that is in us, and the fame which our doings deserve then remain ours. Let us learn to reverence men for their life's worth-not

for what " 'they were worth" in their lives; so shall we rightly estimate the efforts each makes in this great field of function. Then shall we adjudge his life to be a success who works a noble purpose into it, and predicate failure only of him whom truth compels to confess,

John William Donaldson was one of England's glories-a truesouled hero, whose life-convictions guided all his efforts, and whose aims were pursued with a consistent persistency equal to the energy of the faith with which they were held. He was a man of purpose, and of labour governed by his purposes; one of England's foremost scholars, and one of the brightest ornaments of its literary life. His career as student, tutor, lecturer, author, clergyman, university examiner, &c., was varied in its outward aspect, but one in its inward spirit. His was a fertile life; and his name is one which will yet be found graven—

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Upon the forehead of the age to come," amongst the brightest of those who have laboured for the improvement of English classical learning; for the great aim of his life-toil was to construct a Novum Organon of philological study. A notice of the chief events of the history of such a man may fittingly be introduced, we think, among the records of those who have, in recent years, distinguished themselves by the energy and the value of their exertions in "toiling upwards;" though the story must be brief, it shall not we hope fail for usefulness, interest, and moral worth.

Stuart Donaldson, a wealthy London merchant, descended from an old Scottish family, was the father of our English BunsenJohn William Donaldson. His mother was a daughter of J. Cundall, Esq., of Shale Green, Lancashire. He was born in the metropolis, June 10th, 1811. He was one of the early students of the University of London, and where he gained the highest Greek prize in 1830, there he subsequently pursued a course of training with the special design of engaging in the law as a profession. But the fresh and fascinating life which the new university had evoked set the staid calculations of worldly prudence at defiance, and Donaldson deliberately forsook the profit-promising pursuits of the bar to devote himself to the reform of the philological studies of his native land, and the improvement of the classical training of his country's educational institutions. He left the University of London to become a student in Trinity College, Cambridge, where earnest minds were working for the advancement of scholarship and the production of a higher grade of educated men. Donaldson's excited

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soul found here many kindred minds, with whom to form a friendship was a lifetime's cause of gratitude. The old classicism of Gaisford and Blomfield was passing away. Arnold, Hare, Thirlwall, and Clinton were engaged in inaugurating a new era. writings of Niebuhr, Boeckh, Welcker, Buttman, Krause, Goettling, Delbrueck, &c., had led to the forming of an idea of a higher type of scholarship than had been common in England, although it boasts the names of Porson, Elmsley, Dobree, &c., while Bunsen, Humboldt, and Carl O'Müller, began to exercise the dominion of original minds over the thoughts of others of weaker disposition. Such were the formative elements amid which the ardent and eager, work-thirsting spirit of Donaldson was placed. The influences which these wrought on him fixed and rooted his previous aim, and his keen intellect and extraordinary capacity for work gave him a high place in the estimation of his fellow-students and his tutors. In 1834 he graduated, taking the second place in the classical Tripos, yet gaining neither of the Chancellor's medals,— the first being taken by Mr. Selwyn, of Trinity College, whose name did not appear in the class-list, and the second by Mr. Forsyth, the author of "Hortensius," and the biographer of Cicero, who stood next below Donaldsen in the Tripos. J. W. Donaldson was not the man to quail under this defeat, he made each defeat the stepping-stone to a new victory. In the following year he competed successfully for a fellowship at Trinity, where he entered into residence as an assistant tutor. Here he gave his heart to work out a larger amount of information on comparative philology than had yet been attained in England, in the full conviction that there lay in him the capacity to do something in that line which could not shame the scholarship of his country. In 1836 he edited for college use "The Theatre of the Greeks.' In 1839, in the fifth year after his graduation, he issued his " New Cratytus; or, Contributions towards a more Accurate Knowledge of the Greek language." This is a thick octavo volume containing a vast amount of learning, and was the first attempt made by an English student to present in his own land's language the results of the philological researches of the scholars of the Continent, and to exemplify the mechanism and organization of inflected speech in such a manner as to explain many of the more intricate phenomena of the Greek language. Though the work is much indebted for its facts and form to German suggestion, it is, nevertheless, original enough in conception, plan, and treatment, to claim a place for itself as a work of mark in the library of the philologist beside those of his precursors or contemporaries, Pott, Bopp, Grimm, &c.

