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full vent to it. The broad comedy of his sketch of the garret of poor Codrus, a hero of the Grub Street of Rome, has often amused us :

Codrus had but one bed, so short to boot

That his short wife's short legs hung dangling out;
His cupboard's head six earthen pitchers graced,
Beneath them was his trusty tankard placed;
And to support their noble plate there lay
A bending chiron cast in honest clay.
His few Greek books a rotten chest contained
Whose covers much of mouldiness complained;
Where mice and rats devoured poetic bread,
And on heroic verse luxuriantly were fed.

We dare not quote Dryden's incomparable rendering of the famous passage on Messalina in the sixth satire; but we confidently recommend it to all who relish the old English comic vein. Gif ford's whole Juvenal, too, is well worth reading;-good, sturdy, faithful stuff, giving a just notion of the sense, though not always equally of the humor, of the Latin. Juvenal's is one of the cases, like that of Frere's Aristophanes, in which the ancient fell into the hands of precisely the kind of moderns who sympathized with him at all points, and resembled him in essential characteristics of feeling and taste. There are other instances in the history of Roman translation. The Terence of the elder Colman is one of them; and the Pliny's Letters of Melmoth. But it sometimes happens that, by a strange perversity, a man just gets hold of the very author with whom he has nothing in common. Elphinstone, who produced a Martial in the last century, was one of these men; and his book enjoys the ignoble distinction of being the very worst version of a classical author in the literature of England. Let us hope that we are now beginning to learn that to translate a humorist, requires humor; and and to translate a poet, poetry; and that the mere power of giving the literal meaning, by itself, can create nothing but that lowest of all kind of translation which is called a "crib." The best-turned Martial's epigrams we ever saw appeared in Blackwood's Magazine some years back. As a satirical epigrammatist, he has no equal for point; and there are casual intimations in him of far higher powers than he ever did justice to. His chief rival in the Latin epigram was that most delicious of all Latin poets, Catulluswho is, and ever will be, peculiarly

untranslatable; his spirit being so rare, and his form so perfect. Translation has sometimes been compared to decanting wine; but what if you have to transfer the glass as well as the liquor? The greatest of the poets of Rome according to modern ideas,-Lucretius,-was long read in the pages of the eccentric and forgotten Creech; but may be most profitably studied now in the verse of Dr. Mason Goode, or the prose of his celebrated editor, Mr. Munro.

The two great Roman historians are, on the whole, at a disadvantage in our literature, as compared with the two great Greek historians. We are unable to name a Livy from which anything higher than an honest reproduction of the meaning can be expected; but Livy's style is remarkable for combining remarkable natural beauty, especially in narrative, with a dignity which has all the effect of stateliness and elabora

tion. As for Tacitus, it is not fair to ask for a thorough-going translation of him. He stands apart from the established models of classical diction, pretty much as Mr. Carlyle does in our own times. He may be familiarly described as a cross between a great tragic poet and Rochefoucauld: his touches of description light upon a scene like shafts of sunlight breaking through clouds in a storm; he delivers oracles in epigrams, and his satire is prussic acid ;-his whole books giving you an impression which lasts for life, of a great soul steeped in speculation, sorrow, and scorn,-and sustained on the human side of it by an indomitable spirit of aristocracy which is Roman to the spinal marrow. Such a man, delivering himself in brief, terse, elliptical sentences, reading like a kind of spiritual short-hand, tasks the strength of a translator to the uttermost. The "standard" translation of Tacitus, that by Murphy, is painfully long-winded; and as far as the History is concerned, must be looked on as thrust out of the field by the History of Mr. Church and Mr. Brodribb, issued by Macmillan and Co., in 1864. From this very clever volume, we select a couple of passages. Our first is the account of the death of Vitellius when the Flavian troops obtained possession of Rome in A.D. 70:

"When Rome had fallen, Vitellius caused himself to be carried in a litter through the

back of the palace to the Aventine, to his wife's dwelling, intending, if by any concealment he could escape for that day, to make his way to his brother's cohorts at Tarracina. Then, with characteristic weakness, and following the instincts of fear, which, dreading everything, shrinks most from what is immeately before it, he retraced his steps to the desolate and forsaken palace, whence even the meanest slaves had fled, or where they avoided his presence. The solitude and silence of the place scared him; he tried the closed doors, he shuddered in the empty chambers, till, wearied out with his miserable wanderings, he concealed himself in an unseemly hiding-place, from which he was dragged out by the tribune Julius Placidus. His hands were bound behind his back, and he was led along with tattered robes, a revolting spectacle, amidst the invectives of many, the tears of none. The degradation of his end had extinguished all pity. One of the German soldiers met the party, and aimed a deadly blow at Vitellius, perhaps in anger, perhaps wishing to release him the sooner from insult. Possibly the blow was meant for the tribune. He struck off that officer's ear, and was immediately despatched.

