The learned expounder, in his notes, says that Landino, and some of his predecessors too, understood it so; and that their interpretation has been followed by almost all the modern commentators, except Daniello and Biagioli. Mr. Cary must be as contented as he can under his error, seeing he shares it with such company, and not envy too much the illumination of those who have discovered it to be evident, that Dante asks Virgil to lead him so that he might see the gate of Paradise, after the Roman poet had just assured him that it was utterly impossible for him to take him thither, -For that Almighty king Who reigns above, a rebel to his law Adjudges me; and therefore hath decreed That to his city none through me should come. Cary's Trans. 10. Canto 2. V. 9. Mr. Cary is a little inaccurate in translating nobilitate, "eminent endowments." For thus he strictly limits the signification of nobility to one, and indeed its higher sense; whereas it was probably intended to convey some, though a secondary reference to the birthrights of its author at the same time. It is very forbearing in the expounder not to press this objection; not to show by what secondary refer ence Dante intended to allude to his right by birth of having an excellent memory. He would thus have clearly proved the existence of those properties which he ascribes to Dante, in his comment on this line; "the pride of elevated birth, and the minuteness of a profound genealogist." 11. V. 93. That fierce fire. would be clearer. Yon Esto incendio is the original. 12. V. 94. Donna gentil is made to mean Divine Mercy, without a notion of her having been a real lady. Yet without this, it were hard to enter into the spirit of the author. Who can well express what he does not feel? The expounder here again makes an objection to Mr. Cary's translation in one part of his book, which he is so kind as to answer in another. In his comment on this very line, he says, "Whether this lady be a personification of Divine Charity, as is said, I cannot exactly aver; nor is it much to our purpose to inquire." Though the learned gentleman's feelings, however, may be dispensed with, yet Mr. Cary ought to have paid more attention to a real lady, whom it seems the expounder has discovered, from a manuscript in Florence, to be no less a personage than Dante's Gentucca. Of this real lady, there has been a most unpardonable neglect, inasmuch as no comment, with which the learned genti man is acquainted, either in writing, or in print, has ever deigned to say a syllable on the subject, except this same manuscript in the Riccardi Library. (P. 141.) Mr. Cary and his predecessors would, of course, all make the same apology, that they did not know of this mention of the lady, and that they never dreamed of her being in Paradise, as she was at this time living on earth. 13. V. 108. It is an unreasonable deficiency not to have marked the true signification of the allegorical images, "death" and " torrent" (fiumania); for it is not so obvious that every reader may discover it. This observation were not made, had Mr. Cary no notes: but he has many that are mere superfluities, when compared with the necessary explanation of the text. How, Mr. Cary will ask, could he have known the true signification before the learned gentleman had disclosed it to the world, in the following passage of his Comment ? The ever-flowing flood that never finds an ocean to arrest it, and which is evidently another symbol for that called a forest, vale, or wilderness, in canto the first (the ills besetting a politician), is only the torrent of iniquity, so often introduced in the Bible: : as "the wicked came upon me like a wide breaking in of waters; in the desolation they rolled themselves upon me. Then the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had gone over our soul, the proud waters had gone over our soul." Perhaps Mr. Cary will say for himself, that though he reads the Psalms of David regularly at church, yet being no great politician himself, he did not perceive that David here meant the "ills besetting a politician;" and as little, that Dante, whom he reads sometimes at home, had any such allusion. What want of discernment! But who can express what he does not feel? maids," Divine Mercy, Lucia, and Bea14. V. 124. Mr. Cary calls the three trice," an odd jumble of fact and allegory. In all this he seems not quite to have understood his original. What says our expositor himself of these three real ladies? "M. Biagioli, in his late Comment, calls the passage about the three ladies the most obscure and difficult of any throughout the whole Divina Commedia; and although I am not in this exactly of his opinion, yet it is certain that the various allegorical subtilties introduced by those, who pretend to expound it, suffice to confuse any head." Probably Mr. Cary will urge that he does not reckon his head at any time a very clear one, that he had a particular objection to confusing it still more, and was therefore very shy of these three real ladies. Shilly Shally! faint-hearted man! who would not confuse his head in such a cause? Thou art worse than Abraham Slender, when he was a-wooing the fair Ann Page. "Will't please your worship to come in, Sir? Sl. No, I thank you, forsooth heartily; I am very well." Not so the learned gentleman. He ventures