FOR APRIL, 1814.

rable fidelity, seem hitherto to have met with no counterpart in the literature of any country. The word epigram (properly an inscription) has been almost exclusively applied in the latin, as well as in the living languages, to that species of trifle, generally compressed within the space of a few distichs, the beauty of which consisted in some happy play of words, or conceit of thought. Very different was the epigram of he Greeks: without any of the aids by which the greater poets of antiquity embellished their works, with no development of character, no condensation of descriptive images, no agreeable fictions recommended to the imagination by what is at least the most poetical of all the systems of theology, they have contrived to infuse into their brief composi tions a charm at once sober and pleasing. Most of the commonplaces of poetry may be traced to the anthology, and as the acVOL. III. New Series.

34

Collections from the Greek Anthology, and from the Pastoral, Elegiac, and Dramatic Poets of Greece. By the Rev. R. Bland and others. 8vo. pp. 525.

[From the Quarterly Review.]

THE greater part of those small poems, which, though often arbitrarily abridged and mutilated by the taste or whim of their editors, have, on the whole, been transmitted from the hands of Polemo and Meleager to those of Brunck and Jacobs, with tolerable fidelity, seem hitherto to have met with no counterpart in the literature of any country. The word epigram (properly an inscription) has been almost exclusively applied in the latin, as well as in the living languages, to that species of trifle, generally compressed within the space of a few distichs, the beauty of which consisted in some happy play of words, or conceit of thought. Very different was the epigram of he Greeks: without any of the aids by which the greater poets of antiquity embellished their works, with no development of character, no condensation of descriptive images, no agreeable fictions recommended to the imagination by what is at least the most poetical of all the systems of theology, they have contrived to infuse into their brief compositions a charm at once sober and pleasing. Most of the cominonplaces of poetry may be traced to the anthology, and as the acVOL. III. New Series.

34