"Vitellius, compelled by threatening swords, first to raise his face and offer it to insulting blows, then to behold his own statues falling round him, and more than once to look at the Rostra and the spot where Galba was slain, was then driven along till they reached the Gemoniæ, the place where the corpse of Flavius Sabinus had lain. One speech was heard from him indicating a soul not utterly degraded, when to the insults of a tribune he answered, 'Yet I was your Emperor.' Then he fell under a shower of blows,

and the mob reviled him when he was dead

with the same heartlessness with which they

had flattered him when he was alive."

The above has been chosen to illus trate the historian's power of description. What follows will do the same

office for his faculty of analyzing character, one of the greatest of his great gifts:

"The body of Galba lay for a long time neglected, and subjected, through the license which the darkness permitted, to a thousand indignities, till Argius his steward, who had been one of his slaves, gave it a humble burial in his master's private gardens. His head, which the sutlers and camp-followers had fixed on a pole and mangled, was found only the next day in front of the tomb of Patrobius, a freedman of Nero's, whom Galba had executed. It was put with the body, which had by that time been reduced to ashes. Such was the end of Servius Galba, who, in his seventy-three years, had lived prosperously through the reigns of five em

perors, and had been more fortunate under the rule of others than he was in his own. His family could boast an ancient nobility, his wealth was great. His character was of an average kind, rather free from vices than distinguished by virtues. He was not regardless of fame, nor yet vainly fond of it. Öther men's money he did not covet, with his own he was parsimonious, with that of the state avaricious. To his freedmen and friends he showed a forbearance which, when he had fallen into worthy hands, could not be blamed; when, however, these persons were worthless, he was even culpably blind. The nobility of his birth and the perils of the times made what was really indolence pass for wisdom. While in the vigor of life, he enjoyed a high military reputation in Germany; as pro-consul he ruled Africa with moderation, and when advanced in years showed the same integrity in Eastern Spain. He seemed greater than a subject while he was yet in a subject's rank, and by common consent would have been pronounced equal to Empire, had he never been Emperor."

We shall speak of only one more Roman writer, the most various, versatile, and accomplished of them all; the flower of their culture; the type of their eloquence; the great, the genial, the humane Cicero. Of him, it may be said, as Byron said of Pope, and with even more justice, that he is a "literature in himself." Hardly any writer of antiquity instructs us so much about has attained excellence in so many so many different sides of its life; or branches of knowledge. His oratory has every merit; high eloquence; ingenious and plausible reasoning; genuine familiar letters are among the most agreehumor; picturesque description. able ever written. His moral dialogues, like the Friendship and Old Age, anticipate the kindly wisdom and polite pleas

His

ant shrewdness of our Addisons and Goldsmiths. His philosophical dialogues at least add a charm to the Greek doc

trines by strengthening and enlivening them with a swarm of apposite anecdotes and illustrative sketches. His bons mots are as good as those of Talleyrand or Sheridan; and he would have laughed his great living enemy Mommsen out of any public assembly in Europe. Of such a man, every sensible Englishman ought to know something; and if no translation does him justice, any translation, whether the older one of Duncan, or the more recent one of Yonge,

supplies ample opportunity of learning from the vast mass of knowledge accumulated in his books. If a selection had to be made, we should recommend, first, among the speeches, those in defence of Archias, Milo, and Murena, as well as all the Catilinarians, and the second Philippic; secondly, as many of the letters as possible, the preference being given to those of Atticus; thirdly, among the dialogues, the Friendship, the Old Age, and the Tusculan Questions. Some of his elegance and stateliness of style must appear in any translation; his sense in any case is sure to assert itself; and above all, he is thoroughly human and sympathetic. Few kinder men have ever lived; and it is this element of unconquerable geniality, this thread. of a tenderness almost Christian, which has made his name dear to so many men

who well know all that can be urged against his weaknesses, and the errors of his public conduct. In any case, however, the mere study of such controversies is elevating; and teaches the modern reader to enlarge his views by comparing the public men of his own age with those mighty ones of old whose ashes have long been resolved into the dust of their native land. Contact with

the distant past gives poetry to a man's daily experience, and colors the everyday existence around him with a certain grave sentiment which refines and hal

lows it.

