transfigure the world, he turned to purely practical affairs-first, rather unsuccessfully, to the building of the Suez Canal, and after that, in a perfectly businesslike spirit, to the amalgamation of several French railway companies into the great P.L.M. which is still flourishing. There was in him a quite American combination of grotesquely concrete crankiness with very serious businesslike capacities. The bulk of Miss Butler's book is occupied, however, not with Saint-Simon and Enfantin, but with their German followers, few of whom remained followers very long. The most interesting of them is, of course, Heine. The others are rather minor men, and the extraordinarily fascinating personality of Prince Pückler Müskau, one of the most subtly picturesque figures of the century, appears only in the background. These chapters, however, are very important for the understanding of modern Germany, and of the mental mechanism of nineteenth-century man in general. But the first fifty pages of the book are a delight and should not be missed. Mr. Routh's book is both interesting and disappointing. It is planned on a very vast scale, far vaster than that of Prof. Chadwick's The Heroic Age, of which it is to a certain degree a continuation. Mr. Routh tries to trace the evolution of the hero, and with him of heroic poetry from the Iliad, through the Odyssey, and Hesiod, to the Aeneid, and thence to the Teutonic epics, the Chansons de Gestes, and finally to Dante. He includes in his survey much that is not within the usual ken of the student of epic poetry. In particular, he gives much room to man's idea of the other world. One of the functions of the epic Hero is, in his view, to penetrate beyond the veil of death, and probe the mysteries of the future fate of the soul. So the Divine Comedy is represented as the direct continuation of Ulysses's and Aeneas's visits to hell, as well as of the Vision of St. Paul and of the Purgatory of St. Patrick. Dante is not only an epic poet, but an epic Hero, the true successor of Ulysses and Aeneas. “In the person of Dante," he says, medieval civilization again reached the epic ideal of human sufficiency through divine Power-the conquest of fear and the satisfaction of man's highest impulses." But, he adds, "It was for the last time." Is it quite certain? Does it not appear so only because Mr. Routh has stopped his survey there and not continued it further? It would be interesting to carry it on. For if it is possible to regard Dante's relation to Beatrice as essentially of the same type as Achilles's and Ulysses's to Pallas Athene, would it not be possible to extend similar interpreations to Blake, Swedenborg or Shelley? It does not appear that by giving the epic ideal so wide an interpretation, Mr. Routh has achieved any great advance in clarity and lucidity. His attempt to relate it to the whole religious history of western mankind from Homer to Dante is fruitful. But the work, it would seem, still remains to be done. Mr. Routh's exposition is not easy to follow. The accumulation of detail and a certain vagueness of expression make it difficult reading. The best part of the book is the beginning-the chapters on the Iliad. Here Mr. Routh has, it must be admitted, said some of the very best things on the Homeric spirit, on its materialism and its egoism, on the greatness and nobility of this egoism, as the greatest assertion of human dignity, on the essentially irreligious spirit of the Homeric age and on the "Homeric melancholy." Self-sufficiency of man, glory in his power, in his achievement and his possessions, intense enjoyment of life and an attitude to death as to a thing unmitigatedly horrid but inevitable, such is the spirit of the Iliad. Mr. Routh sometimes makes too great claims on his reader's emotion. Thus, for instance (Vol. II., p. 147), to prove the growing scepticism of the Middle Ages, he quotes the following text:" Wel filliche heo castem heom a-wei: ase pei heo nouzt wurth nere." Few readers will be able to judge for themselves how far this is cogent, and not all, I am afraid, will even at once recognise the quotation as plain English. In the first volume Mr. Routh tries to spell his Greek names in as Greek a manner as possible but without consistency. He has Thoukydides and Aigisthous but Plato and Hesiod, and the Queen of Troy is once Hecuba and once Hekabe. This rather spoils the impression. Palgrave, says Mr. Brimley Johnson in his preface to The Passionate Pilgrim," was a poet, above all a lover of poetry, who made poems of life." That he was a genuine lover of poetry The Golden Treasury is there to prove, but that he was a poet, or that he made poems of life, is open to doubt. He was a cultured mid-Victorian, who was deeply imbued with a definite kind of poetry, and who idealized his experience in terms of such poetry. In telling the uneventful and unintense story of his first and undivided love, he must needs give the English girl he loved the name of Désirée, and lay the scene of the story in a poetically conventionalized Tuscany. The book is certainly not poetry in any sense of the word, but it is all round and about poetry, and from beginning to end saturated with quotation and allusion to poetical literature. Its "poetical diction," which is quite as artificial as that of the eighteenth century, is remarkably successful in avoiding every suspicion of directness or spontaneity. It is typical of the effect on a sensitive " poetical," yet essentially tame and uncreative, mind of the attitude to poetry held by Keats and by a nineteenth-centuryfied Dante. The way Palgrave reflects it almost touches on parody, but in essence it is the attitude of the vast majority of poetry-loving English people of the second half of the nineteenth century, and still forms the background of the English