to quote, and that I shall take from Mrs. Foster's "Handbook of European Literature."

The title of this work indicates its character and scope. It is a compilation which any writer might have undertaken, and in the execution of which many a writer would have displayed both learning and research. From the catalogues and lists of publications of the several countries whose literature is noticed, Mrs. Foster copies the names of authors and of their works. So far no one is imposed upon, and no one has a right to complain. But the case is altered when we come to deal with the comments with which the authors' names are introduced. Such comments, when their origin is not indicated, are supposed to be the fruit of the writer's knowledge and experience; and to her we naturally assign any merit, for soundness or sagacity, to which they may be entitled. Now, I find that Mrs. Foster's notices, with very few exceptions, have been appropriated without acknowledgment from other writers. Some are copied from encyclopædias, some from magazines, some from reviews. Some are purloined from Sismondi; some from Roscoe; others from Macaulay; others again from Sir Bulwer Lytton. In one place a whole page of comments is adopted from one work; in another, the comments are made up of sentences cut out of different writers, and strung together with peculiar ingenuity. The book, in short, cannot

be more appropriately described than in the words of Hazlitt :—“ It is all patchwork and plagiarism, the beggarly copiousness of borrowed wealth;" and this is carried to such an extent, that there is scarcely an important remark in its 452 pages that is not traceable to the writer from whom it has been taken.

At pages 10, 11, there is a notice of Petrarch, occupying twenty-two lines, which is given as part of Mrs. Foster's text, without inverted commas, or any other marks to show that the writer intended it as a quotation; yet the whole passage is copied word for word from Macaulay's "Essay on Machiavelli." Farther on, at pages 26, 27, Mrs. Foster has a paragraph of thirty lines on the subject of Machiavelli and his writings, which she has very dexterously appropriated from the same writer. The passage is not to be found anywhere in Macaulay in a consecutive form; but there is not a sentence in it that has not been picked out from some part of the Essay already referred to. Again, at pages 293 and 294, we have some twenty-five lines of comments on our British writers, which have been extracted verbatim from pages 61, 62, and 64, of Sir Bulwer Lytton's "England and the English."

What can be said in defence of this wholesale system of literary plunder? That the author preferred giving to the public the matured judg

ments of our great critical authorities, rather than her own crude and ill-expressed opinions? But then, why did she not acknowledge the sources from which she drew the observations? She has done so in a few instances, and this proves that she intended the unacknowledged passages to be received as the emanations of her personal experience and sagacity. For the rest, nothing can be more imperfect than this compilation. Some of the best writers are not mentioned even by name; and in a great number of instances the names are incorrectly given, or the authors are inaccurately described. Of those that are named, the best works are frequently omitted; while, as regards the compiler's remarks, what is good is borrowed, and what is not borrowed is commonplace.

We hear a great deal in this age of what are called "Idées Napoléoniennes," the wisdom of Napoleon, and so forth. Some of this is invented by the writers, and ascribed to Napoleon; some of it is no wisdom at all; and some is what I call second-hand wisdom, an old familiar face with a new dress. Of this last sort is the famous saying:

"From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but a step."

For this remark Napoleon has obtained considerable notice. The truth, however, seems to be, that he adopted it from Tom Paine; Tom

Τ

Paine from Hugh Blair, and Hugh Blair from Longinus. Napoleon's words, as quoted by the Abbé De Pradt, are:

“Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas."

The passage in Tom Paine, whose writings were translated into French as early as 1791, stands thus:

"The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again."

Blair has a remark akin to this:

"It is indeed extremely difficult to hit the precise point where true wit ends and buffoonery begins."

But the passage in Blair from which Tom Paine adopted his notion of the sublime and the ridiculous, is that in which Blair, commenting on Lucan's style, remarks :—

"It frequently happens that where the second line is sublime, the third, in which he meant to rise still higher, is perfectly bombast."

Lastly, this saying is borrowed by Blair from his brother rhetorician, Longinus, who, in his "Treatise on the Sublime," has the following sentence at the beginning of Section III. :

“ Τεθόλωται γὰρ τῇ φράσει, καὶ τεθορύβηται ταῖς φαντασίαις μᾶλλον ἢ δεδείνεται, κἂν ἕκαστον αὐτῶν πρὸς αὐγὰς ἀνασκοπῆς ἐκ τοῦ φοβεροῦ κατ ̓ ὀλίγον ὑπονοστεῖ πρὸς τὸ εὐκαταφρόνητον.”

This is referred to by Warton in his comments on Pope's translation of the "Thebais" of Statius; and Dr. Croly, apparently unacquainted with the passages in Paine and Blair, describes it in his edition of Pope as the anticipation of Napoleon's celebrated remark. It will be seen that the original saying has undergone a slight modification, Longinus making the transition a gradual one, "HAT' oníYou," while Blair, Paine, and Napoleon make it "but a step." Yet, notwithstanding this disguise, the marks of its paternity are sufficiently traceable.

So much for this celebrated apothegm. And after all there is very little wit or wisdom in it that is not expressed or suggested by Seneca's remark:

"Nullum ingenium magnum sine mixtura dementiæ;"

or, as Shakspeare adopts it in "Measure for Measure:"

"Her madness hath the oddest frame of sense;"

or Dryden, more closely still, in the well-known line :

"Great wits are sure to madness near allied;"

or Bayle, where he says:

"Il n'y a point de grand esprit dans le caractère duquel il n'entre un peu de folie."

The sentiment also occurs in Horace's line:

"Aut insanit homo, aut versus facit;"