which may be traced upward to an age when of public life, the well-remembred prize exLatin was still vernacular, and retained in a ercises at school or college, as well as the 'Nuchurch in which the whole ritual is Latin--gæ Metricæ,' as they are called by more than are, no doubt, with all their accompaniments, one distinguished scholar who has indulged imposing, effective, and sublime; but in them- in this style of writing. It is curious how selves they are surely no models for compo- many of our great poets have been distinsition at best, there is an air of modern guished for their Latin verse: Milton, CowGothic about the imitations of them. If we ley, May, Addison, Johnson, Cowper, and are to have Latin verses, let them be written, Gray, occur immediately to the recollection; as far as their latinity and their versification, and modern names would not be wanting. after the example of the great Latin poets: if Composition in Latin verse has, indeed, been we introduce, and introduce we may and we accused of tending to a stiff, foreign, and artiought, Christian thoughts and sentiments, let ficial style in poetry. We much doubt this; them be in the form and in the metres of we suspect that it has never made or marred Virgil and Horace, not even of St. Ambrose a poet. This, however, is a field on which and Prudentius, far less of the monks of the we cannot enter at present; but even in modtwelfth or thirteenth century. Not that these ern days, if we might survey the whole of compositions are without merit. Herrick's our eminent men, we should not want contribeautiful Litany to the Holy Spirit is cleverly butors to our Muse' from every department done; but we think the thing itself a waste of literature and public life. Notwithstandof skill and ingenuity. We want a chaunt ing that here and there respectable places in to make them acceptable to the ear; which, our literature may have been reached by without it, flies from them, and takes refuge some, we speak it to their honour, almost in the exquisite music of well-modulated self-educated men, and many more have come Sapphics or hendecasyllables. from quarters where little attention is paid to After all, the present volume must be re- classical lore, and none to composition in the ceived as a very inadequate representative of learned languages, there are not a few in the Cambridge classical verse: the editor him- highest ranks (to instance Mr. Hallam alone), self would hardly offer these slight pieces, whose names recur constantly in the Muse elegant as some of them may be, but mixed Etonenses,' and who may represent the older with much inferior matter, as approaching to race of our scholar-authors. But even leaving a selection from the odes and triposes of Cam- out our men of letters,-every rank and probridge, the prize poems of the sister univer-fession will furnish its contingent, and that not sity, or the best exercises of our great public schools. We are not likely to see, in the present day, a new Musæ Anglicanæ.' But merely considered as an exercise of the talents of the young, who have afterwards risen into fame, or a blameless and graceful amusement of many of our greatest men in the decline of an useful and distinguished life, it is remarkable how much of this reflected interest is thrown on the composition of Latin and Greek verse by the characters of those with whom it has been a favourite study. It would not be difficult to form a volume called 'Poemata illustriorum Virorum,' which would comprehend names of the highest distinction in every profession, and in the highest walks *Had I a heart for falsehood framed, For tho' your tongue no promise claim'd, Then, lady, dread not here deceit, Nor fear to suffer wrong, For friends in all the old you'll meet, ( by conscription, but by voluntary enrolment. To represent the profession of medicine we may summon no less eminent a personage than the President of the College himself. Sir Henry Halford's Nuga, as he informs us, were mostly written in the carriage, and served to beguile the tedium of many a long day spent in his professional pursuits. But his lines have none of those jolts and inequalities, said to have dislocated Sir Richard Blackmore's verses, while he rattled over the rough stones of the metropolis. The President's chariot seems to have glided smoothly over a well-constructed wood-pavement. Here are a few specimens: 'Si violare fidem mihi cor proclivius esset, Crede mihi, me non posse nocere tibi: Quamquam etenim tua verba fidem me nulla rogassent, Fecissent fidum forma decusque tuum. Ergo pone metus, et fraudem parce vereri (?); Nugæ Metricæ, by Sir H.H, Bt., M. D. 1839. pp. 40 (not published). Two rejected stanzas of the Elegy' find a more successful imitator than