Part 5

But a Confederate student, like the rest of his tribe, could more readily renounce sweetness than light, and light soon became a serious matter. The American demands a flood of light, and wonders at the English don who pursues his investigations by the glimmer of two candles. It was hard to go back to primitive tallow dips. Lard might have served, but it was too precious to be used in lamps. The new devices were dismal, such as the vile stuff called terebene, which smoked and smelt more than it illuminated, such as the wax tapers which were coiled round bottles that had seen better days. Many preferred the old way, and read by flickering pine-knots, which cost many an old reader his eyes.

Now, tallow dips, lard, wax tapers, terebene, pine-knots, were all represented in the Peloponnesian war by oil. Oil, one of the great staples of Attica, became scarcer as the war went on. "A bibulous wick" was a sinner against domestic economy; to trim a lamp and hasten combustion was little short of a crime. Management in the use of oil--otherwise considered the height of niggardliness--was the rule, and could be all the more readily understood by the Confederate student when he reflected that oil was the great lubricant as well; that it was the Attic butter, and to a considerable extent the Attic soap. Under the Confederacy butter mounted to the financial milky way, not to be scaled of ordinary men, and soap was also a problem. Modern chemists have denied the existence of true soap in antiquity. The soap-suds that got into the eyes of the Athenian boy on the occasion of his Saturday-night scrubbing were not real soap-suds, but a kind of lye used for desperate cases. The oil-flask was the Athenian's soapbox. No wonder, then, that oil was exceeding precious in the Peloponnesian war, and no wonder that all these little details of daily hardship come back even now to the old student when he reopens his Aristophanes. No wonder that the ever present Peloponnesian war will not suffer him to forget those four years in which the sea of trouble rose higher and higher.

NOTES

POSTSCRIPT.--The bulk of the Notes would have been greatly augmented, if I had undertaken to explain 1892 as well as 1865 to the children of 1915. In 1892 Mr. CARNEGIE (p. 19) was not yet the benefactor of the outworn members of my own profession, and Mr. CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS was declaiming against the College Fetich to which I have borne a life long allegiance. To some of my own allusions I have lost the clue and find myself in the category with which BROWNING has made the world familiar.

CONTEMPORANEOUS OPINIONS OF THE NORTHERN PRESS

"A poetical view of the Southern cause in the Civil War."--The Nation, January, 1892.

"An attempt on the part of Professor Gildersleeve to make the Creed of the Old South seem a little less absurd than it has for twenty years past."--Springfield Republican.

"Professor B. L. Gildersleeve states the Creed of the Old South in a way to make every Northern man respect those who took up arms like General Lee under the conviction that the State had the first claim upon their allegiance. The writer would have strengthened this sympathy, however, did he show that he had been docile to the stern teacher, experience, and had come to reject the parochial creed of state rights."--Literary World, January 2, 1892.

"I hope it is not improper to add that wherever, in all Christendom, there is hearty appreciation of profound learning allied to conscience and to a refined life, the recent paper of the Johns Hopkins professor of philology will be taken as conclusive proof that good and true and able men could uphold the cause of the Confederacy even in arms, and never doubt in their hearts that they were right."--JACOB DOLSON COX, "Why the Men of '61 Fought for the Union," Atlantic Monthly, March, 1892.

CORRECTIONS.

p. 108, l. 18, for 'Weir' read 'Weyer'.

111, l. 27, LEE'S middle name was KENDALL, not KNOX.

115, l. 23, read 'As Gabriel on the devil'.

121, l. 15, read 'was and is'.

123, l. 6, for [Greek: zyg/on] read [Greek: zyg\on].

124, l. 6, read AUGUSTINE, 'as always in the Washington family' W. GORDON McCABE.

126, l. 6, for 427 read 417.