, that the Imperial cities Metz, Toul, Verdun and Cambrai should henceforth belong to France-a concession which curiously illustrated the proclamation in which, at opening the war, Henry called himself the champion of German liberty, and protested that he had only taken up arms against the Emperor by warm and disinterested 1 Cogimur huic electioni totis viribus intendere et quia alii sunt, qui huic coronæ cæsareæ quoque innitentur et pro ea ingentem vim pecuniarum offerant, et quodammodo electionem in auctione ponant.' (Charles to his brother-in-law, King Christian the Second of Denmark, April 8, 1519.) 2 In a letter to Pope Clement the Twelfth (Dec. 23, 1523), he called Luther 'hominem post homines natos scelestissimum.' inclination for the German nation, which, as he hoped, would reward him for such great benefit by an everlasting thankfulness. One of his German partisans, Markgraf Albert of Brandenburg-Culmbach, called himself a servant of the French monarch, and adopted the lilies of France in his colours. The King lost no opportunity of preventing the settlement of the religious conflicts within the Empire, of fostering the distrust of the German princes against Charles the Fifth's intentions, which unhappily was but too well founded; at the same time he induced the Turks to reject the humiliating proposals for peace of the Emperor's brother Ferdinand the First, and, after the accession of Pope Paul the Fourth, a deadly foe of the house of Habsburg, made a league with him in order to crush the Spanish dominion in Italy. It was thus that Henry the Second, who cruelly persecuted the Protestants in France, and ordered a general thanksgiving for the re-establishment of the Catholic faith in England by Queen Mary, forced the Emperor to conclude the religious peace of Augsburg (1555) with the Protestant princes, which annihilated his whole life's endeavours to crush the new doctrine-a humiliation which, tired as he was, determined him to depose his crowns, and to bury himself in a Spanish convent, where he concluded his days. By the treaty of Vaucelles (February 1556) Metz, Toul, and Verdun were definitely ceded to France. Queen Catherine of Medici, in the first part of her reign, was inclined to come to an understanding with the French Protestants in order to vanquish her great foe, Philip the Second of Spain; and King Anton of Navarre proposed to the German Evangelical princes a general league of all Protestant powers, to be headed by Elizabeth of England, against the enemies of their faith. But the Guises, who were in Philip's service, adroitly availed themselves of the theological hatred of the German Lutherans against the French Calvinists for dissuading them to enter upon these offers, and so the project came to nothing; nay, some of these Lutheran princes, incited by their fanatic pastors, drew the sword for the French Crown against the Huguenots, and were amply rewarded for this ill-advised help by Spanish and French gold. When, however, Catherine was forced in 1570 to make peace with the Huguenots at St. Germain-en-Laye, Charles the Fourth sent Kaspar von Schomberg on a mission to the Protestant German princes, proposing a defensive alliance against Spain and the Pope, if they would vote at the Reichstag for the abandonment of the Flemish provinces to France, and for raising the King, or at least a French prince, to the German throne. were these offers unfavourably received, those princes being afraid lest the Crown might become hereditary in the house of Habsburg, their principal foe, and considering that, in yielding to the wishes of the King, they might impose upon him stringent conditions for this and that benefit of the Protestant creed. It was only by the sudden. Nor reversal of Catherine's policy, which led to the massacre of St. Bartholomew, that this plan remained barren. The renewed attempts of Henry of Navarre, supported by Elizabeth, to bring about a general Protestant league, were baffled by the fanaticism of the Lutheran zealots against the Calvinists, and only the constant civil wars of France prevented the internal struggles of Germany from having still worse consequences. It was different when, since the accession of Henry the Fourth, those civil contests were quelled; his tolerant wisdom indeed pursued as principal aim a general Protestant league against the encroachments of the house of Habsburg, led by the Jesuits; but even in his project of a Christian European Republic it was provided that never two princes of the same house should successively be invested with the German Imperial dignity, in order to make the inherent weakness resulting from the Electoral monarchy everlasting. It is, however, impossible not to acknowledge that in Henry the Fourth's policy general and generous instincts prevailed, and that his influence in Germany has been several times a favourable one; but when, under his successor, Richelieu became first and nearly omnipotent minister (1624), the intervention of France in German affairs took a most pernicious character. It may be said that in the prior part of his tenure of power his activity was mainly directed towards emancipating Germany from the crushing sway of the bigoted Habsburgs; but since Gustav Adolf of Sweden, supported by French subsidies, had made important conquests, Richelieu saw that by adroitly shuffling the cards he might realise a similar gain for France, and was resolved to push on the war till the exhaustion of all parties allowed him to secure his prey. He did not live to see his projects fully realised, but his successor Mazarin continued his work in the same spirit, and the peace of Westphalia not only confirmed the French possession of Metz, Toul, and Verdun, but enlarged it by the acquisition of the Landgraviate of Upper and Lower Alsace, Sundgau, Breisach, and the right of occupying the important fortresses of Philipsburg and Pignerol. The Netherlands and Switzerland were definitively severed from Germany, and Sweden obtained large possessions on the German soil; but perhaps the most ill-omened clause of that treaty was the right accorded, by the influence of France, to all estates of the Empire of concluding alliances between each other and with foreign powers. It was, indeed, added that such alliances should not endanger the safety of the Empire, but that provision proved perfectly nugatory, and since the accession of Louis the Fourteenth the majority of the German princes, ecclesiastical as well as secular, were simply in French pay, and seconded, or at least suffered, that ambitious sovereign's encroachments upon German soil. France at that time was the strongest and most concentrated monarchy of Europe. Louis was fortunate enough to find in Colbert the man who knew how to develop, in an unheard-of manner, the resources |