mer long."

ac

And he feeds horses for the Olympian games on oats, for no other reason we can imagine, except that rye or barley would have been proper cording to the economy of the Grecian stable. For the next specimen of waywardness we must quote his own words :

"ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

"The Persians in these matters are not quite so silly as we are. Herodotus tells us that, instead of altars and temples, the verdure of the earth is chosen for their sacrifice; and music and garlands, prayers and thanksgivings, are thought as decent and acceptable ny comminations and blood."

Cleone says, in her answer, "Our early companions, the animals of good old Esop, have spoken successively in every learned tongue. A Milesian, of the age of Pericles, speaking of the learned tongues!--and supposed to know any thing about the apologues of Bidpai the Gymnosophist, Lokman the Nubian slave, or Syntipas the Persian philosopher! This is of a piece with Iconoclast from the pen of Aspasia.

We will add only two other examples. Psamiades of Ephesus upbraids the Attic dialect for stammering with its augments. No true Ionian would have criticised in this manner. For the Ionic Greek itself was furnished

(often in verse and always in prose) with the only augment, namely, the syllabic, that has any resemblance to a stammer. Moreover, the greatest stammerer among all the augments, called by grammarians the Attic reduplication of the perfect tense, prevailed also in the Ionian dialect. The Ionian even has it in some verbs, in which the Attic is without it. We are not going to read Mr Landór a lecture on the philosophy of the aug ment-albeit one of the most remarkable things in the structure of the Grefor Scotch metaphysics; but let him recian language-lest he should abuse us member, if he will meddle with such topics, that no good jokes can be founded on ignorance. Again, Alcibiades, writing to Pericles from the camp before Potidæa, complains that the son of Pericles presumes to call him "Neaniskos and Kouridion." Now Alcibiades, who was only 18 at the siege of Potidæa, would have been flattered, not offended, by the appellation of Neaniskos, which was often used for Man, and which, in its lowest sense, included a term of life from 21 to 28, according to Pollux, or from 23 to 40, according to Phavorinus. for Kouridion, that word is not Greek at all, in the meaning Mr Landor would assign to it.

As

To the category of vagaries rather than of errors, we must refer Landor's theory that the Odyssey of Homer is older by thirty years than his Iliad. 10 All sound argument, all fine appreciation of minute differences, appear to us to demonstrate, on the contrary, the precedence of the Iliad ; and a just enthusiasm, kindled by the glowing imagery of Longinus, pleads on the same side of the question. The vagary, such as it is, is not of course original, having long ago found German champions-Bernard (not Frederick) Thiersch being one-and derived all the support it could from their flimsy and fanciful reasonings. It is one of those Teutonic discoveries, which we should have expected the taste of such a man as Landor to reject instinctively, and which we should equally expect to hear cried up by the pro

round admirers of foreign universities, among ourselves, who are so fond of failing at the uninventive character of our domestic scholarship. A little real knowledge, well whipped into these sages at the proper end, would teach them to understand better, and to prize more, the masculine vein of intellect (long may it flourish upon our side of the water!) that, in classical literature, as in all other lofty branches of learning, prefers truth, however old, to its counterfeit, however tricked out with the gewgaws of a meritri cious novelty.

Not that we have any objections to novelty and truth united. Above most things we esteem that kind of criticism which throws a new, an ennobling, and an unillusive light on subjects that have been for ages before the world. Therefore did the spirit of some of the following remarks find favour in our sight, even before their soundness had been further attested by the assent of so ingenious a person as the author of Pericles and Aspasia. We have been challenged, somewhat arrogantly, to show any resemblance, in Mr Landor's writings, to the thoughts of other men.

1.

"It is remarkable that Athens, so fertile in men of genius, should have produced no women of distinction."-Per. and Asp. i., 69.

2.

"At the feet of Myrtis it was that Pindar gathered into his throbbing breast the scattered seeds of poetry; and it was under the smile of the beautiful Corinna that he drew his inspiration and wove his immortal crown."—Ibid. i, 69.

