could neither hear nor see; out of church they were met by lessons, well intended indeed, but, ensuing on what they had done and suffered already, too much for their jaded minds and bodies. Still more important, considering the vast experience he must have gained in the position which he holds, are the words of Dr. Miller, Rector of St. Martin's, Birmingham. We quote from Dr. Hessey's notes: I do not believe there is a single father on this platform, or in this hall [the extract is from a speech delivered at the Sunday School Union] who would attempt, if he had a grain of common sense, to deal with his own children as we have been dealing with the children of the poor. Who that knows the elasticity of a child's body and mind, and the difficulty of keeping it still, even at family prayer, would ever dream, if he thought at all on the subject, of overtasking the physical and mental powers of children, as we have so long been doing on the Lord's-day! I know how it is in Birmingham, and I suppose it is much the same elsewhere. Our children come down to school at nine or a quarter past nine o'clock; many of them having to leave their homes an hour; or nearly so, before that; and they very often come with a half-finished slice of bread and butter in their hands. The child is taken into the school, and first of all there is a religious service; then you sit down to lessons, and now and then the child is placed under the care of the kind of teacher to whom I have a great objection, and that is a preaching teacher. Well, when the child has gone through all this, he is taken to church or chapel. I will take the case of my own church, and then I shall not appear invidious. Whatever praises may be lavished upon the Liturgy of the Church of England, it is not one in all its parts specially attractive to little children. Then in our churches-I do not know how it is among nonconformists - these young ones placed in a gallery, far off, and almost out of sight of the pulpit, where they very often get the benefit of all the hot and foul air of the place; and there you see these poor unhappy little creatures cracking nuts, peeling oranges, and engaged in all sorts of things which disturb the congregation and distress their teachers. Well, you keep them there under a very good and eloquent sermon, as I am bound to suppose, but in my case a very long one [a fault, we venture are to think, which the worthy Doctor would do well to remedy for the sake of others besides the children], and then at a quarter to one you let them out [in some places, we know, to go through a great part of the process again in the afternoon]; and you turn round and imagine that, having gone through this round for years, they will, at the age of seventeen, having left your school, be so enamoured of it and all connected with it, that they will come back and become regular attendants at your churches and your chapels, to hear your sermons and your prayers. Now I for one, say the whole thing is a mistake; and I maintain that one of the reasonS why you have to be perpetually asking 'What has become of the working classes who were brought up in our Sunday schools is the way in which you have thus detached them from you on the Lord's-day. [Well may he say, as be has said, that] we need have many searchings of heart when we see the small effect produced by our Sunday schools and by our Sunday teaching generally; and that the whole treatment of Sunday in reference to the children of the poor requires revision. No comment of ours can add to the force of this testimony; we heartily commend it to the attentive consideration of those who have to deal practically with these questions. It is scarcely our province to indicate the remedy for an evil of this nature; those of our readers who take an interest in the question, will find some useful suggestions in Dr. Hessey's book, in the body of the work and in the notes. We only trust the clergy will well consider the risks they incur by over-strictness in their teaching as regards the observance of Sunday. If you condemn harmless amusement on a Sunday as 'Sabbath-breaking,' and denounce this 'Sabbath-breaking' as a deadly sin, you are almost sure to end either in making people hypocrites, or else in making them reckless of all restraint either on that day or any other. Let Scotland be our warning. We earnestly hope that the paradoxical saying attributed to a Scottish judge, himself a Presbyterian, 'that it was not Sabbathbreaking but Sabbath - keeping (meaning by that, the unnatural constraint put upon children) that 1861.] Statutes of the Plantagenets and Tudors. was the beginning of almost all crime,' may never be as true on this side the border as we doubt not it is on the other. It is interesting at this moment, when the rifle targets are taking the place of the archery butts of former days, to note that statutes were passed in the reigns of Richard II. and Henry IV. prohibiting 'quoits, dice, kails, and such other unprofitable games' on Sundays and holydays, but enjoining on all persons, including servants and farm labourers, the diligent practice of archery on all such days. In 1541 an act was passed (13 Henry VIII. cap. 9) by which these statutes and all others relating to the same subject are pealed, but the same injunctions and prohibitions are renewed in still more stringent terms. By this act it is further provided that Butts be made in every city, town, and place, according to the law of ancient time used; and that the inhabitants and dwellers in every of them be compelled to make and continue such butts; and shall re 503 exercise themselves with long bows in shooting at the same, and elsewhere, in holy days and other times convenient.' This act is referred to with marked approval by Latimer, in a sermon preached before Edward VI. in 1549. In accordance with these laws of ancient time used' the butts were set up in every parish on Sunday afternoon, and every man between the ages of seventeen and sixty (with the exception of 'spiritual men, justices of one bench and of the other, justices of the assize, and barons of the exchequer) was required to shoot a specified number of arrows; while provision was also made for the instruction in archery of children between the ages of seven and seventeen. It must, however, be observed that the object of these enactments was rather to substitute a wholesome and useful recreation for other more or less objectionable pastimes which had taken its place, than to introduce a new mode of passing the Sundays and festivals, foreign to the existing habits of the people. The language of these statutes is curious :-'Eient tielx servantz et laborers arkes et setes et les usent les dymenges et jours des festes. Et lessent tout outrement les jeues as pelotes sibien a meyn come a piee et les autres jeues appellez coytes dyces gettre de pere keyles et autres tielx jeues importunes.'