composition is not a mere means for conveying truths, but its own end and final object, there, and there only, it may be allowable to attempt a happy evasion of some modern barbarism by means of its nearest Roman equivalent. For example, in a sepulchral inscription, one of the finest modes of the serious epigram, where distinction for the understanding is nothing, and effect for the natural sensibilities is all in all, Dr Parr might be justified in saying that a man died by a ballista, as the nearest classical weapon of offence to that which was really concerned in the fatal accident. But the same writer, treating any question of Natural Philosophy, could never have allowed himself in so vague a term. To know that a man perished under a blow from some engine of war acted on by a mechanical force, without distinguishing whether gun or pistol, bomb, mortar, howitzer, or hand-grenade-might be all that was required to engage the reader's sympathy. Some little circumstantiality, some slight specification of details, is useful in giving direction and liveliness to a general tone of commiseration; whilst too minute an individualization of objects, not elevated enough to sustain any weight of attention, would both degrade the subject and disturb the natural current of the feelings by the disproportionate notice it would arrogate under the unwieldy periphrasis that might be necessary to express it. But, on the other hand, in pure physics, the primary necessity of rigorous distinction would demand an exact designation of the particular implement; size, weight, bore, mode of action, and quantity of resistance, might here all happen to be of foremost importance. Something, in fact, analogous to all this, for the case itself, and for the law which it suggests, may be found in the art of gardening, under its two great divisions of the useful and the ornamental. Taste was first applied to the latter. From the art of gardening, as cultivated for picturesque effects, laws and principles of harmonious grouping, of happy contrast, and of hidden co-operation in parts remote from each other, were soon derived. It was natural that some transfer should be attempted

of these rules to the humbler province of kitchengardens. Something was tried here, also, of the former devices for producing the picturesque; and the effects were uniformly bad. Upon which two classes of critics arose, one who supposed kitchengardens to be placed altogether out of the jurisdiction of taste, and another, who persisted in bringing them within it, but unfortunately by means of the very same rules as those which governed the larger and more irregular province of pleasure gardens. The truth lay between the two parties; the last were right in supposing that every mode of exhibiting objects to the eye had its own susceptibilities (however limited) of beauty, and its own rules of good taste. The first, on the other hand, were equally right in rejecting the rules of the picturesque, as applicable to arrangements in which utility and convenience presided. Beauty," wild without rule or art, enormous bliss," (that is, bliss which transcends all norma, or artificial measurements,) which is Milton's emphatic summing up of the luxuries of Eden, obey a much wider law, and in that proportion more difficult to be abstracted than the elegance of trim arrangement. But even this has its own appropriate law of ornament. And the mistake is, to seek it by translation from some province, differing essentially, and by its central principle, from itself. Where it is possible (as in ornamental gardening on the English plan it is) to appear as an assistant, and in subordination to nature, making her the principal artist, and rather directing her efforts than positively interfering with them

there, it is certain, that the wild, the irregular, the illimitable, and the luxuriant, have their appropriate force of beauty; and the tendency of art is no more than simply to assist their developement, and to sustain their effect, by removing whatever is inharmonious. But in a system of which utility is the object, utility must also be the law and source of the beauty. That same convenience, which dictates arrangement and limitation as its own subsidiary instruments, ought to dietate these same principles as the presiding agents for the creation of appropriate ornaments. Instead of

seeking a wild picturesque, which delights in concealing, or in reveal ing only by fits, the subtle and half evanescent laws under which it grows, good taste suggests imperatively, as the object we should court, a beauty of the architectural kind, courting order and symmetry, avowing, not hiding its own artifices, and absolutely existing by correspondence of parts.

