very recently and, I may add, accidentally, met my notice. At the close of an admirable essay just alluded to, on the life of Sir Walter Raleigh, in No. 145, page 96 of the Review, after stating that the various qualities which fit men for action and speculation were conjoined in that remarkable personage, it is added, "that he seemed, as Fuller observed, to be like Cato Uticensis, born to that only which he was about." Fuller, supposing the extract to be accurate, here necessarily bore in mind the pointed words of Livy, (lib. xxxix. 40,) "Ut natum ad id unum diceres quodcumque ageret.' But it was the elder Cato, the renowned Censor, that the historian thus characterised, the founder of his name, and not his great-grandson, who fell by his own hand at Utica, whence this adherent appellative. Of the younger Cato no mention in fact could occur in the residuous books of Livy, which, to the deep regret of the learned, extend not beyond the fortyfifth U. C. 585, above eighty years prior to his birth (U. C. 65,); nor does any advertence to him appear in the Epitomes, or contents of the lost books, till the hundred and fourth; U. C. 695, when he was commissioned to regulate and administer, as a province, the island of Cyprus.* Indeed, of the Roman Annalist's work, the second decade, including the interval from the tenth to the twenty-first book, having also perished, not more than thirty-five have reached modern times; and even of this inconsiderable portion of the original achievement, which embraced one hundred and forty, the last five, extending from the fortieth to the forty-fifth, are mutilated in several parts. It is in the hundred and fourteenth that the stern patriot's suicide was related, as we learn from the Epitome, where a few rapid words commemorate the act, which has been celebrated, with rivalry of panegyric, by Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Manilius, and Lucan, as shown in the Gentle man's Magazine for December 1838, page 594. With the prose writers of Rome, Cicero (Tuscul. Quæst. i. 30), Seneca (passim), Florus (lib. iv. cap. * I use the commonly received chronology, without recurring to Niebuhr's probably more accurate calculation, though the difference is not great. 2), A. Gellius (lib. xv. 18), it is a subject of similar eulogy, and not less so with Appian (de Bello Civili, lib. ii.), as well as with Plutarch (in Catone Minore, cap. lxxix.). The former (page 490, edit. H. Stephani, Geneva, 1592, folio) represents him as wholly acting on his own discriminating views of justice and honour, “ τὸ δίκαιον ἤ πρέπον ἤ καλον οὐκ έθεσι μάλλον, ἤ μεγαλοψύχοις λογισμοῖς ὁρίσαι.” Dio Cassius, in his forty-third book (p. 247, edit. H. Stephani, 1591, folio,) is still more laudatory, and concludes by stating how much the glory of his character was enhanced by his death, “Ο μὲν οὖν Κάτων . . . . μεγάλην δόξαν καὶ ἀπ ̓ αυτου θανάτου ἔλαβεν.” According to Plutarch, so soon as he found himself alone, uncontrolled by the presence of others-Now, said he, I am myself, “ Nûv éμós eiμ, and, having prepared the instrument of death, he twice, as was reported, read Plato's Phædo, “τὸ βιβλίον . . . . λέγεται δίς ôλov dieģeλew. Yet this work most explicitly condemns suicide, while maintaining the immortality of the soul; but it altered not Cato's resolution of quitting this life, however it may have cheered him with the prospect of an imperishable futurity, "Nous avons en nos mains la fin de nos douleurs ; [malheurs." Et qui veut bien mourrir, peut braver les Corneille, Les Horaces, Act iii. Sc. 5. Lactantius (lib. iii. 18) and St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, (lib. i. 23,) discuss the subject, as may be supposed, in a different sense-a Christian one-little variant, indeed, from Plato's, whose dialogue is of such length that its repeated perusal, within the presumed time, is not easy of belief. That Mr. Macaulay should thus have adopted old Tom Fuller's classical blunder is extraordinary in the author of the "Lays of Ancient Rome." And yet that beautiful effusion is not wholly free from critical, or, as possibly may be thought, hypercritical animadversion. At page 145, introductory to the lay of Virginia, it is stated that Appius Claudius Crassus, in whose time the lay, though referable to an anterior period, is supposed to be sung, "was descended from a long line of ancestors distinguished by their haughty demeanour and hostility to the plebeian order." But this proud patrician, whose bitter and not unargumentative speech (U. C. 387) against the creation or the compulsory election of plebeian consuls, in answer to Licinius and Sextius, we find in Livy, (lib. vi. 40,) was only the fourth in descent from the founder of his house in Rome; and to the settlement of the family there Mr. Macaulay's assertion solely applies, which will hardly warrant the ascription to him of a long line of ancestors. The first Claudius was Consul U. C. 259, and this altercation with the Tribunes occurred in 387, an interval of 128 years, constituting surely no ancestral antiquity in elevated fortune. What peer, of whose predecessors nothing was publicly known, or who