succeeded in obtaining precedence over the Spanish Ambassador Vargas in 1558. (See Hénault under that date, and 1572.) He died at Bayonne in 1585. Gilles de Noailles is comparatively little known; but the eldest, and, indeed, creator of the family, Antoine, born in 1504, and the senior of François by fourteen years, filled various high situations, at home and abroad, under Francis I. and Henry II. He was an attendant on the Vicomte de Turenne in 1530, when that nobleman was deputed to conduct from Madrid Eleanora de Austria, sister of Charles V., and widow of the Portuguese monarch Emmanuel, as the second wife of Francis 1.; and it was to him that Saint Simon alluded as the domestic of the family of Bouillon, or La Tour d'Auvergne. (Gent. Mag. for Sept. 1840, p. 252.) I recollect having seen in the cathedral of Bordeaux, of which city he was governor, and where he died in 1562, a monument to his memory, of which the inscription is given in the Chronique Bourdeloise of Darnel, (1620, 4to.) page 44, verso. The château of Noailles is in the Limousin (Corréze) near Brives, (la Gaillarde,) a place now rendered famous by the trial of Madame Laffarge. In 1763, a history of the Embassies of the brothers was published by the Abbé Vertot, comprising five volumes 12mo. One expression of your correspondent's communication, Mr. Urban, is not, I must say, very intelligible. Gilles, he states, abdicated in 1600. What did he abdicate? I may ask.

That Anna Fabra, as intimated in the succeeding paragraph in the same page (331), was Anne Lefévre, I was fully aware, as a reference to page 380 (note) of the Gentleman's Magazine for October 1838 will show; but I used the Latin name assumed by herself in her edition of Callimachus, by which she first became known, in 1674, and in the five authors, Florus, Aurelius Victor, Eutropius, with Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius, which she contributed to the collection ad usum Delphini, and of which one of the rarest is the volume of Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius. All, however, were of easy commentation, and, therefore, entrusted to her,"

-"Sumite materiam vestris, qui

I avail myself of the occasion to offer a passing remark on Lord Grenville's letter to Dr. Burgess, at p. 352, in which he concludes, from the known tenor of Milton's religious opinions, more especially from those apparent in the Paradise Lost, and the great poet's characteristic sincerity, which forbids all suspicion of disguise, that the work attributed lately to him, "De Doctrinâ Christianâ," could not have been his composition. And the inference, in its general application, is perfectly legitimate, though scarcely available, I apprehend, in reference to poetry, which, as Waller told Charles II. deals best in fiction. We must also bear in recollection the rigid censure then imposed on all publications, and the special vigilance directed against those of Milton, which will not suffer us to doubt that if the Paradise Lost betrayed any aberrance of national belief, the imprimatur of Sir Roger L'Estrange would never have authorised its impression, nor would any publisher have dared to undertake it. Epic poems, the rarest fruit of human genius, are the test of popular, not personal doctrine, of which the Henriade is sufficient evidence; for, although the production of the direst foe to Christianity, it is in perfect conformity with the religion of his country, one of the distinctive tenets of which he defined, with singular energy of language and vivid delineation,

"Le Christ, de nos péchés victime renaissante,

De ses élus chéris nourriture vivante, Descend sur les autels à nos yeux éperdus, Et nous découvre un Dieu sous un pain qui n'est plus."

Henriade, Chant X. ad calcem.

These lines, together with that quoted on a former occasion, ("Tel brille au second rang qui s'éclipse au premier," G. M. for March 1840, p. 252,) the arch-infidel, under the visor of the orthodox poet, was wont to boast, were unresolvable into an equal compression of sense in any other tongue. The Iliad can hardly be considered a criterion of Homer's belief, nor the Eneid, surely, of Virgil's; but if we were to draw any inference of

Shakspere's faith from his works, it would be that, like his father, (Johnson and Steevens's edition, vol. ii. p. 300,) he was a Roman Catholic. (See Whalley's note to Hamlet, Act i. sc. 5, p. 15.) Other support than that furnished by Paradise Lost, or Regained, must be sought for Lord Grenville's rejection of the authorship of the " Doctrinâ Christianâ" by Milton, and may, indeed, be amply supplied, though no uniformity of creed appears deducible from his writings. Impelled by circumstances, and independent of authority, consistency could scarcely have ruled his doctrine, which owned no definite worship.

