from the left, and leave Priscian's head unbroken. The most earless nation on earth-a nation which has produced no music, except those simple strains which, like currents of electricity, run round the whole globe, which cannot show a single composer of real eminence-prides itself upon an accuracy for which there is no parallel save that of a deaf musician. The whole world must be pestered with the information, that the British Senate knew that the penult of vectigal is long, and that Cambridge was aware that the penult of profugus is short: and these stories are hawked about wherever the English language is spoken, and every lad in the rudiments learns to sneer at Paley's quantity and triumph over Pitt's short syllable in labenti.* Every article on America contains some gibe at our unfortunate proclivity to Polish perversions.† Even men who should know better, lay special stress on the mechanical accomplishment of making verses. The same Bulwer who, in Pelham, laughed at the facility with which he could turn off Latin verses, compared with his other deficiencies, in "the Caxtons" throws a slur on German erudition by contrasting Dr. Herrmann's eulogy of Pisistratus' ode with the parody of Mr. Caxton. Classical education in England has been, for long years, one huge polypus of verse-making, an exercise which, however useful, still stands, in a pedagogical point of view, far behind the exercise of writing prose, not so much on account of the disproportion in numbers between those who possess the faculty divine and those who do not, as because vapidity and inanity cannot conceal themselves so well on the plain ground of the pedestris oratio, as in the flight of an anser inter olores, nor loose syntax and careless construction shelter themselves behind the convenient plea of poetic license. "Long reading and observing, copious invention and ripe judgment," may enable a Herrmann to reproduce

* Macaulay's Essays. Art. Thackeray's Chatham. † Nos Póloni non cúramus quantítatem syllabarum.

"I could make twenty Latin verses in half-an-hour; I could construe without an English translation all the easy Latin authors, and many of the difficult ones with it; I could read Greek fluently, and even translate it, through the medium of a Latin version at the bottom of the page."

Schiller in Greek or a Ritschl to supply the lacunæ in Plantus; but, as Milton concludes, "these are not matters to be wrung from poor striplings, like blood out of the nose or the plucking of untimely fruit." And yet, after all their true British boasting, the schools of England must be very defective in the matter of classical training, if we may judge by recent disclosures.* Scholars, who ignore Greek accents and are unacquainted with the composition of words of frequent occurrence and evident structure, are strangely misnamed. We, for our part, would apply in their favour the educational observation of the worthy South: "Stripes and blows are the last and basest remedy, and scarce ever fit to be used but upon such as carry their brains in their backs, and have souls so dull and stupid as to serve for very little else but to keep their bodies from putrefaction."

Reprints of American school books, translations of German works, editions prepared by Germans, for the English market, do not constitute a national philology; and we, therefore, pass over to a brief notice of the Neo-Hellenistic school, under the leadership of Prof. Blackie, who has recently entered upon his high career as Professor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh. This distinguished scholar bids fair to furnish as long a succession of "heads" as any philosophic school of Athens could boast. We are to look,

* We have especial reference to an article in the Westminster Review for October, 1853, from which we extract the following morsel. "On one occasion, when urging the importance of etymology on the attention of a principal of a most respectable school, we said that a boy ought not to pass through his Greek studies without knowing the derivation of such a word as sarcasm (the word which oc curred to us at the moment). His answer was: 'I am not ashamed to confess that I myself do not know.' Yet he was a superior scholar, and a man of great intelligence. An eininent Hellenist, now dead, whom we knew, in like manner did not know the derivation of paraphernalia. How many classical scholars are there who cannot tell the real meaning of so common a word as squirrel, detect cura in proxy, or show that galaxy and lettuce are, at base, one word!" The first two instancess of crassa ignorantia are so crass, that were they related of any respectable teacher in our country, we would reply, if not by the lie direct, at least by the reproof valiant. To find yáda in yadaşías and lacte in lactuca, requires nc superhuman exertion. Proxy (a contraction for procuracy) is not a fair instance, while the etymology of the shadow-tailed squirrel (okiovpus) is as celebrated in its way as those of fox and cucumber in theirs.