were even aliens in residence and origin to our soil, before our second George's promotion of the first of them, could amongst us claim a long line of English ancestry? Three in number, and no more preceded this Claudius, would certainly not authorise the pretension; while, if allowed, more than one of our noble families-very many indeed,-on consonant grounds of date and political character, would be equally entitled to the boastful assumption, which genealogists, the most conscious of its fallacy, would be the promptest to support, or last to contest. The lay itself is an admirable production of pathetic simplicity; and truly impressive is the father's address to his victim, whose sacrifice can alone protect her honour. The gifted writer's interpretation, likewise, of the word "Tonμáτwv," in the quoted passage of Plutarch, is ingenious, and, after consulting the original, (in Romulo, cap. viii. page 40, edit. H. Stephani, 1572,) I hesitate not to pronounce it correct, though differing from other versions. The Claudian race, to which the preceding observations advert, ceased, we know, to exist in the year of Rome 808, after filling the highest offices of the state, republican and imperial, from the year 250, a space of 558 years. Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius, successively wielded the imperial sceptre, after Augustus, whose consort Livia, by adoption only of the Livian race, was also of the family, and whose nephew Marcellus, (so pathetically deplored, on his premature fate, by Virgil, Æneid. vi. 833,) his destined heir, was a scion of the plebeian branch of the great house. It was in the person of Britannicus, the son of Claudius by the dissolute Messalina, herself one of the last survivors of the popular Valerian name, that the Claudian generation failed, and, I may well repeat, " Extremum tanti generis per secula nomen," (Lucan. vii. 589,) became extinct. Nero, who poisoned Britannicus, (Tacitus, xiii. 16,) had been engrafted on the ancient stock, the sole instance of adoption recorded of it in history, (Tacit. lib. xii. 25 ;) and it is to a singular error of reference, regarding this imperial monster, that I now proceed to direct the reader's indulgent attention. The number CXXIX. of the Quar * Yet this embodied spirit of evil, a name of paramount execration, and synonyme of demoniac madness, aspired, in the words of Seneca's tragedy of Octavia, to be enrolled among the gods! believing himself quite as well entitled to deification as his predecessor Augustus, whose early crimes were not less flagrant, during the horrors of the Triumvirate, which he enumerates at length. "Ille qui meruit pia Virtute cœlum Divus Augustus, viros Quot interemit nobiles, juvenes, senes! Pietate gnati factus eximiâ Deus, Thence, with an assumption of equal right, he anticipates a similar posthumous homage to himself. "Nos quoque manebunt astra, si svo prior Ense occuparo quidquid infestum est mihi," &c. Octavia, Act ii. v. 504, et seqq. And had Seneca, whose death forms so prominent a feature of his sanguinary career, survived him, the apotheosis would have afforded still more pungent grounds of ridicule, or worse, than those so well urged by the philosopher, (obviously different from the tragic poet,) in his ATOKOλOKÚVTwois, or deification of the stultified Claudius, the grand-uncle and stepfather of Nero, one of the few humorous essays bequeathed us by antiquity. A heaven thus filled made a modern German, Jacob Heinrich Meister, believe that Homer could never have seand impressed him with a conviction that riously intended to glorify its inmates, the Iliad and Odyssey, were, in truth, mock heroic productions aimed, in derision, at the Grecian mythology of his day. Some articles published, during the year terly Review contains a most interesting essay on Flower Gardens. At page 233, in reproof of Walpole's sneer at the classical, in abandonment, as he urges, of the natural model of a college garden, it is shrewdly remarked" He little thought how soon sturdy Oxford would blunt the edge of his periods. Still more astonished would he have been to have had his natural style traced to no less a founder than Nero." And, in a subjoined note, I find added, "Tacitus in the Sixth Rook of his Annals gives us this information-Ceterum Nero usus est patriæ ruinis, extruxitque domum, in qua haud perinde gemmæ et aurum miraculo essent, solita pridem et luxu vulgata, quam arva et stagna, et in modum solitudinum, hinc sylvæ, inde aperta spatia et prospectus, magistris et machinatoribus Severo et Celere, quibus ingenium et audacia erat, etiam quæ natura denegavisset, per artem tentare, et viribus principis illudere." We since, pursues the reviewer, learn from Loudon's Encyclopedia, section 1145, that this passage was suggested by Forsyth to Walpole, who promised to insert it in the second edition of his essay. It would, however, appear that the second edition, published in 1780, has not fulfilled this promise. On reading the above paragraph with the pregnant quotation from Tacitus, it struck me at once, that his sixth book, and the number is in full letters, could not possibly include