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Shakespeare keeps closer to his guide's steps when he adapts Ovid's sympathetic sketch of man's journey from youth to age. In Sonnet LXIII he imagines the day when his love's 'youthful morn' will have travell'd on to age's steepy night.' Similarly Ovid notes how the boy, 'growing strong and swift, . passeth forth the space of youth; and ... through drooping age's steepy path he runneth out his race.' Not merely does Ovid's metaphor of travel correspond with Shakespeare's reflection, but Golding's phrase, 'age's steepy path,' is accepted with very slight modification. The uncommon adjective 'steepy' tells its own tale.

In Sonnet LX, Shakespeare, with an eye on the same passage in Ovid, tells somewhat cryptically how

'Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity.'

This is a difficult mode of saying that the newborn babe, when it has once emerged into the full expanse of the day's light, passes on to manhood through a period of crawling. The main of light' echoes Golding's 'lightsome sun' and 'daystar clear and bright.' The ambiguity frequently attaching to Shakespeare's habit of using abstract for concrete terms (i.e. 'nativity' for 'newborn babe') is here increased by an insistent reminiscence of Ovid's graphic description, in the same connexion, of the baby's early endeavour to crawl. On the infant's crawling processes the Latin poet lays curious stress in his account of man's progress from infancy. Golding's version runs: 'The child newborn lies void of strength; within a season though

He, waxing fourfooted, learns like savage beasts to go; Then, somewhat faltering, and as yet not firm of foot, he stands

By getting somewhat for to help his sinews in his hands.

Another instructive verbal echo of Golding is heard in Sonnet XV. The four ages of man are likened by Ovid to the four seasons-to 'spring-tide,' which decks 'the earth with flowers of sundry hue,' to 'summer waxing strong. . . like a lusty youth,' to 'harvest,' and to 'ugly winter,' which, like age, steals on with trembling steps, all bald or overcast with shrill thin air as white as snow.'

In Sonnet xv Shakespeare writes, again claiming another's vision:

...

'I perceive that men as plants increase . Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease.' Nothing very distinctive can be alleged of such comparisons between human life and nature. But Shakespeare here, with singular precision, goes on to define his presentation of this law of growth, in language of Golding's coinage; he calls it 'the conceit of this inconstant stay.' Golding repeatedly adapts a negative periphrasis, of which the word stay' is the central feature, when he writes of the Ovidian theory of Nature's unending rotation. Golding's usage, which is none too felicitous, was probably due to exigencies of rhyme. Thus he asserts that 'in all the world there is not that that standeth at a stay.' At different points he notes that 'our bodies' and 'the elements never stand at stay.' Shakespeare's 'inconstant stay' (Sonnet XV, 9) is Golding's clumsy vocabulary. He shows a keener artistic sense, and a better appreciation of Ovid's argument, when he replaces this inconstant stay' elsewhere by such variants as 'nature's changing course' (XVIII, 8), 'revolution' (LIX, 12), interchange of state' (LXIV, 9), and 'the course of altering things' (cxv, 8). This terminology, which also echoes Golding (e.g. 'the interchanging course' and 'exchange' of 'estate'), does better justice to the lucidity of the Latin poet.

Some of the ideas common to Ovid and Shakespeare are the universal food of poetry. But the majority of the cited parallelisms have individuality; and their collective presence both in the Sonnets and in one short passage of the Metamorphoses establishes Shakespeare's debt. He by no means stood alone among Elizabethan poets in assimilating Ovid's Neo-Pythagorean doctrine. Nor is the cyclical solution of Nature's mysteries the exclusive property of Ovid, or of his Neo-Pythagorean tutors; it is shared by the Stoics and the Neo-Platonists. But the poets of Europe first learnt its outlines in Ovid's pages, even if curiosity impelled some of them subsequently to supplement Ovid's information by resort to metaphysical treatises of one or other of the Greek schools and to current Italian adaptations of Neo-Pythagoreanism

or Neo-Platonism. Such was clearly the experience of Shakespeare's great poetic contemporary, Edmund Spenser, who twice in his 'Faerie Queene' repeats Ovid's 1 account of the processes of Time and Nature in the Metamorphoses, but subtilises it by references to Plato or Plotinus, to Ficino or Bruno. In Spenser's third book, where Adonis personifies the productivity of Nature, and the garden of Adonis is pictured as a treasury of Nature's seeds, the poet champions the doctrine of the imperishability of matter, despite the variations of its forms, in lines like these:

'That substance is eterne and bideth so:

Ne when the life decays and form does fade
Doth it consume and into nothing go,

But changed is and often altered to and fro.'