Latin composition falls into the same or analogous divisions; and these divisions obey the same or corresponding rules. The highest form of Latin composition, ornamented Latin, which belongs to a difficult department of the higher belles lettres, clothes itself, by natural right, in the whole pomp and luxury of the native Roman idiom. Didactic Latin, of any class, in which the subject makes it impossible to sustain that idiom for two consecutive sentences, abandons it professedly, and creates a new law for itself. Even the art of annotation, a very extensive branch of purely didactic Latin, and cultivated by immense numbers of very able men, has its own peculiar laws and proprieties, which must be sought in the works of those who have practised it with success.*

For an example, in support of what we have been saying, and illustrating the ludicrous effect, which arises from a fastidiously classical phraseology employed upon a subject of science, we might refer our readers to the collection of letters between Leibnitz and various correspondents in different parts of Europe, published at Hanover by Feder, among which are some extra superfine letters by a certain Italian Abbé.

It is really as good as a comedy, to see the rope-dancing tricks of agility by which this finical Italian petitmaitre contrives to talk of electricity,

retorts, crucibles, and gas, in terms that might have delighted the most delicate ears of Augustan Rome. Leibnitz pays him some compliments, as he could do no less, upon his superfine apparel; but evidently he is laughing in his sleeve at the hyperbolical pains and perspiration that each paragraph of his letters must have cost him. This Italian simply carried a pretty common mistake to a ridiculous excess. The notion is universal, that even in writing upon scientific subjects, it is right to strive after classical grace, in that extent to which it shall be found attainable. But this is false taste. Far juster, better, and more self-consistent, is the plain, unpretending Latin of the great heroes of philosophy-Lord Bacon, Des Cartes, and Leibnitz.† They court no classical ornaments, no rhetorical phrases; yet the Latin idiom, though not studiously courted, is never harshly violated. Philosophic ideas, philosophic dogmas, of modern birth, are not antedated by giving them pagan names. Terms of modern science, objects of modern discovery, are not disguised in a ridiculous masquerade of classical approximations, presenting a conjectural travesty, rather than a just and responsible translation by fair equivalents. The interests of the sense, and the demands of the primary purpose, are everywhere made the governing considerations; and whilst the barbarisms of some amongst the schoolmen are never imitated, and no idioms positively modern are adopted, the pure Roman idiom is only so far courted as it favours the ends of expedition and precision. In short, we shall not much err in making this general assertion, that a philosophic Latin style, suited to the wants of modern speculation and modern research, has gradually matured itself in the hands of the great

philosophic reformers; an ancient language has bent to the pressure of new circumstances, and of modern revolutions in thinking; and it might be shewn, that it has, in fact, thrown off a new and secondary idiom, neither modern nor antique, and better fitted for dispatch, though less shewy, than that of ancient Rome; and this secondary idiom has been created in the same way, and by the same legitimate agency, as any language whatsoever, viz. by the instincts of feeling, and the necessities of the human mind. Voluntarily and consciously, man never did nor could create a language.*

The great men we speak of, as all men engaged in that function, were controlled by circumstances existing out of themselves, viz. the demands of human thinking, as they have gradually been unfolded, and the needs of experimental philosophy. In maturing their product, that neutral diction of philosophy which is neither modern nor ancient, they were themselves controlled by the circumstances we state: yet, again, as they started with a scholarlike knowledge of the ancient Roman idiom, they have reciprocally so far reacted upon these circumstances, and controlled their natural tendency, as not to suffer their own vernacular idioms to impress themselves upon their new diction, or at all to mould its shape and character.

Into these discursive notices we have allowed ourselves to wander, from the interest which attaches to every phasis of so imperishable a monument of Roman power as survives for all cultivated nations in the Roman language: and also from its near connexion with our immediate subject. Recalling ourselves, however, into that branch of our theme which more particularly concerns Dr Parr, who wrote little (if any thing) in the neutral or didactic form of the Latin

idiom, but came forward boldly as a performer on the great classical lyre of that majestic language,—we have said, that in our judgment he was a skilful performer: we will add, that, in spite of his own modest appreciation of his own claims, he was much more skilful than those who have been most accredited for this accomplishment in modern England: particularly, he was superior, as a master of Latinity, to Sir William Jones and Bishop Lowth, the two most celebrated English composers in Latin through the course of the eighteenth century.

