Argostoli. The houses are all built of stone and of very solid workmanship, to enable them to withstand the shocks of earthquake,: which are very frequent, and occasionally very violent: the better to effect this purpose, the best constructed have iron clamps in various parts of the walls, and generally at each corner is a raised pilaster of cut stone; this and other little architectural ornaments are executed in the Venetian manner, The low and paltry dwellings erected upon the foundation of many others of these palaces, as they are called, give awful memento, to the inmates of these latter stately edifices, of what they may expect from earthquakes. The town consists of one long street, which runs close by the beach; it is tolerably clean and well built. The water is deep, which renders the air pure, excepting during a long prevalence of the sirocco wind in the hot weather, which, with other inconveniences, carries most offensive exhalations from the shallow part of the inlet situated to the southward of the town. These proved highly deleterious to the inhabitants and the garri-” son in the summer of 1815: in that season no less than eighty soldiers out of one company of the 14th regiment were carried off by remittent fever. A little quadrangle occupies the centre of the town, where the markets are held; this has been lately begun to be flagged: with tomb-stones brought from the ruins of Samos; a few letters, rudely inscribed may be traced upon some of them, but all now nearly obliterated. A public work of more utility however does great credit to the spirit of the inhabitants, at whose expense it was completed, together with the contributions of other islanders concerned. This is the bridge of Trapano, which crosses the gulf at the southern extremity of Argostoli, affording an excellent road between the town and country, by which the communication is shortened four or five miles, and an almost impracticable moun tain-road round the lake avoided to the peasants, who have to convey their goods to the market in the city. The walls of the bridge are of cut lime-stone, and instead of arches, strong planks of oak are thrown across connecting the piers horizontally, by which a most excellent, wide, and level road is carried over this angle of the lake. The centre is occupied by a little insulated platform, in the middle of which is a pyramid, containing an inscription in four different languages, one upon each side. The inscription is, " Tor the Glory of the British Nation, the Inhabitants of Cephalonia, 1813."'. Zante, situated to the south of the islands just mentioned, we have always been taught to consider as the most beautiful and fertile of the Polynesia; the greater part of its surface consisting of an immense plain of one continuous vineyard, interspersed with groves of olives, oranges, and other fruittrees. It is about sixty miles in circumference: but the antient epithet, "nemorosa," does not at present characterize its scenery; unless the broken ridges of the horizontal strata along along the eastern range of its mountains, which are beautifully fringed with olive groves, might authorize that denomination Of the dreadful visitation of 1820, which occurred in this island, Mr. Goodisson translates a detailed account from a Corfù paper. The official return of damages sustained was as follows. Seventy-nine houses entirely destroyed, eight hundred and seven houses much damaged, eight persons killed, and twenty-nine with wounds and contusions,' It is mentioned as a singular fact that, numerous as are the earthquakes experienced in these islands, they are seldom, simultaneous in any two; an interval of more than 24 hours, and generally of many days, taking place between any two shocks from which Mr. Goodisson rationally infers that the cause, which he conceives to be electricity, does not lie deeper than the superficial strata in each island. The town of Zante is regularly built, on the curve of a bay which extends nearly two miles; and the uniformity of the descent, on which it stands, gives it a picturesque and pleasing effect. The many steeples and spires with which it is ornamented, built in the Venetian manner, add considerably to the beauty of the whole, and to a stranger, arrived at anchor in the night, the scene opening at once in the morning, with the busy tolling of bells, and the harbour-bustle, excites a sensation indescribably de lightful; heightened as it is by the usual cool serenity of the hour, and the reflection, perhaps, of having completed a sea-voyage,' the pleasure of which those who dislike the sea can best appre ciate. The heights are crowded with groves of orange and lemon trees, through which are thickly scattered the beautiful villas of the rich citizens. The bay terminates in the fine mass of mount Scopò upon the left, and the extremity of the castle-range upon the right the castle is built upon a hill that literally overhangs the town, and above floats the British flag over a beautiful scene of richness and repose.' Zante contains about 15,176 persons. The Ionian parlia ment has voted a large sum of money for the erection of a fine mole, and the work, says Mr. G., is now carrying on through the exertions of Sir P. Ross, the governor of the island. An aqueduct has also been begun, intended to convey a plentiful supply of water from Scopò; that with which the town is furnished at present being extremely bad, on account of the strata of gypsum through which it passes. The total population of the island is upwards of 35,000. We have already stated our doubts as to the political advantage of these islands to Great Britain. Their revenue is wholly inadequate to their expenditure, although by the new constitution they are liable only to the expences of lodging the troops, viz. those of building barracks and their repairs. L 2 The The actual cost of the British force in 1821 was 105,000l. sterling so that the maximum of revenue, which does not exceed 550,000 dollars, would leave only 5000l. to cover the civil expences of the government. We must now close this article, and Mr. Goodisson's instructive and amusing volume. To the medical student, we would recommend his remarks on the diseases of the islands, formed during a residence of considerable length at Corfù in his professional capacity. His observations on the diagnoses of the remittent fever of Santa Maura, and the bilious fevers common in other parts of the Mediterranean, deserve the attention of all medical officers, who may hereafter be called to serve in these islands. ART. IV. The Elements of Anglo-Saxon Grammar, with copious Notes, illustrating the Structure of the Saxon and the Formation of the English Language: and a Grammatical Praxis with a literal English Version: to which are prefixed, Remarks on the History and Use of the Anglo-Saxon, and an Introduction, on the Origin and Progress of Alphabetic Writing, with Critical Remarks by the Rev. Charles O'Connor, D.D., and exemplified by Engravings of Inscriptions, and Fac-similes of Saxon and other ancient Manuscripts. By the Rev. J. Bosworth, M.A. F.A.S. &c. 8vo. pp. 330. 