Page images
PDF
EPUB

Thus a Texan once went to a theatre especially to witness the last combat and glorious death of a popular naval hero. Unfortunately, the Texan fell asleep, and did not wake until the curtain had fallen on the final tableau. He begged a neighbor to describe to him the spirit-stirring scene. "Wall," was the answer, "he fired off three pistols, wrapped himself in the American flag, and died like a son of a " mother of puppies. Another roving Texan was once prevailed upon to go to meeting, and was asked by a comrad what he thought of the spiritual exercises of the minister. "Wall," said he, "he worn't so great in preachin', but he prayed like a son of a " lady dog. It is a conjecture of our own that this gift may have been developed by the company of a panther in a pig-pen. We shall not describe how the parson blundered into danger, nor how the hunter extricated him. Those who are induced by this notice to read the book will thank us for exciting their curiosity.

But in our amusement at particular scenes we had almost forgotten to notice that the book we have been praising contains a story with love-making, and tragic incidents, and a happy ending. Indeed, we should prefer, if possible, to forget this portion of the book altogether. It is something like a personal injury that we feel on seeing Ingun Mike made to fall in love. The Long Rifle did service in many ways to the novelist who created him, but he was never condemned to make so very poor a figure before a lady as does this modern reproduction of the sagacious and dreaded Hawk-eye. The Achilles of Homer does not shock us more in the pages of Racine than would the white comrad of the Mohican chiefs making humble and hopeless suit to a young lady fresh from a genteel school. However, in the days of which Cooper wrote, young ladies did not

often go from school in the Old States to homes on the border land of civilization, and therefore the hearts of frontiersmen may have been safer, and their views of existence more philosophical, than they can now be. If an Ingun Mike chances to exist in the nineteenth century, he must accept the conditions of existence, of which liability to the tender passion appears to be one everywhere. The young lady who does the mischief is the daughter of a frontier-settler, named Jackson. The only overt act of courtship committed by Mike is to shoot a tiger-cat, of which animal Miss Jackson wishes to possess a skin. The attempt at explanation which accompanies the gift is severely snubbed. Then Jackson's farm is attacked by Indians, and the family, under Mike's guidance, make for the nearest military post. But Jackson is killed as they descend the river, and Mike conducts the orphan daughter to a place of safety. Thence she goes to dwell with her father's brother, who is lighthouse keeper on a sand-bank on the coast, and there the uncle and niece are besieged by Tiger Tail and a band of eight warriors. The old man is killed, and the girl is blockaded in the light-tower, when, of course, Mike comes to her relief. Need we say that the crack of his single rifle is the knell of fate to the bloodthirsty foe? Need we tell how, in three years, Miss Jackson finds out that she loves her preserver, and how she returns to affluence and civilized society, and then hints to the respectful and devoted Mike that the passion he has striven to subdue is reciprocated, and that she is prepared for the usual consequences? We close the book with a mournful apprehension that, if there be a miserable dog on earth, it must be Injun Mike after six months' experience of civilization and connubial felicity.

BEE SUPERSTITION.-A strange mode of alluring bees, when the usual way of dressing cottagers' hives fails, was related to me lately by an old farmer, who says he saw it practised fifty years ago at Churcham, near Gloucester:

pint of beans, which they then caused a sow to devour from the hive; and deponent stated that after such a process the swarm at once took to icately fastidious are bees as to strong or unthe hive. Now, when we consider how delseemly odors, the puzzling point is, does this When a swarm was to be hived, the Church-custom, if fact, rest upon any natural or recogam bec-masters, it appears, did not moisten the in- nizable principle, or is it, like many other bee cusside of the hive with honey or sugar and water, toms, the relic of an effete superstitious usage? etc., but threw into the inverted hive about a-Notes and Queries.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

POETRY.-Departure of the Prince of Wales, 578. Solitary Life, 578. The Future of the Fashions, 628.

SHORT ARTICLES.-Coverdale's Bible, 603. Proverbial Sayings, 603. The Maronites and the Druses, 609. Queen Victoria and President Buchanan, 614. Mind and Matter, 614. Poisoned Harpoons, 614, 625. Yankees, 618. Swimming, 618. Original Letter of George Fox, 622.* Hot-Air Bath, 625. Ride or Drive, 628. Dr. Wright of Norwich, 628. Temples: Churches, why so called, 630. Thomas Fuller, M.D., 630. The word "ventilate," 634. Four-bladed Clover, 634. Baptismal Names, 640. Urchin, 640. Henpecked, 640.

NEW BOOKS.

JACK HOPETON; or The Adventures of a Georgian. By Wm. M. Turner, of Putnam Co., Georgia. Derby and Jackson, New York.

THE SUNNY SOUTH; or the Southerner at Home, embracing Five Years Experience of a Northern Governess in the Land of the Sugar and the Cotton. Edited by Professor J. H. Ingraham, of Mississippi. G. G. Evans, Philadelphia.

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

LITTELL, SON, & CO., BOSTON.