so direct an advertence to the conflagration in the reign, or, perhaps by the contrivance of Nero, which opened a vacancy for the constructions here described. The book, I knew, was confined exclusively to the narrative of the concluding years of Tiberius, whose death, in fact, preceded the birth of Nero by nine months (see Ernesti's note, on Suetonius, in Tiberio, cap. 73.) The name of Nero, one of the distinctive patronymics of the Appian family, appears, indeed, at the close of the sixth book, and fifty-first chapter; but it is that of the father of Tiberius, the great-grandfather of Agrippina, the mother of the Emperor Nero, and whose wife, the parent of Tiberius, was transferred, while still pregnant of Drusus, to Augustus, to whom, not improbably may be ascribed the answer of Nero to Seneca, in justification of his espousing Poppaa; for Augustus uniformly evinced towards Drusus a paternal tenderness. "Cum portet utero pignus, et partem mei, Quin destinamus proximam thalamis diem?" Octavia, Act ii. v. 590. The extract from Tacitus by the reviewer is not, as I have observed, from the sixth, but the fifteenth book, chapter forty-second, of the great historian, far removed truly from its stated place, where it would have been in vain looked for. Painters and writers, equally in prose and verse, have emulously exercised their tastes and descriptive powers in their views of the picturesque, and supplying by art the apparent deficiencies of nature, whose appropriate union and consonance of effect constitute the genuine beauty of garden or rural scenery. Various languages would furnish me with numerous illustrative references, and demonstrate that there was little novelty in Walpole's recommendation. Thus, the poet Delille compliments the architect, Morel, for proving by the very moderate intermixture of art, that "nature when unadorned is adorned the most." The passage is impressive, and from the poem on Gardens, (chant 111) therefore not irrelevant. "Digne de voir, d'aimer, de sentir la nature, 1817, in the Parisian "Publiciste," and "Journal Général," displayed considerable learning and ingenuity on the subject; but, as Lord Chesterfield remarked of those who should now pretend that the old Grecian and Virgil were indifferent poets, he came too late with his assumed discovery. Though a native of Zürich, Yours, &c. J. R. the language of Paris, where he long re sided, was familiar to him, and it was he who furnished the second part of Grimm's Correspondence with the Northern Courts, purified, indeed, and necessarily so, for publication, by M. Lefebure de Cauchy, Meister's biographer. He died at Zürich in 1826. REVIEW OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. The History of Reynard the Fox, from the edition printed by Caxton in 1481. Edited by W. J. Thoms, Esq. F.S.A. [Percy Society.] 8vo. Reynard the Fox. A renowned Apologue of the Middle Age, reproduced in Rhyme. By S. Naylor, Esq. 4to. THESE are two very different books, although devoted to the same subject. The former is the Reynard for the antiquary, for the literary historian, for the bibliographer, and for the reader who desires to know not merely what Reynard the Fox is, but where it came from, and what many deep searchers after truth have thought, and said, and written touching its origin and history. In Mr. Thoms's introduction we learn that this "worldrenowned history was popular in France and Flanders more than 600 years ago, that it is alluded to by our own Richard Cœur de Lion, and can be traced back (if our critics understand rightly a passage in the life of Abbot Guibert de Nogent) to the very respectable antiquity of the year 1112, at which time it was a wide-spread fable. This is an age which will probably satisfy most of our readers; but, if they will turn to Mr. Thoms's introduction, they will find glimpses of an antiquity to which seven centuries are almost as nothing. They will there be told that Grimm, using the word " Renart as a peephole into the past, caught glimmerings of "the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries," and did not hesitate to maintain that even then these fables were well known. (p. xxi.) All this is very enthusiastic and very interesting, and, what is more, may be very true. The story comes obviously of a fine old Teutonic stock, and its general outline, and particular incidents in it, are probably of an antiquity very far beyond that to which our critics have been enabled to ascend. The patriotism of a Belgian antiquary (M. Willems) has claimed the story as of Flemish origin, and given certain places which are mentioned in it a local habitation in a very wild and GENT. MAG. VOL. XXIII. The earliest MSS. are in Latin, one in leonine verse, which Grimm pronounces to be not later than the middle of the tenth century (Thoms, p. xxviii.), Isengrimus, printed by Grimm from a fourteenth-century MS., and Reinardus Vulpes, printed by Mone from a later MS. of the same century. Mr. Thoms gives outlines with specimens and translations of all these poems, controverting in his way a theory of M. Mone, who would convert this universal history into an allegorical