During this time he became associated with the literary spirits who were engaged under Charles Knight and George Long in producing the "Penny Cyclopædia," to which he contributed many of the leading articles on Philology and matters relating to Classical Literature, as a specimen of which we may note the paper on Pindar. About the same time he was co-translator with the late Sir G. C. Lewis,

of Carl O'Müller's "History of Greece," which was composed at the suggestion of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and in part published by them. After the author's death Donaldson was entrusted with the continuation and completion of the work according to the original plan, bringing down the work from the foundation of the Socratic schools to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in a narrative concise without being dry or meagre. At this time, too, he delivered lectures in Trinity College on the text and the interpretation of Herodotus.

Having taken holy orders, Donaldson accepted a curacy and married the daughter of Sir John Mortlock, of Stapleford. From his country retirement he sent forth his edition of "Pindar's Epicinian Odes and Fragments," founded, in great measure, on the editions of Boeckh and Dissen, though enriched by many valuable notes of his own. To this date is also to be referred his edition of the "Antigone of Sophocles," with a verse translation, which maintains much of the spirit and pathos of the original.

In 1841 the head mastership of the Grammar School of Bury St. Edmund's, the first of King Edward VI.'s numerous educational foundations, became vacant. The governors, sixteen gentlemen resident in the town, with the Bishop of Norwich as visitor, appointed Donaldson to the post. Here, in the work of actual teaching, the ardent scholar saw that one of the great impediments to sound and efficient philological training was the conglomeration of thoughtless, empirically-brought-together matter which school books contained, and the deficient recognition of principles in them, even at their best, as in Matthie's Greek Grammar, which had been translated in 1819, and had held the field since that time almost unchallenged. His "Complete Greek Grammar" was the result. Here, amidst the engrossing cares of the schoolmasterly superintendence of "Royalists" (or foundationers) and "Oppidians," he continued to pursue and extend his linguistic studies until he had acquired a knowledge of most of the languages, with their dialects, of modern Europe, and had devotedly studied Hebrew and Arabic, and undauntedly laboured to improve the philological lore which he had already stored up in the capacious treasures of his mind. The gratification, however, of his own mental tastes and aptitudes never hindered him from engaging in such practical work as suggested itself to him. He noticed in England the slight amount of studious industry devoted to the improvement of our forms of teaching the Latin language, or of perfecting the texts of the distinguished writers of Rome's literary eras. This induced him to plan and, in 1844, to produce, under the title of “ Varronianus," (after Marcus Terentius Varro, 116-27 B.C., author of a work on the Latin language dedicated to his friend Cicero, 44 B. c.) " A Critical and Historical Introduction to the Ethnography of Ancient Italy, and the Philological Study of the Latin Language." Donaldson chose Dr. Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's, as the Cicero to whom the "Varronianus" was

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dedicated, in gratitude for the benefit derived from his tutorage at Cambridge as well as, perhaps, from the relation the subject treated of had to the opinions enforced in Niebuhr's "History," of which Thirlwall was the translator. It is a book of great research and high originality, and out of its publication-it is most proper to note in this serial-there arose a sharp and stubborn debate between the author and his friend Baron Bunsen. He supplemented this work by a "Latin Grammar," in which the tenets the book contained were reduced to teachable form with considerable simplicity and completeness, and thus he laid the foundation of a fresh system of teaching the Latin tongue.

With a similar intent-namely to simplify and promote the study of Hebrew among those from whom the ranks of the clergy were recruited-he published his " Maskil le Sopher," a Comparative Hebrew Grammar. His edition of Thucydides, in the superintendence of the text of which not only Blomfield, but Arnold, had recently preceded him, won new honour to his name as an accomplished critical Greek scholar. It contains some singularly acute suggestions for the emendation of the text.

