Or, 3. "Quod adsignificat tempus sine casu." • Or, 4. “Quod agere, pati, vel esse, significat." Or, 5. "Nota rei sub tempore." Or, 8. "Nihil significans, et quasi nexus et copula, ut verba alia quasi animaret." 'Or, 9. "Un mot declinable indeterminatif." 'Or, 10. "Un mot qui presente à l'esprit un être indeterminé, designé seulement par l'idée generale de l'existence sous une rela tion à une modification." 'Or, 11. H. A truce, a truce.-I know you are not serious in laying this trash before me: for you could never yet for a moment bear a ne gative or a quasi in a definition. I perceive whither you would lead me; but I am not in the humour at present to discuss with you the meaning of Mr. Harris's-" Whatever a thing may Be, it must first of necessity Be, before it can possibly Be any thing ELSE." With which precious jargon he commences his account of the Verb. No, No. We will leave off here for the present. It is true that my evening is now fully come, and the night fast approaching; yet if we shall have a tolerably lengthened twilight, we may still perhaps find time enough for a farther conversation on this subject: And finally (if the times will bear it) to apply this system of language to all the different systems of Metaphysical (i. e. verbal) Imposture.' We have inserted this large extract, as it is a complete and favourable summary of the professed views of Mr. Tooke. That these views may be attended with utility, we are ready to acknowledge; but that they will be promoted by satirical personalities, or by bitter allusions to the struggles of political parties, we need not be at the trouble of denying. That Mr. Tooke may have been harshly treated as a political partizan, by men who had opposite interests as political partizans, is very probable; and it is very probable that, though Mr. Tooke may not have deserved, he may have provoked that usage. We believe it to be a general opinion, that by exciting false alarms in an administration that was easily alarmed, he was the indirect occasion of many of those laws which dishonoured our public code, without being of any utility to the administration which introduced them. The peculiar faculties of Mr. Horne Tooke as a politician seem to be to excite alarms, and to keep up a perpetual irritation, where the evil has either been imaginary, or it has spent itself, or it has been remedied. His political creed, we believe, nobody ever understood. He talked loudly of an English constitution while he abetted Thomas Paine, who affirmed that the English had no coustitution. Lord Shelburne has been the object of his flattery, and of his bitterest abuse. Mr. Pitt was his idol, and, we believe, received from him the title of heaven-born minister. We shall not repeat the epithets of a contrary nature, which Mr. Tooke has since annexed to his name. Mr. Fox has been at different times, an angel of light, and a fiend of darkness. All these variations have followed those of the author's views. Mr. Tooke has talents for the highest situations of public business, if he be compared with those who usually possess them. He has considerable stores of knowledge, and the art of appearing to have much more than he really possesses. He has a fa miliar, pointed, and sarcastic eloquence, and no scruples of any kind in the use of it. But though he will bear the buffetings of adversity, and the oppressor's wrong, he has not that species of patience which would enable him to toil up the hill of preferment, with the motley fraternity of claimants and intriguers: and when, at the termination of every struggle, he has found himself at the foot of the hill, he has clamoured in the bitterest language, against all those who have been more artful and more 'successful. The reader will say, all this is personal. But the book we review is personal. It perpetually alludes to the politics of Mr. Tooke, and to the consequences of those politics to himselt. As an auxiliary to English grammar, and to the future compilers of English dictionaries, the EMEA IITEPOENTA will afford valuable materials. As to the philosophy of the work, we do not hold it in much estéem-for these reasons: 1. Words are not representations, but the arbitrary, or perhaps conventional signs of ideas. 2. The meaning of a word is not always, perhaps not generally, explained by etymology. We will take a few instances (among the thousands that may be elsewhere collected) from a periodical publication now accidentally lying before us. EPISCOPUS, among the Romans was a military commission, similar to that of a commissary of provisions.-Can it be applied to our present prelates, as commissaries of spiritual provisions? ARMS-The artificial arms-were originally offensive instruments; now shields, helmets, &c. are so denominated. WEAPON from Wepa, a coat-is applied to sword, firelock, &c. TONGUE-from Tong, the organ of language-and LANGUAGE (Lingua), are applied to that vehicle of our thoughts which may be either written,. printed, read, or spoken. Glorious uncertainty of etymology! It would be a profitable speculation, for moderate fees, to decide controversies by etymology, as they are commonly decided by the quibbles of the law. 3. The effort to resolve the English language into its elementary words in Anglo-Saxon, is a retrograde effort towards barbarism. We are much indebted to Middleton, Lowth, and even to Dr. Johnson (with all his rumbling pomposity) for approxi mations in our language to those of Greece and Rome; which men of taste will never abandon for the bald and circumlocutory phraseology of barbarous ages. But the great defect of the work, is the rejection of general or abstract terms, and the reference of them for explanation to periods, which scarcely admitted of general and ab stract ideas. At this awful period, when France is laying every thing prostrate at its feet, the cabinets of Europe are calling to their aid PUBLIC UNION, and PUBLIC SPIRIT, as the most poweri ful MORAL CAUSES. No says Mr. Horne, Tooke-there are no moral causes! What! when Robespierre, by the operation of FEAR, disposed of the lives and fortunes of 30,000 of people, is not FEAR a MORAL CAUSE? and when Bonaparte, by a FEAR of