died; and told a silly story that Garrick, when at Geneva, would not go to see him because he had written irreverently against Shakespeare. On me déchire à Londres comme un ennemi de Shakespeare; je suis, il est vrai, choqué et rebuté de ses absurdités, mais je ne suis pas moins frappé de ses beautés, et l'on trouvera après ma mort une edition de lui avec les beaux passages marqués de ma main, et en grand nombré." "He told me that he never could speak fluently or understand English as spoken in common conversation, and that he never at the play could follow without a book any actors, except Booth and Mrs. Oldfield. "What he said about sacred history was only a repetition of what he has so often stated in print, and were it not I should scarcely enter his observations upon that subject here. One thing, however, I must not omit, he has found out in Berose that King Chichuter, after the irruption of the Black Sea, which drowned all his country, fitted out an ark, and found out the waters were subsiding by the "He is very susceptible of flattery, consequently a well-turned compliment must please. Such was one Mons. Tronchin paid him, as quick as lightning. Voltaire, after repeating some passages of Garth, Dryden, &c. said, 'Je ne lis que les vers des autres.' 'Ma foi!' said Tronchin, 'les autres vous le rendent bien.' No lady ever received more compliments than he did upon his eyes: Qu'importe,' said he, que les fenêtres soient bonnes, quand les murailles tombent ?' 6 "On expressing our amazement at his memory, he said, 'C'est l'effet de mon malheureux métier de compilateur.' "These are nearly all his remarks, nay, his exact words, during our stay with him, which was till past twelve. He very civilly and graciously thanked us for the visit, and hoped to see us again, and attended us to our very carriage though so late at night.”† THE NEW THE notice of a work which treats of grammar and comparative philology hardly belongs to the province of an historical magazine. We are unwilling, however, to pass over in silence so important a contribution to linguistic science as the New Cratylus; and we cannot but express our surprise that the volume before us should have failed to attract the attention of such of our contemporaries as could have afforded space enough for a satisfactory analysis of its contents. Such an analysis is beyond our scantier limits. We cannot pretend to give more than an outline of Dr. Donaldson's researches. Yet even this may CRATYLUS. suffice to convey to our readers some conception of one of the most scientific of recent treatises on the Greek language. The dialogue of Plato, from which the present volume borrows its name, was not, properly speaking, a treatise on philology. The elder Cratylus was a humorous protest against the philosophic vagaries of the Eleatic and Heracleitean sects. Never, perhaps, was dialectic pleasantry more completely misunderstood. Etymologists have put language to inconceivable tortures for the purpose of establishing some of Plato's derivations. Camden gravely cites the Cratylus as an authority in *Berosus, a priest of the Temple of Belus in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus. The only genuine writings of Berosus now remaining are a few fragments preserved by Josephus. The book which passes under his name is universally allowed to be a fabrication, probably of Annius of Viterbo, in the sixteenth century. + Voltaire was then in his 79th year. The New Cratylus, or Contributions towards a more accurate knowledge of the Greek Language. By John William Donaldson, D.D. Head Master of King Edward's School, Bury St. Edmund's, &c. &c. Second edition. London. 1850. ethnology; and the sportive chief of the Academy has been roundly rated by Whiter and Horne Tooke for his ignorance of verbal science, or his attempts to bamboozle the learned. It seems never to have occurred to these learned Thebans that a great philosopher may have something of the jester in his composition, and may hide under a serious brow the humour of a Rabelais. In fact, the ancients were neither philologers themselves, nor did they possess any sufficient materials for philological researches. Their delicate organs both of speech and hearing, as well as their national arrogance, caused the Greeks to recoil equally from the idioms and the written literature of foreigners; and, with the exception of the traveller Herodotus, to whom the language of barbarians must have been necessary as a passport, and of the exile Ovid, who wrote an elegiac poem in the speech of the Getæ, it would be difficult to name any one of the ancients who had made much proficiency in foreign languages. This self-sufficiency of the Greeks and Romans has proved, indeed, in this respect, a considerable hindrance to our acquaintance with the ancient world. They might, with the help of a little linguistic curiosity, have told us many things which we are now enforced to learn from obscure inscriptions or to guess by bold analogies. We are informed, for example, that the fugitive Themistocles acquired in a few months Persian enough to converse, without the aid of an interpreter, with Xerxes and his satraps, and