Erasmus then resided. The latter, afraid of the consequences of intimacy with one so little in favour in high places, refused to see his former friend. An angry personal controversy was the consequence. The magistracy of Basel, fearful of harbouring him, requested him to leave their city. He proceeded to Mühlhausen. Here he heard of the failure of Sickingen's freebooting expedition against Richard, Archbishop and Elector of Treves; of his retreat to Landstuhl; of its investment and capture, and of the hero's death. His stay at Mühlhausen was short. The rabble, incited by the partisans of the old ecclesiasticism, threatened his safety, and he was compelled to make his escape by night to Zurich, where, at the hands of the reformer Zwingli, "he sought and found protection, help, and consolation."

Presently he retired to the little island of Ufnau, in the lake of Zurich; and there, not unattended by friendly ministrations, breathed his last, after a short but violent illness, towards the end of August or the beginning of September 1523, being then thirtyfive years and four months old.

The faults of Hutten's character lie on the surface, and it requires no particular acuteness to discern them. They are those of a warm and passionate temperament. But his merits are as conspicuous, courage, unselfishness, a ready enthusiasm for what he believed to be true and right, ardent patriotism, and quenchless love of liberty. He lived for great and worthy ends, for which he was satisfied to spend and be spent. Mr. Hallam thinks that Hutten's early death is more likely "to have spared the reformers some degree of shame than to have deprived them of a useful supporter." It may be so. Hutten was one of a class of men needful at the commencement, often dangerous in the subsequent course of revolutions; powerful to set the forces of change in motion, but little skilful to control and guide their movement. Such men have their place, and do their work; and are to be judged of by what they are, rather than by what they are not. His life, to use his biographer's words, is a rebuke "to those who would without a struggle again hand over to Rome, and to a priesthood in the interest of Rome, the keys of the conscience and intellectual cultivation of the German races;" and yet more so "to those who would plant a new popcdom in the very bosom of Protestantism itself,-to the princes who make their will their law, and to the scholars to whom circumstances and motives of prudence are more than the truth."

ART. III.-RECENT CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE STUDY OF

LATIN LITERATURE.

Bibliotheca Classica: edited by George Long, M.A., and the Rev. A. J. Macleane, M.A.-Publi Terentii Comœdiæ Sex; with a Commentary by the Rev. E. St. John Parry, M.A.-Juvenalis et Persi Satire; with a Commentary by the Rev. A. J. Macleane, M.A.

The Speech of Cicero for Aulus Cluentius Habitus; with Prolegomena and Notes by William Ramsay, M. A. Trin. Col. Camb., Professor of Humanity in the University of Glasgow.

Lectures on Roman Husbandry, delivered before the University of Oxford. By Charles Daubeny, M.D., Professor of Botany and Rural Economy in the University of Oxford.

THAT till within the last few years the Greek and Latin languages have been cultivated in this country, each after a distinct fashion, we suppose will be generally acknowledged. The cause, or at least one very sufficient cause, is plain enough. We do not often possess a familiar and a critical acquaintance with the same thing. The process by which the former is acquired blunts our ardour for the latter. We do not make a psychological study of our father and mother. We do not get up the Times Newspaper with a gazetteer and an atlas. These are things to be enjoyed as parts of our daily life; not to stand off from us, and be critically probed and dissected. Latin, accordingly, under the old-fashioned system of education was not learned scientifically, because it was learned so easily and so colloquially; it grew up with us, and became as it were a second mother-tongue. It was not then one of several accomplishments which make up the educated man. It underlay them all. A professor of Latin was deemed as superfluous as a professor of English. Greek, on the contrary, was a specialty-a thing to be pursued, if a man had a turn for it; not otherwise. Add to this the confessedly greater difficulty* of learning Greek, which rendered critical commentaries indispensable when it came to be generally studied; and we shall have said all that is necessary in illustration of the fact laid down.

But of late years a change has come over scholarship. The tradition, which lingered on through the first quarter of the present century, is fast dying out. The habit of Latin composition is no longer enforced with pristine stringency; other branches of knowledge divert the infant mind from that exConf. De Quincey's Essay upon Bentley.

clusiveness of diet which is necessary to even partial assimilation. Latin, therefore, is taking its place among other objects of study; and is becoming a subject of curiosity rather than of love. As we say of men, that it is only after their death we can form a just estimate of their characters, so, now that Latin has ceased to be spoken, and is fast ceasing to be written, we begin to investigate its elements. It is becoming that formidable affair, "a matter of history." Our annotations are becoming philological and idiomatic: Madvig is becoming generally known,-Oxford has established a professor; and we may almost say that the transition state of Latin scholarship is concluded, and that a new era has commenced.

