CHAPTER III.

MODERNS EMINENT IN THE TWO SPECIES OF CRITICISM BEFORE MENTIONED, THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND THE HISTORICAL THE LAST SORT OF CRITICS MORE NUMEROUS THOSE MENTIONED IN THIS CHAPTER CONFINED TO THE GREEK AND LATIN LANGUAGES.

Ar length, after a long and barbarous period, when the shades of monkery began to retire, and the light of humanity once again to dawn, the arts also of criticism insensibly revived. It is true, indeed, the authors of the philosophical sort (I mean that which respects the causes and principles of good writing in general) were not many in number. However, of this rank among the Italians were Vida and the elder Scaliger; among the French were Rapin, Bouhours, Boileau, together with Bossu, the most methodic and accurate of them all. In our own country, our nobility may be said to have distinguished themselves: lord Roscommon, in his Essay upon translated Verse; the duke of Buckingham, in his Essay on Poetry; and lord Shaftesbury, in his treatise called Advice to an Author: to whom may be added our late admired genius, Pope, in his truly elegant poem, the Essay upon Criticism.

The discourses of sir Joshua Reynolds upon Painting have, after a philosophical manner, investigated the principles of an art, which no one in practice better verified than himself.

We have mentioned these discourses, not only from their merit, but as they incidentally teach us, that to write well upon a liberal art, we must write philosophically; that all the liberal arts in their principles are congenial; and that these principles, when traced to their common source, are found all to terminate in the first philosophy.

:

But to pursue our subject. However small among moderns may be the number of these philosophical critics, the writers of historical or explanatory criticism have been in a manner innumerable. To name, out of many, only a few of Italy were Beroaldus, Ficinus, Victorius, and Robertellus; of the Higher and Lower Germany were Erasmus, Sylburgius, Le Clerc, and Fabricius; of France were Lambin, Du Vall, Harduin, Capperonerius; of England were Stanley, (editor of Eschylus,) Gataker, Davis, Clarke, (editor of Homer ;) together with multitudes more from every region and quarter,

Thick as autumnal leaves, that strow the brooks

In Vallombrosa.

See Hermes, p. 154, and Philosophical philosophy, in the index to those ArrangeArrangements, p. 356; also the words first ments.

But I fear I have given a strange catalogue, where we seek in vain for such illustrious personages as Sesostris, Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar, Attila, Tottila, Tamerlane, &c. The heroes of my work (if I may be pardoned for calling them so) have only aimed in retirement to present us with knowledge. Knowledge only was their object, not havoc, nor devastation.

After commentators and editors, we must not forget the compilers of lexicons and dictionaries, such as Charles and Henry Stevens, Favorinus, Constantine, Budæus, Cooper, Faber, Vossius, and others. To these also we may add the authors upon grammar: in which subject the learned Greeks, when they quitted the East, led the way, Moschopulus, Chrysoloras, Lascaris, Theodore Gaza; then in Italy, Laurentius Valla; in England, Grocin and Linacer; in Spain, Sanctius; in the Low Countries, Vossius; in France, Cæsar Scaliger, by his residence, though by birth an Italian, together with those able writers Mess. de Port Royal. Nor ought we to omit the writers of philological epistles, such as Emanuel Martin; nor the writers of literary catalogues, (in French called catalogues raisonnées,) such as the account of the manuscripts in the imperial library at Vienna, by Lambecius; or of the Arabic manuscripts in the Escurial library, by Michael Casiri.1

Sanctius, towards the end of the sixteenth century, was professor of rhetoric, and of the Greek tongue, in the university of Salamanca. He wrote many works, but his most celebrated is that which bears the name of Sanctii Minerva, seu de Causis Lingua Latina. This invaluable book (to which the author of these treatises readily owns himself indebted for his first rational ideas of grammar and language) was published by Sanctius at Salamanca in the year 1587. Its superior merit soon made it known through Europe, and caused it to pass through many editions in different places. The most common edition is a large octavo, printed at Amsterdam in the year 1733, and illustrated with notes by the learned Perizonius.

h Emanuel Martin was dean of Alicant in the beginning of the present century. He appears from his writings, as well as from his history, to have been a person of pleasing and amiable manners; to have been an able antiquarian, and, as such, a friend to the celebrated Montfaucon ; to have cultivated with eagerness the various studies of humanity, and to have written

Latin with facility and elegance. His works, containing twelve books of epistles, and a few other pieces, were printed in Spain about the year 1735, at the private expense of that respectable statesman and scholar, sir Benjamin Keene, the British ambassador, to whom they were inscribed in a classical dedication by the learned dean himself, then living at Alicant. As copies of this edition soon became scarce, the book was reprinted by Wesselingius, in a fair quarto, (the two tomes being usually bound together,) at Amsterdam, in the year 1738.

i Michael Casiri, the learned librarian of the Escurial, has been enabled, by the munificence of the last and present kings of Spain, to publish an accurate and erudite catalogue of the Arabic manuscripts in that curious library, a work well becoming its royal patrons, as it gives an ample exhibition of Arabic literature in all its various branches of poetry, philosophy, divinity, history, &c. But of these manuscripts we shall say more in the Appendix, subjoined to the end of these Inquiries.

CHAPTER IV.

MODERN CRITICS OF THE EXPLANATORY KIND, COMMENTING MODERN WRITERS-LEXICOGRAPHERS-GRAMMARIANS-TRANSLATORS.

THOUGH much historical explanation has been bestowed on the ancient classics, yet have the authors of our own country by no means been forgotten, having exercised many critics of learning and ingenuity.

