observes, "The Puritans disapproved of bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the people." Was Puritanism a struggle after true religion, or was it a mangling of the vestments of religion into grotesque garments for fools, or cloaks for hypocrites, a tearing up of the curtains of the Holy of Holies into Madge-Wildfire ornamentation for fanatics or madmen? Is it a clearer vision of the realities of existence,—a truer insight into the "divinity that shapes our ends;" and is the starting-point, the course, and the goal, the all-in-all of human life on earth and beyond it? In truth, there is a little of all these heterogeneous elements in Puritanism: chaff is blown about and overlies the wheat; the lightest uppermost and most patent. Hypocrisy and austereness are readily suspected, and not difficult to see through; sincerity and genuine devotion are qualities that are never conceded until proved by time. Out of its great crucible, which dissolves generations into air, the fame of Cromwell and Milton have come purified like gold from a furnace seven times heated. They are the finest metal of Puritanism, and great and worthy is the age and the religious agitation that produced them. But they are not Puritanism. They were simply true, sincere, religious men, born into an age not unworthy of them, and not unsuitable for the development of their gigantic endowments; and they were ready to be anything else as much as Puritans. Above the small conceits, the bigotries, and the intolerance of Puritanism, they rose completely clear. The ridiculous and most notorious characteristic of Puritanism did not adhere to them in reality. In so far as Puritanism was absurd or irrational, Milton was no Puritan, and Cromwell and Bunyan, though exhibiting that religious vehemence which hypocrisy can imitate and scepticism caricature, were too great to be confined by any little creed, or to be bound by the crotchets of any number of self-convinced but short-sighted little men. They were in the world and of the world, but only partly of the world in which they were. They rose out of it as icebergs rise out of the sea, deepset in it, floating in it, partly moulded by it, and wholly borne by it. And the sea that bore them is not Puritanism, which was an accident, but the deep vast ocean of human sincerity and religious conviction which flows through all ages and climes, and is not limited by name, nation, or accident, though revealed in all.

On Translating Homer. Three Lectures given at Oxford by Matthew Arnold, M.A., Professor of Poetry. London: Longmans. 1861. MR. ARNOLD fears "that classical literature is probably on the decline," yet holds it certain "that as instruction spreads, more attention will be directed to the poetry of Homer, not, indeed, as part of a classical course, but as the most important existing poetical monument." How is this statement reconcilable with another position of his first lecture, that "the only competent tribunal for translators of Homer is the body of classical scholars?" If the Professor's fears are well grounded, the tribunal which he proposes, will in time fail

for lack of judges; and, if accuracy of classical taste is at a low ebb, it may be doubted whether the mass of English readers will either require, or find, more satisfactory food than the doubtless unreal, yet still poetical and spirited, version of Pope. But there is no need to despair of that learning which has done so much to make English literature what it is; and therefore, despite the opening supposition of the Professor, we are sanguine that scholarship will continue to furnish votaries enough to form a competent tribunal before which Homeric versions may be tried.

Mr. Arnold passes in review the chief of these that have in time past contended for the palm; and treating, in three lectures, of the faults of each in turn, leads the "coming man" (who is to set all things right in Homeric translation) through a process of demolition of existing translations, to what he conceives the standard ought to be. Much of his matter is able, truthful, and original. Laying down the requirements of an English translation of Homer to be "rapidity of movement" (this, by the way, Dryden held to be Homer's excellence), "plainness of speech, simplicity, and nobleness," he finds Pope and Sotheby wanting when tried by the second test, and Cowper and Wright when subjected to the first. The Elizabethan Chapman he condemns for lack of imitation of Homer's plainness and directness of ideas, and he stigmatizes Mr. Francis Newman's version, when he contrasts its manner and matter with the noble style of Homer, as ignoble.