3.

"Many prefer Pindar's Dithyrambicks to his Olympian, Isthmian, Pythian, and Nemean odes: I do not; nor is it likely that he did himself. We may well suppose that he exerted the most power on the composition, and the most thought on the correction of the poems he was to recite before kings and nations, in honour of the victors at those solemn games."—Ibid. i., 73.

Nay,

It would not, perhaps, be difficult to do so on a larger scale; but the innocent observation of ours, which provoked this challenge, was restricted, in the first place, to classical topics, and in the second place, to Landor's present work, on the one hand, and to publications issued periodically, on the other. Within these limits, therefore, we must eonfine our answer. with uncommon gallantry, we will limit ourselves to periodical publications north of the Tweed-especial objects of Mr Landor's abhorrence. We merely wish to show that, even in these tramontane and barbarous regions there are persons who love to dwell on themes congenial to his tastes, and that now and then they stumble upon similar conclusions. And we are sure the writers, whoever they may be, whom we shall take the liberty of quoting, must be gratified to find their preconceived opinions fortified by such a mind and pen as those of Walter Landor. Some of the coincidences are more striking than others, but, as in the case of the mistakes, we will pick them up as they occur :

1.

"To no lady of ancient Athens-if we except a foolish and unfounded notion that the 8th book of the annals of Thucydides was composed by his daughter-has any great achievement in letters been ascribed."-Edinburgh Review, lv., 185.

2.

"As the child (Pindar) grew into the minstrel, he was committed to the gentle discipline of womanhood and beauty. With Myrtis for his female professor,' and Corinna for his rival, he must have been a dull boy had he escaped inspiration."Ibid. lix., 133.

3.

"Pindar had that overmastering sentiment of veneration which is observable in many great poets, but it drew his eyes as frequently and fondly to divine as to human glories. The mere abstract feeling, however, without analyzing its objects and tendencies, was enough to make him bestow all his energies on the EPINICIA, the triumphal songs, to which his extant works belong; and is sufficient to convince us, that in these we have specimens of his highest powers exerted on his favourite themes."Ibid. lix. 133.

4. "Myrtis and Corinna, like Anacreon and Sappho who preceded them, were temperate in the luxuries of poetry. They had enough to do with one feeling; they were occupied enough with one reflection." Ibid. i. 104.

5.

"There are things beyond the art of Phidias. He may represent Love leaning upon his bow, and listening to philosophy; but not for hours together: he may represent Love, while he is giving her a kiss for her lesson, tying her hands behind her: loosing them again must be upon another marble."--Ibid. i. 137.

6.

"Pericles, who is acknowledged to have a finer ear than any of our poets or rhetoricians, is of opinion that the versification in all the books, of both Iliad and Odyssey, was modulated by the same master-key. Sophocles, too, tells me that he finds no other heroic verses at all resembling it in the rhythm, and that, to his apprehension, it is not dissimilar in the two poems."-Ibid. i., 178.

7.

"Aristophanes, in my opinion, might have been the first lyric poet now living, except Sophocles and Euripides; he chose rather to be the bitterest satirist."-Ibid. i., 194.

8.

"The sounds of the Ode would be dulled and deadened by being too closely overarched with the fruitage of reflection." -Ibid. p. 294.

As a compensation for the above cited parallelisms, we will allude, in passing, to some of Mr Landor's own undoubted" thunder." No one will question his right of sole property in those perverse and annoying passages -so often breaking the charm of com

4.

"The female mind is fond of dwelling on a subject; the female funcy loves to hover round a theme, in airy but lingering gyrations, rather than to dart from point to point in vigorous and excursive flight.' -Ibid. lv., 182 (on Greek Authoresses.)

5.

"Phid. Most subtle criticism! But what if you are forgetting that this is not the divinity of Love himself-'tis but his faint resemblance carved in stone-that the artist can only seize upon one momentone flash of the soul's lightning.”—Bluck, Mag. xxxix., 385.