most of those which Gray retained have done : 'And thou! who, mindful of the unhonoured dead, Dost in these lines their artless tale relate, By night and lonely contemplation led To wander in the gloomy walks of fate; Hark! how the sacred calm that breathes around Bids every fierce, tumultuous passion cease, In still small accents whispering from the ground A grateful earnest of eternal peace.' Tuque memor! sortem ingenuo qui carmine narras Functorum vitâ, temere et sine honore jacentum Cum contemplari juvet, et crescentibus umbris Nocte sepultorum solus peragrare recessus ; Audin'? ut hic sancto afflatu, tranquillior æther Temperet effrenos animi quoscunque tumultus; Dum tenue assurgens viridi de cespite murmur Dat grata æternæ tandem præsagia pacis.' A wicked wit might insinuate that to a less experienced and skilful physician than the President, the passage of Shakspeare, so neatly rendered below, might have been suggested by some qualm of conscience at having dismissed a patient, rather prematurely, on that awful journey from which poor Claudio shrunk with such natural apprehensions: 'Ay, but to die and go we know not whither, The meanest and most loathed worldly life, Sir Henry was bred in a school, or at a time when the niceties of quantity were not enforeed with proper regard. He indulges too often in the short final o, and antě scelus' (p. 27) is quite inadmissible. We return to the judges of the land. We presume not to know whether some of these learned persons ever beguile the weariness of an interminable cause, or the dullness of some lengthy and remorseless argument, by relaxations of this kind. Certain Greek epigrams 'Attamen ; heu! quam triste mori! nec quo sit eundum Scire prius-positum clausâ putrescere in arcâ ; Horrendum! quodcumque mali ferat ægra senec- As, then, we are not aware that any of these in these days especially, when (in theory at learned personages have brought themselves least, we cannot say much for the practice) recently under our jurisdiction, even by the the celibacy of the clergy being so strongly doubtful act of printing for private circulation, urged, any reminiscence of such juvenile we shall revert to an older hand, that of one weakness, even in poetry, might shock the still held in the highest traditionary rever- austerity of the modern Novatians; and even ence in the profession, and who, we believe, call forth an anathema from the cloisters of was only prevented by his own unwilling- Magdalene, no longer to be contaminated by ness to receive favours from a government to female footsteps. We will allow, then, the which he was adverse in politics (he was a reverend bench to repose on the memory of firm, consistent, and honourable Whig) from Bishop Lowth, and the names which occur attaining the very highest rank. We hap- so frequently in all our collections of prize pen to possess a copy of verses by Mr. Ser- compositions, as well as the late Bishop of geant Lens (not printed in the Muse Eton- Lichfield. One specimen, however, we enses'), which, though youthful in style and possess of youthful religious verse as well as subject, appears to us of such peculiar ele- youthful scholarship, by one who afterwards gance, as to deserve preservation :rose to the bench;—this versification of the 'Te Deum' appears to us so happy, that we venture to subjoin it. The friends of the late kind and learned Bishop Dampier will scarcely take offence at the liberty which we take with his production : AD AMICAM. Grates insidiis tuis dolisque, Nunc tecum assideo diu, nec unquam We are not quite sure that, if we were to ransack our treasures, we might not find something, if not quite so easy and graceful, yet in no severer tone, bearing the name of one or other of our right reverend prelates. But we are checked by the still higher reverence due to the lawn above the ermine; 'Laudamus, et Dominum, Deus, Te laudat et pulcherrima, Tuere nos, nostrasque res were not met at the threshold by the warning inscription addressed to those friends of the author whom he honoured by the gift of his Nugæ Metricæ:'*. 