Many an arising thought accompanied the perusal of the elaborate article on English Grammar, from p. 365 to 372, and some, perhaps, not devoid of interest in their elucidation, which would embrace occasional recollections of Lowth, Harris, Horne Tooke, &c. but I shall only mark the frequent mis.. application of who and whom in several of our best authors. Scott and Cobbett oftener commit than avoid the fault, unless in very clear exposition of phrase; and few indeed, are the female authors not guilty of it. In the recent Quarterly Review, (No. 132, for September 1840,) a signal instance occurs at page 540, where Niebuhr is stated "to have communicated the discovery of the old Roman jurist, Caius, at Verona, to his friend Savigny, whom he seems to expect would immediately set off by post to examine the treasure" (a palimpsest). A proper punctuation, a comma before the pronoun he, and after expect, would have prevented this error, by showing clearly that who was the nominative, referable to the verb would, and not the accusative, govern. ed by expect. A similar inaccuracy is, I think, perceptible in our established translation of St. Luke, ch. ix, v. 18. where our Saviour asks,- "" Whom say the people that I am? The original Greek necessarily required the accusative, Τίνα με λέγουσιν οἱ οχλοι εἶναι; as it equally appears in the Latin Vulgate-" Quem me dicunt esse turbæ ?" which, in every respect, is more faithful; and, were the English as literal, the fault would not have occurred. "Whom do the multitude say (or, declare) me to be? or, more idiomati

cally, "Who do the multitude say I

am.

Another periodical, of considerable pretensions and some merit, "The Monthly Chronicle for Sept. 1840," presents a misstatement, for the notice of which, thus deviously introduced, I must seek protection in the mighty name that constitutes its subject. In an article, and, generally, a well written one, "On the study of the Old English Dramatists,” at page 225, in a

*Ne verbum verbo curabis reddere," is Horace's rational precept (De Arte Poet. 38). A close adherence to the text of Scripture is, doubtless, most desirable, but, surely, not at the sacrifice of the sense; as for instance, in Judges, iii. 24. where, after Ehud had slain Eglon, it is added, in our authorised Bible, (v. 23,) "Then Ehud went forth through the porch, and shut the doors of the parlour upon him, and locked them. (24.) When he was gone out, his servants came; and when they saw that, behold, the doors of the parlour were locked, they said, Surely he covereth his feet in his summer-chamber." Now, the condition of Eglon, as supposed by his servants, is by no means conveyed to our understanding by these last words, which, I am aware, literally express the original Hebrew, (page 87, verso, edit. Amst. 1701, 12mo.) as well as of the Septuagint, (Μήποτε ἀποκειννᾶι τους πόδας αυτῶν ἐν TQ ταμείῳ τῳ θερινῳ,) but it is quite explicit in the Latin Vulgate, which equally removes the confusion of the pronoun he, and his, in the first line of the verse" Per porticum (Aod) ingressus est. Servique regis ingressi viderunt clausas fores coenaculi, atque dixerunt : Forsitan purgat alvum in æstivo cubiculo." To Oriental habits the Hebrew and Greek expressions were, no doubt, sufficiently intelligible, but certainly not so to us. In Luther's version, though professing to reflect the original, the translation appears to be from the Vulgate-" Er ist viellecht zu stuhl gangen in der Kammer an der sommerlaube." (Das Buch der Richter.) The early Northern Protestant interpreters scarcely thought it necessary to ascend beyond that of Luther-"Juxta versionem Martini Lutheri," was their all-sufficient authority; and Coverdale declares that his Bible (1535) "is faithfully and truely translated out of Douche and Latyn," (Biblioth. Spencer. i. 78.) The Douche, of course, meant Luther's, and the Latyn, the Vulgate, which is the avowed archetype of the Roman Catholic vernacular translations,

note, it is said, "Our Shakspere's All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players, (As You Like It, Act ii. 7.) might be almost supposed to have been literally taken from Calderon's

"En el teatro del mundo,
Todos son representantes," &c.
Saber del Mal y del Bien.

Here we find Shakspere the debtor or plagiarist of the Spanish dramatist; but the latter, born in 1600, was a boy of fifteen or sixteen at Shakspere's death in 1616, and certainly, though very precocious, had not then appeared as an author. There is, indeed, little reason to suppose that Calderon had heard of our great bard, or borrowed from him; but it is quite impossible that he could have furnished the thought to Shakspere, while it may easily have occurred to both, without any communication. Steevens has shown that it may be discovered in one of the classic authors (Petronius); and Malone has traced it to other and earlier English sources. (Edit. 1793, vol. vi. 66.)*

Again, at page 235, the same writer asserts that the Spanish theatre had arrived to its pitch of excellence in Lope de Vega and Calderon, long before we had escaped from the most puerile attempts," &c. Now, though an equal priority of date cannot be established for Shakspere over Lope de Vega, as over his rival in fame Calderon, yet as there was only an interval of nineteen months between their births (25 November 1562,-and 23 April, 1564), they were strictly contemporaries; and, when the English poet's first dramas were enacted, probably in 1591, perhaps previously, (Chronological Order of Shakspere's Plays, edition 1793, vol. I.) the Spaniard, however premature, could not long before

* In Frazer's Magazine for this month (a Newspaper Editor's Reminiscences, p. 429) a writer places the Walcheren expedition of 1809 under the administration of Pitt, who died in 1806, and who certainly never would have committed that enterprize to his incapable brother. Several other inconsistencies of time, place, and persons, disfigure the otherwise interesting narrative; of which, in

deed, the author seems conscious-a very bad excuse for avoiding the trouble of correction.

have arrived at the pitch of excellence dwelt on by the essayist in the Monthly Chronicle. In fact, our stage had reached its unsurpassed excellence in the exhibition of Shakspere's plays simultaneously with Lope de Vega's representations in Spain, and several years anterior to Calderon's birth. We are surprised, and justly so, at the numerous emanations of our immortal countryman's genius; but, in quantity, he fell immeasurably short of the two Spaniards, more especially of the elder, who published, it is affirmed, eighteen hundred dramas, all in verse. Twenty-four hours sufficed for the composition; at least, he thus rapidly threw off one hundred in an equal number of days, as he

asserts:

"Mas de ciento, en horas viente quatro, Passaron de la Musas al teatro."

