Obrázky na stránke
PDF
ePub

ing the name and arms of Plaut in all time coming, it would gratify many of us. As to the rest, or those that anybody cares about, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Martial, Claudian, all have been raised to the peerage. Ovid was the great poetic favorite of Milton; and not without a philosophic ground: his festal gayety, and the brilliant velocity of his aurora borealis intellect, forming a deep natural equipoise to the mighty gloom and solemn planetary movement in the mind of the other; like the wedding of male and female counterparts. Ovid was, therefore, rightly Milton's favorite. But the favorite of all the world is Horace. Were there ten peerages, were there three blue ribbons, vacant, he ought to have them all.

[ocr errors]

Besides, if Mr. Landor could issue decrees, and even harmonize his decrees for reforming our Anglo-Grecian spelling decrees which no Council of Trent could execute, without first rebuilding the Holy Office of the Inquisition still there would be little accomplished. The names of all continental Europe are often in confusion, from different causes, when Anglicized: German names are rarely spelled rightly by the laity of our isle: Polish and Hungarian never. Many foreign towns have in England what botanists would call trivial names; Leghorn, for instance, Florence, Madrid, Lisbon, Vienna, Munich, Antwerp, Brussels, the Hague, all unintelligible names to the savage Continental native. Then, if Mr. Landor reads as much of AngloIndian books as I do, he must be aware that, for many years back, they have all been at sixes and sevens; so that now most Hindoo words are in masquerade, and we shall soon require English pundits in Leadenhall Street.92 How does he like, for instance, Sipahee, the

modern form for Sepoy? or Tepheen for Tiffin? At this rate of metamorphosis, absorbing even the consecrated names of social meals, we shall soon cease to understand what that disjune was which his sacred Majesty graciously accepted at Tillietudlem. But even elder forms of oriental speech are as little harmonized in Christendom. A few leagues of travelling make the Hebrew unintelligible to us; and the Bible becomes a Delphic mystery to Englishmen amongst the countrymen of Luther. Solomon is there called Salamo; Samson is called Simson, though probably he never published an edition of Euclid. Nay, even in this native isle of ours, you may be at cross purposes on the Bible with your own brother. I am, myself, next door neighbor to Westmoreland, being a Lancashire man; and, one day, I was talking with a Westmoreland farmer, whom, of course, I ought to have understood very well; but I had no chance with him for I could not make out who that No was, concerning whom or concerning which, he persisted in talking. It seemed to me, from the context, that No must be a man, and by no means a chair; but so very negative a name, you perceive, furnished no positive hints for solving the problem. I said as much to the farmer, who stared in stupefaction. 'What,' cried he, 'did a far-larn'd man, like you, fresh from Oxford, never hear of No, an old gentleman that should have been drowned, but was not, when all his folk were drowned?' 6 Never, so help me Jupiter,' was my reply: never heard of him to this hour, any more than of Yes, an old gentleman that should have been hanged, but was not, when all his folk were hanged. Populous No-I had read of in the Prophets; but

[ocr errors]

6

that was not an old gentleman.' It turned out that the farmer and all his compatriots in bonny Martindale had been taught at the parish school to rob the Patriarch Noah of one clear moiety appertaining in fee simple to that ancient name. But afterwards I found that the farmer was not so entirely absurd as he had seemed. The Septuagint, indeed, is clearly against him; for there, as plain as a pikestaff, the farmer might have read Noë. But, on the other hand, Pope, not quite so great a scholar as he was a poet, yet still a fair one, always made Noah into a monosyllable; and that seems to argue an old English usage; though I really believe Pope's reason for adhering to such an absurdity was with a prospective view to the rhymes blow, or row, or stow (an important idea to the Ark), which struck him as likely words, in case of any call for writing about Noah.

The long and the short of it is that the whole world lies in heresy or schism on the subject of orthography. All climates alike groan under heterography. It is absolutely of no use to begin with one's own grandmother in such labors of reformation. It is toil thrown away and as nearly hopeless a task as the proverb insinuates that it is to attempt a reformation in that old lady's mode of eating eggs. She laughs at She has a vain conceit that she is able, out of her own proper resources, to do both, viz., the spelling and the eating of the eggs. And all that remains for philosophers, like Mr. Landor and myself, is away in sorrow rather than in anger, dropping a silent tear for the poor old lady's infatuation.

one.

to turn

ON WORDSWORTH'S POETRY.

HERETOFORE, upon one impulse or another, I have retraced fugitive memorials of several persons celebrated in our own times; but I have never undertaken an examination of any man's writings. The one labor is, comparatively, without an effort; the other is both difficult, and, with regard to contemporaries, is invidious. In genial moments the characteristic remembrances of men expand as fluently as buds travel into blossoms; but criticism, if it is to be conscientious and profound, and if it is applied to an object so unlimited as poetry, must be almost as unattainable by any hasty effort as fine poetry itself. "Thou hast convinced me," says Rasselas to Imlac, "that it is impossible to be a poet; so vast had appeared to be the array of qualifications. But, with the same ease, Imlac might have convinced the prince that it was impossible to be a critic. And hence it is, that, in the sense of absolute and philosophic criticism, we have little or none; for, before that can exist, we must have a good psychology; whereas, at present, we have none at all.

[ocr errors]

If, however, it is more difficult to write critical sketches than sketches of personal recollections, often

it is much less connected with painful scruples. Of books, resting only on grounds which, in sincerity, you believe to be true, and speaking without anger or scorn you can hardly say the thing which ought to be taken amiss. But of men and women you dare not, and must not, tell all that chance may have revealed to you. Sometimes you are summoned to silence by pity for that general human infirmity, which you also, the writer, share. Sometimes you are checked by the consideration that perhaps your knowledge of the case was originally gained under opportunities allowed by confidence or by unsuspecting carelessness. Sometimes the disclosure would cause quarrels between parties now at peace. Sometimes it would carry pain, such as you could not feel justified in carrying, into the mind of him who was its object. Sometimes, again, if right to be told, it might be difficult to prove. Thus, for one cause or another, some things are sacred, and some things are perilous, amongst any personal revelations that else you might have it in your power to make. And seldom, indeed, is your own silent retrospect of such connections altogether happy. “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of princes," this has been the warning,- this has been the farewell moral, winding up and pointing the experience of dying statesmen. Not less truly it might be said, "Put not your trust in the intellectual princes of your age: "form no connections too close with any who live only in the atmosphere of admiration and praise. The love or the friendship of such people rarely contracts itself into the narrow circle of individuals. You, if you are brilliant like themselves, they will hate; you, if you are dull, they will despise. Gaze, therefore, on

[ocr errors]
« PredošláPokračovať »