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.1 Hugo de Saint Victor,2 Luther's favourite divine, was a wonderful man, who, in the 12th century, the jubilant age of papal dominion, nursed the lamp of Platonic mysticism in the spirit of the most refined Christianity. JUNE 9, 1832. Sympathy of Old Greek and Latin with English.-Ennius." Roman IF you take Sophocles, Catullus, Lucretius, the better parts of Cicero, and so on, you may, just with 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 or Tibullus: if you attempt it, you will make nonsense. 1 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.—H. N. C. 2 This celebrated man was a Fleming, and a member of the Augustinian society of St. Victor. He died at 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.-H. N. C. 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 aftereffort 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.1 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 anything ab extra to conquer, the state advanced: when nothing remained but 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 1 Perhaps it left letter-writing also. Even if the Platonic epistles are taken as genuine, which Mr. Coleridge, to my surprise, was inclined 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!— And really upon getting out of bed, where the cramp most frequently occurred, pressing the sole of the foot on the cold floor, and then repeating this charm with the acts configurative thereupon prescribed, I can safely affirm that I do not remember an instance in which the cramp did not go away in a few seconds. I should not wonder if it were equally good for a stitch in the side; but I cannot say I ever tried it for that. JULY 7, 1832. Greek.-German, Spanish, and Italian.*—Dual, Neuter Plural, and Verb Singular.-Theta. T is hardly possible to conceive a language more perfect than the Greek. If you compare it with the modern European tongues, in the points of the position and relative bearing of the vowels and consonants on each other, and of the variety of terminations, it is incalculably before all in the former particulars, and only equalled in the last by German. But it is in variety of termination alone that the German surpasses the other modern languages as to sound; for, as to position, Nature seems to have dropped an acid into the language when a-forming, which curdled the to believe, they can hardly interfere, I think, with the uniqueness of the truly incomparable collections from the correspondence of Cicero and Pliny.-H. N. C. vowels and made all the consonants flow together. The Spanish is excellent for variety of termination; the Italian, in this particular, the most deficient. Italian prose is excessively monotonous. It is very natural to have a dual, duality being a conception quite distinct from plurality. Most very primitive languages have a dual, as the Greek, Welch, and the native Chilese, as you will see in the Abbé Raynal. The neuter plural governing, as they call it, a verb singular is one of the many instances in Greek of the inward and metaphysic grammar resisting successfully the tyranny of formal grammar. In truth, there may be Multeity in things; but there can only be Plurality in persons. Observe also, that, in fact, a neuter noun in Greek has no real nominative case, though it has a formal one, that is to say, the same word with the accusative. The reason is -a thing has no subjectivity or nominative case: it exists only as an object in the accusative or oblique case. It is extraordinary that the Germans should not have retained or assumed the two beautifully discriminated sounds of the soft and hard theta; as in thy thoughts—the thin ether that, &c. How particularly fine the hard theta is in an English termination, as in that grand word-Deathfor which the Germans gutturize a sound that puts you in mind of nothing but a loathsome toad. I JULY 8, 1832. REGRET to see that vile and barbarous vocable talented, stealing out of the newspapers into the leading reviews and most respectable publications of the day. Why not shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced, &c. ? The formation of a participle passive from a noun, is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse. If mere convenience is to justify such attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come from America.1 Never take an iambus as a Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do very well. Edith and Rotha are my favourite names for women. JULY 9, 1832. I Homer.-Valckenaer. HAVE the firmest conviction that Homer is a mere traditional synonyme with, or figure for, the Iliad. You cannot conceive for a moment anything about the poet, as you call him, apart from that poem. Difference in men there was in a degree, but not in kind; one man was, perhaps, a better poet than another; but he was a poet upon the same ground and with the same feelings as the rest. The want of adverbs in the Iliad is very characteristic. With more adverbs there would have been some subjectivity, or subjectivity would have made them. The Greeks were then just on the verge of the bursting forth of individuality. 2 Valckenaer's treatise on the interpolation of the Classics by the later Jews and early Christians is well worth your perusal as a scholar and critic. I JULY 13, 1832. Principles and Facts.-Schmidt. HAVE read all the famous histories, and, I believe, some history of every country and nation that is, or ever existed; but I never did so for the story itself as a story. The only thing interesting to me was the principles 1 See" eventuate," in Mr. Washington Irving's "Tour on the Prairies," passim.-H. N. C. 2 Diatribe de Aristobulo Judæo.-H. N. C. |