At this point, we may bring our imperfect sketch of a great subject to a close. The intelligent reader sees what we want; we desire to concentrate into a focus the scattered interest of a valuable class of books, the existence of which is half useless, just because they are seldom thought of in connection with each other, and remain unknown by reason of their isolation. Let a library of them be formed anywhere, giving the preference to the best, and their importance would be instantly seen. If every public library, such as those of the Mechanics' Institutes and Literary Institutions of the country, contained every book that we have mentioned in this paper, and they were only in moderate demand there, we should look forward without despondency to the growth of the thought and taste of the rising generation.

Blackwood's Magazine.

THE REIGN OF LAW.*

THE main object of this able and very Reign of Law-meaning thereby that interesting_treatise is to show that the invariable order, or those persistent forces, which science delights to contemplate-is by no means incompatible with the belief in an overruling and creative Intelligence. In this its main purpose it is what, a few years ago, would have been called a Bridgewater Treatise, and it would have deserved to take its place amongst the instructive series which bore that title. But whereas the Bridgewater lustrations of the great argument of Treatises in general abounded with ildesign, the present volume is chiefly occupied with discussions that bear upon not, however, without due share of illusthe nature of the argument itself. It is. tration; and the description given of the contrivance, or adaptation of the laws or forces of nature, displayed in the megeneral purpose of enabling a vertebrate chanism of a bird's wing-or say in the animal to fly through the air-is amongst the happiest of the kind we have ever met with. We shall henceforth watch

the flight of the seagull, a bird which the tion, with additional interest. The Duke author especially selects for his illustraof Argyll has evidently looked on birds with far other than the sportsman's eye well as that of the man of science. Not -with something of the poet's eye, as that the sportsman is altogether destitute

have known him discourse eloquently on of admiration for the bird he kills; we the beauty of the creature soaring above the next moment glory in bringing it him, in an element he cannot inhabit, and

down.

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agree in the main conclusions to which the author would conduct us. No proposition appears to carry a stronger conviction with it than this-that mind, not matter, or the forces called material, should be considered as the primal power in the universe. In the order of science, we commence with the simple and lead onwards to the complex; but when, at any epoch, science presents to us such whole, such Cosmos, as it has been able to conceive, the conviction immediately follows that this whole existed as Thought or Idea before it was developed as a reality of space and time. The great conclusion, therefore, which the Duke of Argyll, in common with all our theologians, would enforce, is one which we, too, would maintain with whatever energy we possess. We are not in the least disposed to relinquish what is familiarly known as the argument from design in favor of any "high à priori road" to the first great truth in theology. But there may be methods of stating this argument from which we should dissent. There may also be a tendency to implicate the argument with philosophical opinions which, whether correct or not, are still under discussion, and which, in fact, are the opinions only of one section of the speculative world. Such a tendency (we do not say that it is manifested in an unusual manner in the present writer) we should venture to protest against.

The press has lately teemed with productions which must have manifested to most readers how utterly unsatisfactory are those metaphysical or ontological reasonings which are supposed to conduct us more directly to the knowledge of the absolute and infinite Being. Rejecting, as anthropomorphic, the persuasion felt by reflective men in every generation that the world is full of purpose, or rather say of intermingled and inseparable purposes, and may therefore be called one great purpose, many profound reasoners have preferred to found their theology on certain abstractions of the intellect, such as pure Being, Substance, Cause, and by so doing they have been led into results either of a self-contradictory nature, or of so vague and shadowy a description that we are left in doubt whether it is an idea or a mere word that we are at least put in possession of. God has become the Absolute,

or the Infinite, or the One Substance, or the Unknowable First Cause, everywhere present, and under no form of human thought conceivable.