The

And, though necessarily, of the greater part of such improvisations, we may truly say, "in vento et rapidâ scribere oportet aquâ," yet occasional gleams of genius and resplendent thought will be found to pierce the dense mass of the crude and hasty productions, from which the early French theatre, including Corneille and Molière, derived, while they refined, many of their plots and scenes. collective amount of Lope de Vega's printed verses has been estimated at the enormous sum of twenty-one millions three hundred thousand, equivalent to nearly one hundred (strictly, ninety-seven and a fraction) lines per hour, or 1120 each day, allowing twelve hours of daily unbroken composition for fifty years. "" Forse era ver', ma non pero credibile;" as Ariosto shrewdly observes of Angelica's boast after her adventure with Orlando,—

"Ch'el fior virginal cosi avea salvo,

Come selo portó dal matern' alvo." Pope, we know, was quite satisfied with producing fifty lines a day of his noble translation,-which only cost Lope de Vega about half an hour. Cicero (de Oratore lib. iii. 50.) mentions a Greek improvisatore, Antipater,

qui solitus est versus hexametros, aliosque variis modis atque numeris fundere versus ex tempore;" but the Spaniard committed his to the press.

Yours, &c. J. R.

tion in ed, by syncope of the vowel and change of d into t, (as burned, burn'd, burnt;) his second of the contractions of the formation in en (which he has omitted to specify before), by syncope of the vowel, as knowen, known. To these are added special anomalies, which are comprised in the second conjugation of B. Jonson.

Our four Grammarians do not concur in their division of the kinds of verb: Wallis and Butler restrict themselves to active and passive; Wallis introducing the latter with-ut loquuntur Latini. Gill and B. Jonson recognize a neuter. "In consideration of the times (says the latter), we term it (the verb) active or neuter; active, whose participle may be joined with the verb am, as I am loved, &c.; neuter, which cannot be so joined, as pertain, die, live." All proceed upon the supposition that, because we can render the Latin passive by the aid of auxiliaries or suppletives, we are therefore possessed of a passive verb.* And so also with the tenses and moods, though they differ among themselves, yet (with a salvo in favour of Wallis) they take the Latin for their guide.

All that Wallis teaches upon syntax is compressed into one chapter, "On the place of the nominative and accusative word, and other things pertain ing to the syntax of verbs."

To a late edition of his Grammar (we are inclined to think the last), Wallis appended a concise tract De Etymologia, in two sections, the first, on analogical formation, that is, the formation by regular inflexion; and the second, on more remote formations. The regular inflexion is effected by our terminations, and in his explanation of these Wallis very materially improves upon Gill. From a portion of this second section, containing a list of words having a sound in accordance with the thing signified, Dr. Johnson made rather copious quotations, introducing them as ingenious, but of more subtilty than solidity. The Doctor's Grammar, indeed, rests

* Verbam passivum formatur apud Anglo-Saxones per verbum substantivum et participium præteriti temporis. Hickes, Gram. A.-S. c. 9.

upon that of Wallis as its main support.t

Wallis produces some instances: 1st, from an abundant class of words, variously deflected from the same theme; 2nd, from the multitude of those which, through the French and Italian, we have received from the Latin; 3rd, of those immediately from the French.

There are many words (he further observes) common to ourselves with the Germans, which it is doubtful whether the ancient Teutonic received from the Latin or the Latin from the Teutonic, or both from one common source. But it is not to be doubted, he adds, that the Teutonic is more ancient than the Latin. Nor is it less certain that the Latin, which collected a great farrago of words, not only from the Greek, especially the Eolic, but from neighbouring tongues, (the Oscan, and others so long obsolete that scarcely any traces of them remain,) received no small number from the Teutonic, or German. Clear it is, too, (he continues) that the English, German, and other languages sprung from the Gothic, retain not a few derived from the Greek, which the Latin scarcely, if at all, acknowledges. The instances which he produces (about fifty in number) should have induced him to extend the doubt which he felt as to the source of the many Latin words possessed by us in common with the German, to those which the Gothic dialects possess in common with the Greeks.

It is obvious from this sketch that Wallis made some advance, not only in the rules of grammatical arrangement, but also in the general principles of language. He wrote his book, he tells us, in Latin, because he knew that many foreigners, especially theologians, who were desirous of becoming acquainted with the practic theology of the English divines, were