'At tu quicquid id est ineptiarum, Ne prodire sinas in ora vulgi.' We will not attempt to elude the force of this prohibition by denying, as we fairly might, the justice of the disparaging terms which the modesty of the author has applied to his compositions. We have carefully abstained from assigning any very high literary rank even to the most finished verses of this As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends;'— 'With all that should accompany old age, Whether any of our younger statesmen in the present day keep up the remembrance of their early studies by the practice of classical composition, we presume not to say; many of them on both sides of the house are good kind. Whatever may be the proper intrinsic scholars, and occasionally soften the rude merit of the verses to which we allude, much strife of political contention by those allusions of their charm consists in their having affordto classical writers which delighted Pulteney ed amusement to the declining years of Lord and Walpole and Bolingbroke, North, Fox, Grenville: they are a grave and a grateful and Pitt. On one side Lord Morpeth, on testimony to the value of such studies from the other Lord Stanley, are well known to the highest authority. To those who had possess even if they have ceased to culti- the advantage of witnessing the tranquil digvate this graceful endowment. Nor are nity of Lord Grenville's retirement, this testhese the only recent names among our flour- timony cannot but be singularly valuable. ishing or our rising statesmen, who might be Deliberately retreating, at an earlier period expected to contribute to our Latin Poems than is usual, from public affairs-withdrawn by distinguished Men.' But our limits warn froin the passions of political life, with no us that we must confine ourselves to but a assumption of philosophic disregard, but with few. We have precluded ourselves indeed an earnest though contemplative interest in by our notice of the Marquess Wellesley's all that concerned the civil and religious welelegant 'Primitiæ et Reliquiæ, from adduc- fare of his countrying one of the more commanding illustrations of our Defence of (Latin) Poesy.' We cannot, however, deny ourselves the pleasure, we should say, perhaps, the melancholy in the gardens of Dropmore, his own exquisite pleasure, of inserting the following few lines, creation, exercising almost a parental care which appear in the copy before us, a sort of over the university of which he was chan'l'Envoy to Lord Brougham of some addi- cellor, and overlooking from his grounds the school at which he was educated; entering into all the literature of the day, and discussing a new novel of Walter Scott's with the warmest delight and the soundest judgment, -Lord Grenville reverted to those classical studies, which he never neglected, with fresh delight, and occasionally threw off in his leisure hours these very elegant Nuge.' We feel still stronger temptation to trespass on this forbidden ground, as admitting us, as it were, into more intimate familiarity with this distinguished man, and showing his strong and solid character, as it appears in his public life, touched by the softer lights of kind There is another volume before us, by the and amiable feelings. There is a playful friend and contemporary of Lord Wellesley, correspondence, in Homeric verses, about which we should boldly open before our some French lamps, with the late Lord Holreaders, as commanding this double recomland, in his pure classical tastes, no less than mendation in an extraordinary degree, if we tions to the small volume : 'Accipe reliquias jam denique reliquiarum, Graiaque mista Italis, fragmentaque fragmen torum, Quæ nocte insomni, atque inter planctusque doloresque Effusa (heu cassi verba imperfecta poetæ !) Ad te confugiunt, atque in te vota reponunt.' * Quart. Rev., vol. lxv. • Nuga Metricæ.-Nos hæc novimus esse nihil. -MDCCCXXIV.' in other respects, the legitimate heir of Charles | Wales, from a wreck, with his master's Fox, and worthy to take a third place in this pocket-book in its mouth. It lived for some highly-cultivated triumvirate. But there is time on the beach, but at length found a one poem, which we are so confident that master in Lord Grenville, and accompanied we have seen in print beyond the charmed him to Dropmore, where, if we remember circle, that we have less scruple in transfer- right, these lines are inscribed on a stone in ring it to our pages. It is an epitaph on a the grounds.-N. B. The town of Tenby fine Newfoundland dog, named Tippoo, was occupied by a Flemish colony as early, which swam on shore at Tenby, in South it is said, as Henry I. "Tippo ego hic jaceo: lapidem ne sperne, viator, Quæcumque exornant nobilitantque genus. Ipsa etiam his olim gens aliena plagis; Perfugium et requiem cura dedit domini: Et vixi felix, et tumulum hunc habeo.' We cannot refrain from one further trespass. There is something to us in the contemplation of the quiet dissolution of a good and religious man, as described in the following verses, suggested by the exquisite 'Salve, quæ placidi gratâ sub imagine somni, Nec rabidæ auditur vox ululare lupa. Vix sentit vitâ deficiente mori; Ut levis arboreos autumni sidere fructus Quin et amicorum curæ lacrymæque sequuntur, In vain, with fruitless love, I strove to save. His dying trust, his tablets to the shore. bloom, Gave me a happy life, and honoured tomb.' |