"Nor seek to part me from the mountain glen : Some consolation for an evil lot Lies in wise words, in song, in crowds forgot. (DAVIES.) We have heard that this First Part of Babrius has been used as a class-book in one of our public schools, and we really think the example might be worth following. The subject matter ensures that the thoughts will be simple, while the language is just sufficiently difficult and characteristic to give that exercise which constitutes to a schoolboy one great advantage of a classical training. Some few forms of expression will require to be unlearnt when the student comes to compose in Attic Greek but the general character of the style is classical enough for all intents and purposes. The Second Part purports to have been discovered under much the same circumstances as the First. Each professes to have been found in a monastery at Mount Athos,—whether in the same monastery we do not hear: in each case the monks made a difficulty about parting with their treasure, which accordingly reached Europe only in the form of a transcript. The difficulty in the case of the First, however, appears to have been only on the score of expense; and this M. Mynas was able to overcome in a subsequent visit, when he became the purchaser of the original. Of the MS. of the Second Part we hear only that the monks refused to part with it, and that M. Mynas brought away a facsimile, which, with the original MS. of the First Part, was sold by him to the authorities of the British Museum, in August, 1857. We understand that it was offered in the first instance to the French Government, the purchasers of the copy of the First Part, but that they disbelieved the story of the second discovery, and refused to buy. Sir George Lewis, however, as Mr. Davies tells us, had no doubt that the copy was what it professed to be made from a genuine archetype. Genuine or not, it is admitted on all hands that the Second Part is of far less value than the First. It professes to be not Babrius, but Babrius spoiled. The whole collection, from first to last, has passed through the hands of a 'diaskeuastes,' a scribbler who, apparently for his mere pleasure, has turned classical Greek into a barbarous jumble, and good choliambics into a kind of political verse, as it is technically called, lines having the requisite number of syllables, but written with scarcely any regard to quantity; so that nearly one half of the verses are shown by the metre alone to be such as Babrius never could have produced. Such writers were not uncommon at various periods during the decline of Greek literature, though their function was more usually that of turning verse into prose, or vice versâ, or one kind of recognised metre into another. Still, even Babrius spoiled, if we could be sure that we really possessed him, would be of some literary value. He would scarcely give pleasure to the student who reads Greek poetry for the love of it, nor could we recommend him as a school-book; but he would still have his place somewhat above those prose versions which, no doubt, still conceal various Babrian fables,the great point of superiority consisting partly in traces of the Babrian manner, which could hardly be obliterated, and partly in the certainty which we should then have, and which in the case of the prose versions is wanting, that each particular fable had a real Babrian original. Our own opinion is, we confess, strongly adverse to the genuineness of these new fables. An attentive examination of them has led us to suspect that they are a forgery, and that of a very recent date. It is not easy to prove fabrication where the thing fabricated is, as we have said, not Babrius himself, but Babrius barbarized, and where the document to be appealed to is not an original MS. but a copy, for the absolute accuracy of which we have no definite guarantee. We believe, however, that the evidences of spuriousness we have discovered are neither few nor small. We can only state them briefly and generally, leaving those who care to pursue the subject to seek further details in an article De Babrii Fabularum Parte 'Secunda,' in the Rheinisches Museum. First of all, we think it improbable that a new collection of ninety-four fables by Babrius should ever have existed. By far the greater part of the fragments and restored fables which were extant previous to 1842 are comprised in the former collection, and those which remain are no more than may well have been contained among the forty additional fables which that collection originally comprehended. Again, nearly half of the verses of which the new fables consist are obviously unmetrical, while a large portion of the remainder are not such as a poet like Babrius is likely to have produced; yet of the actual fragments of Babrius which these fables embody few are altered at all, and not more than two lines out of twenty-four rendered unmetrical. Another most suspicious symptom is to be found in the extraordinary coincidences between the text of these new fables and Lachmann's conjectures on the frag ments and restored fables as appended to his edition. This can only be estimated by those who will examine the matter in detail; and therefore we will only say that Lachmann's judgment is confirmed not only where he is probably right, but where he is almost certainly wrong, or, at any rate, where he has conjectured with scarcely any data to go on. It should be observed that we have here the twofold improbability that Lachmann should bave restored the text of Babrius, and that the text of Babrius should not have been altered by the barbarizing 'diaskeuastes.' Fourthly, while most of these fables closely coincide with one or other of the prose versions (a thing itself explicable on either hypothesis of genuineness or of spuriousness), the