forsooth, for a revival of the study and general diffusion of the literature of ancient Greece, from a more intimate acquaintance with the Sclavonic tribes, which inhabit the seats of the ancient Hellenes, and which have received the mantle of their great predecessors in tatters.* The name of this professor is mentioned with great deference in the Westminster Review, and a fervent follower of the new school has had the hardihood to publish, in the North British Review,† an article on the Literature and Language of Modern Greece, which savours strongly of Romaic anthologies, and which we shrewdly suspect to be the production of some Edinburgh or Glasgow student, who has spent six months in Greece, and has derived his limited knowledge of the ancient tongue in that short space of time, from some of the illustrious professors whom he delights to honour. "Greek," they triumphantly maintain, "is not a dead language ;" and point to this and that purely classic word. It would require a close observer to tell the difference between an empty nut and a full one, between bark growing on its tree and that which has been stripped off. The difference is in the continuance of organic life. Latin was not more certainly a dead language in the middle ages than Greek is now. ancient spirit, and, consequently, the ancient syntax and constructive power, are gone forever. The language of modern Greece is essentially a modern language, its syntax is loose and shambling, its composite words are the laughing stock of educated Europe. Its sentences run into the straight channels of modern construction, and only here and there a classic idiom reappears, as a fossil relic of a dead antiquity. The absurdities of this system of learning ancient Greek are, indeed, so glaring, that it would be an insult to the intelligent reader to pursue the subject much farther. The Romaic language, it is true, is undergoing a process of reconstruction, and, in the course of time, an approach will, no doubt, be made to the external semblance of ancient Greeks.

The

*The boasts of our Greek friends never fail to remind us faithfully of Lessing's bitter fable, (b. 1, fab. 16,) founded on the text of Ælian (de nat. animal. 1, 28), • Ιπποσ εῤῥιμμενος σφηκῶν γένεσίς ἐστιν.”

+ Nov., 1853.

Words of foreign origin have been resolutely plucked out, and others derived from the ancient language, or composed of Greek elements, have been substituted. The time will come when the eye and taste will no longer be offended by a lingua franca in Greek characters. But, as yet, the struggle has been chiefly with the vocabulary. The next step will be to renodel the syntax, an undertaking which, we venture to say, is hopeless. Words, the symbols of ideas, may be exchanged with comparative ease. But to alter the syntax, to change the sequence of men's thoughts, with the structure of their sentences and the conrection of their words, is nothing short of raising up children unto Abraham from the stones of the causeway. A modern Greek philolo gian told the writer, that since his school-boy days at least a thousand words, which were then culled carefully from dictionaries and committed to memory, had found their way not only into the written, but also into the spoken language. A thousand years must elapse before the Greeks give up their for, or restore the dative to its full rights, and bring back the optative and infinitive. What little literary merit there is in Greece is modern in its cast, and must be read with modern eyes and modern feelings. When the ancient models are held up over against these modern productions, and the Hellenist is forced, as he is by these stony advocates of "living Greek," to compare them, the only emotion excited is that of disgust. A single wild ballad, which jumbles Hercules, Alexander the Great and Themistocles, into one category, is far more pleasing to us than all the would-be eloquent speeches of the wordy representatives of the Parliament of the Ionian Islands.

We have taken leave of our English school-masters and English sciolists with joy, and not with grief, recommending, as a motto for their future productions, the words of Sir Andrew Aguecheek-"I am a great eater of beef, and, I believe, that does harm to my wit."

"The history of sciences," says Goethe, "is a grand fugue, in which the voices of the peoples come in one by one." The Germans are now dominant in the science of classical philology, and we must harmonize with them or make a

senseless discord. To characterize German philology at once, briefly and satisfactorily, is impossible. To understand its present state and influence, we must go back to the Alexandrians, and trace the history of the ancient grammatica in its genesis, developement, flower and decay. We must sympathize with the ardent enthusiasm of the Italian period, and admire both the varied condition of the French school, and the patient industry of the plodding Dutch, as they

"Stuffed the head

With all such reading as was never read."

We must, also, take note of individuals, such as are called, in our day, "representative men," because they cannot find representatives; we must mark Scaliger's genius and Bentley's method. For, as the last great German school of philosophy boasts that it has absorbed and appropriated all the essential elements of its predecessors, so does the last great school of philology embrace, in its universality, the warmth of the Italian period, the material knowledge of the French school, the geniality of Scaliger, the method of Bentley, the accumulative perseverance of the Dutch. The results lie plainly before us. The science of textual criticism may now be regarded as complete. The irregular and empirical, though, at times, surpassingly ingenious attempts of former schools, have given way to a systematic treatment. The mechanical collation of manuscripts has been succeeded by an intellectual classification. Nor has the science of Hermeneutics been neglected. Less attractive in its nature, and more chary of flattering rewards than its twin-science, it has, notwithstanding, received great and increasing attention. Under the influence of a more expanded philosophy, departments, once considered as the mere auxiliaries of classical learning, have been drawn into the circle of philological study, and subjected to the same searching investigation and acute analysis. The history of ancient literature has been raised to a higher power; and a closer scrutiny into the latter, and a deeper penetration into the spirit of history, in its wider sense, are the legitimate results of a more pro