The article on Philology which he furnished to the "Encyclopædia Brittanica," is recognized by scholars as one of the most valuable treatises in that repertory of the materials of knowlege.

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In school-work, in the revisal of his former productions, and in extending his researches into the Hebrew and Arabic cognates, several years were passed, and then came a marked and remarkable book. This was entitled "Jasher," or Fragmenta Archetypi Carminum Hebraicorum in Masorettico Veteris Testamenti Textu passim tessellata." 'Sepher ha-yasher," The Book of the Upright," is one of the lost books of the Jews, lost perhaps at the time of the Babylonish captivity. It is twice quoted in the canon of Scripture (Josh. x. 13; 2 Sam. i. 18). It has been variously conjectured to be a collection of national ballads, and to have been a name for Genesis, Deuteronomy, Judges, &c., though none of these books contain the passages quoted. Donaldson suggests that it is a composition of the age of Solomon, the production of Nathan and Gad, and that portions of it have been used here and there in the books composing the present canon; and he endeavours to bring together these fragmentary extracts from the extant Scriptures, giving reasons for his belief that they formed part of this Hebrew record of the righteous. It was a bold book-one perhaps not very advisedly published, even though as a product of the Berlin press, by a student in a land like ours, where the odium theologicum exerts itself in all sects so uncharitably. It was written only for the learned, in vigorous and elegant Latin, and as a mere speculation on a critical enigma might easily have been passed over as at least harmless. But the scent of heresy excites some men much more acutely than the sight of sin, suffering, and ignorance, and many who remain silent in the presence of the special iniquities of city life, or the peculiar sorrows of rustic

parishioners, can glow with indignation at heresy in Latin, which is certain to be very harmless if simply left untranslated. Critics of the measure-your-neighbour school, when they found the German theologians moved to admiration of the linguistic acumen of the author, could satisfy themselves with nothing less than a game of hunt-the-heretic; and that self-styled "religious press" sounded "the proyse." He had treated the sacred text as a philological critic and scholar, and the subject as one of literary interest; they drew their own inferences, and charged the author with all the fearful consequences which followed from their interpretation of the results of his scholarship.

We are far from adopting his opinions, or maintaining the correctness of his views. Indeed, the best thinkers and scholars in Germany and England look on his theory, not with disfavour only, but with distrust, and we cannot but regard the suggested cento as a rash and unwarrantable hypothesis. As an exercitation of scholarship, however, it was given forth, not as a theological treatise, and the bigotry of seizing upon an attempt to solve a problem in philological criticism as a weapon of theological controversy, appears to us to be not disingenuous only, but dishonest. Gerald Massey, himself an illustrious instance of toiling upward, has both truly and beautifully said, that those,

"Who work for freedom win not in an hour:

Their cost of conquest never can be summed!

They toil and toil through many a bitter day

And dark-when false friends flee and true ones faint.
The seed of that great Truth from which shall spring
The forest of the future, and give shade

To the reapers of the harvest, must be watched
With faith that fails not, fed with rain of tears,

And walled around with life that fighting fell."

Suck a workman for the choicest freedom-that of thought-was Donaldson; and in the supreme crisis of the hour of trial he comported himself with the fearless dignity of one to whom truth is dearer than comfort, fame, or even life.

The author, resolute in his integrity, replied to his impartial judges by the issue of a second edition of the obnoxious book, and they sounded the tocsin of alarm so eagerly that the trustees of Bury St. Edmund's School lent themselves to the service of the inquisitors, and annoyed Donaldson into resignation, greatly to the regret of all who had ever studied under the wise and thoughtful master. In his own defence he wrote his work entitled, "Christian Orthodoxy reconciled with the Conclusions of Modern Biblical Learning.' This work was issued in 1857, after he had returned to Cambridge and recommenced his labours of tutorship, as a protest against the assumption made by his critics, that being in holy orders it was a mark of want of Christian conscientiousness to issue any book likely to throw doubt on the contents of the received Canon of Scripture.