we accordingly infer that the Greek and Persian tongues cannot have been radically dissimilar. Mac Dermot, King of Leinster, could not, in so brief an interval, have talked intelligibly to Henry the Second. Now the glossary which Themistocles used, when reading with his Persian private tutor, or a list of the Egyptian words which Herodotus and Plato picked up in colloquy with the priests of Memphis, would, if preserved, do us yeoman's service in solving many a linguistic or ethnological problem. Instead, however, of thus catering for the interests of a learned posterity, the Greeks and Romans misunderstood and perverted whatever they had learned of the dialects of their neighbours, and ridiculed their speech as the chirping Cratylus junior, however, sets much more seriously to work than his ancestor. Had the learned author been contemporary with Horne Tooke we might perchance have witnessed another etymological "set-to," after the fashion of the former one, especially as Dr. Donaldson displays in his notes quite humour and asperity enough for a combat with the "Diversions of Purley." But to all the world, except Lord Brougham, the Diversions of Purley is defunct as a grammatical oracle, and accordingly the New Cratylus, having no particular Eleatic or Heracleitean sciolism to overthrow, proceeds deliberately and methodically with his argument. Of that argument the following is a brief outline: He Dr. Donaldson starts with a description of the functions and an assertion of the claims of philology to be regarded as a science. proceeds with a brief history of its origin, progress, and present state, with a cursory review of the most eminent classical and comparative philologers since the era of the Reforma tion, and with a recommendation to etymologists to combine the method of classical training now pursued in our public schools and universities with their wider and more adventurous excursions into the realm of language. We think that he overrates the benefits derived from the practice of composition in the dead languages. But on this point he certainly has a claim to speak ex cathedra, since he is both an accurate verbal scholar and an accomplished linguist. We have not leisure, however, to debate this much mooted question, although we sincerely hope that the University Commissioners will sift it thoroughly. For the system of our public schools and college lecture-rooms is either essential or it is highly mischievous. It is an elaborate instrument, if it be a useful one also. It produces definite results with great precision. Our doubt is whether these results are worth the enormous sacrifice of time and toil which they involve. Sed hæc hactenus. In his third chapter Dr. Donaldson treats of the philosophy of language, and enters upon an acute metaphysical disquisition respecting its original unity and subsequent divarications, its transitions, its corruptions, its materials, its organisation, its relations to mind and matter, its distinctions of speech and writing, and its functions as a social and psychological constituent of man's nature. As we shall presently notice portions of this chapter, we pass on at once to the section which possesses the most interest for the general reader—that, namely, on "the ethnographic affinities of the ancient Greeks." Upon this chapter we shall briefly dwell, both because its contents are better adapted to our narrow limits, and because the former emigrations of the human race cannot fail of being a subject of deep interest to an age and a country which, like our own overpopulated England, seem on the verge of some fresh impulsive movement over the steppes and savannas of imperfectly-peopled continents. Philology holds an intermediate place between the sciences of geology and physiology. It takes up the one at its extreme bourne-the aptitude of the earth for the reception of the human race; it is the handmaid, or rather the guide, of the other in detecting and discriminating the migrations and varieties of mankind. Of the movements of the human swarm from their original hive in Asia, monuments, inscriptions, and tradition mark the successive stages; but anterior to all such records is language itself. Much time has frequently been lost and some gall been shed in attempts to discover the mother-nation and the primitive speech; and, by a singular infelicity, the tertiary language of the Hebrew people was selected by the elder etymologists as the claimant for seniority. This unfortunate surmise, which physiology and linguistic science equally oppose, has not only led to much Procrustean handling of the nobler and more perfect dialects, but has also been the cause of no little philological dishonesty. The wish to prove the language of the Hebrew scriptures the primitive speech of man has been the father of much gratuitous assertion, and has accordingly loaded bookshelves with many tons of ponderous hallucination. The search for a primitive tongue has indeed been to philologers what the search for the philosopher's stone once was to chemists. The inquiry itself led them far astray, yet it has indirectly benefited science, since it has enabled inquirers to pick up some sterling truths by the wayside. We believe the primitive language to be irrecoverably lost, although we cannot agree with Frederick Schlegel that, even if discovered, it would be quite unintelligible to our impaired and degenerate organs of perception. Nevertheless, approaches may be made, if not to its essence, yet at least to its outskirts: and they can be made only by inverting the former process of research, and by collecting, as Grimm, Bopp, and Dr. Donaldson have done, facts, phenomena, and analogies from every authentic member of the family of languages, and not from one of its idioms alone. For the history of all languages, and of their progressive development, proves that the older a language is, and the nearer it is to its original, the more complete and perfect are its forms. That some part of Asia, some one of its great central plateaus, was, at a period long antecedent to history, the cradle of the human race, is an hypo thesis so consonant to all record and tradition, that, even without the aid of linguistic science, it must be deemed valid and incontrovertible. We can indeed only get rid of it by supposing, with the Greeks, that men in certain localities were autocthonous, and sprang, where they were wanted, like mushrooms from the earth. This is a theory which we suspect will find little favour with any sound philologist, in spite of the pleas which physiology sometimes enters in its behalf. For, setting aside the express testimony of the most venerable of records to the original unity of the human species, and the concurrent voice of tradition pointing from Europe eastward and from farther Asia westward to the source of population, it seems incredible that autocthons should have conspired first to invent a story of migration, thereby, as it were, cancelling their own patent of indigenous nobility, and then have been enabled to confirm their invention by coincidences in laws, national customs, and religious creeds, and, above all, by numberless similarities, or rather identities, of name for the objects and relations of life. Such a conjecture is disowned and refuted by all that is known of the history of language, and by the fact-which becomes more and more certain with the progress of research-that the higher we ascend towards the fountain-head of language, its divarications become fewer and the traces of an organic unity more frequent and palpable. In this, as in so many other respects, philology, which is often a groundless object of terror to the half-learned or wholly uninstructed, proves in the end the most efficient auxiliary of religious faith. It is with the simulated religion, which clings to dead formularies and obstinately refuses to gaze upon the light of reason, that philology wages, through good and through evil report, an internecine war. "We might fairly assume," Dr. Donaldson remarks, "as the basis of our view with regard to the origin of language, the account given in the Book of Genesis, so far as that account is confirmed by the researches of modern philosophy. Now the results of our philosophy are as follows. We find in the internal mechanism of language the exact counterpart of the mental phenomena which writers on psy chology have so carefully collected and classified. We find that the structure of human speech is the perfect reflex or image of what we know of the organisation of the mind: the same description, the same arrangement of particulars, the same nomenclature would apply to both, and we might turn a treatise on the philosophy of mind into one on the philosophy of language, by merely supposing that every thing said in the former of the thoughts as subjective, is said again in the latter of the words as objective. And from this we should infer, that, if the mind of man is essentially and ultimately the same-in other words, if man, wherever he lives, under whatever climate, and with whatever degree of civilisation, is still the same animal,-then language is essentially the same, and only accidentally different, and there must have been some common point from which all the different languages diverged, some handle to the fan which is spread out over all the world, some first and primeval speech: and that this speech was not gradually invented, but necessarily sprung, all armed like Minerva, from the head of the first think. ing man, as a necessary result and product of his intellectual conformation." 66 The reader, who might perchance be deterred by the erudite aspect of Dr. Donaldson's pages in general, will find in his chapter on ethnographic affinities" abundant matter of instruction and entertainment, without any peril of being reminded of the days when he was compelled to conjugate his verbs or mind his prosody. The charm and culmination indeed of philology to all except technical grammarians are the august and attractive spectacles it affords of the primal processions, the interweaving, and dispersion of mankind upon their appointed task of replenishing the earth. The ancients almost precluded themselves from the enjoyment of this ethnological panorama. The Hebrew and Egyptian believed all nations but their own impure; the Greeks aspired to isolate themselves from surrounding barbarism; and the Chaldean thought that all the earth beyond his ample plains and lustrous canopy of sky was, as it were, the penal settlement of degraded and sinful races. We owe probably to the more erratic and tolerant instincts of our Teutonic ancestors, who aimed rather at brotherhood than isolation, our larger sympathies with the movements and fortunes of the human species. Comparative philology admits of no seclusion of races, but claims alike Jew, Greek, and Barbarian as members of a common family. We are unable to follow the successive stages of the march of nations by which Dr. Donaldson conducts the primitive population of the globe from the Armenian highlands to the extremities of the old continent, "eastward to Cathay" and westward to the Atlantic. He is led to define Armenia as the original seat and cradle of mankind by the following considerations. On the whole we think his theory more tenable than that of Herder and Blumenbach, who derive the original stream of population from the Hindoo Coosh. "If we collect into one focus all the scattered information respecting the birthplace of the human race, which we can gather from tradition, from physiological considerations, and from the exhaustion of contradictory hypotheses, we must feel convinced that man originated in the temperate and fertile regions which lie between the southern extremities of the Euxine and Caspian seas. Independently of all special inductions, we should be inclined à priori to conclude, in accordance with the general and systematic arrangements which we notice in the procedure of creation, so far as we are able to trace its successive stages, that the human race would not be planted upon the surface of the globe until life had become both possible and easy to a creature so endowed, until the conditions of soil, atmosphere, vegetable production, and animal life, to which our existence is still liable, had been established on their present footing. And it is reasonable to think that man would be first cradled on some plateau which-while it was raised above the lacustrine impurities of the alluvial plains-was likewise free from an overgrowth of wood, and well adapted for the cultivation of those fruits and grasses which furnish the necessary food of man. There is no region in the world which combines all these recommendations so fully as the Armenian tableland lying to the south and east of Mount Ararat. All tradition points to this district. On the supposition that mankind originated there, we may harmonize every linguistic phenomenon, and explain every ethnographical fact....... .... Armenia was always a fertile and prolific country. It abounded in corn, wine, and oil, and in those animals which minister most directly to the comfort of man. We cannot doubt therefore that the first society of human beings, having every advantage of climate GENT. MAG. VOL. XXXIV. and situation, could make a rapid advance in all the arts of life, and would soon lay the foundations of civilisation and citizen ship. The earliest records tell us of the use of fire, of the fabrication of metals, of the computation of time, and even of navigation. We read of cities built, of fields cultivated, of herds collected; and even the fine arts were not unknown; at least, these early men were able to accompany their native poetry with the sweet strains of instrumental music." We have no record, nor even any means of guessing, how many years or even generations elapsed before this original nation became too populous for the highland pastures of Armenia. But tradition informs us that primeval civilisation first extended itself to Asia Minor and afterwards to Mesopotamia. From Mesopotamia the stream skirted the mountains of Kurdistan, of population descended the Tigris, and established itself, as the central heart of mighty empires, at Babylon, upon the Euphrates. In Asia Minor the earliest emigration was into the district afterwards called Lydia; and the city of Iconium, in Lystramore than once in subsequent history destined to become the camp and capital of nomade hordes-claimed for its founder Annacus, or 'Hanok, the first author of an improved calendar. So long as the primitive population was confined to Armenia and its Asian and Mesopotamian colonies there is no trace of any difference of nation or of language. On the lower Euphrates the settlers first became too numerous for the soil, and flowed forth in separate currents over the habitable sur face of the globe. Hundreds and even thousands of years may have elapsed while these emigrants were wandering further and further away from home. Their course cannot have been uninterrupted. Necessity, caprice, and external violence gave various impulses to their movements; rivers and mountains barred their progress; they avoided the desert, they followed the fresh pastures; at one point they were stayed by luxuriant valleys, like the valley of Cashmere, at another they were turned back by the billows of the Indian and Persian seas. Those who advanced furthest from the centre of civilisation were probably the first to degenerate in manners and to introduce cor4 E |