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of matters asserted on the hustings !-proved by the plump and plain testimonial of by-standers. Think (as we are there!) of Tests proposed and accepted. Recollect the delicious traditions only waiting the call of Antiquarians with regard to any obscure passage and how A shall cap B's impression till C gets a fact, which he retaileth unblushingly and D goes the length of challenging scrutiny-whereupon E enters into an inquiry! &c., &c. Reflect how a whimsical idea, referred to twice or thrice, as a pleasant freak of imagination, takes that form and consistency, which prepares you for referring to it a fourth time as something you have heard," if not a reality which has passed within the sphere of your own knowledge! And the end will be, if not a mistrust of the testimonials which others command, a reserve in granting them to others—a determination, not to rush out with something which may be true-by way of producing an effect, or strengthening a cause :-but to let no wish to serve, persuade, influence, or other immediate object, blind you to the dry truth, that the Testimonial in which Exaggeration has aught to do,. injures three persons-the party recommended, who is encouraged to refrain from progress; the party without testifying recom-. menders, who is unfairly neglected; and the party who testifiesto the damage of his discrimination-self-respect, and integrity!

LITERARY INTERCHANGE.

It would be a curious inquiry that, which would endeavour to ascertain the circumstances which obtain celebrity for a writer beyond the limits of his own country. Some of our greatest English authors are perfectly unknown in Germany and France, and not a few of the noblest literary geniuses that France and Germany have produced have not yet reached England even by name. On the other hand, how many English scribblers whom the English themselves scarcely deign to read have a continental reputation! And how many French and German scribblers who are almost forgotten in their native land, have a popularity wider and far more fulminating than that which some of our best authors enjoy, or are ever likely to acquire. Fame is, of all human

caprices, the most capricious. Sometimes the eccentricity that condemns an author to obscurity and contempt in his own country, gives him glory somewhere else. Sometimes the breadth of heart and the catholicity of spirit, which make a writer a mystery tohis nation, a mystery not to be revered but to be laughed at, make him a miracle to other nations, a miracle which they feel inclined to worship all the more enthusiastically from the very distance of the scene where it has appeared. It is strange also to see some worthy wight, who in his day was something more than a notoriety, but who for half-a-century has simply been known as one of the great unread, spoken of by foreign critics," as if he were as alive in the memory and the heart of Humanity, as Cervantes, or Ariosto, or Shakspeare. Thus, for instance, Villemain, an elegant and tasteful, often eloquent writer, though not remarkable for grasp or perspicacity as a thinker, and who, some fifteen or twenty years ago, was as celebrated as a lecturer on literature as Guizot on history, and Cousin on philosophy, devotes as much of serious attention and of conscientious analysis to Richardson the novelist as any English Review would think it proper to bestow on Walter Scott. Occasionally an author secures a European audience for the whole of his productions, however numerous, through having tickled their ear by some early production, trifling and tedious it may be in itself, but which flattered or echoed some temporary foible of the age. Would " Faust," and "Wilhelm Meister" be considered as such marvellous books, or would Goethe the Epicurean be viewed as so admirable a poet, so noble a man, if he had not when young arrested the notice of mankind by his sentimental Werther? Because one of Goethe's boyish works was preposterously overrated, it has been thought a duty as preposterously to overrate all the rest. Some of the best authors cannot be naturalised in foreign literatures. Barrow and Jeremy Taylor will always remain exclusively English. The former has a weight of thought, and an exhaustiveness which we look for in vain in any other preacher; but though often eloquent he has no artistic graces of style. His grand massiveness of solid sense unfits him for Germany, his want of rhetorical skill unfits him for France. Jeremy Taylor was not a remarkable thinker; neither can he properly be called an orator; he was a poet in prose, and perhaps as such, unsurpassed. Now poets in prose are peculiarly English; other nations offer nothing precisely similar. The very circumstance, therefore, which renders the

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name of Jeremy Taylor a hallowed name in England, prevents him from being naturalised in the literatures of other lands. Montaigne is altogether French; translate him into another language, you strip him of his quaint but picturesque and forcible style, and take from him half of his beauty and strength. There are authors who are very translateable, who are yet very inadaptable. Thus, though Montaigne was born fifty years after Rabelais, the style of Rabelais has much more flow and finish, is really a more modern style; yet the subjects which Rabelais chose, and their mode of treatment, render his works unsuitable for any atmosphere but France. In general it may be said, that the literary material that can most easily find its home everywhere, is French prose, chiefly by reason of the social universality of the French intellect, but also through the colloquial power of the French language, which makes it, from its friendly and familiar aspect, welcome, all the world over. Thus, Voltaire's "Charles the Twelfth" is as much a household book in England as ever it has been in France. There are works which from their intense nationality cannot be relished in translation, though easily enough translated. The peculiarities belonging to the style of Junius can be rendered into another language without much loss of pungency, fervour, or energy. But Junius possesses scarcely any interest, except to those Englishmen who are familiar with the history of England seventy or eighty years ago, not only in its greatest events, but in its minutest gossip and most trifling scandal. To any foreigner, therefore, except perhaps a ponderous gluttonous German mind aspiring to know all, both in the universe and out of it, Junius must be utterly without attraction. The “Provincial Letters" of Pascal are nearly in the same predicament. What care the majority of English readers for the squabbles of Jesuits and Jansenists two hundred years ago? In the ecclesiastical history and in the national recollections of the French, however, those disputes have an indestructible vitality. The only persons in England to whom "The Provincial Letters can have any charm, are ripe scholars, who would prefer reading them in the original. The productions of some authors have scarcely any other merit than that of style. All such it is folly to translate. La Fontaine had the genius, the rare genius for a poet, of being archly and aboundingly natural. His style is perfect; but his productions. have no merit beyond the style. Hence he is the most tedious or the most pleasing of writers, according to the subject that chance

