The reader of poetry, too, must perhaps be born with the critical facalty: "Both must alike from heaven derive their light, These born to judge, as well as those to write." But cultivation is as necessary for the one as for the other. "An accurate taste in poetry," says Sir Joshua Reynolds, "and in all the other arts, is an acquired talent, which can only be produced by thought and a long-continued intercourse with the best models of composition." Who of us has not looked back with wondering pity at some of the favorite poems of our early days? Emerson sums it up: "What we once admired as poetry has since come to be a sound of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown." There is another part of a poet's work to which, however, he is not necessarily called, which demands especial scholarship in addition to poetic art, namely, translating. It is not enough that he should thoroughly understand the language of his author-it is not enough to be a master of his own tongue-though both of these are pre-essential, but he must thoroughly comprehend the spirit and age of the original and be in some sort the poet he is to translate. How many generations of men who could not read a line of Homer have enjoyed Pope's translation? True, it is full of errors and faults of carelessness, but it is so melodious and the spirit of the age is so well sustained in it that we can say with Christopher North, "If it be not Homer we must be thankful for another Iliad." Upon the whole, it may be said, perhaps, that no poet has excelled Dryden as a translator. Nothing can be more perfect than his presentation of the spirit and feeling of the original in his version of the twenty-ninth ode of Horace, of which I will venture to quote one stanza : "Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call to-day his own; He who, secure within, can say, To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day. Be fair or foul, or rain or shine, The joys I have possessed in spite of fate are mine. Not heaven itself upon the past has power; But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour." There has been much debate as to when poetry took its origin. We know there were poets before Hesiod and Homer, and it has been asserted that pastoral poetry is as old as the human race. Strabo declares that poetry was the original language of men, and that prose is only an imitation. If this curious theory be correct, we should be obliged to look more pityingly upon the herd of versifiers, believing that their unhappy condition is in reality a case of atavism. The early history of most nations was chiefly recorded in poetry; that of the Hindoos entirely so. The Mahabarata is an epic history, complete and compendious. The poet did not falsify history, but presented it by peculiar methods belonging to his art. When Shakespeare wrote his historical plays he gave to generations of readers a vivid picture of English history which they never would have learnt so thoroughly or impressively from ordinary writers. It cannot be questioned that poetry has the advantage over prose of condensation of thought and of attractiveness of sound, and from these qualities it is more readily stored up in the memory. "Well-sounding verses is the charm we use We learn that sound as well as sense persuades.”* I have endeavored in this rapid and necessarily imperfect sketch of a very copious subject to describe the qualities which critics and poets concur in attributing to the true poet. I have endeavored to show that the greatest poets are those who have loved truth and wisdom above all things; who have striven valiantly after all attainable knowledge;. have deeply studied the human mind and its passions; have observed nature with close scrutiny; have mastered to the extent of their opportunities the treasures of poetry and prose in their own and other tongues, and have diligently sought to perfect their art in melody and method. When to the divine birthright some share, be it greater or less, of these qualities which are attainable only by labor is added, are we not justified in saying that the poet was born and was made? Or, in conclusion, it may be summed up in Aristotle's threefold division of poetry in relation to its progress: Nature without art; art begun; art completed. * Waller. A KACHGAR-CHINESE MENU.-The menu of a dinner given M. Blanc, the French explorer, by the Chinese governor of Kackgar (on the borders of Siberia) was as follows: "Shark fins; holothuries (jelly-fish?) stuffed with marrow; eggs stuffed with perfumed jelly; bamboo roots pickled in palm oil (to be eaten with fish-spawn at the end of the repast); duck à la mode, Yun-nam and forced meat-balls of duck livers; rat tails preserved in sugar; comfits of leeches (blood suckers); salamanders (a species of lizard), preserved and stuffed." A menu such as this, absolutely authentic, presents a style of eccentricity to satiate the most ardent haters of the common and conventional. Notwithstanding the fantasticalness of it and the strangeness of the dishes composing it, the dinner was not at all uneatable; the duck and the leeches were simply delicious, but the bamboo roots were more than detestable.-Revue, Société de Géographie de Tours (Dec., 1892). J. N. B. HEWITT. SLAVERY IN EASTERN AFRICA.