the fluent movement of these verses sufficiently argues the off-hand ease with which Lord Wellesley must have read Greek, writing it so elegantly, and with so little of apparent constraint.

Meantime the most interesting (from its circumstances) of Lord Wellesley's metrical attempts, is one to which his own English interpretation of it has done less than justice. It is a Latin epitaph on the daughter (an only daughter) of Lord and Lady Brougham. She died, and (as was generally known at the time) of an organic affection disturbing the action of the heart, at the early age of eighteen. And the peculiar interest of the case lies in the suppression, by this pious daughter (so far as it was possible), of her own bodily anguish, in order to beguile the mental anguish of her parents. The Latin epitaph is this:

"Blanda anima, e cunis heu! longo exercita morbo,

Inter maternas heu lachrymasque patris,

Quas risu lenire tuo jucunda solebas,

Et levis, et proprii vix memor ipsa mali;

I, pete calestes, ubi nulla est cura, recessus:
Et tibi sit nullo mista dolore quies!"

The English version is this:

"Doom'd to long suffering from earliest years,

Amidst your parents' grief and pain alone
Cheerful and gay, you smiled to soothe their tears;

And in their agonies forgot your own.

Go, gentle spirit! and among the blest

From grief and pain eternal be thy rest!"

In the Latin, the phrase e cunis hardly expresses from your cradle upwards. The second line is faulty in the opposition of maternas, an adjective, to the substantive patris; whilst the repetition of the heu in two consecutive lines is ungraceful. In the fourth line, levis conveys a false meaning: levis must mean either physically light—i. e., not heavy -which is not the sense, or else tainted with levity, which

C-VIII.

is still less the sense. What Lord Wellesley wished to say was light-hearted: this he has not said; but neither is it easy to say it in good Latin.

I complain, however, of the whole, as not bringing out Lord Wellesley's own feeling-which feeling is partly expressed in his verses, and partly in his accompanying prose note on Miss Brougham's mournful destiny ("her life was a continual illness "), contrasted with her fortitude, her innocent gaiety, and the pious motives under which she supported this gaiety to the last. Not as a direct version, but as filling up the outline of Lord Wellesley, sufficiently indicated by himself, I propose the following

INSCRIPTION FOR THE GRAVE OF THE HON. MARIA BROUGHAM:

66

*
Child, that for thirteen years hast fought with pain,

Prompted by joy and depth of filial love,

Rest now at God's command. Oh! not in vain

His angel ofttimes watch'd thee-oft, above

All pangs that would have dimm'd thy parents' eyes,

Saw thy young heart victoriously rise!

Rise now for ever, self-forgetting child!

Rise to those choirs, where love like thine is blest,

From pains of flesh, from filial tears assoil'd

Love which God's hand shall crown with God's own rest!"

* "For thirteen:"-i. e., from the age of five to eighteen, at which age she died.

SCHLOSSER'S LITERARY HISTORY OF THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

In the person of this Mr Schlosser is exemplified a common abuse, not confined to literature. An artist from the Italian opera of London and Paris, making a professional excursion to the French or English provinces, is received deferentially and almost passively according to the tariff of the metropolis; no rural judge being bold enough to dispute decisions coming down from the courts above. In that particular case, there is seldom any reason to complain-since really, out of Germany and Italy, there is no city, if you except Paris and London, possessing musical resources for the composition of an audience large enough to act as a court of revision. It would be presumption in the provincial audience, so slightly trained to good music and dancing, if it should affect to disturb a judgment ratified in the supreme capital. The result, therefore, will be practically just, if the original verdict was just; what was right from the first cannot be made wrong by iteration. Yet, even in such a case, there is something not satisfactory to a delicate sense of equity; for the artist returns from the tour as if from some new and independent triumph, whereas all is but the reverberation of an old one; it seems a new access of sunlight,

whereas it is but a reflex illumination from lunar satellites.

An

In literature, the corresponding case is worse. author, passing (by means of translation) before a foreign people, ought de jure to find himself before a new tribunal; but de facto too often he does not. Like the opera artist, but not with the same propriety, he comes before a court that never interferes to unsettle a judgment, but only to re-affirm it. And he returns to his native country, quartering in his armorial bearings these new trophies, as though won by new trials, when, in fact, they are due to servile ratifications of old ones. When Sue or Balzac, Dumas or George Sand, comes before an English audience, the opportunity is invariably lost for estimating the men at a new angle of sight. What is thought of Dumas in Paris? asks the London reviewer; and shapes his notice to catch the aroma of the Parisian verdicts just then current. But exactly this is what he should prudently have shunned. He will never learn his own natural and unbiassed opinion of the book when he thus deliberately intercepts all that would have been spontaneous in his impressions, by adulterating with alien views-possibly not even sincere. And thus a new set of judges, that might usefully have modified the narrow views of the old ones, fall by mere inertia into the humble character of echoes and sounding-boards to swell the uproar of the original mob.

In this way is thrown away the opportunity, not only of applying corrections to false national tastes, but oftentimes even to the unfair accidents of luck that befall books. For it is well known to all who watch literature with vigilance, that books and authors have their fortunes, which travel upon a far different scale of proportions from

those that measure their merits. Not even the caprice or the folly of the reading public is required to account for this. Very often, indeed, the whole difference between an extensive circulation for one book, and none at all for another of about equal merit, belongs to no particular blindness in men, but to the simple fact, that the one has, whilst the other has not, been brought effectually under the eyes of the public. By far the greater part of books are lost, not because they are rejected, but because they are never introduced. In any proper sense of the word, very few books are published. Technically, no doubt, they are published; which means, that for ten or twenty times they are advertised; but they are not made known to attentive ears, or to ears prepared for attention. And amongst the causes which account for this difference in the fortune of books, although there are many, we may reckon, as foremost, personal accidents of position in the authors. For instance, with us in England, it will do a bad book no ultimate service that it is written by a lord, or by a bishop, or by a privy counsellor, or by a member of Parliament; though undoubtedly it will do an instant service-it will sell an edition or so. This being the case-it being certain that no rank will reprieve a bad writer from final condemnation-the sycophantic glorifier of the public fancies his idol justified; but not so. A bad book, it is true, will not be saved by advantages of position in the author; but a book moderately good will be extravagantly aided by such advantages. "Lectures on Christianity," that happened to be respectably written and delivered, had prodigious success in my young days, because, also, they happened to be lectures of a prelate; three times the ability would not have procured them any attention, had they been the lectures of an obscure curate. Yet, on the other hand, it is