dency for a mutilated and starveling growth, which, like a western Bagoas, ruled the court of a western grand monarque. A new spirit came with the Phrygian cap and wouldbe antique absurdities of the first French Revolution-the spirit of enfranchisement. The false idols of the preceding generations were attacked by a new race of iconocluts. The new Batrachomyomachic of the classicists and Romanticists is now over. The world has withdrawn from its noise and confusion. The smoke of the battle-field has cleared away, and we can see the results plainly. The Romanticists tried to revive a poetical literature, which cannot take root in our reflective eye. The classicists held fast to a formal literature, which lacked the deep feeling with which our reflection is combined. The followers of the Latin school laid down laws which they themselves did not follow, and Byron's judgment was at variance with his art. In France piebald eclectiveness has taken the place of a national literature. The Greens and the Blues have formed a coalition. In Germany a truer conception of the nature of classicism prevailed during the whole conflict, and has come forth triumphant. Romanticism is cherished only by a faction of modern obscurants. Stories of the feudal times-ballads of knights and 'ladies' are now standing themes for travesty and parody, and it is ludicrously provoking to see this Brummagem ware brought forward in our country, which, if the fervent prayer of the great German poet,* to whom we have already had, and, indeed, in every question of culture must have, frequent reference, had but been heard, would have escaped the infliction. The recent literature of the English language has been marked by a steady return to antique themes. The deeper apprehension and livelier conception of Grecian. myths has given rise to a class of poetry of peculiar and ex

quisite beauty. A soft rose light is thrown on the classic statue, and it seems alive. We are not ready to admit with some, that Keats or Tennyson have seen deeper into the Eleusinsian mysteries of antiquity than the ancients themselves. Impersonations and conceptions to us, these were entities and realities to them. Keats may be "as sublime as Eschylus," but the chasm between them is impassable. Here, too, we find a contradiction, in fact, to the specious fallacy that poetry can only flourish in an unenlightened age. On the ruins of Roman history Macaulay has built his "Lays." The heroic character is now a different being from the Achilles of the time of Louis Quatorze, who talks the court language, calls Iphigenia 'madame,' and wears a horse-hair wig. No poet of our age would bid the fearful Naïddo fly before "Louis, by the grace of God, king of France and Navarre, accompanied by his field-marshals," as Victor Hugo maliciously phrases it.* In short, classical machinery is worn. out, but classic inspiration remains as fresh as ever.

A sure index of the returning influence of the ancient classics is to be found in that department of literature which seems to be the most remote from the classic norm. The general reader knows that the modern novel, which completed its form in the last century, and has filled up the measure of its high importance in the present, was almost unknown to the ancients; that from the first writer of Milesian stories, down to Aristænetus, the history of the Greek romance, no genuine product of the Hellenic mind, but arising from Hellenized nations, exhibits nothing but a series of smooth descriptions-luscious pictures, theatrical incantations, wild and improbable adventures. The modern novel is the exhibition of the highest talent, and the expositor of weighty principles. Yet, on this very field, if we mistake not, a law of ancient art is every day asserting itself. We learn from the archæology of art, that the types of Zeus and Athene were fixed by Phidias, Apollo and Aphrodite, by Sco

En trouvant fort ridicules les Néréides dont Camöëus obsede les compagnons de Gama on désirerait, dans le cèlèbre Passage du Rhin de Boileau, voir autre chose que des Naïades craintives fuir devant Louis, par le grâce de Dieu, roi de France et de Navarre, accompagné de ses marichaux-des-camps-et-armees.

From these

pas and Praxiteles, Hephaestus by Alcamenes. no subsequent artist ventured to deviate. The ideal was found, and no word could be added to, or taken away from, the finished revelation. The same law prevailed in the statuesque drama. Not even Euripides dared change the groundfeatures of the heroes, whom he brought upon the stage. Our modern literature has never been content with types. It has vehemently sought to produce new creations. And how has it succeeded? Except Shakspeare, that miraculous Prometheus, who broke the moulds of all his persons, whose four-worded* characters have a life distinct from all the rest of mankind; and how many creations are there in English literature? How many that are not types are not shadows? Examine the works of Dickens, universally extolled as a creative mind, and how many creations will be found that are not monsters or abortions? Let any one ask himself, is Quilp a human being? Is Barkis anything but a sentence? Is Uriah Heep a possibility? Wherever Dickens has suc

ceeded, it has been in the delineation of a class, in Dick Swiveller, Miss Trotwood, Mr. Pickwick, all of whom are our acquaintances, all of whom we can, to use a popular term, at once locate. The works of our older novelists, Fielding and Smollet, present us with characters closely imitated from nature. The types, which they have thus formed, are immortal, while the nightmares of a heated imagination must pass away even in the narrating. The characters of Sterne live again in Bulwer, and if the novel of the Caxtons is not equal to Tristram Shandy, neither is the Medicean Venus equal to the Cnidian. In this connection, it is remarkable that Thackeray, who has been blamed for a similar tendency, defends the reappearance of his standing characters, by an olio of apologues, the most clearly typical of all representations.