on boldly, and is, in imitation of Longinus himself," the great confusion he describes." I trust, (says he,) I have been able to divest it of all obscurity. I suppose there is no man of Dante's time of life - without some dear deceased friends, who it is soothing to think are employed in watching over him from the lofty regions of light and happiness, whither their spirits are gone. We all, I hope, share such a pleasing though melancholy persuasion. Dante then, in expressing it, did nothing but what was natural; and, if there is any singularity in his doing so, it is only that he is singularly true to nature. It was an encomium on his own virtue as well as theirs, to represent the three females whom he had admired on earth, as become three saints in Paradise. (P. 153.) Now the expounder had himself observed (p. 142) "that in Purgatory we shall find Gentucca," (whom he makes one of these three ladies) "spoken of as on earth, and that here she is represented as already in Paradise." "There is only one way," he adds, " of reconciling these things, -conjecturing that the author here ventures on her apotheosis before her death." O! exquisite feeling of Dante for his deceased friends, who could imagine a young lady still living, and tenderly beloved by him, to be dead and buried, and soothe himself with thinking that she was watching over him in that lofty region of light and happiness whither her spirit was gone!" But, says our ingenious commentator, "this is highly poetic, because highly tender, natural, and sublime. There is nothing in this hard to understand; and this, and no more than this, is in the text." There is something so happy in the critic's illusion, that we really feel some pain in wakening him out of it. But perhaps it will continue, and we shall not hear the mournful reproach of "Pol, me occidistis amici." If so, who will refuse hereafter to confuse his head for three real ladies? 15. V. 142. Mr. Cary makes cammino alto e silvestro, "deep and woody way." It should be steep, etc. per celsa cacumina, as Aquino translates; for Dante's descending did not prevent the path from being steep. Landino's note is "Entrai per lo camino alto cioe profundo: come diciamo alto mare ed alto fiume." The expounder is too deep for us if he does not see that the meaning of steep is included in this word, as the less is in the greater. 16. Canto 3. V. 32. Error instead of horror is the usual reading; but I am inclined to adopt the latter without reserve, not because it seems to me the most poetical and intelligible, and much less, because it is authorized by Velutello and Lombardi, (for these would be no authorities when opposed to the academy) as cited by Mr. Cary, but on what I take to be the very best possible authority-that of Boccaccio. Mr. Cary must answer for himself in his note. Instead of "error," Vellutello's edition of 1544, has "orror," remarked also by Landino, in his notes. So much mistaken is the collater of the Monte Casino manuscript, in calling it "lezione da niuno notata," a reading which no one has observed." Mr. Cary will, perhaps, insist that the expounder's head still remains so confused after his encounter with the three real ladies, that he mistakes Lombardi for Landino, though there are nearly three hundred years between them, and an English word for an Italian one; "horror" for "orror." (The remainder of this Review in our next.) LETTERS TO A YOUNG MAN WHOSE EDUCATION HAS BY THE AUTHOR OF THE CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. On Languages. MY DEAR SIR,-In my three following letters I am to consider, 1st. Languages; 2d. Logic; Arts of Memory; not as parts of knowledge sought or valued on their own account, but simply as the most general amongst the means and instruments of the student, estimated therefore with a reference to the number and importance of the ends which they further, and fairly to be presumed in all schemes of self-improvement liberally planned. In this letter I will speak of languages; my thoughts, and a twenty years' experience as a student, having furnished me with some hints that may be useful in determining your choice, where choice is at first sight so difficult, and the evils of an erroneous choice to great. On this Babel of an earth which you and I inhabit, there are said to be about three thousand languages and jargons. Of nearly five hundred, you will find a specimen in the Mithridates of Adelung, and in some other German works of more moderate bulk.* The final purposes of this vast engine for separating nations, it is not difficult in part to perceive; and it is presumable that these purposes have been nearly fulfilled; since there can be little doubt that within the next two centuries, all the barbarous languages of the earth (i. e. those without a literature) will be one after one strangled and exterminated by four European languages, viz. the English, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Russian. Central Africa, and that only, can resist the momentum of civilization for a longer period. Now, languages are sometimes studied, not as a key to so many bodies of literature, but as an object per se; for example, by Sir W. Jones, Dr. Leyden, &c. and where the researches are conducted with the enthusiasm and the sagacity of the late extraordinary Professor of Oriental languages in Edinburgh, Dr. Alexander Murray, it is impossible to withhold one's admiration: he had a theory, and distinct purposes, which shed light upon his paths that are else "as dark as Erebus." Such labors conducted in such a spirit must be important, if the eldest records of the human race be important; for the affinities of language furnish the main clue for ascending, through the labyrinths of nations,-to their earliest origins and connexions. To a professed linguist, therefore, the natural advice would be-examine the structure of as many languages as possible: gather as many thousand specimens as possible into your hortus siccus; beginning with the eldest forms of the Teutonic, viz. the Visigothic and the Icelandic, for which the aids rendered by modern learning are immense.