For Six Dollars a year, in advance, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded free of postage.

Complete sets of the First Series, in thirty-six volumes, and of the Second Series, in twenty volumes, handsomely bound, packed in neat boxes, and delivered in all the principal cities, free of expense of freight. are for sale at two dollars a volume.

ANY VOLUME may be had separately, at two dollars, bound, or a dollar and a half in numbers.

ANY NUMBER may be had for 13 cents; and it is well worth while for subscribers or purchasers to complete any broken volumes they may have, and thus greatly enhance their value.

ODE ON THE DEPARTURE OF THE

PRINCE OF WALES.

(If the Laureate wont do his work, Punch must.)

AUSPICIOUS blow, ye gales,
And swell the royal sails

That waft the Prince of Wales
In a vessel of the line,
Away to Canada
Across the ocean brine;

As the son of his mamma,
His weather should be fine.

What transports the Canadians will evince
When they behold our youthful prince!
Not ours alone, but also theirs,
Each colony with England shares
In Protestant Sophia's heirs.

How all the bells will ring, the cannons roar !
And they who never saw a prince before,

Oh, wont they feast him and caress him!
Waylay him, and address him,
His royal highness-bless him!-
Their demonstrations possibly may bore.

They'll make, no doubt, a greater fuss,
Than what is usually made by us

In some of our remoter parts,
Where country corporation sce,
For the first time, her majesty,-

(May she be destined long to reign!) When by her parliament set free,

She travels by a stopping train,

Britannia's trump, the queen of hearts.
But still more pressing ceremony waits
The prince in the United States;

What mobs will his hotel beset,
A sight of him in hopes to get!

What multitudes demand
To shake him by the hand!

Hosts of reporters will his footsteps dog,
(As Baron Renfrew though he goes incog.),
Take down his every word,

Describe his mouth and nose,
And eyes, and hair, and clothes,
With a minuteness quite absurd.

Ye free and easy citizens, be not rude,
Disturb not our young prince's rest;
Upon his morning toilet don't intrude:
Wait till he's drest.

Oh! will that Yankee not be blest

[blocks in formation]

She had her griefs,-but why recount them here?
The heart-sick loneness, the on-looking fear,
The days of desolation dark and drear,—

To whom the son of England's queen shall say Since every agony left peace behind,

"Out of the way?"

[merged small][ocr errors]

And healing came on every stormy wind,
And with pure brightness every cloud was lined,

[blocks in formation]

From The Quarterly Review.

to the founder of historical criticism, and men

Joseph Justus Scaliger. Von Jacob Ber- have become aware of the gulf which divides nays. Berlin, Herz, 1855.

FROM the space which Joseph Scaliger once filled in the world-at least in the world of books-it might have been, thought that he would have found many biographers. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries every writer of any figure had his Boswell. Joseph Scaliger wrote the Life of his father Julius Cæsar. But Joseph himself is an exception. Professor Bernays, at the distance of two hundred and fifty years, is the first person who has undertaken to give any complete account of perhaps the most extraordinary man who has ever devoted his life to letters.

[ocr errors]

the emendatory critics, the "syllabarum aucupes," the herd of grammarians and antiquaries, from the master-mind of Joseph Scaliger. What, when compared with him," cries Niebuhr, "is the book-learned Salmasius? Scaliger stood on the summit of universal solid philological learning, in a degree that none have reached since ; so high in every branch of knowledge, that from the resources of his own mind he could comprehend, apply, and decide on, whatever came in his way.'

[ocr errors]

Professor Bernays, himself a rare union of comprehensive intellect with intimate familiarity with the details of the literary history of the time, has at last restored the younger Scaliger to his rightful throne. The powerful delineation of his philological labors presented by Dr. Bernays, throws quite a new light on the origin of historical science in modern Europe. In laying before our readers some notices of the personal life of the archcritic, we must beg to refer them to the volume of the Breslau professor for a strictly scientific survey of his philological and critical performances.

This remarkable silence is itself not without a cause. Scaliger's great works in historical criticism had outstripped any power of appreciation which the succeeding age possessed. It was not that his name was forgotten at his death; on the contrary, his fame maintained itself at least during all the first period of splendor of the Leyden school, by whom reverence for Scaliger was exalted into a culte. But this veneration was inspired by Scaliger's secondary labors-by his Joseph Juste de L'Escale was born at Agen, gift of emendatory criticism, and his skill in then in the province of Guienne, 4-5 August, the Greek language. His merit came to 1540. Joseph was the tenth of fifteen chilconsist, with these worthy commentators, in dren, whom his father had by his marriage, his having given good editions of two or three at the age of 46, with Andiette de Roques Greek authors, and, with the schoolmasters, Lobesac, æt. 16. De L'Escale is only the in his facility in writing verses. But when French form of Della Scala, the title of the it was found that the Variorum Classics were princely house of Verona, who were disvastly better edited, and that his Greek lam- possessed by the Venetians. From a cadetbics contained metrical errors, his credit was branch of this family Jules-Cesar, the fashaken. In the philosophical eighteenth ther of Joseph, believed himself descended. century, when the tables were turned upon When the Jesuits afterwards got the ear of classical learning, when, from having en- literary Europe, they spent a vast amount grossed all the honors of the republic of let- of lying and forgery in disproving this deters, the classics were voted obsolete, or scent, and at last succeeded in persuading the only endurable in a "modern dress," Scali- world of their story. The world was bored ger became a synonyme for a pedant. When enough with Joseph in his capacity of " PrinChurchill, foaming at the mouth, would make ceps literarum:" it could not put up with his teeth meet in Warburton's flesh, he can having to acknowledge him a prince by blood do no worse than compare him to "the Scal- besides. The Jesuit onslaught on Scaliger igers, the learned pedants of the sixteenth for we shall use henceforth the Latinized century." Only a scholar of comprehensive form of the name-is an important feature knowledge, here and there one, such as in his life, and will have to be explained preWesseling or Ruhnken, was capable of meas-sently.

