Germans, is not altogether wrong, and like them also, is never altogether right. Six volumes of translated selections from Luther's works, two being from his Letters, would be a delightful work. The translator should be a man deeply imbued with his Bible, with the English writers from Henry the Seventh to Edward the Sixth, the Scotch Divines of the 16th century, and with the old racy German. * Hugo de Saint Victor †, Luther's favourite * Mr. Coleridge was fond of pressing this proposed publication : — "I can scarcely conceive," he says in the Friend, "a more delightful volume than might be made from Luther's letters, especially those that were written from the Warteburg, if they were translated in the simple, sinewy, idiomatic, hearty mother tongue of the original. A difficult task I admit, and scarcely possible for any man, however great his talents in other respects, whose favourite reading has not lain among the English writers from Edward the Sixth to Charles the First." Vol. i. p. 235. n. - ED. This celebrated man was a Fleming, and a member of the Augustinian society of St. Victor. He died at divine, was a wonderful man, who, in the 12th century, the jubilant age of papal domi nion, nursed the lamp of Platonic mysticism in the spirit of the most refined Christianity. June 9. 1832. SYMPATHY OF OLD GREEK AND LATIN IF you take Sophocles, Catullus, Lucretius, the better parts of Cicero, and so on, you may, with just two or three exceptions arising out of the different idioms as to cases, translate page after page into good mother English, word by word, without altering the order; but you cannot do so with Virgil Paris in 1142, aged forty-four. His age considered, it is sufficient praise for him that Protestants and Romanists both claim him for their own on the subject of transubstantiation. - ED. or Tibullus if you attempt it, you will make nonsense. There is a remarkable power of the picturesque in the fragments we have of Ennius, Actius, and other very old Roman writers. This vivid manner was lost in the Augustan age. Much as the Romans owed to Greece in the beginning, whilst their mind was, as it were, tuning itself to an after-effort of its own music, it suffered more in proportion by the influence of Greek literature subsequently, when it was already mature and ought to have worked for itself. It then became a superfetation upon, and not an ingredient in, the national character. With the exception of the stern pragmatic historian and the moral satirist, it left nothing original to the Latin Muse.* Perhaps it left letter-writing also. Even if the Platonic epistles are taken as genuine, which Mr. A nation, to be great, ought to be compressed in its increment by nations more civilized than itself-as Greece by Persia ; and Rome by Etruria, the Italian states, and Carthage. I remember Commodore Decatur saying to me at Malta, that he deplored the occupation of Louisiana by the United States, and wished that province had been possessed by England. He thought that if the United States got hold of Canada by conquest or cession, the last chance of his country becoming a great compact nation would be lost. War in republican Rome was the offspring of its intense aristocracy of spirit, and stood to the state in lieu of trade. As long as there was any thing ab extra to conquer, the state advanced: when nothing remained but Coleridge, to my surprise, was inclined to believe, they can hardly interfere, I think, with the uniqueness of the truly incomparable collections from the correspondence of Cicero and Pliny. — ED. what was Roman, then, as a matter of course, civil war began. June 10. 1832. CHARM FOR CRAMP. WHEN I was a little boy at the Blue-coat School, there was a charm for one's foot when asleep; and I believe it had been in the school since its foundation, in the time of Edward the Sixth. The march of intellect has probably now exploded it. It ran thus: Foot! foot! foot! is fast asleep! Thumb thumb! thumb! in spittle we steep: Two for the thieves, and one for Christ Jesus! And the same charm served for a cramp in the leg, with the following substitution: The devil is tying a knot in my leg! Mark, Luke, and John, unloose it I beg! - |