Whilst thus limiting our comparison of Parr to English competitors for the same sort of fame, we are reminded that Reiske, the well-known editor of the Greek Orators, a hasty and careless, but a copious scholar, and himself possessing a masterly command over the Latin language, has pronounced a general censure (Preface to Demosthenes) of English Latinity. In this censure, after making the requisite limitations, we confess that reluctantly we concur. Not that the continent does not keep us in countenance by its own breed of bald composers: but our English deficiences are the more remarkable when placed in opposition to the unquestionable fact, that in no country upon earth have the gentry, both professional and non-professional, and the majority even of the higher aristocracy, so large a tincture of classical knowledge. What is still more remarkable, some of our first-rate scholars have been our poorest masters of Latinity. In particular, Taylor, the eminent civilian, and the able editor of Demosthenes, whose style it was, to the best of our remembrance, in connexion with some illnatured sneer at Wolff, that furnished the immediate provocation to Reiske's remark, was a poor composer in Latin; and Porson, a much

greater scholar than any of these men, as a Latinist was below the meanest of them. In fact, he wrote Latin of any kind,—such Latin even as was framed on his own poor ideal, with singular want of freedom and facility so much we read in the very movement of his bald disjointed style. But (more than all that) his standard and conception of Latin style was originally bad, and directed to the least valuable of its characteristics. Such an adventurous flight, and a compass so wide as that of Parr, was far beyond Porson's strength of pinion. He has not ventured, in any instance that we are aware of, to trust himself through the length of three sentences to his own impulses; but, in his uniform character of annotator, timidly creeps along shore, attached to the tow-line of his text, and ready to drop his anchor on the least summons to stretch out to sea. In this, however, there is something equivocal: timidity of thinking may perhaps be as much concerned in his extreme reserve, as penury of diction. But one most unequivocal indication of incompetence as a Latin composer, is to be found in the structure of his sentences, which are redolent of English idiom. In reality, the one grave and mortal taint of English Latinity is -that it is a translation, a rendering back, from an English archetype. In that way, and upon any such principle, good Latin never can arise. It grows up by another process. Good Latin begins, as well as terminates, in itself. To write like an ancient Roman, a man must think in Latin. Every translation out of an English original must necessarily fail of becoming good Latin by any mode of transmutation that an ordinary activity can ever hope to accomplish: from its English shape, the thoughts, the connexions, the transitions, have already received a determination this way or that, fitting them for the yoke of an English construction. Even the most absolute fixtures (to use that term) in an English structure, must often be unsettled, and the whole framework of the period be taken to pieces and recast in a thoroughly Latin composition. The interrogative form must often be changed to the absolute affirmative, and versa vice; parenthetical intercalations must often be melted into the body of the sen

tence; qualifications and restraints added or omitted; and the whole thought, its succession, and connexion altered, before it will be fitted to receive a direct Latin version.

This part of our subject, and, in connexion with it, Dr Parr's singular command of the Latin idiom, we might easily illustrate by a few references to the Bellenden Preface; and there is the more propriety in a studious use of this preface, because Parr himself declared to one of his friends, [Dr Johnstone's Memoirs, p. 263,] that "there are in the preface almost all the phraseological beauties I know in Latin."

But this task we must reserve for a separate paper, which we meditate on modern Latinity. For the present, we hasten to a class of the Doctor's Latin compositions, in which his merits are even more conspicuous --because more characteristically his

own.

In the epitaphs of Dr Parr, as amongst the epitaphs of this country, where a false model has prevailed-the lapidary style and arrangement, and an unseasonable glitter of rhetoric-there is a rare, almost a unique body of excellence. Indeed, from these inscriptions, we believe it possible to abstract all the negative laws which should preside in this species of composition. The sole defect is in the positive qualities. Whatsoever an epitaph ought not to be, that too frequently it is; and by examining Dr Parr's in detail, we shall find, by the uniformity of his abstinence in those circumstances which most usually offer the matter of offence, that his abstinence was not accidental; and that implicitly, as the scholastic phrase is, that is, by involution and silent implication, all the canons of a just theory on this branch of art are there brought together and accumulated. This is no light merit; indeed, when we reflect upon it, and consider how many and how able men have failed, we begin to think that Sam was perhaps a greater man by the intention of nature, than our villainous prejudices have allowed us to suppose. But with this concession to the negative merits of the Doctor, let it not be thought illiberal in us to connect a repetition of our complaint as to the defects of the rò affirmative in this collection. Eve