representation of the affairs and quarrels of "various well-known personages," amongst whom the principal are Zwentibolcus and Reginarius. (Thoms, p. xxxvii.) All these MSS. are imperfect, but Mr. Thoms's extracts sufficiently identify them as parts of the one fable, which was rendered applicable by variations to the peculiar circumstances of many different readers. In the vernacular languages of Europe, Reynard is widely traceable, but we must refer for the particulars to Mr. Thoms's introduction. A High German version is found in a MS. fragment of the twelfth century in the library at Cassel; a fragment which was formerly part of the binding of an account book. (p. xlix.) The French version ascends to the thirteenth century; the Flemish, to the times of Willem van Utenhoren, or die Madoc, (for there is a great dispute as to his name, p. lxi.) who lived about 1250. Madoc's poem was continued by some nameless and inferior writer, and the 3 D racy original and the poor continuation being united by transcribers, became thenceforth the stock Reynard -the Hume and Smollett of Reynardine story. But the heaviness of the continuator was fatal to the original, and, after the invention of printing, they were both, to the entire suppression of Madoc's fame and name, reduced into prose, and the story on its appearance in this form was received with such universal favour, that in a short time the older poems from which it was derived were entirely forgotten." (Thoms, p. lxiii.) This prose translation was first published at Gouda in 1470, and was the work of which, on the 6th June 1481, Caxton finished a translation "into his rude and simple English, at the Abbey of Westminster." Caxton's version was printed by himself, and afterwards by Pynson, and a third, fourth, and fifth times (with many alterations) in 1550, 1650, and 1667. It is now, for a sixth time, reprinted from Caxton's first edition, in Mr. Thoms's work before us. Mr. Thoms shews that the Reynardine story was known in England before Caxton's time, and gives us bibliographical notices of the several continuations and poetical versions which have from time to time made their appearance amongst us. There were none of them of any merit, and Reynard consequently became in this country a mere study for antiquaries and lovers of the curiosities of literature. It ceased to exercise any influence upon the popular mind, or to form a living part of the learning of the people. Mr. Douce, indeed, read it regularly every Christmas time to his wife (Thoms, p. lxxix.); but in this, as in many other things, Mr. Douce was an exception. In Germany the fate of Reynard has been very different. There a general acquaintance with the main incidents of the story has never been lost, and for many centuries the fox of the apologue has been the popular type of worldly selfishness and successful craft. A Low German translation made by Heinrich von Alkmar in 1498, has been the great means of keeping alive this knowledge of Reynard's history. Mr. Thoms speaks slightingly of the book, but admits its influence, and says that "most popular it assuredly has been, as is shown not only by the innumerable editions of it which have from time to time appeared, but also from the various translations which it has undergone." (Thoms, p. lxv.) Mr. Naylor differs from Mr. Thoms in his estimate of the value of von Alkmar, and certainly his popularity is strong testimony in his favour. Of the many translations from him, the first into High German was made by " Michael Beuther, the friend and pupil of Luther and Melancthon," and was published in 1545. Ten editions of Beuther's book succeeded one another at long intervals, and then, the language having probably become somewhat obsolete, another translation appeared in 1650, which ran its similar round of editions, and after the lapse of another hundred years was succeeded by Gottsched's translation, published at Leipsic and at Amsterdam in 1752. Gottsched had kept the field for about 40 years, when "Are you aware,' said Herder to Goethe, that we have an epic poem in German as wise and as original as the OdysseyReynard the Fox? Goethe confessed that, having only heard of the book as modernized by Gottsched, he had not thought it worthy of any particular notice. The book was produced : Goethe carried it away with him, and almost immediately began his work." (Naylor, p. 5.) That work was a versification "of the old poem shortly afterwards published, and now recognised as the standard classical edition throughout Germany.” (Naylor, p. 6.) But Goethe did more than versify the book himself; he recommended the earlier edition to the attention of Mr. Naylor, and although for some time the advice was unheeded, chance threw Heinrich von Alkmar in Mr. Naylor's way, the advice of the illustrious German recurred to his mind, and "hovering, as Goethe said of his own work, between translation and paraphrase," (Naylor, p. 6,) he has composed the poetical English version which is the second book named at the head of this article. The facts we have stated will have convinced our readers of the accuracy of our assertion, that these are indeed |