-12 Rich. II. cap. 6. 11 Henry IV. cap. 4, recites this act, and enforces its provisions under a penalty of six days' imprisonment. SOMETHING ABOUT MODERN ARABIC. THE modern history of European nations has been dated from the time at which each successive national language received a cultivation fitting it for the service of literature. We do not mean to start a mere verbal question, 'What is to be called modern?' but undoubtedly the rise of a literary language which is at the same time spoken by the educated, is a critical era to each nation, and generally founds what is called a Nationality. Within recent memory Greece has thus recovered her own tongue, which had become so mutilated, and so mixed with Slavonian, as to be unintelligible to mere classical scholars. The first process was to save certain inflexions which were not yet obsolete; to lean as far as might be to the classical verb; and, where the choice was given, to employ Hellenic instead of Slavonian or Turkish vocables. Under Coray, the modern style seemed to be fixed. But the newspapers of Athens, and the British Star, published in London, show a progress towards classical antiquity much beyond the style of forty years ago. The dative case is often used, and sometimes the infinitive mood: and 'purism' has successfully ejected all foreign words. But the idiom is decisively modern, and as such wholly suitable for popular use; separated by no chasm from the tongue of the uneducated. It is destined to unite all who use it, and diffuse the highest thought of Europe by that simple process of translation which almost puts word for word. This is the most recently notorious resurrection of a literary language. Side by side with it, but extending over a far vaster geographical range, a cultivated Arabic is reviving. So high a wall of partition is unhappily raised by those Eastern characters, that Europeans in general are profoundly ignorant of all that is going on in them. Nor are we so vain as to dream here of giving more than a popular and superficial view (which we trust shall nevertheless be accurate) of the leading phenomena, which will well repay attention. Historians regard the overthrow of the Arab Empire in Bagdad by the Turks of the House of Seljuk, as the era which made Cairo the first of Arab cities. Henceforward all the literature or learning of the Arabs had this city for their home. But with the conquest of Egypt in 1517 by the Ottomans under Selim I., the classical period ends. Learning became comparatively rare, books scarce, and original composition all but vanished. Nevertheless, the recitation of tales presently assumed an importance before unknown; among which by far the most celebrated and most influential were those of the Thousand and One Nights, which Mr. Lane is disposed to refer precisely to the era of the Ottoman conquest. The positive statements which he makes concerning this work go a great way towards convincing us that it may be considered as the origin of the modern literary style. He says, in the Introduction to his Translation :— No sheykh includes the Thousand and One Nights among the classical works. Its style is neither classical, as some Europeans have supposed; nor is it, as others have imagined, that of [modera] familiar conversation. I believe that the language of every copy of it now known, excepting those improved by modern sheykhs, is almost as different from the former style as it is from the latter. Professional story-tellers have long been accustomed to recite these and other less celebrated tales to groups of listeners at the coffeehouses. The same recitations being repeated, often by the same men, in different provinces, preserved a certain unity of the language in the midst of the provincial dialects: and however little they may be allowed to be 'classical' by the learned few who look back with pride and regret to the ancient literature, they have held up a mark high enough, and not too high, for more ordinary minds to aspire to. A merchant who desired to avoid in his letters the peculiarities of his own province (which might be unintelligible to his correspondents), and to attain a style which should be familiar without being vulgar, would find no standard so useful or so accessible as these tales. Of course, we do not undervalue the importance of sacred books-the Koran to the Moslems, the Bible to the Christians-in imparting some taste for a pure and ancient style: but from the nature of the material such books go but a little way in furnishing one for the needs of daily life; and any close approximation to their style would appear unseemly and profane. Three centuries passed, during which all the Arabian cities continued to decline under the unintellectual and improvident rule of the Ottomans. The vernacular dialects had deviated widely from the old tongue and from one another; and these popular tales appeared more and more classical in the comparison. No movements at all of the intellect are recorded: original talent seems to have been entirely extinct. But into the midst of this literary stagnation, a disturbing influence plunged by foreign activity, partly religious, partly political and scientific. The English Church Missionary Society began, from their press at Malta, to publish religious tracts, and presently some other small works, which they hoped would be popular. Simultaneously, under Mohammed Ali Pasha of Egypt, colleges were established with political aims, to instruct the Government officials in various branches of European knowledge, chiefly under French inspiration. Geography-national and physical-medicine and surgery, mathematics, drawing, and some knowledge of European history and diplomacy, have been, we believe, prominent in the course of instruction. When the material of knowledge had to be supplied by Europeans, who were virtually translators, a change of idiom and spirit was likely to be transfused into the language, even when the vocables were used in their purely classical sense. And