on the dialects is most valuable. He is surprised that there is no form for the infinitive, but that they say,— I wish, (go, or eat, or drink, &c.) interposing a letter by way of copula, forgetting his own German and the English, which are, in truth, the same. The confident belief entertained by the Abipones of immortality, in connection with the utter absence in their minds of the idea of God, is very remarkable. If Warburton were right, which he is not, the Mosaic scheme would be the exact converse. My dear daughter's translation of this book is, in my judgment, unsurpassed for pure mother English by any thing I have read for a long time.

*

Of sad remembrance: and the empress-queen,
That great Teresa, she did not disdain

In gracious mood sometimes to entertain

Discourse with him both pleasurable and sage;

And sure a willing ear she well might deign

To one whose tales may equally engage

The wondering mind of youth, the thoughtful heart of age.

"But of his native speech, because well-nigh
Disuse in him forgetfulness had wrought,

In Latin he composed his history;

A garrulous, but a lively tale, and fraught

With matter of delight, and food for thought.

And if he could in Merlin's glass have seen

By whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught,
The old man would have felt as pleased, I ween,
As when he won the ear of that great empress-queen.

"Little he deem'd, when with his Indian band
He through the wilds set forth upon his way,
A poet then unborn, and in a land

Which had proscribed his order, should one day
Take up from thence his moralizing lay,
And, shape a song that, with no fiction drest,

Should to his worth its grateful tribute pay,

And sinking deep in many an English breast,

Foster that faith divine that keeps the heart at rest."

Southey's Tale of Paraguay, canto iii. st. 16.

"An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay. From the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer, eighteen Years a Missionary in that Country."- Vol. ii. p. 176.

I HAVE generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The Scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the English; the English have a morbid habit of petting and praising foreigners of any sort, to the unjust disparagement of their own worthies.

You will find this a good gage or criterion of genius, whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri, Shaftesbury and Buckingham; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas, in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized. In like manner compare Charles Lamb's exquisite criticisms on Shakspeare with Hazlitt's round and round imitations of them.

August 7. 1832.

MILTON'S DISREGARD OF PAINTING.

Ir is very remarkable that in no part of his writings does Milton take any notice of the great painters of Italy, nor, indeed, of painting as an art; whilst every other page breathes his love and taste for music. Yet it is curious that, in one passage in the Paradise Lost, Milton has certainly copied the fresco of the Crea

tion in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. I mean those

"now half appear'd

The tawny lion, pawing to get free

His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds,
And rampant shakes his brinded mane ;—” &c.*

an image which the necessities of the painter justified, but which was wholly unworthy, in my judgment, of the enlarged powers of the poet. Adam bending over the sleeping Eve in the Paradise Lost †, and Dalilah approaching Samson, in the Agonistes ‡, are the only two proper pictures I remember in Milton.

His wonder was to find unwaken'd Eve
With tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek,
As through unquiet rest: he on his side
Leaning, half raised, with looks of cordial love
Hung over her enamour'd, and beheld
Beauty, which, whether waking or asleep,
Shot forth peculiar graces; then, with voice
Mild, as when Zephyrus on Flora breathes,
Her hand soft touching, whisper'd thus: Awake,
My fairest," &c.

Book v. ver. 8.

"But who is this, what thing of sea or land?

Female of sex it seems,

That so bedeck'd, ornate, and gay,

Comes this way sailing

Like a stately ship

Of Tarsus, bound for the isles

Of Javan or Gadire,

With all her bravery on, and tackle trim,

Sails fill'd, and streamers waving,

Courted by all the winds that hold them play;

An amber-scent of odorous perfume

Her harbinger, a damsel train behind!"

HESIOD.-VIRGIL.

183

August 9. 1832.

BAPTISMAL SERVICE.- JEWS' DIVISION OF THE SCRIP

TURE. SANSKRIT.

What

I THINK the baptismal service almost perfect. seems erroneous assumption in it to me, is harmless. None of the services of the church affect me so much as this. I never could attend a christening without tears bursting forth at the sight of the helpless innocent in a pious clergyman's arms.

The Jews recognized three degrees of sanctity in their Scriptures : first, the writings of Moses, who had the auralía; secondly, the Prophets; and, thirdly, the Good Books. Philo, amusingly enough, places his works somewhere between the second and third degrees.

The claims of the Sanskrit for priority to the Hebrew as a language are ridiculous.

I LIKE reading Hesiod, meaning the Works and Days. If every verse is not poetry, it is, at least, good sense, which is a great deal to say.

There is nothing real in the Georgics, except, to be sure, the verse. Mere didactics of practice, unless seasoned with the personal interests of the time or

I used to fancy Mr. Coleridge paulo iniquior Virgilio, and told him so; to which he replied, that, like all Eton men, I swore per Maronem. This was far enough from being the case; but I acknowledge that Mr. C.'s apparent indifference to the tenderness and dignity of Virgil excited my surprise. - ED.

author, are inexpressibly dull to me. Such didactic poetry as that of the Works and Days followed naturally upon legislation and the first ordering of municipalities.

All genius is metaphysical; because the ultimate end of genius is ideal, however it may be actualized by incidental and accidental circumstances.

Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions. Sancho is the common sense of the social man-animal, unenlightened and unsanctified by the reason. You see how he reverences his master at the very time he is cheating him.

POOR dear Steinmetz is gone, - his state of sure blessedness accelerated; or, it may be, he is buried in Christ, and there in that mysterious depth grows on to the spirit of a just man made perfect! Could I for a moment doubt this, the grass would become black beneath my feet, and this earthly frame a charnel-house. I never knew any man so illustrate the difference between the feminine and the effeminate.

A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. and myself in a lane near Highgate.

knew

him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and staid a minute or so.

After he had left us a

little way, the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!" "There is death in that hand," I said to

he came back and said: "Let me carry away