their, drawn sabres. By this manoeuvre we got a complete sight of his gigantic figure, for, raising his head as high as he could stretch it above the rider, he pushed forward, and, evading the stroke of the sabre, ran away. This rashness was much condemned by the Africans, as they assured us, that if the bird in its flight had given them a flap with its powerful wing, and this might easily have happened, an arm or thigh would probably have been broken. The number of ostriches we saw in this place could scarcely be less than three hundred. I never on any other occasion saw so many together.'

In these quotations, we have been desirous of selecting the most entertaining passages; and we regret that the dulness of other parts of the book obliges us to exhibit them in the light of exceptions to its general character. Dr. L.'s travels through the Cape-territory are divided into three distinct parts; first, the journey with M. de Mist, in a north-west direction from Cape Town, passing by Saldanha-bay; secondly, the journey eastward, along the southern coast as far as Algoa-bay; and, thirdly, a continuation of the same route, inclining towards the northeast, and extending to the remote settlement of Graaff Reynett. He makes (pref. p. 7.) large promises of the store which he will give to the public in the remainder of the work: he engages to furnish a list of all the books hitherto published on southern Africa, with strictures on their respective merits; and this is to be followed by what he styles the important but invidious task' of correcting the multiplied errors of his predecessors. No wonder that a writer of such confident anticipations should be inspired' with the project of expanding his work to a gigantic bulk: but we cannot help feeling both surprize and regret that Miss Plumptre did not take on herself the task of reducing and adapting his diffuse composition to the taste of the English pub

lic.

"Long must have been her toil in the work of translation;" and the abridging liberty which we have mentioned would, in such a case, have been perfectly allowable. No farther preliminary would have been required than a brief notice of the passages that were subjected to curtailment; and these, in course, would have comprehended the endless minutiæ of the author's details in all instances in which they partook of repetition, or were unprofitable for the illustration of some general truth. Instead of pursuing such a plan, Miss P. seems to have obsequiously followed the author not only in his tedious recapitulations, but in a literal insertion of every qualifying clause with which a German writer is accustomed to clog his sentences. She has occasionally subjoined an useful annotation: but this serves little other purpose than to tantalize the reader with a view of the improvement which the book might have received at her hands. Such, indeed, seems to be her veneration for the 1. Professor,

Professor, that she has permitted herself not unfrequently to copy his foreign idioms into English. The Dutch commissary is styled a regent,' as if that word were significative in our language, as in theirs, of a mere magistrate. In p. 60., we are told of a month and a half;' and we are presented in the same paragraph with the new coined word, useable.' This, however, is trifling in comparison with the happy phrase to inspire a spirit,' with which we are presented in p. 57., and from which some readers may suspect that the author of the "Rejected Addresses" borrowed his memorable line,

"His fireman's soul was all on fire."

Should Miss P. again condescend to introduce Dr. L.'s labours to the British public, we hope that her modesty will not prevent her from lopping off his manifold exuberances, and rendering him better adapted to the fastidious taste of the British public : while her own style, we hope, will receive correction and polish. A few engravings illustrate the volume.

ART. II. Madame de Staël on Germany.

[Article continued from p. 68.]

Or that part of Mad. de Staël's production which may be considered as the description of her tour, and which gives so sprightly, so intelligent, and so characteristic an estimate of the German country and people, we have already spoken on two occasions; in December last (p. 421.), and in January (p. 63.) The public eagerness of perusal and glow of satisfaction are scarcely commensurate, we are told, with the decided and concurring admiration of the literary critics. Perhaps the English are so accustomed to caustic reviewing, that they mistake the absence of censure for the simulation of flattery, and suspect a bookseller's puff when an author is not broken on the wheel.

We have now to consider the second part of the work, which treats of literature and the arts; and, as these are topics of less pressing though more lasting interest, we have quietly awaited leisure to weigh and convenience to insert our commentary on them. The marking feature of German literature is its comprehensiveness; and out of this, as a cause, arise all its peculiarities. The entire library of the world circulates in the vernacular language of Germany. It contains, as in a mediterranean sea, the tributary waters of every literary region, the streams of classical antiquity and of modern refinement. This comparison, however, is depreciating to the prototype, which rather resembles the endless ocean; the Euphrates floats thither

its Hebrew remains, and the Ganges its Hindoo reliques: there the Baltic casts its hyperborean amber; and there the Thames and the Delaware empty not only their waters, but their bubbles and their mud.

Were we to enumerate and examine severally the various departments of human inquiry, the profusion of German attention bestowed on each would astonish our readers. What other nation has explored with equal industry the Hebrew classics, the Jewish records? The thousand and one translations, introductions, commentaries, dissertations, lectures, repertories, lexicons, and other expositions, recensions, and paraphrases of the sacred writings, which have been printed in Germany, form a vaster library than the collective literature of all other Christian nations in that palmary branch of study.

In our own country, Scripture-criticism is less cultivated as a liberal art, than as a common necessary; less for the discovery of truth, than for the diffusion of utility. Like a Birmingham glass-press, it is employed to stamp faces for seals, not lenses for philosophy. We await the decease of a Michaelis, or a Griesbach, to declare our admiration of their greatness in learning, and of their impartiality in judgment; as if we wished always to deserve the reproof of our satirist,

"That nations slowly wise and meanly just

To buried merit raise the tardy bust."