Cowper, as Mr. Arnold remarks, avoids through his blank verse the drawback to Homeric translation, caused by the exigencies of rhyme, as tending to pair independent verses, and so to change the movement of the poem. But his Miltonic manner has not the stirring rapidity of Homer, to which Chapman, indeed, lays a fairer claim, though his quaint, grotesque style is fatal to his pretensions. To the Professor's estimate of Pope our feelings admit of only a limited assent. Alongside of it may be read, as a corrective, Professor Conington's Oxford Essay (pp. 30, 31, Oxford Essays, 1858), whose warm avowal of the debt due from every English school-boy to the " calm, majestic, unhasting, unresting flow of Pope's language," will meet a response from the hearts of lovers of English poetry, which may be denied to Mr. Arnold's criticisms, however plausible. As to Mr. Newman, the Poetry Professor only pays him that which he has deserved, for his un-Homeric Homer is only what might be expected from one who, as Mr. Arnold shows in his second lecture, applies to the immortal bard the epithets "quaint," "garrulous," "prosaic," "low;" but a protest must be entered against the Arnoldian repudiation of the claims of the ballad-school to the credit of realizing beyond others the spirit of Homer's poetry. Mr. Arnold fairly selects for criticism average specimens of Pope and Cowper. Why does he proceed on other principles when he picks ridiculous snatches of ballad-poetry, such

as

"While the Tinker did dine, he had plenty of wine,"

to illustrate his dogma, that the ballad cannot reproduce the nobleness

of Homer? His ear may ring for ever "with the detestable dance of Dr. Maginn's lines"

"And scarcely had she begun to wash

Ere she was aware of the grisly gash."

Yet they do not sound so ludicrous when read with the context; and he will pardon us for saying that the practice of judging the whole by a detached and arbitrarily-selected part is one which is justly out of date. For proofs of grace, beauty, simplicity, nobleness, he might have set his finger on numberless passages of that popular volume, the Homeric Ballads. The "Return from Troy," the "Beggar-man Beaten," have more chance of taking hold upon the English taste, through the English ear, than the best hexameters which have yet appeared, not excepting those with which he illustrates his own judgment, that that metre is the only fit vehicle for reproducing Homer. In spite of Mr. Arnold's reasonings, many more lectures will be required, many nights and days of polish of the English hexameter, ere it will realize Homer's spirit as effectively as would that poet who could bring Sir Walter Scott's spirit, genius, and ballad-manner to the task of rendering Homer with the graphic rapidity (Mr. Arnold calls it "jerkiness") of Marmion. Mr. Gladstone's few versions of Homeric passages, just published in a volume of translations, of which he and Lord Lyttleton are joint authors, may be cited in proof of this. Written in the manner of Scott, they illustrate what has been said all the more forcibly, because they are given to the world more recently than Mr. Arnold's lectures. And if the Chancellor of the Exchequer's versions of the battles in the fourth and the eleventh books of the Iliad be not Homeric, even when tried by the Arnold standard, we know not where to look for what is so.

To concede Pope is hard! Cowper and Chapman we give up; and Mr. Newman may be thrown in! In a word, Mr. Arnold may demolish the representatives of every other school, so he but leave us the balladists. Professor Blackie points, in an Essay on English Hexameters in the Classical Museum (vol. iv.), to "Locksley Hall," and the Trochaic measure of fifteen syllables, as the proper English correlative of the Homeric hexameter. This is an admission which, coming from so competent a judge, is important as in favour of the balladists. At all events, till the hexametric style is smoother, more natural, more acclimatized than as it strikes us in the "Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich," or in Mr. Arnold's specimens (of which, to do him justice, he speaks but diffidently), it has small chance of becoming the instrument of an English Homer, which shall supersede all others. Yet the volume before us is well worth reading. There is much sound criticism, much good sense, especially in its negative hints; e. g., that the intending translator may wisely eschew the question whether Homer was one or many, etc. He is happy, too, in his observation that the English Bible is an authority of high value, in a question of diction, to the translator of Homer. We can scarcely conceive a better preparation than close study of the book of Job. Up and down the three lectures, are scattered manifold indications that their

author is intimately conversant with the best of the modern, as also of the ancient poets and critics.

And if, in his not infrequent dogmatism, he recalls the clever saying of the author of "Friends in Council," that "the large, fluent, unquestioning, unhesitating dogmatism, is one of the grand elements. of success in modern life," so that you may "keep your carriage on a dogma," whereas a doubting man "will not even keep a gig on it;" yet there is something to be learnt in every page; and everywhere there is convincing proof, from internal evidence, that the Professor is not only a teacher of the divine art, but also a practising and practised weaver of immortal verse.'

A Complete Latin Grammar. By John William Donaldson, D.D. London: Walter and Maberley.

THE preface to this, the second edition of his Latin Grammar, was penned by Dr. Donaldson in October 1860, and since then, comparatively young in years though old in labours-ætatem virtute superavit -he has passed from among us, another victim to the over-brain work of this toiling age. We shall not here attempt an exhaustive review of the services rendered by him to the cause of scholarship in this country, or seek to assign him his due place among the great scholars of this and former ages. This task is reserved for a future occasion. We shall merely indicate briefly the distinctive features of this his last work, on which were brought to bear the results of his life's researches.

All grammars must, to a great extent, be alike. Paradigms, lists of verbs, and illustrative examples, belong to the edicta tralatica of Latin grammarians, which are transferred from one grammar to another in an unbroken succession of literary inheritance. Such improvements as are possible must lie either in a fuller statement of facts, or in a more scientific arrangement. In both these respects this grammar is an advance, and while the arrangement has been everywhere subordinated to the laws of the language which the researches of comparative philology have established, it is pleasing to find those good old mnemonic aids retained which later grammars have rejected, but without which it is impossible to conquer that vast mass of details necessary to accurate scholarship. The declensions are reduced to three, and arranged according to the stem or crude form. We have thus the a declension, the o declension; and the consonantal, including the semiconsonantal, forms the third. Those generally known as the fourth and fifth declensions are arranged under the semi-consonantal division of the third; and there can be no doubt that the fourth is a contracted form of the third. The fifth, however, seems much more properly to be regarded as a modified a declension, in which the old terminations more fully appear, a view of the case supported by the fact of many nouns, as materia, luxuria, being declined according to both forms. On the same principle of arrangement the conjugations of verbs are reduced to two classes, the vowel and the consonantal. The first three are vowel conjugations-the a, the e, the i; and the fourth is composed

VOL. I.

G

of consonantals, as reg-o, including the semi-consonantals, as faci-o, аси-о. As to the formation of the perfect of verbs there are three forms having distinct origin, but not differing in signification; the reduplicated form, like the Greek perfect, as do, de-di; the aorist form in si, as scribo, scrip-si; the composite form in vi or ui from fui, as ama-vi for ama-fui. Whether the derivation of the third form be correct is a very doubtful point, but such as wish to follow the arguments by which it has been supported, will find them in full in the Varronianus. The tense usually known as the future-perfect-indicative is relegated to its proper place in the subjunctive mood, and it is pointed out that in the i and consonantal conjunctions the futureindicative and present-subjunctive are but modifications of the same form, the outward symbol of the close relation of the ideas of futurity and contingency.

The Syntax is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is occupied with an application to Latin grammar of the general principles on which all syntax depends, and gives in a succinct form the main rules of Latin construction. Such a summary is useful not only to those just entering on the study of Latin syntax, but also to the advanced student, who, occupied with a variety of details, may constantly recur to it, and gather up his knowledge into a convenient shape. Such a summary is a desideratum in most larger works on grammar. The three remaining chapters are devoted to the separate and methodical investigation of the rules for construing the noun, the verb, and the sentence. There follows a chapter on Prosody, in which the metres are explained on certain general principles, not only, in the author's view, more true in theory than the usual expositions, but also calculated to remove the principal difficulties of versification. Five appendices are added at the end of the book, containing a vast amount of information which does not necessarily belong to an exposition of Latin grammar, but which it is convenient for the student to have collected in the manual to which he goes for the main facts of the language.

A special feature in the grammar lies in the attention which is paid in the accidence to the careful discrimination of synonyms, to which the student cannot pay too much attention.

Cicero's Second Philippic. Edited by John E. B. Mayor, M.A., Classical Lecturer, St. John's College, Cambridge. Cambridge:

Macmillan & Co.

THIS is just such an exhaustive edition of the Second Philippic as a painstaking and accurate teacher loves to get up, and an exact and laborious student to have placed in his hands; such an edition as Professor Ramsay of Glasgow has issued of the much more difficult, but not less instructive one, Pro Cluentio. Here is everything that heart can wish: a list of books of reference, useful to the student of Cicero, that would make up a nice little modern library; an Introduction, setting forth, in clear and terse English, the previous history of