another kind, shakes the thrones of kings, and occupies even the dreams of their subjects-is not that FEAR also a MORAL CAUSE? and where is the dictionary or treatise of etymology, to give the meaning, or the ingredients of this cause? What would his present friend Mr. Fox say, if Mr. Tooke were to refer him for the ingredients of that PUBLIC SPIRIT which he now courts, to the meaning of the words in Anglo-Saxon? England wants only PUBLIC SPIRIT to be SECURE. She has ministers and friends of ministers, sufficient etymologists, to trace the words to all their possible elements. But will they produce that public spirit? God grant they may !! But certainly not by etymology; certainly not by the common arts of partizans they can produce it only by the (too-much neglected) SCIENCE OF MORAL CAUSES, to which the school at Wimbledon seems to be a stranger. ART. V. Poems; and Runnamede, a Tragedy. By the Rez. John Logan, F.R.S. Edinburgh, one of the Ministers of Leith. A new Edition, with a Life of the Author. small Svo. 4s. 6d. Vernor and Hood. 1805. AS the poems of Logan are not entirely new to the public eye, our first attentions are due to the editor, who has prefixed a short life of the author, an account of the pieces published, and a few well written observations upon them. The life of a retired votary of the Muses is usually rather meagre of incident: yet this nothing is what the world would be sorry not to know, and are therefore obliged to those who will tell them. It too often happens that in indulging this natural propensity of the public, the biographer and editor, either from his own partial attachment to the author, or from a more interested motive, first wearies us with his circumstantialities, and then compromises the fame of his departed friend by printing any thing and every thing which he ever wrote, or is supposed to have written. We owe therefore a yet farther obligation to the biographer who tells us all that is desirable to be known in few words, and have no less reason than the author himself to thank the editor who selects with judgment and delicacy. So far as these merits extend, they belong to the publisher of the present volume. It is now time to speak of the poet. 'From dazzling deluges of snow, From summer noon's meridian glow To Nature's robe of vernal green, Of an autumnal sky.' So says Logan (p. 12.); and so turn we our aking eyes from the false refinement, the affected languor, the nambypamby vapidness, which singly or jointly characterize so many of our modern fashionable verse-makers, to the pages of a poet, who, if not worthy of a place in the highest ranks of genius, discovers at least incontrovertible marks of a pure and chastised taste, keeping the Augustan models in sight, and accompanied with sufficient good-sense not to despise what is good, merely because it is not also new. Our approbation, indeed, is not wholly without drawbacks, as will appear when we descend to particulars: but we will not dissemble that wherever we have the gratification to meet. with a style and manner of writing, exempt from epidemic faults, we feel an irresistible partiality and tendency to be pleased, not perhaps altogether defensible in a strict and rigid judge, nor yet wholly inexcusable in an arbiter elegantiarum,' anxious to see the overthrow of false taste and the establishment of the true. It is easy to feel, but difficult to express definitely, the nice shades and almost evanescent differences of style. If any one doubts this, let him endeavour to annex determi nate and distinct ideas to the various qualities of style mentioned by Cicero and Quintilian, and to render in appropriate English the phrases, tenue,' 'argutum,' 'subtile,' &c. genus dicendi. Perhaps no attribute of style has been more misapplied and misunderstood than that of simplicity. Had a critic in the time of Pope professed himself an admirer of simple verses, he would (ten to one) have been supposed to mean such poetry as Phillips's Pastorals- O silly I, more silly than my sheep! &c.' And the critic who should in these days declare the same sentiment without adding limitations and exceptions, would run a great risk of being enlisted in that fantastic school, lately sprung up and supported, it must be owned, by considerable talents, which refuses to poetry her old prescriptive right to an appropriate elevation of language, and deems no metrical compositions possessed of the merit of simplicity, but such as are founded on the models of Hush a bye, baby!' or 'Goosy, goosy, gander.' It becomes necessary, therefore, when we avow our love of simplicity in poetry, to state that we do not mean by that term any thing incompatible with manly strength of thought, or with nervous and even occasionally figurative diction. It is no less possible in poetry than in common life to be at once, in wit a man, simplicity a child.' There are two rocks upon which the pretenders to this virtue have principally stuck. Affectation is one; poverty of thought and want of animation the other. From the first of these charges the poetry of Logan is perfectly exempt. From the second not always so. Like many other writers, in avoiding extravagance and wildness he is occasionally somewhat weak and tame. We every where discern in his compositions marks of a feeling heart, a cultivated taste, and a power of expressing himself with peculiar terseness and ease. the os magna sonaturum,' that grandeur of conception and expression which bears the impress of very exalted genius, the thoughts that breathe and words that burn'-the reader of Logan must rarely expect. But The Braes of Yarrow' is a composition upon which the fame of Logan as a poet chiefly rests, and such is its merit that there is no fear of its not supporting the burthen. It certainly is one of the first ballads in the English lan-guage. Every line abounds with true strokes of pathos : every thought is such as would naturally arise from a mind melting with tender regret. The circumstantial mention in the second stanza of the promised milk-white steed, the little page, and the wedding-ring, is in a high degree natural and affecting. The introduction of lccal superstitions |