For the not inferior but living names of Eichhorn and Paulus, our libraries have not a vacancy, nor our translators a vacation, nor our critics a telescope.

In

Of the Greek classics, no other country than Germany has given so many well-edited editions; no other language has provided so many learnedly close yet happy versions. translation, the German idea is to sacrifice every other consideration to fidelity; and their poetic artists take off an antient, as their Holbeins execute a portrait, with the minutest truth of detail. They choose to have the blemishes as well as the beauties distinctly given; so that the critic can moot all his speculative remarks with the vernacular as with the original text. Other nations attach, as we do, their ideas of the beautiful to certain agreed forms of representation; and they endeavour, in translating the antients, to recast them in moulds habitually pleasing at home. So Pope gives a Homer after the manner of the best English versifiers; and Delille supplies a Virgil and a Milton after the manner of the best French versifiers. That, however, which appears to us to ennoble and embellish, often seems to a German to degrade and deform; we have substituted, he thinks, a stiff theatric strut for the REV. APRIL, 1814. Grecian's

A a

Grecian's easy firm walk, and have exchanged the flowing native costume for a "new-fangled" embroidery stiffened with buckram. The German Homer of Stolberg, or of Voss, has nothing of the modern cut and manner in its garb the lines are hexameters, as in the original; and the words are studiously verbal. If Schiller translates Eschylus, or Stolberg renders Sophocles, he conceives that Greek art would be burlesqued by putting the choruses into rhime. This method of fac-simile interpretation has given plasticity not only to the language but to the public taste. The master-pieces of each nation are enjoyed in Germany on their own principles; not compared with, or reduced to, any standard of domestic prejudice. Nationality constitutes to an informed mind a part of the value of any production of literature; it is one of the phænomena, for the opportunity of observing which a foreign work of art is read. Indeed, the German theories of criticism have been so much liberalized by the variety of imported models, that their lawgivers in taste are rather the apologists of anarchy than the enforcers of rule. This latitudinarianism of susceptibility renders Greek literature peculiarly pleasing to the Germans; it has far less of restraint, of system, and of reticency, than Roman literature: it paints from nature, and from naked nature; not from men in togas making set speeches, learnt by heart. -Some one of the Academy della Crusca was blaming the Italian translator of Aristophanes for employing obscene words:

"Let us hear," said Pope Leo in reply, "what blackguards the Greeks were; this will teach us the value of religion and refinement." The Germans have a little of Pope Leo's indulgence for those translators, who honestly betray the want of good breeding or of purity of conversation among the Greeks. Indeed, in translating an antient, to unite sincerity with decorum is not always easy: the Lucian of Wieland is in this respect, as in every other, an admirable model; he knows how to render transparent the curtain which may not be undrawn; and, without suppressing any information, to avoid offending by giving it: he is considered among the Germans as having produced the best of their prose-translations from the Greek.

In editing the Latin classics, the Germans have also great merit but not so much in translating them. At least, with the single exception of Horace, several of whose odes have been as happily Germanized by Ramler as his epistles have been by Wieland, we do not recollect any one eminent Latin writer, the German translation of whom deserves to be cited as a model. Indeed, the German language is ill adapted for that oratorical manner, which Cicero taught to all the subsequent Latin writers, and even to the modern revivers of literature.

It has not much rival excellence to oppose to the Spanish Sallust, or the Italian Tacitus, or the English Letters of Melmoth.

The translations of modern literature, again, are more distinguished for multiplicity than elegance. Not only the classical but the secondary books are sedulously interpreted, and with a scrupulous fidelity. In fact, so complete is the division of literary labour among the Germans, that every science has its separate journal, which seldom fails to import most of the foreign pamphlets and articles of magazines that belong to the department undertaken. Of all the perversities of a translator, to extirpate raciness is with them the most unpardonable: they agree with Roscommon;

"Your author always will the best advise:

Fall when he falls, and when he rises, rise."

From a Mickle's Lusiad they would turn to the prose interpretation in the Portuguese grammar; and, to escape embellishment, they would slight beauty. What can we learn, they would ask, concerning foreign taste, foreign prejudice, or foreign art, unless we see the books of distant countries exactly in their native form?-and for what other purpose is foreign literature to be studied?

The German version of Shakspeare deserves singular distinction. It was executed by the joint labours of a comic prosewriter and a tragic poet: the rhime is given in rhime, the blank verse in blank verse, and the prose in prose; and each with an admirable precision, which unwillingly conceals a quibble or a vulgarism. With similar imitation, Weisse has rendered his French tragedies in rhimed alexandrines. Schlegel is equally shy of adulteration in his Spanish and Portuguese importations.

Mad. de Staël begins (chap. i.) by inquiring why the French do not render justice to German literature? The reason is that the French have hitherto been an untravelled nation, bigoted to domestic forms of art and points of view, and rarely acquainted with any modern language but their own. Until the dispersion of Frenchmen which was occasioned by the Revolution, they were a narrow-minded people, and had not acquired that power of voluntary transmigration which, in taste as in morals, is the basis of every equitable estimate. They could not imagine themselves in the circumstances of others, so as to see with the same tinge of retina. It requires a comprehensive knowlege of any age, or any nation, to enter thoroughly into its range of idea. The circulating productions of the Parisians did not suffice to create this familiarity with the

A 2 2

stranger: