volumes of Observations and Reflections made in the course ' of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany.' The raptures of ordinary Italian tourists entertain us but little in print even when new, and still less when the sensations recorded are those of seventy years since: but Mrs. Piozzi had the rare advantage of knowing the interior of Italian families; and what from the life which this circumstance imparts to her pages, what from her own real talent for description, they are full of interest even now. We can, however, afford to chronicle Mrs. Piozzi's doings and writings no farther, through the period of her second happy marriage, or her busy, rattling, social widowhood. She became a most prolific scribbler, trying her hand with great intrepidity at every style of composition, from frightful stories,' boutsrimés, and other innocent amusements of the Della Crusca coterie, into whose congenial society she got at Florence, up to Retrospection; or a Review of the most striking and important 'Events, Characters, Situations, and their Consequences, which 'the last eighteen hundred years have presented to the view of Mankind,' in a thousand pages quarto. She built a house in Wales and christened it Brynbella'; was at moderate feud with her daughters all her days, each side accusing the other of 'want of heart; and excited a good deal of Cambrian animadversion by leaving some of her property to a nephew of Piozzi's, as she had a perfect right to do. She lived to be eighty; and to form, when close on that age, a last belle passion for Conway, a handsome actor: on which circumstance Mr. Hayward, as in duty bound, touches with much gentleness. We must add that in all relations of life, except those with her first husband's family, she appears to have been friendly, generous, and kindhearted. 'Her piety,' says Mr. Hayward, was genuine;' and 'old fashioned politicians, whose watchword was Church and King, will be delighted with her politics.' She was a personage, on the whole, to be remembered with more of cordial feeling than of censure, and whose errors might have been passed over as those of one who, in common phrase, was no 6 one's enemy but her own,' had not the vindication of the dearer and more honoured memory of her great friend been incompatible with such silence. 6 ART. VIII. —¡1. Babri Fabulæ Æsopeæ cum Fabularum Deperditarum Fragmentis. Recensuit et breviter illustravit GEORGIUS CORNEWALL LEWIS, A.M. 1846. 2. Babri Fabula Esopea. E Codice Manuscripto Partem Secundam nunc primum edidit GEORGIUS CORNEWALL LEWIS, A.M. 1859. 3. The Fables of Babrius. In Two Parts. Translated into English Verse by the Rev. JAMES DAVIES, M.A. 1860. THE HE name of. Babrius is one which for the last hundred and eighty years has been gradually becoming more and more significant to students of antiquity. That he was a fabulist of one or other of the Greek classical periods, who wrote in choliambic verse, was already evident from a few fragments preserved by lexicographers and grammarians. But the first to make him more than a name was Bentley, in a dissertation on the supposed fables of Esop, appended to the first draught of the immortal work on Phalaris. In reducing the father of fable to a mere shadow, he showed that some of the substance which had invested him really belonged to Babrius, whose halfcorrupted choliambics might occasionally be traced through the prose versions of late paraphrasts. Tyrwhitt followed up the hint in a Dissertatio de Babrio,' published in 1776, detecting verses in a Bodleian MS. of the prose fables, and collecting all the remains of Babrius that were then extant. The publication, in 1809, of more prose fables belonging to an earlier version, from a Florentine MS., led to further choliambic discoveries, prosecuted in the first instance by Bishop Blomfield and Mr. Burges, though with different degrees of success, and afterwards by Sir George Lewis, whose coup d'essai, containing a collection of all the fables capable of entire restoration, appeared in 1832, in an elaborate paper in the Philological Museum. In 1835 a similar collection was published by a German scholar, Knoch, who appended the fragments, forming altogether a kind of variorum edition of all that had been written by or on Babrius up to that time. The year 1842 witnessed another discovery, much more important than any- that of an actual MS. of Babrius, containing a collection of fables supposed to have originally amounted to about 160, but now consisting of 123 fables and two short prefatory poems. discoverer, M. Mynas, a Greek, was employed by the French Government; and accordingly the duty of giving the new-found The treasure to the world devolved on M. Boissonade, the patriarch of French scholarship. Other editions soon followed; and the list of editors or critics of Babrius now includes the names of Dübner, Orelli, Baiter, Fix, Ahrens, Lachmann, Meineke, the Hermanns, Schneidewin, and Sir George Lewis. In 1857 it was announced that M. Mynas had made yet another discovery; and two years later Sir George Lewis introduced to the public a Second Part of Babrius, containing an independent collection of ninety-four fables and a prefatory poem. As we shall soon see, there are reasons for doubting whether this Second Part affords a very favourable field for the display of English scholarship: but at any rate, it will be apparent that to English scholarship Babrius has already been greatly indebted. When he existed only in a fragmentary form, English scholars were his most felicitous restorers; and though when the MS. of the First Part was discovered, there was no Porsonian school in England to do the work of Lachmann and his friends, producing by joint labour an amended text in a short time, the accuracy, judgment, and fullness of information displayed in Sir George Lewis's edition, embodying as it does the chief results of continental criticism, entitle it to rank as the standard one. The discovery of the First Part of Babrius made a substantive addition to the treasures we already possess in the remains of Greek poetical literature. Whatever the date of the fabulist -and dates of all kinds have been suggested, ranging from about 250 B.C. to as many years after the Christian æra he certainly wrote in a time when the echoes of classical poetry had not yet died out. In terseness, point, and eloquence he is, we think, equal to Phædrus, whom indeed he sometimes excels in treating the same subject. Let our readers compare the two following versions of an old favourite, 'The Fox and the • Crow': 'Qui se laudari gaudent verbis subdolis Κόραξ δεδηχὼς στόματι τυρὸν εἱστήκει· (BABRIUS, part i. fab. 77.) There is much quiet humour in the following, which seem either to have suggested or to have been suggested by Horace's 'Lusisti satis, edisti satis, atque bibisti: Tempus abire tibi: 'Ζωμοῦ χύτρα μᾶς ἐμπεσὼν ἀπωμάστῳ, καὶ τῷ λίπει πνιγόμενος, ἐκπνέων τ' ἤδη, Βέβρωκα, φησί, καὶ πέπωκα, καὶ πάσης τροφῆς πέπλησμαι· καιρός ἐστί μοι θνήσκειν. (Fab. 60.) We subjoin Mr. Davies's version, which, though somewhat deficient in freedom, is commendably close to the original :'A mouse into a lidless broth-pot fell : Choked with the grease, and bidding life farewell, "And all good things; 'tis time that I should die."' The following, which is rather a poem than a fable, touches the mythological history of the swallow and the nightingale with an imaginative delicacy which may remind our readers of Shakspeare's lines: * One of the prose versions points to another reading of the last line, which we should prefer as more humorous: ἔχεις, κόραξ, ἅπαντα· νοῦν μόνον κτῆσαι. Such variations are not uncommon, the citations in Suidas occasionally differing so much from the text of the MS. of Babrius, as to indicate the existence of a different recension. For an instance in which Phædrus's treatment of his subject is more successful than Babrius's, compare Phædr. iii. 7., with Babr., part i. fab. 99. ἔκ τοῦ μέλους δ' ἔγνωσαν αἱ δύ ̓ ἀλλήλας· παραμυθία τίς ἐστι τῆς κακῆς μοίρης (Fab. 12.) 'Far from men's fields the swallow forth had flown, Each knew the other through the mournful strain, “ Our virgin * lives till now apart have been. “And day-god's heat? a wild wood life and drear ? * Mr. Davies here apparently mistakes the sense, which seems to be, 'Even when we were maidens, we lived apart from one another.' |