Hellenism of the present; and in the Greek islands, despite the strictness of the more civilized members of the Orthodox Church, they cling to them with surprising tenacity. A body which dies unlamented cannot enter Hades, and wanders about like that of Patroclus and Elpenor in misery in the upper air, neither belonging to the living nor to the dead. Consequently, the death wails and the burials take place as soon as possible after death, that the gates of Hades may be opened to them as soon as may be. The tenacity with which the islanders cling to their death wails is illustrated by the following story of a Mykoniote merchant who had settled in Marseilles, and made money there. On his death-bed he implored his wife to sing a death wail over his body, but she pleaded that owing to long absence from home she had forgotten how. Go to my desk,' he said, 'take out my ledger, read all that I have earned, and sing that.'

Solon in his day, St. Chrysostom in his, and the modern bishops in theirs, have all in their turn tried to put down the extraordinary grief of women on the occasion of a death. 'O women, what do you do?' wrote St. Chrysostom; 'you destroy your dresses, you tear your hair, you utter great cries, you dance, you imitate the Monads, and you do not think that you are offending God. What extravagance.' Bishop Lycurgus of Syra, whose great object in life was the union of the Anglican and the Orthodox Churches, used all his influence to check this custom, but in vain. The love of a death wail is such, that when a person dies from home, they spread out his clothes in the middle of the room and go through all the forms of lameutation, with even greater vehemence than when the corpse lies in their midst.

In remote villages the wax cross which bears the initials I. X. N. (Inσous Xpirròs vikậ), and which the priest puts on the lips of the deceased, is still called the valov, or freight-money, thereby demonstrating its pedigree from the coin which was anciently placed on the lips to pay for the ferry across the Styx. Sometimes when a man dies who has been conspicuous for his good fortune during life, they will cut off his nails before the corpse is removed, and tie them up in a bag to be preserved amongst

the other sacred things which are hung up in the sanctuary belonging to every house.

Before the corpse leaves the house a vase of water is broken on the threshold. When anyone starts on a journey, it is customary to spill water as an earnest of his success and safe return, and when the body goes on its last long journey the vase also is broken. The bier is carried by four male bearers, and about a bier the Greek islanders have this most gruesome riddle,—what is that which he who makes does so to sell, he who buys does not use himself, and he who uses does not see? As the funeral procession passes through the village street the priests chant the Offices of the Dead, and from time to time the mourners, who go in front, break forth into their hideous wails, and women come forth from their houses to groan in consort with the others. Of a truth a Greek island funeral is a painful sight to witness. On reaching the church the corpse is left in the porch, and whilst the liturgy is proceeding the mourners cease to wail. Then comes the very impressive stichera of the last kiss, which is chanted by all the congregation, and begins, Blessed is the way thou shalt go to-day,' whereat each mourner advances and gives the last kiss to the cold face of the corpse, and once more the extravagant demonstrations of grief break forth. Finally the corpse is lowered without a coffin into its shallow grave, and each bystander casts on to it a handful of soil. There is a prejudice against coffins, for they say the flesh cannot properly decay; and it is the custom to exhume the bones after a year has elapsed, when, if any flesh remains on them, they think it is a proof that the spirit has not gone to rest. This ceremony of exhuming the bones is a very painful one. They are washed carefully, and in some places tied up in a bag and consigned to a charnel house, and often these charnel houses fall into ruins, and hideous sights of skulls and bones are exhibited to the gaze of surviving relatives.

The house of mourning is thoroughly cleansed and washed after a death. The deceased's bed and pillow are left as they were for three days, with a lamp burning, for it is believed that during that time the spirit loves to hover around its old haunts, and would be hurt to find alterations made. Also it is deemed

unlucky to cook in a house where a death has occurred, consequently the neighbours always come in with cooked provisions for the benefit of the inmates, who have sufficient occupation during the succeeding days in visiting the tomb and continuing their heartrending wails. Boiled wheat, ornamented with sugar plums, and called the Kósa, are presented as an offering to the dead on successive days after death. Sometimes these are called ‘blessed cakes,' out of euphony no doubt. On the third day the friends and relations reassemble, again being summoned by the town. crier; fresh death-wails are sung, and more boiled wheat is presented as an offering to the dead, which is finally distributed to the poor, who always congregate near a churchyard for what they can get when a funeral has taken place. This same ceremony is likewise gone through on the ninth and fortieth days after death, much as the feasts were performed on similarly stated days amongst the antient Greeks, called rpíra and 'Evvàra, from the days on which the feast took place.

