always been as pure and disinterested as their duty required, they must have been divested of all the weaknesses of human nature, and have arrived at a degree of perfection, which does not seem to be attainable in this state of existence. But notwithstanding the interruptions occasioned from time to time by the ambition and profligacy of some worthless popes; the grand work was pursued with spirit; the barbarian tribes were converted; Europe was again civilized, preserved first from anarchy, and then from Turkish invasion, and finally raised to that degree of refinement, which places it at present above the most renowned nations of antiquity. Thus, while the evils occasioned by the vices of the pontiffs were incidental and temporary, the influence of their virtues was constant, and the services which they rendered were permanent, and may probably last as long as the species itself...... To them we owe the revival of arts, of architecture, of painting, and of sculpture, and the preservation and restoration of the literature of Greece and Rome. One raised the dome of the Vatican; another gave his name to the calendar, which he reformed; a third rivalled Augustus, and may glory in the second classic era, the era of Leo. These services will be long felt and remembered, while the wars of Julius II, and the cruelties of Alexander VI, will ere long be consigned to oblivion. In fact, many of my readers may be inclined, with a late eloquent writer, (Châteaubriand,) to discover something sublime in the establishment of a common father in the very centre of Christendom, within the precincts of the Eternal City, once the seat of empire, now the metropolis of christianity; to annex to that venerable name sovereignty and princely power, and to entrust him with the high commission of advising and rebuking monarchs; of repressing the ardour and intemperance of rival nations; of raising the pacific crosier between the swords of warring sovereigns, and checking alike the fury of the barbarian, and the vengeance of the despot.'—pp. 648–650.

This is, indeed, a magnificent idea! but, unfortunately, it is about as difficult to realise as the visions of Plato, or of Sir Thomas More.

ART. XII. Mithridates, oder Allgemeine Sprachenkunde. Mithridates, or a General History of Languages, with the Lord's Prayer as a Specimen, in nearly five hundred Languages and Dialects. By J. C. Adelung, Aulic Counsellor and Professor at Dresden. 8. Berlin; Vol. I. 1806; Vol. II. continued by Professor Vater, 1809; Vol. III. Part I. 1812. Pp. 1867.

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N a universal and philosophical history of languages, the critical scholar, the metaphysician, and the historian, are equally interested. The difficulty and magnitude of the undertaking has not discouraged a variety of learned men from attempting an approximation to its execution; but the present work is, perhaps, the first that can be denominated any thing more than an approximation;

and

and even this requires to be studied with all the indulgence, to which so arduous and so important a task is justly entitled. Much indeed have the authors been indebted to a compilation but little known in this country, the Idea dell' Universo of Lorenzo Hervas, a Gallician Ex-jesuit, printed at Cesenna from 1778 to 1787, in twenty-one quarto volumes, the last five of which particularly relate to languages and their dialects: but it appears to be more in the preliminary and mechanical labour of accumulation, than in the ulterior and more intellectual departments of comparison and arrangement, that this work has rendered them material assistance.

The first general treatise on languages, which is now extant, bears the same title with that of Professor Adelung, the Mithridates, de Differentiis Linguarum, of Conrad Gesner. 8. Zurich, 1555. It contains twenty-two translations only of the Lord's Prayer as specimens: but nothing which bears the name of so industrious an author as Gesner can be wholly contemptible. In 1592, Megiser printed at Frankfort a Specimen 40 Linguarum: Duret soon afterwards published at Cologne his Thrésor de l'Histoire des Langues, of which it is enough to say, that it extends to those of animals and of angels. A great addition to the diversity of specimens was made by Müller, who published at Berlin, in 1680, under the name of Liideken, a collection of eighty, with their appropriate characters, and to these, thirteen were added in an Auctarium: the Alphabeta appeared after his death, which happened in 1694; and the specimens were afterwards copied by various printers in Germany and in London. The next original work was that of Chamberlayne, assisted by Wilkins, whose Oratio Dominica is exhibited in 152 different forms, mostly engraved in their proper characters: it was printed at Amsterdam in 1715. Some additions were made to Chamberlayne's materials in the Orientalischer und Occidentalischer Sprachmeister, edited by Schultz at Leipzig in 1748, containing also a hundred different alphabets. It was principally from this work that Bergmann copied his collection, published in 1789 at Ruien in Livonia. Fry, in his Pantographia, has neither employed the Sprachmeister nor Hervas. Marcel's specimens of 150 languages, printed at Paris, 1805, in compliment to Pope Pius the Seventh, are principally copied from Chamberlayne, with a very few original additions.

The Glossarium Comparativum, published at Petersburg in 1787, by order of the Empress Catherine, in two volumes quarto, affords us a very extensive collection of European and Asiatic words; the African and American languages were added in a second edition, which was printed in 1790, but which is very little known, and has indeed, in great measure, been suppressed. With respect to the literature of languages, the catalogue of dictionaries

and

and grammars, published in 1796, by our countryman Mr. Marsden, furnishes us with ample information, much of which has been incorporated with Professor Adelung's still more extensive enumeration of critical and elementary works.

The first, and perhaps the most important consideration in a general essay on this subject, is the system according to which its different parts are to be distributed. A perfect natural order of arrangement, in treating of the peculiarities of different languages, ought to be regulated by their descent from each other and their historical relations: a perfect artificial order ought to bring together into the same classes all those genera which have any essential resemblances, that is, such as are not fortuitous, nor adop tive, nor imitative or derived from onomatopoeia. It has been observed by Linné, that the order of nature is reticulated, while that of art passes on in a single line; and still more strictly speaking, the order of nature may be compared to a solid, which has three dimensions, and which could not be adequately represented even by a map, or a reticulated structure. In fact, wherever the human mind pursues any process of nature, it must be subjected to the inconvenience of breaking off occasionally some one train of connexion, in order to pursue another; although that system must in general be the most perfect, in which this happens the least frequently; and when our ideas are once stored up in the intellectual treasury, they seem to possess the same property which belongs to their originals, allowing themselves to be traced at pleasure according to a variety of different principles of analogy and of as

sociation.