this process is certain to go on with accelerated force, if Arabic newspapers can be not only started, but maintained. Even if the editor of a newspaper were a 505 learned native, and one zealous for the classical type, we know how large a part of his work must consist in real translations from European newspapers: and where he does not actually translate, he is still writing with foreign material before him, with the foreign idiom in his mind, without time to consult classical authors, and at most able to refresh his memory sometimes from a mere dictionary. And, in fact, we may be assured that as no native can be a competent editor who has not a large prior acquaintance with Europe, so it is all but impossible to find the needful acquirements in one who is at the same time a professed scholar of the old literature. editor must rather have the qualities of an accomplished merchant, and (under correction we assert) is more likely to be a European than a born Arab. An It is difficult hitherto to induce the natives of those countries to pay for any literature. It is in like manner notorious, that medical fees can never be got out of them, except by the process-so repulsive to European physicians-of extorting them beforehand, by an estimate of the probable expense of curing the disease. American newspapers have introduced systematically the principle of subscription and pre-payment: this method has been adopted in Syria and Algiers. A newspaper, called the Garden of News, was set up more than two years ago at Beyroot-whether still it exist we have not been able to learn-which made grave complaints as to the difficulty of getting money when due. In the twentythird number it says: To gentlemen the subscribers.-With all sorrow we now see that half the year is already passed, and some of the subscribers have not yet paid, although they know that the price of this journal is paid in advance. We entreat them now to send the money to us, lest we be compelled to further measures. We observe that the Algiers journal (called the Mercury) has, as a sort of running title, the following notice along the top: Advertisement.-We entreat of any one who desires to be a subscriber to our jour nal, that, in sending to us his requisition, he will accompany it with the money; for, if not, we shall be constrained to decline to send the journal to him. We may add, that it appears once a week; fills a single sheet of moderate folio; the price of subscription being 36 francs a-year, or 20 for the half year. Thus to the yearly subscriber it is about 61⁄2d. for each weekly paper. We had conjectured that the Algiers Mercury had the advantage of some subsidy from the French Government, in whose interest it wrote. Indeed, if even it were less Napoleonist, and were merely a diffuser of French thought, it would be of great value politically to the French Empire in Algeria. But it has suddenly come to a close, having been suppressed (as we are assured from Paris) by the Imperial censor! This surely indicates, not merely that the Emperor's servants are more active than he could wish them to be, but that influences far other than dynastic move them. It is not the Imperial Power, but the bigoted Moollahs, who had reason to wish such a paper arrested; and it is hard to doubt that their intrigue has been the moving cause. With regret, therefore, we have to speak of the Mercury as having had but temporary existence. We observe that in one number the editor distinctly professes himself to be a foreigner, in apologizing for the difficulty of developing a certain subject in Arabic. Even without this avowal, we should have unhesitatingly judged the writer to be a Frenchman; and what is to us of much interest, we find the style, idiom, and vocabulary to be almost identical with that of the familiar books published some twenty-five years ago by the Church Missionary Society in Malta; as, for instance, their Robinson Crusoe (except that the latter is slightly interlarded with stereotype quotation): nor does it differ, further than as political and religious writing must differ, from the New Testament as translated by Sabat under the auspices of the English Bible Society. Under correction we say that it differs from the style of the Arabian Nights, chiefly that it uses popular words in their most current sense, and thus exterminates the ambiguities which are such a nuisance in this language. We may here adduce the confession of the accomplished Mr. Lane in regard to his own translation: No translator can always be certain that, from twenty or more significations which are borne by one Arabic word, he has selected that which his author intended to convey.' Nevertheless, this modern prose is not really the popular tongue anywhere, though (except where the subject itself is beyond the popular reach) it is in general everywhere understood. And this is a point that needs to be more closely explained. If any one passes through France to Algiers, Morocco, or Tunis, he will have his ears assailed by sounds unintelligible* to a mere classical scholar; and, in fact, unintelligible also to a Bedouin, The Arabic of Syria is, in its own way, equally eccentric and perverse. That of Egypt and of Bagdad are less strongly corrupted, though two of the consonants (the th and dh) have, in Egypt, as in Syria, most confusedly lost their aspiration. To count the dialects is fruitless; some will say there are three, and others six. Yet in truth the * Even where a word preserves its classical sense and its true consonants, confusion, either perplexing or ludicrous, often results from the obliteration or falsification of vowels. An Englishman will correctly imagine one large case of confusion by supposing our words police and pelisse to be both sounded pliece; for the moderns uniformly clip to the utmost of their power a short vowel so situated. As in old days the Romance languages were discriminated by Si, Oc, and Oui, their renderings of Yes; so the modern Arabic dialects might be discriminated by the mode in which they often express Of, or Shall, or There is. The Algerine Arabic has developed a very elegant present tense of the verb To Be, which is deficient in the classical language, and might advantageously be adopted into written style, which is often obscure from want of it. It is Rani, Rác, Raho; Rana, Racom, Rahom ; for Sum, Es, Est; Sumus, Estis, Sunt. Literally the words mean Behold me, Behold thee, Behold him, &c. |