16s. Boards. Harding and Co. 1823. THE THE history of the Anglo-Saxon language has never been satisfactorily developed. We have grammars and vocabularies of its terms, and translations of Scriptures, homilies, and hymns in the dialect: - laws and chronicles have been promulgated in its idiom;-and war-songs, sagas, entire epic poems, (Judith and Beowulf for instance,) are extant among the remains of its literature: yet no traces of its vernacular existence any where have descended to our times. The Celts continue to speak their language in the Highlands of Scotland, and the bogs of Ireland; and the Cimbri still talk their Pelasgic in Wales and Cornwall: but neither on the banks of the Weser, where the Saxons abounded in Charlemagne's time, nor on those of the Thames, where they numbered Alfred among their kings, does even a patois exist which seems ever to have employed the complex inflections of this curious form of language. The alphabet of the Anglo-Saxons appears clearly to have been borrowed from modern Italy; for it retains the Italian peculiarity of pronouncing the c before e and i as ch. Thus the word witch in Anglo-Saxon is written wice; the word I chaff is written ceaf; the word orchard is written orcird; the word word chide is written cidan; child, cild; &c. Yet some characters were invented for the use of the Anglo-Saxons that are not extant in the Italian alphabet, such as a single character for th and another for w. stantive and adjective are more distinctly marked in AngloThe cases of nouns subSaxon, than in any other Gothic dialect; yet of the existence of these cases the vernacular remains are every where faint and evanescent. The s of the genitive singular still appears in English; and the e of the dative singular remains, or has been restored, in German: but the nominatives plural in a and the datives plural in um are without a parallel in any living northern tongue; although they are applied in the Edda to an Icelandic dialect, of which the roots often diverge greatly from the common Anglo-Saxon. Anastasius, in his life of Pope Leo III., mentions a Schola Saxonum at Rome as already existing in the year 800, to which young Englishmen were sent to be there brought up as missionaries; and the writers of Anglo-Saxon, whose names are known to us, were mostly educated at this Schola Saxonum of the Italians. At least, this is notoriously true of Caedmon, Elfric, and Alfred, and is highly probable of Bede and the writers of religious tracts in general. The presumption, therefore, seems to be that at this Saxon school of the Italians were devised the forms of Anglo-Saxon grammar; and that the missionaries were ordered to apply them to the various Gothic dialects, as directions to their correspondents at Rome how to construe their communications. Those who first reduce a language to writing may easily have grafted on it forms of inflection not known to the multitude, or never in vernacular use; and with this theory all the phænomena correspond. We suspect, consequently, that our vulgar English is of more antient date in this country than the merely literary language called Anglo-Saxon, and that the Londoners of Julius Cæsar's time conversed in the language now extant. Camden, Rapin, and other historical commentators, have spoken of the Saxons as if they first came over with Hengist and Horsa to this island: but the Romans had long before appointed a Count of the Saxon shore, whose jurisdiction included Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Kent; so that these shires were already immemorially stocked with a Saxon population; and it does not appear from any names of rivers or towns that the Cimbric, or Welsh, tongue was ever spoken in the eastern half of Britain. Mr. Pinkerton has proved that the Caledonians of Agricola were Goths; and although the dialect spoken northward of the Humber always resembled more the Danish, and the dialect spoken southward of L 3 the the Humber always resembled more the Saxon, because the Piks, or pirates, who first colonized these coasts were so descended respectively, yet both these populations were so far mixed that they had dropped for common convenience their originally dissimilar formative syllables: - every lingua franca, or mixed form of speech, (the Malay for instance,) being remarkable for paucity of inflections. The sailor easily learns the names of things, and has an interest in retaining them but he does not easily acquire, and has no interest in remembering, the local mechanism of a foreign dialect. - In the grammar before us, the learned author commences with a dissertation on the stem-tribes of the European north. He does not contradistinguish the Erse and Welsh dialects, but considers them as both belonging to the class Celtic: though to us their dissimilarity appears so great as to announce tribes in a widely different stage of civilization; the Erse having all the characters of a rude, savage, unwritten tongue, and the Welsh all the characters of a formed and civilized language. We should have preferred, therefore, with Schloetzer, (see his admirable Nordische Geschichte,) to make a separate class of the Armorican, Cornish, and Welsh dialects, under the common name of Cimbric; and we would by no means apply the term Cimbric to the Icelandic, which is certainly a Gothic dialect. The Chaldeans, or Celts, for these denominations seem to have been originally identical, first flourished along the Euphrates, and supplied a large proportion of the early population of Judea. One division of them settled on the Euxine coast, and bequeathed their name to Galatia. From among these Galatians, probably in consequence of the inroads of Sesostris, that tribe of Gaels appears to have crossed the Euxine, which strolled along the middle zone of 1. Europe, occupied in early ages the north of Italy, laid Rome in ashes during the time of Camillus, gave its name to Gaul, and was finally pushed by the ensuing wave of Cimbri from the mouths of the Loire into Ireland. There the language of this oldest of the northern European tribes is still in some degree preserved: it is said to resemble the Punic scene in Plautus, and has been employed to decypher the soliloquy of Hanno. From Ireland certainly came the Scotch Gauls, or Highlanders, whose speech is therefore called Erse: but an elaborate comparison of their language with the Chaldaic remains is still wanting to complete the proof of a pedigree, which tends to establish their right to be considered as the elder children of human society. Population having begun in the east, the remotest emigrants must have set off first, and |