Ovid's influence is more clearly visible in the extant fragments of the seventh book of Spenser's moral epic, the unfinished canto of Mutability. There Spenser depicts

the regular rotation of Nature and Time,

'The ever-whirling wheel

Of Change, the which all mortal things doth sway.'

Spenser's and Shakespeare's phrasings of their accounts of the cyclic workings of Dame Nature's' activities differ. But there is sufficient resemblance in thought to prove the suggestive energy of Ovid and to confirm the right of the Metamorphoses to its French title of La Bible des Poètes.'

The cryptic problems commonly associated with Shakespeare's Sonnets lie beyond the scope of this demonstration of the Ovidian temper which colours the Sonnets' philosophy. The new proofs of Shakespeare's dependence on Ovid support the belief that the bulk of the Sonnets came from Shakespeare's pen in his early life, when his memory of the Metamorphoses was freshest. In that elegy of Ovid from which Shakespeare drew the motto for his 'Venus and Adonis,' the Latin poet pays a noble tribute to Lucretius, the greatest of all poets who made philosophy their theme. Ovid's fine reference to Lucretius must have been familiar to Shakespeare in very early life, and may well have stimulated an effort to fuse lyric emotion with the philosophic speculation of Ovid's own pages.

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In any case, an examination of the philosophic sentiment which courses through the Sonnets renders indefeasible the claim of those poems to rank with the richest fruits of the pagan Renaissance. The main themes of the Sonnets are beauty's obligation to propagate itself in offspring, the supremacy of masculine beauty, faith in the immortality of verse and in its capacity to eternise its subject. All these themes belong to the paganism of Greek lyric poetry, which flowed from Greece through Latin literature into the vernacular poetry of the Western Renaissance. But the philosophical reflections which pervade the poems offer the plainest evidence that has yet been adduced of the pagan tone of the poet's voice. The doctrine that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, Time is an endless rotatory process, and that what seems 'new' is mere recurrence of what has been before,' is fatal to all Christian conception of the beginning and end of the world, with its special creations at the outset and its day of judgment at the close. No notion of the soul's immortality is quite consistent with the cyclical workings of Time and Nature. There is no possibility of reconciling these pagan cosmic views with Christianity. Such a conclusion is of importance because it brings Shakespeare's spirit into closer kinship with the intellectual development of the European Renaissance than is sometimes acknowledged. But critical lovers of the Sonnets, who recognise in them the flower of poetic fervour, will probably be content to draw, from the fact of Shakespeare's absorption of the Ovidian philosophy, fresh evidence of that miraculous sympathy and receptivity whereby

'all the learnings that his time

Could make him the receiver of, . . . he took,
As we do air, fast as 'twas minister'd,

And in 's spring became a harvest.'

SIDNEY LEE.

Art. 8.-EARTHQUAKES AND THEIR CAUSES.

1. The Physics of Earthquake Phenomena. By C. G. Knott, D.Sc. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908.

2. Les Tremblements de Terre: Géographie Séismologique. By F. de Montessus de Ballore. Paris: Colin, 1906. 3. La Science Séismologique. By Le Comte de Montessus de Ballore. Paris: Armand Colin, 1907.

4. Earthquakes in the Light of the New Seismology. By Major C. E. Dutton. London: Murray, 1904.

5. Earthquakes: an Introduction to Seismic Geology. By Prof. W. H. Hobbs. New York: Appleton, 1907.

IN 1755 the city of Lisbon was destroyed by the greatest of all recorded earthquakes. That the shock itself was felt in England is possible, though far from certain. But there can be no doubt whatever as to the effects produced by the unfelt earth-waves as they spread outwards beyond the limits of the disturbed area. All over this country lakes and pools alike were agitated, the vertical movement in some of the larger basins amounting to several feet. Four or five hours afterwards the great sea-waves, so destructive to the harbour of Lisbon, reached our shores, the water rising and falling again and again like brief miniature tides. Many letters, in which these movements are described, were read before the Royal Society. They are interesting as careful records of an unusual event, but they derive their chief value from the fact that they prepared the way for the remarkable memoir in which, a few years later, the Rev. John Michell grouped and explained the phenomena then observed. The accurate descriptions contained in this memoir, and the author's wonderfully clear, almost prophetic insight, entitle it to rank, not only as one of the earliest, but as the most important, of all contributions to seismology.

Nearly a century passed, however, before the next advance was made, Michell and his work in the meantime being almost forgotten. In 1846, while pondering over a minor but interesting problem, Robert Mallet, a Dublin engineer, was led to apply the laws of wavemotion in solids, as they were then known, to the general theory of earthquakes. He was thus able to form a