The casual reader, on seeing these lines, might be forgiven for the thought that Lord Byron had the crossword puzzle in mind when he wrote them. In an uncertain world nothing is more certain than that this was not the case. Byron died in 1824. The crossword puzzle was born, at least in its popular modern shape, almost precisely a century later. Its history begins suddenly. Neither in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of 1921, nor in the twelfth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, dated 1922, does the crossword appear at all. But from the year 1923 references to it become increasingly frequent. In 1924 a popular work entitled The Crossword Puzzle Book was published. In 1925 there was a reference to crosswords in Punch. In 1926 the thirteenth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica had a short article on it. In 1928 the crossword puzzle was mentioned in Galsworthy's Swan Song. From that time every good standard dictionary or work of reference has included it. These facts document its emergence as a literary phenomenon in Great Britain. The history of the crossword in the United States is very similar, except that it would appear to have achieved stardom in the popular firmament a few months earlier in that country than in this.

One day last April it was my good fortune to spend a few hours on the famous hill of Hissarlik. Being only a dabbler in archaeology, I felt little dismay that my time there was so short; even a brief visit would be sufficient to get a vivid impression of the setting and geographical background of the Iliad. It is doubtless a pleasant fancy to imagine the Trojans hauling the wooden horse, some with foreboding, others with exultant shouts, up the steep ramp which the archaeologists have laid bare; and to be told by an expert that a bit of broken pot that one has casually picked up dates from the time when the Greeks are alleged to have sacked Troy should send a thrill through the heart of any one who boasts a classical education.

All writers are to some extent consciously interested in the technique of their art; many of them far more so than is generally realized. The majority follow the principle Ars maxima celare artem, and do not allow us more than a glimpse into their workshop; many a lyric that delights us by its apparent spontaneity has been hammered out slowly and shaped and altered until its final form contains hardly a trace of the original creation. The late W. B. Yeats in his Autobiography says:

‘Metrical composition is always very difficult to me. Nothing is done upon the first day, not one rhyme is in its place; and when at last the rhymes begin to come, the first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes the whole day. Sometimes a six-line stanza would take several days, and not seem finished even then.’

Although Professor Murray in his edition of Aeschylus' plays puts Prometheus between Persae (472 b.c.) and Septem (467 b.c.), many students nowadays show a tendency to place it in the last period of the poet's work. For instance Mr. W. F. J. Knight (J.H.S. lviii, 1938, p. 53) says:

‘It is important to regard all the extant plays of Aeschylus, and at least some of the plays that are lost, as a single sequence of developing poetic thought. Accordingly, at the end, when Aeschylus solves the hardest problem of all, the marriage of Heaven and Earth, something like the Prometheia with a satanic Zeus might almost have been predicted…. In fact the metaphysical argument may even have some force in determining the date and authenticity of the Prometheia.

There can be little doubt that the extant remains of Persius form the whole of his writings. In his boyhood he had indulged in the literary exercises of the classroom, and these immature efforts included a tragedy, a book of travels, and some lines on the elder Arria, whose Non dolet1 was an appropriate subject for a young Stoic to commemorate. These experiments had little merit, otherwise they would not have been destroyed on the advice of Cornutus, his friend and teacher and literary executor.