The

This is the first point to be noticed. The second is, the completeness of the equipments with which all new classical editions are now ushered into the world. Gray, who lamented the multiplication of Lexicons a century ago, for its tendency to impair the quality of English scholarship, would lift his hands in horror could he witness the growth of dissertations, introductions, excursuses, appendices, and other aids to the indolent, which these latter days have brought forth. poet's objection was well-founded. Such auxiliaries, however valuable for reasons hereafter to be mentioned, have undoubtedly had one ill effect. Our scholarship is comparatively crude. And if any young aspirant would know the reason why, let him take some portion of a classical author with which he is wholly unacquainted, and endeavour to master it thoroughly without any external assistance. The process will be analogous to that of chewing the bodily food; and he will find that not only has he digested this subject as he never digested one before, but that he has gained a real step in education, and at the same time invigorated his intellectual powers more than ten times the same amount of reading would have done, pursued under the ordinary system. His progress, we admit, will be slow. All those little words which he is apt to pass over as unimportant, when his Lexicon has supplied him with the leading idea of the sentence, will now be, as it were, put to the torture, and compelled to shed their quota of light upon the meaning of the whole. As an idiom which he could not comprehend in the third page, recurs in the tenth, and again, perhaps, in the twentieth, under different combinations, its radical significance will gradually dawn upon his mind, never to be again forgotten. The moods and voices of verbs, and the varying force of compounds, will now become matter of serious consideration. Of the technical allusions, some, as he reads on, will explain themselves, and others he will carefully set aside for separate inquiry. Till at last, by pursuing this exhaustive process, he

will be astonished at the comparatively small residuum of real difficulties; and from the immobility of the knowledge he has acquired in the mean time, will be able to form some estimate of the results attained by those whose whole education was conducted on more or less the same system.

It might be thought, that of the two new features in modern scholarship here pointed out, the one would compensate for the other, that the scientific study of Latin will do even more good than an excess of facilities can do harm. That those who really study the language for themselves will find this to be the case, is very probable. But the results of philological inquiry are easily epitomised and tabulated. It is, in fact, one of the characteristics of the age, that they should be so presented. And the consequence is, that the changed method of study will make no difference to the mass of learners; while the encroaching growth of commentaries will supersede even that little independent exercise of thought which still is necessary to the comprehension of some portion of the Latin classics.

But our best consolation for this state of things is, that it was inevitable. It is impossible that young men should continue to devote the same space of time to the acquisition of classical literature which they did when that, and that alone, was the test of a liberal education. Scholarship, therefore, must either perish or change its character. And, as certainly it will not be denied, even by those who do not appreciate a familiarity with the subjunctive mood, that it is for the good of society that a knowledge of ancient history, and a taste for the classic models should still flourish amongst us, we must admit the necessity of making the ascent of Parnassus easier and more inviting at the outset, even though we sacrifice something valuable in the process. To change our metaphor, scholarship is now in its old age, and must be sustained by artificial means. This is a truth on which the editors of the works we have selected for illustration have certainly acted, whether they have recognised it or not. And, in fact, all the Latin volumes of the Bibliotheca Classica which we have read are even more remarkable for the care bestowed upon accessories than for critical commentary on the text itself.

Mr. Parry's Terence is an admirable case in point. For the last fifty years or so, and perhaps longer, Terence has not, with one or two well-known exceptions, been included within the ordinary curriculum of school or college reading. What was the reason? His works are a magazine of Latinity. There is less coarseness in all his six comedies than in a single satire of Horace or Juvenal. He is witty, and graceful, and human.

We can account for it in no other way than by the fact, that he lay a little out of the beaten track; that there were difficulties connected with the composition of his plays in which college tutors did not care to involve themselves; and lastly, that his versification was a stumbling-block in the eyes of those who would have shuddered at a boy reading a Latin poet which he could not scan. But now all these difficulties have been driven from the field. Terence is placed before us in a positively appetising shape. The history of his plays, his metres and scansion, and his position in Roman literature, are all amply discussed. The young beginner is positively pampered with commentary, and is coaxed into reading an act or two through sheer shame of allowing so much learning to be wasted on him. While his instructor can get up almost all that it is needful for him to know in a single morning. That this edition, therefore, will lend a wholesome incentive to the study of Terence,' and act, through him, upon the general popularity of Latin literature, we sincerely believe. We trust to see him placed on a level for educational purposes with Virgil and Horace, and his easy idiomatic Latin as familiar in the mouths of schoolboys as the flowing periods of Cicero, or the artful couplets of Ovid.

Although, however, it has fallen to Mr. Parry's lot to be the chosen instrument of editing what we do not affect to doubt will be the standard edition of Terence, we cannot in justice award him any higher praise than that of industriously collecting, and skilfully employing, a mass of scattered commentary previously in existence. Some of this, he tells us, he had not seen till after his own was finished, and has arrived at the same conclusion with previous investigators by an independent line of thought. We willingly give him the benefit of this avowal, and will now briefly run over the various important improvements embodied in the present volume.

His essay on Terentian metres derives its principal intrinsic value from being written in English. Bentley had done the real work; and, in the chief points where Mr. Parry has improved on that great scholar, he had been anticipated, as he admits, by Professor Key. The modern theories embraced under the heads of synizesis and synalopha had been enunciated in the Journal of Education. They relate principally to the system of Roman pronunciation. For Bentley's dictum, that such words as habent, cave, &c., at the beginning of a line, shorten the last syllable even where it is long by position, they substitute a contraction of the word into one syllable, pronouncing habent 'ha'ent,' like the English 'han't' for 'have not' and 'can't' for 'cannot,' and in the same way making cave into cau; and most