6.

"No version, in any tongue, can ever approach that melody, unrivalled by the later bards of Greece herself at once soothing and majestic as the music of those dark-blue waves which murmured in the ears of Homer, when his glorious eyes could behold them no more.-Edinburgh Review, li., 477.

"In both Iliad and Odyssey there is the same general cast of thought, language, and versification; the same mellifluous but masculine forms of speech; the same flexible harmony and rich cadences of metre."-Pop. Encyc. xii., 9.

7.

"Aristophanes is no ostentatious coxcomb to drag down poetry from her car of fire yet he will sometimes fling the reins into her hands. We question whe ther the united genius of Pindar and Euripides, fond as the latter is of the nightingale, could have produced anything superior to that burst of lyric ecstasy, in which he calls on Philomela from her leafy yew to challenge the minstrelsy of Heaven."-Ed. Rev. xxxiv., 286.

8.

"The lyric transport should not be dashed with too much of a meditative vein. Not that emotion shuts out sentiment, or that the heart is less versed in ethics than the brain. But the philosophy of such seasons must be vivid and compendious. There is no room for a train of continuous reflection."-Ibid. lix., 130.

position otherwise enchanting-wherein modern sentiments, follies, and prejudices pretend to be covered by an antique mask, not one feature of which ever existed in rerum natura. For example, Mr Landor does not like the customs of some foolish French socie

"There is a city of Greece, I hear, in which reciprocal flattery is so necessary, that, whenever a member of the assembly dies, his successor is bound to praise him

before he takes the vacant seat."

Mr Landor does not approve of clerical pluralities. In this sober Presbyterian country - though our heartfelt wish is, that every tenth parson had a benefice as good as the late Bishop of Durham's, and spent it as nobly-we suppose, for form's sake, we must subscribe to his opinion. But who except himself would have looked for a sarcasm on this head, to imaginary abuses among the ancient Samians:

"Sacrilege has been carried to such a pitch, that some among them have appointed a relative or dependant to the service of more than one sanctuary." 2

The Established Church-without whose mind-exalting, as well as soulenlightening cares, extending through every ramification of her great educational system, in school, college, and temple, there would not be ten men in Britain qualified to feel the beauties of Pericles and Aspasia-is especially odious to Mr Landor. Therefore, though scorning and detesting Popery, he clothes one of the stalest and weakest arguments in favour of its claim upon the ecclesiastical estates of these realms under the guise of another allusion to Samos, which, in reference to that place, is pure nonsense:

"You remember that anciently all the worship of this island was confined to Juno. She displeased the people, I know not upon what occasion, and they suffered the greater part of her fanes to fall in ruins, and transferred the richest of the remainder to the priests of Bacchus. Several of those who had bent the knee be

1 Vol. i. 66.

fore Juno, took up the Thyrsus with the same devotion. The people did indeed hope that the poor and needy, and particularly such as had lost their limbs in war, or their parents or their children by shipwreck, would be succoured out of the wealth arising from the domains of the priesthood; and the rather as these domains were hequeathed by religious men, whose whole soul rested upon Juno, and whose bequest

was now utterly frustrated, by taking them from the sister of Jupiter, and giving them exclusively to his son." 3

Church-King-Peerage! Thank God, these three good and glorious elements of our social condition are

fast knit together by all the bands that rivet strength to strength, and grace to grace, in the august and comely frame of a limited constitutional mon

archy. You cannot love one and hate the others, nor cleave to one and despise the others. It is quite satisfactory to see how Walter Landor-the contemner of crowns and crosiers—commits himself as to a hereditary peerage. Samos is again the stalking-horseSamos, which in reality never flourtie rule! ished, except under royal or aristocra

"CLEONE TO ASPASIA.

