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188 D. J. CONACHER means of justice but the cause of unsteadiness and lability in human life." (88) Thus, Mme. de Romilly argues, it is the sudden changes of fortune, and how man (particularly heroic man) copes with them, rather than the justice of these intrusions, which are important in Sophoclean drama. In all this, as one may guess, time is again regarded as primary. Taking literally such texts as D.C. 609 (with its reference to "all-mastering time"), the author asserts that ''Time has become the cause of all the ups and downs of life, which have no reason in themselves." (93, my italics). This is surely inaccurate . Some changes occur due to physical dissolution, which merely takes place in time; others because the gods are "righting" an ancient wrong, or balancing an offence against nature by an appropriate reprisal against an offending family; others still, such as Ajax'S fall from glory, are due to god-tempting characteristics in the hero himself; none is due, as the generalization quoted would have it, simply to lltime." Euripides comes off a poor third when assessed by the author's yardstick of "a philosophy of time" - a fate not uncommon for the non-conformist of the Greek Tragedians when he is "compared" with his older colleagues. Mme. de Romilly finds reminiscences of both Aeschylus' and Sophocles' attitudes to time in Euripides, but the Aeschylean echoes are "artificial and independent of the general trend of the play" (144); "". what formerly was strongly felt doctrine, underlying whole plays, had now faded out and weakened into a sort of conventional stock." (116) The allegedly Sophoclean "idea of the unsteadiness of life, as a result of time, was [she suggests] a perfect theme for Euripidean pessimism." (ll8) But in Euripides, instead of serving to reveal the integrity of heroes who resist time, the theme is exploited for the purposes of the celebrated Euripidean pathos (for example, "present woes contrasted with past happiness") and coups de thedtre, in which "time is the realm of tucM or chance." (119) But let us grant that Euripides did not have (as Mme. de Romilly seems to feel he ought to have had) a "philosophy of time"; the limitations, in this instance, of her approach fail to do justice either to that poet's (often sardonic) perceptions of the human condition and to his profound reRections on it. (D. J. CONACHER) AUGUSTAN MISCELLANY' The three volumes I am to treat of are good examples of familiar types of scholarly endeavour: the literary history of a period, the collection of miscel- "'James Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press 1969. Pp. x, 589. 55s; Bertrand Harris Bronson, Facets of the Enlightenment. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UniverSity of California Press 1968. Pp. viii, 365. $8.50; R. F. Brissenden, ed., Studies in the Eighteenth Century: Papers presented at the David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar Canherra 1966. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1968. Pp. xx, 327. $12.50. AUGUSTAN MISCELLANY 189 laneous essays by a distinguished man of letters, and the conference volume. Each of these kinds has obvious advantages and drawbacks. The conference volume while offering the latest research or newest literary speculation, is frequently uneven, with evidence of the haste that conference deadlines impose. One may find facile generalizations strung together to fill thirty minutes, a none too neatly excised extract from a forthcoming book or an irrelevant gem of trivial minutiae. The collection of essays affords the pleasure of a single sensibility moving over diverse topics and bringing them into unity through the focus of this sensibility; it can also however, be an exercise in self-indulgent miscellaneity. The literary history should give the texture and shape of the literature of an age but too often it becomes a string of superficial and pedestrian commonplaces indicating only that the author has spent much time in libraries. Dr. Brissenden's collection is certainly a wonderfully mixed bag, ranging from Franklin Ford's elegant generalizations on the "Enlightenment," to A.H. Cash's fascinating and hOrrifying study of eighteenth·century midwifery . The difficulty with Professor Ford's attempt to redefine the nature of the Enlightenment...

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