ry art is there illustrated which can minister to the gratification of the judgment: the grand defect is in all that should affect the sensibility. It is not enough in an epitaph, that it does not shock or revolt my taste or sense of propriety-of decorum-and the convenances arising out of place, purpose, occasion, or personal circumstances. The absence of all this leaves me in the condition requisite for being suitably affected: and I now look for the positive which is to affect me. Every thing has been removed by the skilful hand of the composer, which could interfere with, or disturb, the sanctity or tenderness of my emotions: "And now then," as Lady Rodolpha Lumbercourt demands, the ground being cleared, "why don't you proceed to ravish me?" Why don't you launch your spicula and arrows, and stings of pathos? The Grecian epigrammata-that matchless bead-roll of tender expressions for all household feelings that could blossom amongst those for whom no steady dawn of celestial hopes had risen-that treasury of fine sentiment, where the natural pieties of the human heart have ascended as high as a religion so unimaginative, and so little suited to the necessities of the heart, could avail to carry them-do not rely for their effect merely upon the chastities of their composition. Those graces act simply in the way of resistance to all adverse forces; but their absolute powers lie in the frank language of natural grief, trusting to its own least elaborate expression, or in the delicacies of covert and circumstantial allusion. Of this latter kind, we have a frequent example in Dr Parr himself:-when he numbers the hours even of a young man's life, he throws the attention indirectly on the affecting brevity of his career, and on the avaricious love in the survivors clinging tenaciously to the record of his too fugitive hours, even in their minutest fractions. Applied to elder persons, this becomes too much of a mechanical artifice. But, at all events, the pointed expression by any means, or artifice whatever, of the passions suited to the occasion, is far too rare in the Parrian inscriptions. One might suppose even that pious grief and tender desiderium, the final cause, and the effi

cient cause, at one and the same moment, of epitaphs, was, in Dr Parr's estimate, no more than a lucro ponamus, something indifferent to its essence, and thrown in casually, and to boot, as a bonus beyond what we are entitled to.

Allowing, however, for this one capital defect, all the laws of good composition, and of Latin composition, in particular, are generally observed by Dr Parr; the spirit of them always-and other important rules might be collected from his letters, or abstracted (as we said above) from the epitaphs themselves. In particular he objected, and we think most judiciously, to the employment of direct quotations in an epitaph. He did not give his reasons; perhaps he only felt them. On a proper occasion, we fancy that we could develope these reasons at some length. At present it is sufficient to say, that quotations always express a mind not fully possessed by its subject, and abate the tone of earnestness which ought to preside either in very passionate or in very severe composition. A great poet of our own days, in writing an ode, felt that a phrase which he had borrowed ought not to be marked as a quotation; for that this reference to a book had the effect of breaking the current of the passion. In the choice of his Latinity also, Dr Parr prescribed to himself, for this department of composition, very peculiar and very refined maxims. The guide whom he chiefly followed, was one not easily obtained for love or money-Morcellus de Stylo Inscriptionum. Yet sometimes he seems to have forgotten his own principles. An epitaph was sent for his approbation, written by no less a person than Louis XVIII. All the world is aware that this prince was a man of cultivated taste, and a good classical scholar. He was, however, for such a task, something too much of a Catholic bigot; and he disfigured his epitaph by introducing the most unclassical Latinity of the Vulgate. Nevertheless, Dr Parr thought proper to approve of this. Now we admit, and the spirit of our remarks already made on the Latinity suitable for scientific subjects will have shewn that we admit, cases in which classical Latin ought professedly to bend