-To a professed philologist, I say, the natural advice would be this. But to you, who have no such purposes, and whom I suppose to wish for languages simply as avenues to literature not otherwise accessible, I will frankly say-start from this principle-that the act of learning a language is in itself an evil; and so frame your selection of languages, that the largest possible body of literature available for your purposes shall be laid open to you at the least possible price of time and mental energy squandered in this direction. I say this with some earnestness. For I will not conceal from you, that one of the habits most unfavourable to the growth and sincere culture of the intellect in our * Especially one, whose title I forget, by Vater, the editor and completer of the Mithridates, after Adelung's death. By the way, for the sake of the merely English reader it may be well to mention that the Mithridates is so called, with an allusion to the great king of that name contemporary with Sylla, Lucullus, &c. of whom the tradition was that, in an immense and polyglott army composed from a great variety of nations, he could talk to every soldier in his own language. Z MARCH, 1823. day is the facility with which men surrender themselves to the barren and ungenial labour of language learning. Unless balanced by studies that give more exercise, more excite ment, and more aliment to the faculties, I am convinced, by all I have ob served, that this practice is the dry rot of the human mind. How should "it be otherwise? The act of learning a science is good, not only for the knowledge which results, but for the exercise which attends it: the energies which the learner is obliged to put forth, are true intellectual energies: and his very errors are full of instruction. He fails to construct some leading idea; or he even misconstructs it: he places himself in a false position with respect to certain propositions; views them from a false centre; makes a false or an imperfect antithesis; apprehends a definition with insufficient rigour; or fails in his use of it to keep it self-consis tent. These and a thousand other errors are met by a thousand appropriate resources-all of a true intellectual character; comparing, com bining, distinguishing, generalizing, subdividing, acts of abstraction and evolution, of synthesis and analysis, until the most torpid minds are ventilated, and healthily excited by this introversion of the faculties upon themselves. But in the study of language (with an exception, however, to a certain extent, in favour of Latin and Greek, which I shall notice here after), nothing of all this can take place, and for one simple reasonthat all is arbitrary. Wherever there is a law and system, wherever there is relation and correspondence of parts, the intellect will make its way; will interfuse amongst the dry bones the blood and pulses of life, and create "a soul under the ribs of death." But whatsoever is arbitrary and conventional, which yields no reason why it should be this way rather than that, obeying no theory or law, must, by its lifeless forms, kill and mortify the action of the intellect. If this be true, it becomes every student to keep watch upon himself, that he does not upon any light temptation allow himself an over balance of study in this direction. For the temptations to such an excess, which in our days are more powerful than formerly, are at all times too powerful. Of all the weapons in the armory of the scholar, none is so showy or so captivating to commonplace minds as skill in languages. Vanity is, therefore, one cause of the undue application to languages. A second is-the national fashion. What nation but ourselves ever made the language of its eternal enemy an essential part of even a decent* education? What should we think of Roman policy, if, during the second Punic war, the Carthaginian language had been taught as a matter of course to the children of every Roman citizen? But a third cause, which I believe has more efficacy than either of the former, is mere levity; the simple fact of being unballasted by any sufficient weight of plan or settled purpose, to present a counterpoise to the slightest mo mentum this way or that, arising from any impulse of accident or personal caprice. When there is no re sistance, a breath of air will be sufficient to determine the motion. I remember once, that happening to spend an Autumn in Ilfracombe, on the west coast of Devonshire-I found all the young ladies whom I knew, busily employed on the study of Marine Botany: on the