"Certain men, some of ancient family, more of recent, had conspired to transmit the reins of government to their elder sons. Possession for life is not long enough! They are not only to pass laws, but (whensoever it so pleases) to impede them! They decree that the first-born male is to be the wisest and best of the family, and shall legislate for all Samos!

"ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

It is credible enough that the oligarchs were desirous of transmitting their authority to their children: but that they believed so implicitly in the infatuation of the citizens, or the immutability of human events, as to expect a continuation of power in the same families for seven generations, is too gross and absurd, even to mislead an insurgent and infuriated populace. He indeed must be composed of mud from the Nile, who can endure with patience this rancorous fabrication. Egypt, we are told by Herodotus, in his Erato, that the son of a herald is of course a herald; and, if any man hath a louder voice than he, it goes for nothing.1

3 Ibid. p. 281.

In

"Hereditary heralds are the proper of ficers of hereditary lawgivers; and both are well worthy of dignity where the deities are cats."

And yet this "most original thinker of our days," who reasons in this very original and unhackneyed style against that hereditary function, which alone stands between us and civil war-forerunner of a long despotism-would have you believe him to be no republican. Genius and virtue, he tells you, have a precarious hold of power in a democracy. 2 "Every man, after a while, begins to think himself as capable of governing as one (whoever he may be taken from his own rank.' 3 Nay, sheer democracies have only one use; "the filth and ferment of the compost are necessary for raising rare plants." In spite of all this, we beg to assure Mr Landor that he is either a democrat or something. which the world cannot take him for, and which he would still less like to be called. Would he have us believe him more blind to the inevitable ten

4

dency of his own principles and political theories than Messrs Hume, Roebuck, Grote, or any Tom-Paine-devouring cobbler or weaver, the rival of those honourable gentlemen in abilities and character? These revilers of Church and Peerage, while they attempt to sow the storm, know well the sort of whirlwind they expect to reap. Is Walter Savage Landor less perspicacious?

If Mr Landor be not at heart a democrat, and quite ready-had he the practical talents of some of those statesmen whom he affects to contemn-to become in act a demagogue, what can have induced him to dedicate his second volume to the American President? What an unkind cut to our handsome friend the Irish Secretary! After Earl Mulgrave, Viscount Morpeth-as promising a lad, joking apart, as the shell of Eton or Harrow could turn out at this moment, and a match at "speeches" for the best of themhad a claim which it argues a want of bowels to pass by. After the Don Quixote of the galley slaves, in which

character we hope HB. intends to immortalize the Earl, should have come-not Sancho-but Dapple-in which character Sir Robert Peel has already immortalized the Viscount :

"Iniquæ mentis asellus Qui gravius dorso subiit onus!" Only think of a classical scholar, like Savage Landor, pretermitting the hero of that quotation, in order to carry his homage, in verse which we are morally certain the worthy general will not comprehend, to the residence in Washington! The only two lines out of sixty, which much study has enabled us to understand, appear to intimate that Andrew Jackson is the modern Pericles.

The second volume, thus ungenerously appropriated to flatter Transatlantic greatness, is in other respects a fitting companion to the first. There is little plot; there are few incidents; and the disquisitions are occasionally somewhat dull. But Pericles the polished and stately, Aspasia the intellectual and eloquent, Cleone the tender and affectionate, are still before you, with now and then a glimpse of Alcibiades, "as beautiful, playful, and uncertain as any half-tamed young tiger." Much force there is; much grace there is; good oratory, good criticism, fine feeling, and once, we think, even sweet poetry. Let us cite our example of a thing so rare in Landor's pages:

1.

Perilla! to thy fates resign'd,

Think not what years are gone; While Atalanta look'd behind, The golden fruit roll'd on.

2.

Albeit a mother may have lost

The plaything at her breast, Albeit the one she cherisht most, It but endears the rest.

3.

Youth, my Perilla, clings on Hope,
And looks into the skies
For brighter day; she fears to cope
With grief, she shrinks at sighs.

1 Vol. i. p. 277.

Vol. ii. 196.