remainder, with a single exception, are copies more or less servile of fables occurring in such writers as Aristophanes, Plutarch, Lucian, and Appian, and included in the collections made by such scholars as Di Furia and Coraes; whereas the genuine Babrius, when telling the same fable as Lucian or Plutarch, takes care to tell it in his own way. Lastly, the general worthlessness of the fables is a strong reason for believing that they do not contain Babrius in any shape. Besides the veritable fragments of Babrius, they contain perhaps 100 lines which Babrius might have produced; not one of these, however, seems to us so decidedly stamped with his genius that it could not have been produced as well by any clever writer of iambics, such as are common enough in England, though possibly less so in modern Greece. The treatment of the fables is almost without an exception just up to the level of the prose versions, and no more, another point of contrast with the genuine Babrius, who frequently throws into his fables poetical images, dramatic touches, and passages of dialogue which the prose fabulists discard as unsuited to their humbler purpose. On the whole, we cannot doubt that these new fables are the work of a forger who has turned the prose versions into choliambic lines, occasionally good, but generally very indifferent or worse than indifferent, and who, if he has not used the prose collections by Di Furia or Coraes, has certainly been a tolerably attentive student of Lachmann. At the same time, we do not profess to account for all the phenomena which the work presents. No one can do this who is not prepared to identify the forger and trace his antecedents. But we see no difficulty in supposing that his extraordinary command of unusual words, the chief point which we have heard alleged in favour of the genuineness of the fables,- may have arisen from a study of ancient grammarians and glossarists, aided by a - native power of invention, while the better choliambics may easily have been furnished to him by some more skilful composer than himself. Forgery is an art, and a forger would naturally provide himself with appliances for practising his art with success. So a few obvious errors which exist in the text of the fables may either have been introduced accidentally in the process of transcription from a foul copy, or inserted deliberately to give an air of genuineness. A forger who should be unable to produce these and other plausible appearances would be a very poor forger indeed. It would be too much to wish that Sir George Lewis may find leisure to enter into the controversy; but we need not say that all scholars would be interested in hearing the mature conclusions of one whose judgment and learning have already done so much for Babrius. Of Mr. Davies's version we have already spoken incidentally. It is close and faithful, but wants facility. Even where the individual lines are expressed with ease, the effect of the whole is frequently that of too great compression and slowness of movement. The rhymes are generally accurate, but there are a few instances like beheld, held (p. 142.), and in one place (p. 208.) broth is paired with forth. Babrius would be nothing without his style, and any want of grace or finish therefore is sure to be noticed in his translator. ART. IX.- Iceland; its Volcanoes, Geysers, and Glaciers. By CHARLES S. FORBES, Commander, R.N. London: 1860. THE appearance of a new volume on Iceland, in speedy sequel to other recent publications descriptive of this extraordinary island, leads us to devote a few pages to the subject; the rather so, as it seems probable that the fashion of travelling adventure, so characteristic of the vigour of English life, will direct itself frequently in future to this northern region. In an article of our last number, we spoke of the enthusiasm for Alpine exploits, duly seasoned and sobered by scientific research, which has made Switzerland and the Tyrol so favourite a resort of our summer tourists. But these Alpine adventures begin to lose somewhat of their novelty; and Mont Blanc has been too often scaled to leave much of glory or gain to those who now follow in this mountain toil. Science may still reap its harvest on glaciers, and the exhaustion of a city life find recreation among Swiss mountains. But curiosity and the love of enterprise-deeply engrafted in the English temperament—are restless and competitive qualities, and fresh objects will ever be sought for to meet their demands. We learn that some members of the Alpine Club-itself so newly createdare already casting their eyes northwards to this island of Iceland, in which fire and frost have worked together in such unwonted and wonderful combination. And one object of the present article will be to furnish suggestions, in aid and guidance of those who may undertake this northern adventure. The island on which we ourselves live shows, even on its fair and populous surface, signal marks of those ancient disturbances and revolutions of the earth which it is the business of geology to record. Going below the surface-as in our mines, quarries, and tunnels-we gather at every step of descent fresh proofs of those vast changes by elevation, subsidence, or dislocation, slow or paroxysmal in kind, which in times anterior to all estimate have moulded the strata into their present aspects; entombing in them the multitudinous remains of ancient life, which form a new and wonderful subject of human study. The result, as regards Great Britain, has been to render it fruitful, beyond any equal known space, in those mineral products which serve to the uses and social comforts of man. Our commercial tables best show the magnitude and variety of these subterranean treasures, which minister so largely to English sovereignty on the globe. |