Mr. Thomas Warton (besides his fine edition of Theocritus) has given a curious history of English poetry during the middle centuries; Mr. Tyrwhitt, much accurate and diversified erudition upon Chaucer; Mr. Upton, a learned comment on the Fairy Queen of Spencer; Mr. Addison, many polite and elegant Spectators on the conduct and beauties of the Paradise Lost; Dr. Warton, an Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, a work filled with speculations, in a taste perfectly pure. The lovers of literature would not forgive me, were I to omit that ornament of her sex and country, the critic and patroness of our illustrious Shakspeare, Mrs. Montagu. For the honour of criticism, not only the divines already mentioned, but others also, of rank still superior, have bestowed their labours upon our capital poets,* suspending for a while their severer studies, to relax in these regions of genius and imagination.

The dictionaries of Minshew, Skinner, Spelman, Sumner, Junius, and Johnson, are all well known, and justly esteemed. Such is the merit of the last, that our language does not possess a more copious, learned, and valuable work. For grammatical knowledge, we ought to mention with distinction the learned prelate, Dr. Lowth, bishop of London; whose admirable tract on the Grammar of the English Language, every lover of that language ought to study and understand, if he would write, or even speak it, with purity and precision.

Let my countrymen, too, reflect, that in studying a work upon this subject, they are not only studying a language in which it becomes them to be knowing, but a language which can boast of as many good books as any among the living or modern languages of Europe. The writers, born and educated in a free country, have been left for years to their native freedom. Their pages have been never defiled with an index expurgatorius, nor their genius ever shackled with the terrors of an inquisition.

May this invaluable privilege never be impaired either by the hand of power, or by licentious abuse.

Perhaps with the critics just described I ought to arrange translators, if it be true that translation is a species of explana

k Shakspeare, Milton, Cowley, Pope.

tion, which differs no otherwise from explanatory comments, than that these attend to parts, while translation goes to the whole.

Now as translators are infinite, and many of them (to borrow a phrase from sportsmen) unqualified persons, I shall enumerate only a few, and those such as for their merits have been deservedly esteemed.

Of this number I may very truly reckon Meric Casaubon, the translator of Marcus Antoninus; Mrs. Carter, the translator of Epictetus; and Mr. Sydenham, the translator of many of Plato's Dialogues. All these seem to have accurately understood the original language from which they translated. But that is not all. The authors translated being philosophers, the translators appear to have studied the style of their philosophy, well knowing that in ancient Greece every sect of philosophy, like every science and art, had a language of its own.1

To these may be added the respectable name of Melmoth and of Hampton, of Franklyn and of Potter; nor should I omit a few others, whose labours have been similar, did I not recollect the trite, though elegant admonition,

Fugit irreparabile tempus,

Singula dum capti circumvectamur amore.

Virg.

Yet one translation I can by no means forget, I mean that of Xenophon's Cyropædia, or the Institution of Cyrus, by the Hon. Maurice Ashley Cowper, son to the second earl of Shaftesbury, and brother to the third, who was author of the Characteristics. This translation is made in all the purity and simplicity of the original, and to it the translator has prefixed a truly philosophical dedication, addressed to my mother, who was one of his

sisters.

I esteem it an honour to call this author my uncle, and that not only from his rank, but much more from his learning, and unblemished virtue; qualities which the love of retirement (where he thought they could be best cultivated) induced him to conceal, rather than to produce in public.

The first edition of this translation, consisting of two octavo volumes, was published soon after his decease, in the year 1728. Between this time and the year 1770, the book has passed through a second and a third edition, not with the eclat of popular applause, but with the silent approbation of the studious few.

See Hermes, p. 195.

CHAPTER V.

RISE OF THE THIRD SPECIES OF CRITICISM, THE CORRECTIVE-PRACTISED BY THE ANCIENTS, BUT MUCH MORE BY THE MODERNS, AND WHY.

BUT we are now to inquire after another species of criticism. All ancient books, having been preserved by transcription, were liable through ignorance, negligence, or fraud, to be corrupted in three different ways; that is to say, by retrenchings, by additions, and by alterations.

To remedy these evils, a third sort of criticism arose, and that was criticism corrective. The business of this at first was painfully to collate all the various copies of authority; and then, from amidst the variety of readings thus collected, to establish by good reasons either the true, or the most probable. In this sense we may call such criticism, not only corrective, but authoritative. As the number of these corruptions must needs have increased by length of time, hence it has happened that corrective criticism has become much more necessary in these latter ages, than it was in others more ancient. Not but that even in ancient days various readings have been noted. Of this kind there are a multitude in the text of Homer; a fact not singular, when we consider his great antiquity. In the comments of Ammonius and Philoponus upon Aristotle, there is mention made of several in the text of that philosopher, which these his commentators compare and examine.

We find the same in Aulus Gellius, as to the Roman authors; where it is withal remarkable, that, even in that early period, much stress is laid upon the authority of ancient manuscripts," a reading in Cicero being justified from a copy made by his learned freedman, Tiro; and a reading in Virgil's Georgics, from a book which had once belonged to Virgil's family.

But since the revival of literature, to correct has been a business of much more latitude, having continually employed, for two centuries and a half, both the pains of the most laborious, and the wits of the most acute. Many of the learned men before enumerated were not only famous as historical critics, but as corrective also. Such were the two Scaligers, (of whom one has been already mentioned,") the two Casaubons, Salmasius, the Heinsii, Grævius, the Gronovii, Burman, Kuster, Wasse, Bentley, Pearce, and Markland. In the same class, and in a rank highly eminent, I place Mr. Toupe of Cornwall, who, in his Emendations upon Suidas, and his edition of Longinus, has shewn a critical acumen, and a compass of learning, that may justly

m See Aulus Gellius, lib. i. c. 7. and 21. Macrob. Saturn. lib. i. c. 5.
n Page 392.