This One Substance, or the One Being, if you travel to it by this road, is a mere hypothesis, and explains nothing. The impression conveyed by the senses is of a multitude of individual things or substances. Science, by its generalizations, may reduce these to a few elementary substances. But the last generalization of science is only of a similarity of a multitude of things. Suppose it reduced all material things to one elementary substafce-that is, to a multitude of atoms all similar in their nature-these atoms would still be numerically or individually different, moving with different velocities and in different combinations. We are as far as ever from this metaphysical entity of the One Substance; and if we could reach to it, what would it explain? The unity of the world which calls for explanation is a unity of plan, that harmony of parts which constitutes it a whole. Now, what connection is there between this and the barren conception of unity of Substance? If the one substance acts diversely-as it must necessarily be supposed to do in order to produce anything-why should this diversity of action of one unintelligential substance more necessarily lead to a unity of plan than the simultaneous action of a multitude of diverse substances? If the one substance had but one mode of action, no world could be produced; if 1t have many modes of action, what is to prevent these from being at variance with each other? Or how are we brought nearer to any comprehension of the real unity of the universe? If this does not suggest to us the precedence or immanence of mind or thought, we know not what it can legitimately suggest at all; we should think it wiser simply to rest in this harmonious state of things-to rest in it in the sense of the. positivist, as the last truth we are capable of reaching, and leave alone all further speculations about the one universal substance, or a supernatural cause.

The old familiar argument gives us a creative intelligence, in other words an intelligential being, and a universe which is the manifestation of this power; we need not say that it has its difficulties,

and that the idea of creation comes to us embarrassed with perplexing speculations; but this other ontological method lands us in mere abstractions, and is, at best, no entrance into theology at all, but merely into some metaphysical the ory of the universe.

And not only do we cling to this great argument, but we are adverse to the supposition that diversities of opinion on such well-known topics of controversy as the nature of the human Will, or of our idea of Causation, should incapacitate either party in such controversies from availing himself of it. We are unwilling that it should be monopolized by any one school of psychology. We someWe some times hear it said, for instance, that the doctrine of Causation taught by Dr. Thomas Brown nullifies the argument by abstracting from the conception of God the idea of power; since, if we have no such idea of power till we enter the domain of theology, we cannot then suddenly form the idea in order to invest God with power. Brown did not reason thus. As he states the argument, we see one great antecedent to the existing world-namely, a preëxisting mind. If invariable antecedents is all that we understand by power, we have still the conviction that there was this antecedent, and this is sufficient for the argument. It is still more frequently asserted that he who denies the freedom of the human will, or its self-determining character, destroys the only type we have of the power of God. It may be so. But to this it may be replied, that we cannot expect to have a type of that which is altogether superhuman and unique. The argument consists in this, that we cannot conceive the world or the universe as a whole without immediately conceiving it as the manifestation of thought. How such a thought manifested itself in creation, is just as impossible to understand as how such a thought came itself into existence. We are not here attempting to decide, be it understood, on the nature of the human will, or of our idea of power; we simply express a conviction that our great argument holds its ground whatever philosophical tenet is embraced on these subjects. Having thus stated as briefly as we could (without glancing at objections which it would require pages to discuss)

the position we occupy with regard to this popular argument from design, we can proceed with the greater freedom to examine what may seem to us peculiar in the treatment of it by our author. The Duke of Argyll opens his treatise with some very just remarks on the vague use of the term supernatural. By a "belief in the supernatural," is sometimes meant a belief in a supernatural Being-or in God; and it is sometimes restricted to a belief in a supernatural or abnormal action of that Being. French writers not unfrequently use the expres sion in the first sense, and understand by a denial of the supernatural a denial of any to us intelligible existence out of the pale of nature and humanity. Among English writers a denial of the supernatural is generally limited to a denial of any events confessedly out of the established order of creation-a denial that God acts in any but the one systematic method which it is the aim of science to explore. In this last sense the supernatural is synonymous with the miraculous.

There is, however, one other applica tion of the term "supernatural" it is necessary to allude to. This is an application of the term to the human will, by those who think that it is not involved in that linked series of cause and effect which we call the course of nature. This use of the term is by no means common, even amongst the staunchest advocates of liberty, but it is plainly admissible. That the human will should effect changes in the material world is, as the Duke of Argyll observes, amongst the most natural of events-meaning thereby amongst the most ordinary and familiar

but if it be true that the will acts from above or from without that order which binds the rest of nature, then, in this sense, it may be entitled to be called supernatural. The ambiguity in the word "natural" must be guarded against. It may either mean what is ordinary, or what is embraced in the strict order of nature. We may find it difficult to speak of anything so familiar, and in that respect so natural, as the moving of a man's hand, as a supernatu ral event; yet, in a scientific point of view, it may doubtless be so described, presuming that the man acts from without that connected series we call nature.

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