-It is learned from Aden (Revue, Société de Géographie de Tours, Dec., 1892) that there is a recrudescence of slavery. Daily more numerous caravans arrive, bringing human cargoes. The slaves come chiefly from the Congo, Monboutou, Ounyoro, Tourkana, Ougogo, and even from Lobemba. The Arabs of the Soudan have combined for these razzias in a common effort, determined to it in consequence of the rates attained by slavery in Egyptian Soudan, Arabia, and in Persia-1,200 francs per head for men between 25 and 30 years of age, and 3,000 francs per head for girls between 14 and 20 years of age. Caravans pass to Witu without any difficulty, where the English have been able to obtain peace only by the maintenance of an excessive tolerance of the commerce in slaves, the sole cause of revolt. The Arab "boutres" load equally at Opia, Gardafui, Zeilah, Djibouti, Massoua, and Souakim. At the end of the month three caravans passed Tokar, and, according to the natives, the forced marches and the secret embarkments have caused a dead loss to the traders of 70 per cent. Accordingly they are furious and have accepted in exchange only improved guns, intended to fight against Europeans. J. N. B. HEWITT. SIMPLIFIED SPELLING. A symposium on the question "Is simplified spelling feasible as proposed by the English and American Philological Societies? "* OPENING ADDRESS. BY F. A. MARCH, PROFESSOR IN LAFAYETTE COLlege, Chairman of the Committee on English Spelling of the American Philological Association. The movement for the reform of English spelling is a product of the spirit of the age-a true birth of time, as Bacon likes to call his filosofy. We ar for reforming everything that can help us in the discovery of truth and the improvement of man's estate. Givn a spoken language, the easy communication of it by writing and printing is a problem in labor-saving machinery. It is doutful whether the welfare of the race is as much promoted by any invention of the century, whether the steam engin or the telegraf contributes as much to the progress of the peple as would the invention and introduction of a good system of spelling our language. The difference between a family who can read and one who cannot is vastly more important than the difference between a family that uzes railroads and telegrafs and one that does not. It is currently stated by students of language that English words as commonly speld contain a large proportion of letters which ar superfluous and misleading, and which greatly increase the cost of writing and printing. It is found that the removal of silent e's would save 4 per cent. of all the letters on a common printed page; that the removal of one consonant of each pair of duplicated consonants would save 1.6 per cent. In the New Testament, printed in fonetic types in 1849 by A. J. Ellis, one hundred letters and spaces ar represented by eighty-three. As far as printing and paper ar concernd, a six-dollar book would be thus reduced to five dol * The spelling used in each paper is that preferred by its author. The opening address is in the spelling recommended by the philological societies. lars. The Encyclopædia Britannica would make twenty volumes insted of twenty-four, and cost twenty-four dollars less. One-sixth would be saved in all writing. Think of the manuscripts of books and periodicals, the boundless expanses of the daily papers, the records of courts, deeds, wils, and other legal documents, the sermons of preachers, the books of business men, and correspondence of all sorts. More than four billions of writn communications in English pass thru the mails in a year; and one-sixth of all this is superfluous and misleading. It is also currently stated by leading educators that the irregular spelling of the English language causes a loss of two years of the scool time of each child, and is a main cause of the alarming illiteracy of our peple; that it involvs an expense of many millions of dollars annually for teachers, and that it is an obstacl in many other ways to the progress of education among those speaking the English language, and to the spred of the language among other nations. The Hon. J. H. Gladstone has carefully collected the statistics of English scools, and he finds that the average time allotted to spelling, reading, and dictation is 32.2 per cent. of the time devoted to secular instruction. An average English child spending eight years in scool spends 2,320 scool hours in these exercises. He concludes that 720 hours of spelling lessons might certainly be dispenst with if our spelling wer simplified. And, further, upon comparing the scools of England with those of Italy, Germany, and other cuntries, he is convinced that "if English orthografy represented English pronunciation as closely as the Italian does, at least half the time and expense of teaching to read and spel would be saved. This may be taken as 1,200 hours of a lifetime, and as more than half a million of money [$2,500,000] per annum for England and Wales alone. .. In the elementary scools of Italy, tho the aggregate time of scooling is shorter, the children lern much about the laws of helth and domestic and social economy. In Germany they acquire considerabl knowledge of literature and science, and in Holland they take up foren languages. It is lamentabl how small a proportion of our scolars ever advance beyond the mere rudiments of lerning a circumstance the more to be regretted as they wil hav to compete with those foren workmen whose erly education was not weighted with an absurd and antiquated orthografy.” The hindrance which our spelling offers to the spred of our language and thought among other nations, the importance of amended. |