We have thus endeavoured to demonstrate, or, at least, to indicate, that the classics are eternal norms and present facts, that we are drawn toward them by a two-fold necessity, a

It was Coleridge, we think, who maintained that the character of James Gurney, in King John, was fully depicted in the four words assigned him, "Good leave, good Philip."

natural and historic. It would be easy to proceed a step farther, and evolve the connection between our literature and the Græco-Roman, from their common linguistic elements. But from this wide and inviting field, we are debarred by the limits of our article-and we must, therefore, content ourselves with the repetition of the old maxim, "He who is not acquainted with foreign language, knows nothing of his own," ," and with urging its peculiar application. The premises being thus settled by demonstration and admission, we proceed to the practical consideration of the condition of classical study in our country. In order to do this, we must first look abroad. Our achievements in this department have been, at best, reproductions, and we must, therefore, examine the original before we judge of the imitation. Two nations have given tone to the study of the classics in this country, the English and the German. The former element is decaying, the latter just springing into life.

To some of the secluded scholars of our Southern country, who devote much of their abundant leisure to the perusal of the classics, and collect Aldines, Juntines and Elzevirs with bibliomaniac zeal, England may still seem to be the Gilead whence the balm must come. But England has never had a philology. The scholars who arose from her soil were of foreign seed. The dragon's teeth brought forth a strange race. Bentley lived a century too soon, and England laughed at the new Aristarchus as she cheered gloryand-shame Porson, not knowing what she did. It is sad to look at the full-length caricature of Bentley, which Pope has drawn, with such malicious distortion, in his Dunciad, and to reflect upon the uniform fate of all those great men who have been sent to that ungrateful people. But a just punishment has overtaken them. Their philological worthies have no national existence and form no national school. The type of their educationists is Dr. Busby, and the type of their scholars Dr. Parr. It is astonishing with what vehement obstinacy, so to speak, England prides herself upon the mere negative merit of keeping her quantity void of offence. In no country on the globe has so much turmoil been made about the fact that scholars know the right hand

from the left, and leave Priscian's head unbroken. The most earless nation on earth-a nation which has produced no music, except those simple strains which, like currents of electricity, run round the whole globe, which cannot show a single composer of real eminence-prides itself upon an accuracy for which there is no parallel save that of a deaf musician. The whole world must be pestered with the information, that the British Senate knew that the penult of vectigal is long, and that Cambridge was aware that the penult of profugus is short: and these stories are hawked about wherever the English language is spoken, and every lad in the rudiments learns to sneer at Paley's quantity and triumph over Pitt's short syllable in labenti.* Every article on America contains some gibe at our unfortunate proclivity to Polish perversions.† Even men who should know better, lay special stress on the mechanical accomplishment of making verses. The same Bulwer who, in Pelham, laughed at the facility with which he could turn off Latin verses, compared with his other deficiencies, in "the Caxtons" throws a slur on German erudition by contrasting Dr. Herrmann's eulogy of Pisistratus' ode with the parody of Mr. Caxton. Classical education in England has been, for long years, one huge polypus of verse-making, an exercise which, however useful, still stands, in a pedagogical point of view, far behind the exercise of writing prose, not so much on account of the disproportion in numbers between those who possess the faculty divine and those who do not, as because vapidity and inanity cannot conceal themselves so well on the plain ground of the pedestris oratio, as in the flight of an anser inter olores, nor loose syntax and careless construction shelter themselves behind the convenient plea of poetic license. "Long reading and observing, copious invention and ripe judgment," may enable a Herrmann to reproduce

* Macaulay's Essays. Art. Thackeray's Chatham. † Nos Póloni non cúramus quantitatem syllabarum.

"I could make twenty Latin verses in half-an-hour; I could construe without an English translation all the easy Latin authors, and many of the difficult ones with it; I could read Greek fluently, and even translate it, through the medium of a Latin version at the bottom of the page."