attitude to poetry. The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye makes a refreshing contrast to The Passionate Pilgrim ; its verse is as honestly pedestrian as Palgrave's prose is derivatively poetical. It belongs to the province of the general rather than to that of the literary historian. It is a pity that the practice of writing on problems of current policy in verse has fallen into disuse. One would like to see Mr. Keynes, for instance, discussing the perils of a return to the gold standard in heroic couplets, or Mr. Garvin the necessity of a naval base at Singapore in rhyme royal, and whatever the critics may think, I have no doubt that their verse would be better reading than by far the greater part of contemporary poetry. Dr. Reed's researches into the earliest stages of English Renaissance drama connected with the circle of Sir Thomas More and with his brother-in-law, John Rastell, deal with a period whose productions have a very great historical interest, but little intrinsic literary charm. The Year's Studies in English, now in their sixth year, continue to be an invaluable and reliable guide over the whole field of English studies. 1925 seems to have been a particularly productive year. Among the books mentioned, the most notable is probably Mr. I. A. Richards's Principles of Literary Criticism. The writers of the book have gone far and wide in their survey, and among the books reviewed is a notable study on Carlyle in Swedish, by Knut Hagberg, while it appears that in Germany Kingsley is one " of the most keenly discussed personalities" in English literature. D. S. MIRSKY 328 ENGLISH GRAMMAR & LANGUAGE SOCIETY FOR PURE ENGLISH. TRACT No. 24. Notes on Related Clauses, POMONA, OR THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH. By BASIL DE SELINCOURT. LARS PORSENA, OR THE FUTURE OF SWEARING AND IMPROPER THE PLACE-NAMES OF BEDFORDSHIRE AND HUNTINGDONSHIRE. A DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION WITH AMERICAN VARIANTS. (In phonetic transcription). By H. S. PALMER, J. V. MARTIN and F. G. BLANDFORD. Heffer. 5s. ON THE STUDY OF WORDS AND ENGLISH PAST AND PRESENT. By RICHARD CHEVENIX TRENCH. Dent (Everyman Library). 2s. NYONE who tries to teach English to educated foreigners is constantly asked, r When should we use the relative that rather than who or which ?” The answer of the honest teacher is, "I really don't know," an evasion no longer excusable, now that Professor Jespersen has handled the problem with his usual insight into linguistic processes. As a foreigner, he is naturally interested in explaining what to natives is a matter of instinct, for bad as most present-day writing is, the who, which or that complex is not a serious factor in its badness. It is interesting to know that Dr. Johnson regarded the omission of the relatives (e.g., “the book I am reading ") as a “colloquial barbarism," that Macaulay so far agreed with Johnson as to omit only two relatives in the whole of his History, and that Tennyson carefully avoided the cacophonous which, even where ordinary usage would require it: From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood, Our wood that is dearer than all. Professor Scott's short glossary of American slang is compiled " for British readers who are struggling with the works of Sinclair Lewis and similar contributions to American literature." To some of the items the editor of the Tracts has added his comments, e.g., blurb is an "admirable word, indispensable." A cursory glance at the glossary reveals the fact that most of the words and phrases included are now familiar English. How could it be otherwise, seeing that the American film is the only intellectual resource of 90 per cent. of our population? One note, taken from the American Mercury (May 1926), asserts that the bootlegger was a familiar benefactor in Kentucky fifty years ago. His present popularity is an example of the local becoming national. Sir Frederick Pollock has something to say about Sir Richard Paget's predilection for the "voiced " sounds, and another correspondent enquires on a post-card : Haz id ever oggurred to Zir Ridgard Baged how very diring it would be do have nodhing bud voized zoundz in dhe zbogen language? Dry id! I mean, of gourze, diring do dhe vogal abbaraduz. Tract 25 is entirely occupied by two of Professor Jespersen's investigations, the first a short note on the construction " that long nose of his," the second a very long one on the type of sentence represented by " I insist upon Miss Sharp (? or Sharp's) appearing." The Professor here breaks a lance with Mr. Fowler, who has dealt with the same question under the heading " fused participle." A very curious illustration is quoted from the account of David Copperfield's first marriage, which contains twenty-three assorted examples of the construction in one paragraph. The conclusion of the whole matter is that l'un ou l'autre se dit, ou se disent. The To-day and To-Morrow series goes merrily on, and no wonder, for there are worse speculations than purveying at 2s. 6d. booklets containing ninety-four tiny pages of widely-spaced print. I cannot say that Mr. de Sélincourt's essay has left me with any clear idea of what, in his opinion, is the Future of English. He points out the obvious fact that "our literature shows symptoms of fatigue." He realizes that " societies to study and protect a language, however admirably inspired, have an ominous, classicizing trend " and that" the less we think about our language, the likelier we are to retain the qualities which have made it what it is," but he does not draw the conclusion, which seems to some observers of language inevitable, that the English of the Future will be a machine-made jargon, without character and without distinction, its drabness irradiated only by successive