The boiled wheat or κóga forms a part of the ceremony on the Greek All Soul's Day, and is, as the Church teaches, symbolical of being sown in corruption and raised in incorruption; but if you ask a Greek peasant why he takes with him his present of boiled wheat to church on that particular day, he will say it is in honour of the dead, that the dead may eat thereof and think kindly of the living. If a household were to neglect to take this offering to church, they would fear a visitation from their deceased friends to claim the proper attention. In some places on the Saturday after the death, when the bread-baking takes place, warm bread with cheese or oil is distributed to poor women at the ovens, in memory of the departed, and if the death has occurred during Lent, at Eastertide the flesh of lambs and skins of ewes are given away in charity by wealthy mourners.

Families of the better class have their own tombs, where the bones of one deceased member are left until it is necessary for them to make way for the incoming tenant. In the island of Karpathos they put plates into the tombs; why, no one seemed to know. But it is an obvious continuation of the antient custom, for in some old tombs we excavated close to the spot, we found as many as sixteen plates laid out with the remnants of a

feast for the dead, which had been there untouched for perhaps two thousand years. They never put a tombstone or name over the grave. It is reserved for the Armenians to perpetuate the old custom of putting on the tombstone some device by which you can tell the calling in life of the occupant. Tailors, architects, farmers, are all thus labelled, reminding one of Elpenor's request to have an oar put on his grave to testify to posterity the fact of his having been a mariner.

J. THEODORE BENT.

ART. VII. ADAM SMITH AND HIS FOREIGN CRITICS.

N the 19th of May, 1885, a circular was issued by the Secretary of the Societé d'Economic Politique in Paris, to announce the completion of a medal, struck to commemorate the centenary of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and Turgot's Edits. The length of time which was allowed to elapse between the passing of resolution to strike the medal in December, 1876 and its tardy execution, as well as the fact that it is being sold now at the Society's office at half the original price fixed upon, would not seem to indicate a high degree of enthusiasm for the Father of Competition' in France, and yet it is among contemporary French Economists that Adam Smith is held more highly in honour than perhaps by any other professors of the science abroad, whereas his authority has been most seriously impaired in Germany, where a modern school has arisen avowedly opposed to Smithianismus,' and counting among its numbers some of the foremost Economists. It is our purpose in this paper to indicate the present influence of Adam Smith in these two countries in comparison with what it was a century ago, and the present appears to us an opportune moment for so doing. Last year was the centenary of the first commercial treaty between France and England, which was regarded at the time as the first important practical result of the publication of the Wealth

of Nations ten years previously. There are other reasons why in a Review, like this, we should devote some attention to the general results of the work accomplished by far the greatest of all Scottish thinkers,' as Buckle calls him, for at no time since the publication of the Wealth of Nations have its doctrines been subjected to more searching criticism both at home and abroad. Such criticisms are in themselves a tribute of honour; for few, indeed, are the works which are thought worthy of much discussion and discriminate examination a century after their publication. Parents have sooner or later to put up with the criticism of their own children, and the 'Father of Political Economy' is not an exception to the rule. Moreover, if there is some truth in what competent observers of the time tell us, that we are approaching a crisis in the history of middle-class ascendancy, that the world is growing a little tired of Free Trade and competition, that the principle of laissez faire is on its trial, and that a belief in the ‘unalterable principles of human nature,' accepted by Adam Smith with other teleological views of the universe peculiar to the last Century, has ceased to satisfy the cravings of sociological inquiries of to-day-it becomes all the more necessary to reconsider Adam Smith's position in relation to the present state of Political Economy, and to examine how far it may be necessary to adapt it to modern exigencies, so as to bring it into harmony with current modes of thought.

The inquiry is interesting from another point of view. The singular grasp of mind possessed by this Scottish thinker of the first order,' as Professor Ingram has called him quite recently, enabled him to survey so large a field in the course of his economic studies that there are scarcely any of the leading sociological questions of the day which are not touched upon in the Wealth of Nations. Not only have we here a full disquisition on the comparative claims of Free-trade and Reciprocity; State regulation and unlimited competition; the importance of liberating industry, and the marvellous results of a division of labour; the sources of wealth in nature and the secret springs of human action, stimulating its production and determining distribution; but we have here, also,