uring the stride of Scaliger. Gradually, and At eleven years of age Joseph was sent to recently, the revival of the study of the an- a Latin School at Bordeaux, a school where cient world in Germany has drawn attention his elder brother Sylvius had been before

the good, rejected the bad. He has escaped the faults of his father's style; the ambitious strain which in Julius' Latinity fatigues the attention. The last thing which a youthful taste learns is the might of simplicity. The more artificial the model, the more captivating the tyro. We should remember this if we would do justice to the originality and native idiom which distinguishes Joseph's style, equally free from the platitudes of Ciceronianism, and the hopeless involutions of contemporary French Latin.

him, and whither his two younger brothers | the first to correct. To his own keen taste we accompanied him. A fondness for bringing must attribute it, that Joseph while he imbibed celebrated names into contact has made biographers say that George Buchanan was one of his masters. But Buchanan had quitted Bordeaux, where he had been a master at the Gymnase, or High School, in 1544; and at the time that Scaliger went to school there,—not to the High School, but one for younger boys, kept by Simon Beaupré, of Orleans, Buchanan was a prisoner of the Inquisition in Portugal. A plague-or rather the plague of 1554-breaking out at Bordeaux, the boys were sent home. Joseph never returned to school; nor did he get any regular instruction at home. But he enjoyed what was more useful to him than any schooling could have been-daily intercourse with his father. Julius Scaliger, though advanced in the seventies, and broken by rheumatic gout, still retained much of the vigor of his very extraordinary mind. He soothed his declining years with writing Latin verses. Scarce a day passed but Joseph was called upon to write to his dictation eighty, or one hundred, on one occasion two hundred lines. The prosody and grammar of these effusions are far from exemplary, but there is a command of the resources of the Latin vocabulary which we may seek in vain in the thinner diction of the best modern Latinists. Besides thus acting as his amanuensis, he was required by his father to produce daily a short declamation in Latin prose, turning on any story or matter of fact he chose to select. In other respects he was left to himself, and we do not hear of his yet attempting any course of classical reading. But the daily practice of speaking and writing a language, under the control of one who knows it throughly, is worth more to a boy than any amount of reading. We may fairly ascribe to this exercise the athletic Latin prose which appears already fully matured in Joseph's earliest production, the "Conjectanea in Varronem," and that firm grasp of the principles of versification which distinguished him from all the scholars of his time. Bentley's judgment, "nemo in arte metrica Scaligero peritior," holds good, without exception, of all scholars before and after Scaliger till Bentley himself. The praise is relative; for no one knew better than Bentley that Scaliger was not free from various erroneous opinions on scansion, which Bentley himself was

More important, however, than the technical tuition, such as it was, was the domestic intercourse he enjoyed as his father's constant companion during the last four years of his life. To this we may trace his disposition for real knowledge, and the observation of nature. His subsequent superiority over other scholars lay not merely in his being a better scholar, but in his being something more than a scholar. The knowledge of the other philologians, however acute or book-learned, is bounded by their books. They know what the ancients said on any matter, but have seldom any practical knowledge of their own. Scaliger, on the contrary, never loses sight of the actual world. This power in him is perhaps a natural gift; nothing more in short, than vigor of understanding. Its habitual direction and employment was an impulse communicated by the father. Intimately connected with this were the pains taken by Julius to impress upon all his children the habit of truthfulness. "We never went before him," says Joseph, "but he bid us 'Never tell a lie.'" In Joseph truth became less a moral habit and a rule of conduct than the very law of his intellect. Its manifestations explain his personal history as well as his books. He found his vocation in philology in the single-eyed endeavor to carry the real and the true into regions in which arbitrary caprice, fancy, tradition, and prejudice, had hitherto passed unquestioned. His straightforwardness in speaking, both of men and things, brought upon him no little of that personal malignity of which he afterwards became, in such a peculiar way, the object. Here, again, the young man's simple nature assimilated the good, and threw off the unwholesome elements of the nourishment pre

« PreviousContinue »