threw in his way. He had no creative strength. All his authorcraft consisted solely in indolently pouring out his good humour on topics that came of their own accord before him. To translate him is, therefore, to crush all the living breath and the warm blood out of him. The Italians lose immensely in translation, so much of the beauty of every Italian book consisting in the delicious music of the Italian language itself. Occasionally the facility with which an author's works are transferred into another tongue, their literary value unimpaired, arises from their defects of style. Sismondi, with substantial merit as a writer, is exceedingly heavy and monotonous in style. His productions, wanting the usual French variety and vivacity, seem to have something of a becomingness, dignity, and force in their English dress which are not obvious in the original. Certain authors would have written with more effect in another language, than they did in their own. Wieland, fanciful, witty, epicurean, would have found French much more suitable for the expression of his ideas than German; and Lessing, bold, earnest, direct, and energetic, could have slashed more rapidly and killingly into the heart of things if pithy English instead of unwieldy German had been his weapon. Languages have a fitness or unfitness for rendering other languages. German gives best the epic and dramatic poetry of the Greeks; Italian, Greek lyric poetry; French, Greek eloquence; English, Greek history and philosophy. For the translation both of Latin poetry and Latin prose, we know no language equal to the English. Italian poetry loses least in English; Italian prose, least in French. The French cannot translate poetry; whatever its characteristics in the original, they convert it into pedantic rhetoric. Shakspeare, in the hands of Ducis, becomes a declaimer. When the French translate poetry, they are compelled to give it in prose in order to preserve somewhat of its texture and spirit. The prose of most languages is more rhetorical than the poetry. French poetry has the peculiarity of being more rhetorical than French prose. Hence it is as difficult to translate French poetry, as it is for the French to translate the poetry of other nations. For rhetoric supposes amplification, and translated rhetoric implies still farther amplification, in the cumbrousness of which all force and beauty evaporate. Most German prose works are improved by a translation into French. The Germans cannot write prose. As French prose is better than all other prose, German is worse. Compare Madame de Staël's book on Germany with Menzel's on German

Literature, which is a very favourable specimen of German prose, and the difference will at once be visible. Strange as it may seem, however, it is the imperfections of German prose which make German thinking appear so much more subtle and profound than it is. The calf seems an elephant when seen through the mist ; and the common-places of the Germans often appear prodigious discoveries, because floating in a haze of cloudy words. France has produced as great, if not greater, thinkers than Germany. But they often look shallow, simply because they are so marvellously clear; and, in the same way as, seen through the cloudless atmosphere of Egypt, the pyramids look smaller than they are. Perhaps, therefore, a German metaphysical work, when translated into French, loses rather than gains. By being improved in style, by being rendered clearer, it is shorn of all its transcendentalism; and what in the original astounded as a mystery, disgusts in the translation as a paltry mystification. Books of more substantial merit, however, especially the chief historical productions, gain by translation from German into French; for they retain all their essential qualities, while acquiring rapidity of movement, sententiousness, and force.

Hitherto Literary Interchange, of which translation is only one of the forms, has been an affair of scholars. One of the best effects of free commerce will be, to make it an affair of nations. And as it is the articles of luxury, often pernicious, that have chiefly passed from country to country, to the exclusion of the corn that feeds and strengthens man, so it is chiefly the pruriences, the frivolities, the vulgarities of literature that have passed from one language into another. As, also, corn will henceforth be the leading article of commerce, we may rationally anticipate that nations, brought into more wise and loving intercourse with each other by the pressure of universal physical needs, will, through the more complete appreciation and sympathy thus produced, be disposed to exchange only that which is best in their literatures. The effect of this on tolerance and civilisation will be prodigious and blissful; but it will also potently and beneficially transform the chief literatures of the world. It will teach the English to generalise, and to see the philosophic links of many isolated details; it will teach the French to confirm and to correct their generalisation by facts; it will teach the Germans that writing is an art like any other, that pith, clearness, variety, and brevity are the four grand requisites of good writing,-that prolixity is