opposite shore of the channel, in all the South Welch ports of Tenby, &c. they were no less busy upon Conchology; in neither case from any previous love of the science, but simply availing themselves of their local advantages. Now, here a man must have been truly ill-natured to laugh. For the studies were in both instances beau tiful: a love for it was created, if it had not pre-existed: and to women, and young women, the very absence of all austere unity of purpose and self-determination was becoming and graceful. Yet, when this same levity and liability to casual impulses come forward in the acts and purposes of a man, I must own, that I have often been unable to check myself in something like a contemptuous feeling: nor See the advertisements of the humblest schools; in which, however low the price of tuition, &c. is fixed, French never fails to enter as a principal branch of the course of study. To which fact I may add, that even 12 or 15 years ago I have seen French - circulating libraries in London, chiefly supported by people in a humble rank. should I wish to check myself, but for remembering how many men of energetic minds constantly give way to slight and inadequate motives, simply for want of being summoned to any anxious reviews of their own conduct. How many cases have I known where a particular study, as, suppose, of the Hartleian philosophy, was pursued throughout a whole college,-simply because a man of talents had talked of it in the junior common-room: how many, where a book became popular, because it had been mentioned in the House of Commons: how many, where a man resolved to learn Welch, because he was spending a month or two at Barmouth, or Italian, because he had found a Milan series of the poets in his aunt's library, or the violin, because he had bought a fine one at an auction. In 1808-9, you must well remember what a strong impulse the opening of the peninsular war communicated to our current literature: the presses of London and the provinces teemed with editions of Spanish books, dictionaries, and grammars: -and the motions of the British ar-mies were accompanied by a cor-responding activity among British compositors. From the just interest which is now renewed in Spanish affairs, I suppose something of the same scene will recur. Now, for my own part, though undoubtedly I would, for the sake of Calderon alone (judging of him through a German translation), most willingly study the Spanish literature (if I had leisure); yet I should be ashamed to do so upon the irrelevant and occasional summons of an interesting situation in Spanish affairs. I should feel that by such an act I confessed a want of pre-occupation in my mind-a want of self-origination in my plans-an inertness of will, which, above all things, I do and ought to detest. If it were right for me (right I mean in relation to my previous scheme of study) to have dedicated a portion of my life to the Spanish literature, it must have been right before the Spanish politics took an interesting aspect: if it were not right, it could not become so upon a suggestion so purely verbal as the recurrence of the word Spanish in the London journals. This, I am sure, you will interpret candidly. I am not supposing you less furnished with powers of self-determination than myself. I have no personal allusion or exception: but I suppose every man liable to be acted on unduly, or by inadequate impulses, so long as he is not possessed by some plan that may steady that levity of nature which is implied in the mere state of indifference to all settled plans. This levity, in our days, meets with an accidental ally in the extraordinary facilities for studying languages in the shape of elementary books; which facilities of themselves form a fourth cause of the disproportionate study given to languages. But a fifth cause occurs to me, of a less selfish and indolent character than any of the preceding; and as it seems to me hardly possible that it should not influence you more or less to make your choice of languages too large and comprehensive, I shall tell you from my own case, what may be sufficient to set you on your guard against too much indulgence to a feeling in itself just and natural. In my youthful days I never entered a great library, suppose of 100,000 volumes, but my predominant feeling was one of pain and disturbance of mind-not much unlike that which drew tears from Xerxes, on viewing his immense army, and reflecting that in 100 years not one soul would remain alive. To me, with respect to the books, the same effect would be brought about by my own death. Here, said I, are 100,000 books-the worst of them capable of giving me some pleasure and instruction: and before I can have had time to extract the honey from 1-20th of this hive, in all likelihood I shall be summoned away. This thought, I am sure, must often have occurred to yourself; and you may judge how much it was aggravated, when I found that, subtracting all merely professional books-books of reference (as dictionaries, &c. &c. &c.) from the universal library of Europe, there would still remain a total of not less than twelve hundred thousand books over and above what the presses of Europe are still disemboguing into the ocean of literature; many of them immense folios or quartos. Now I had been told by an eminent English |