It appears to be most convenient to consider as separate languages, or as distinct species in a systematic classification, all those which require to be separately studied in order to be readily understood, and which have their distinct grammatical flexions and constructions; and to regard, as varieties only, those dialects which are confessedly local and partial diversities of a language manifestly identical. It is however absolutely impossible to fix a correct and positive criterion of the degree of variation which is to constitute in this sense a distinct language: for instance, whether Danish and Swedish are two languages or two dialects of one, and whether the modern Romaic is Greek or not, might be disputed without end, but could never be absolutely decided. In such cases we must pay some regard to common usage in our denominations; and setting out from this distinction of separate languages, we may proceed to comprehend, in the description of one family, such as have more coincidences than diversities with each other; and to refer to the same class such families as exhibit any coincidences at all, that are not fortuitous, imitative, or adoptive. In order however to

avoid too great a number of classes, which would arise from an inadequate comparison of languages imperfectly known, it may be proper in some cases to adopt a geographical character, as sufficient to define the limits of a class, or of its subdivision into orders. We are thus obliged to employ an arrangement of a mixed nature, and this is what Professor Adelung has actually done: but in the abstract view which we shall attempt to give of the subject, we shall endeavour to follow an order somewhat less geographical than that of our author, and more dependent on the nature and connexion of the languages themselves.

If the resemblance or identity of a single word, in two-languages, supposed to be exempt from the effects of all later intercourse, were to be esteemed a sufficient proof of their having been derived from a common stock, it would follow that more than half the languages of the universe would exhibit traces of such a connexion, in whatever order we might pursue the comparison. Thus we find in a very great number, and perhaps in a majority of known languages, that the sound of the vowel A, with a labial consonant, is employed for the name of Father: and if this be supposed to be something like an onomatopoeia, or an application of the first sounds which an infant naturally utters, the same reason cannot possibly be assigned for the still more general occurrence of the combination N M in the term Name, which is by no means likely to have originated from any natural association of this kind. But neither these points of resemblance, nor any other that can be assigned, are universal, for besides the numberless varieties referable more or less immediately to Abba, Father, we have at least twenty different and independent terms for the same relation in the old world; Tia, Issa, Plar, Hair, Rama, Diam, Bina, Kettem, Assainalagi, Medua, Thewes, Sünk, Njot, Anathien, Messee, Indaa, Nu, Nam, Monung, Dengabey, Ray, Tikkob, and Oa; and almost as many for Name, besides those languages in which the version of an abstract term of this kind is less likely to have been ascertained; Ming, Tren, Diant, Sheu, Hessara, Shem, Sacheli, Assia, Wasta, Ngala, Taira, Sünna, Kran, Hhili, Ding, Dbai, and Anghara. At the same time therefore that we venerate the traces of our common descent from a single pair, wherever they are still perceptible, we must not expect to find them in all existing languages without exception; and an Etymologicon Universale,' considered as intended to establish such a perfect community of derivation, must be regarded as a visionary undertaking. Nor must we neglect to unite, in some common arrangement of classification, those languages which have the words here specified, or any other radical words, in common, as incomparably more related

6

related to each other than the Chinese to the Cantabrian, or the Irish to the Hottentot.

The gradations, by which a language is likely to vary in a given time, seem to be in some measure dependent on the degree of cultivation of the language, and of the civilisation of the people employing it. From Homer to the Byzantine historians, the Greek language remained essentially the same for 2000 years: the German has varied but little in 1500; and even the English, notwithstanding its mixture with French and Latin, has altered but three radical words of the Lord's Prayer in the same period. On the other hand a few barbarians in the neighbourhood of Mount Caucasus and of the Caspian sea, of modern origin, and ignorant of the art of writing, are divided into more nations speaking peculiar languages radically different from each other, than the whole of civilised Europe. In such cases little light can be thrown upon history by etymological researches, while with regard to more cultivated nations, we obtain, from the examination of their languages, historical evidence of such a nature, as it is scarcely possible for either accident or design to have falsified.

Without dwelling on the unnecessary hypotheses and the tedious details with which some parts of Professor Adelung's work are filled, and without animadverting very severely on the occasional display of an inflated insipidity of style, which too often assumes, in the writings of the modern Germans, the place of a dignified simplicity, we shall attempt to profit, as far as our limits will permit, by the solid accumulation of knowledge, which usually characterizes the productions of that laborious and accurate nation, among whom our author is well known to have stood in the first rank as a grammarian, a lexicographer, and an etymologist. We must however observe, at the commencement of our remarks, that there is some fallacy in the profession of having collected specimens of nearly five hundred languages and dialects,' a number which the publishers have promised to complete in the third volume; since many of them are merely different translations, or even different readings, in the same dialect: there are twelve, for instance, of the Memphitic Coptic only, sixteen of the Upper German, and upon an average scarcely less than two for each language or dialect considered as distinct; so that we must reduce the 362 already published to about 200 languages at the utmost: and if we suppose that there are as many more, of which specimens have not been obtained, and add 100 for the languages of America, we shall have about 500 for the whole number of dialects that have ever been spoken in any part of the globe; and of these somewhat more than 100 appear to constitute languages generically distinct, or exhibiting more diversity than resemblance to each other.