consignments of the newest American slang. "The best English always has a bloom on it," says Mr. de Sélincourt. There will not be much bloom on the ultimate standardized product. Two things have spoilt my enjoyment of Mr. Graves's cleverly-named treatise on Swearing, etc. One is that it has been submitted to the censorship of a legal authority, who has blue-pencilled anything that seemed likely to bring it "within the Act,' the second is his attempt to perpetuate the etymological wheeze that our national, nay imperial, expletive, which Samuel Butler once heard two New Zealand shepherds use seventy times in ten minutes' conversation, does not mean more than by our Lady"". Still, Mr. Graves does not go so far as another authority, who proclaims that the same word, accompanied by "hell," is "a corruption" of " By Our Lady, Hail!" Mr. Graves treats his subject in connection with taboo. The oath breaks the religious or tribal taboo, while foul language breaks what he calls the " lavatory" taboo. As taboos have practically vanished, both varieties of speech tend to lose the attraction that is associated with daring. Modern swearing, especially, lacks conviction and is hardly even decorative. No one now would seriously employ the equivalent of “ Le grand diable lui rompe le col et les deux jambes !", "Le diable l'emporte, corps et âme, tripes et boyaux!" or other such expressions which Palsgrave thought essential to the education of a Tudor princess. Mr. Graves hardly stresses sufficiently that fact, that, really good swearing was essentially aristocratic. Hotspur reproached his lady with swearing like a comfit-maker's wife, instead of rapping out a good mouth-filling oath, and, in the eighteenth century, which Mr. Graves regards as the golden age of swearing, Swift noted that a footman may swear, but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often, but can he swear with equal delicacy, propriety and judgment? The latest volume issued by the Place-Name Society maintains the high standard set by the Place-Names of Buckinghamshire. The region in question, which is practically the basin of the Ouse, is traversed by four of the great" Roman Roads," Akeman Street, Ermine Street, the Icknield Way and Watling Street. These names are discussed in the opening pages, which are perhaps the most interesting in the volume. One example of the light which these toponymical studies shed on history is furnished by the name Earith (Hunts). This is of identical origin with Erith (Kent) and probably means muddy landing-place (hythe). As the element ear is found in no literary records, the inference is that it may belong to archaic Anglo-Saxon and thus point to a settlement as early as the Kentish Erith, which is probably fifth century. The two counties have a few feudal names, such as Aspley Guise, Higham Gobion, Offord Cluny, etc., but, on the whole are noticeably deficient in those musical combinations which make a list of Dorset villages sound like a medieval chime. When the time comes for the Place-Name Society to tackle Cornwall, Mr. Dexter's preliminary spade-work will be of service. There is a fair amount of information in existence, but it is often out of date and much of it is scrappy and scattered. So it is a great convenience to have Mr. Dexter's summary, along with his preliminary just sufficient Cornish grammar for the interpretation of Cornish names." Despite his brevity, the author manages to give, in most of the more difficult cases, records of those medieval forms without which place-name study becomes a snare and a delusion. Mr. Dexter's concision and clearness of statement provoke the suspicion that he is an experienced teacher. He has written a fascinating little book, for dull would he be of soul who could pass by such names as Boskenna, Carminow, Gwendreath, Morwenstow, Rosemullion and Tintagel. Mr. Palmer, who is linguistic adviser to the Japanese Ministry of Education, has compiled this Dictionary of English Pronunciation with the assistance, for American pronunciation, of Mr. Martin. It has been seen through the press by Mr. Blandford. It should be of service to foreign students of English, at least to those who have enough ability and energy to acquire the preliminary knowledge of narrow phonetics. The Dictionary includes some 9,000 words, selected from "the sort of English which constitutes 95 to 100 per cent. of the great majority of English as used in connected speech or texts." No one ever did so much to arouse an intelligent interest in word-history as Archbishop Trench. His two little books, published in 1851 and 1855, may be truthfully described as epoch-making. After his death revised editions were regularly prepared by the late A. L. Mayhew. My own copy of The Study of Words (1910) is the 29th edition. I do not know what are the editions now reprinted in the Everyman Library, but they are quite out of date, and one must regret the publication in an unamended form of work which, admirable in its own time, is now so antiquated that every chapter requires considerable modification or correction. It is true that Mr. George Sampson's preface is of the nature of a general caveat against accepting all the contents of the two books as gospel, but how is the uncritical reader to separate the wheat from the chaff? The bottom of the world will not drop out because a few innocent souls acquire from these reprints the erroneous belief that bigot means a moustachioed Spaniard, that rossignol is an attempt at imitating the nightingale's note, that a husband is a "houseband" and that country-dance is a "corruption" of French contredanse, etc., etc.; but, after all, many people go to books for information, and in linguistic matters they have the right to expect that information to represent the present state of knowledge. ERNEST WEEKLEY |