several pages which do not contain a single word of more than two syllables. Yet no writer has said more exactly what he meant to say. For magnificence, for pathos, for vehement exhortation, for subtle disquisition, for every purpose of the poet, the orator, and the divine, this homely dialect, the dialect of plain working-men, was perfectly sufficient. There is no book in our literature on which we would so readily stake the fame of the old unpolluted English language, no book which shows so well how rich that language is in its own. proper wealth, and how little it has been improved by all that it has borrowed.

Cowper said, forty or fifty years ago, that he dared not name John Bunyan in his verse, for fear of moving a sneer. To our refined forefathers, we suppose, Lord Roscommon's "Essay on Translated Verse," and the Duke of Buckinghamshire's "Essay on Poetry," appeared to be compositions infinitely superior to the allegory of the preaching tinker. We live in better times; and we are not afraid to say that, though there were many clever men in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only two minds which possessed the imaginative faculty in a very eminent degree. One of those minds produced the "Paradise Lost," the other the "Pilgrim's Progress."

THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT THE EPISTLES OF PHALARIS.

[Essay on Sir William Temple.]

THE chief amusement of Temple's declining years was literature. After his final retreat from business, he wrote his very agreeable "Memoirs," corrected and transcribed many of his letters, and published several miscellaneous treatises, the best of which, we think, is that on "Gardening." The style of his essays is, on the whole, excellent, almost always pleasing, and now and then stately and splendid. The matter is

generally of much less value; as our readers will readily believe when we inform them that Mr. Courtenay, a biographer, that is to say, a literary vassal, bound by the innemorial law of his tenure to render homage, aids, reliefs, and all other customary services to his lord, avows that he can not give an opinion about the essay on "Heroic Virtue," because he can not read it without skipping; a circumstance which strikes us as peculiarly strange, when we consider how long Mr. Courtenay was at the India Board, and how many thousand paragraphs of the copious official eloquence of the East he must have perused.

One of Sir William's pieces, however, deserves notice, not, indeed, on account of its intrinsic merit, but on account of the light which it throws on some curious weaknesses of his character, and on account of the extraordinary effects which it produced in the republic of letters. A most idle and contemptible controversy had arisen in France touching the comparative merit of the ancient and modern writers. It was certainly not to be expected that, in that age, the question would be tried according to those large and philosophical principles of criticism which guided the judgments of Lessing and of IIerder.(') But it might have been expected that those who undertook to decide the point would at least take the trouble to read and understand the authors on whose merits they were to pronounce. Now, it is no exaggeration to say that, among the disputants who clamored, some for the ancients and some for the moderns, very few were decently acquainted with either ancient or modern literature, and hardly one was well acquainted with both. In Racine's amusing preface to the "Iphigénie" the reader may find noticed a most ridiculous mistake into which one of the champions of the moderns fell about a passage in the "Alcestis" of Euripides. Another writer is so inconceivably ignorant as to blame Homer for mixing the four Greek dialects, Doric, Ionic, Æolic, and Attic, just, says he, as if a French poet were

(') Lessing, the great German writer on art, author of the "Laocoon," which Macaulay was never tired of reading, lived between 1729 and 1781. Herder died in 1808.

to put Gascon phrases and Picard phrases into the midst of his pure Parisian writing. On the other hand, it is no exaggeration to say that the defenders of the ancients were entirely unacquainted with the greatest productions of later times; nor, indeed, were the defenders of the moderns better informed. The parallels which were instituted in the course of this dispute are inexpressibly ridiculous. Balzac was selected as the rival of Cicero.(') Corneille was said to unite the merits of Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. We should like to see a "Prometheus" after Corneille's fashion. The "Provincial Letters," masterpieces undoubtedly of reasoning, wit, and eloquence, were pronounced to be superior to all the writings of Plato, Cicero, and Lucian together, particularly in the art of dialogue, an art in which, as it happens, Plato far excelled all men, and in which Pascal, great and admirable in other respects, is notoriously very deficient.

This childish controversy spread to England; and some mischievous demon suggested to Temple the thought of undertaking the defense of the ancients. As to his qualifications for the task, it is sufficient to say, that he knew not a word of Greek. But his vanity, which, when he was engaged in the conflicts of active life and surrounded by rivals, had been kept in tolerable order by his discretion, now, when he had long lived in seclusion, and had become accustomed to regard himself as by far the first man of his circle, rendered him blind to his own deficiencies. In an evil hour he published an essay on "Ancient and Modern Learning." The style of this treatise is very good, the matter ludicrous and contemptible to the last degree. There we read how Lycurgus traveled into India, and brought the Spartan laws from that country; how Orpheus made voyages in search of knowledge, and attained to a depth of learning which has made him renowned in all succeeding ages; how Pythagoras passed twenty-two years in Egypt, and, after graduating there, spent twelve years more at Babylon, where the Magi admitted him ad eundem; how the ancient Brahmins lived two hundred

(') Balzac was a writer of the seventeenth century, patronized by Richelieu.

years; how the earliest Greek philosophers foretold earthquakes and plagues, and put down riots by magic; and how much Ninus surpassed in abilities any of his successors on the throne of Assyria. The moderns, Sir William owns, have found out the circulation of the blood; but, on the other hand, they have quite lost the art of conjuring; nor can any modern fiddler enchant fishes, fowls, and serpents by his performance. He tells us that "Thales, Pythagoras, Democritus, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus made greater progresses in the several empires of science than any of their successors have since been able to reach;" which is just as absurd as if he had said that the greatest names in British science are Merlin, Michael Scott, Dr. Sydenham, and Lord Bacon.(') Indeed, the manner in which Temple mixes the historical and the fabulous reminds us of those classical dictionaries, intended for the use of schools, in which Narcissus, the lover of himself, and Narcissus, the freedman of Claudius; Pollux, the son of Jupiter and Leda, and Pollux, the author of the "Onomasticon," are ranged under the same headings, and treated as personages equally real. The effect of this arrangement resembles that which would be produced by a dictionary of modern names, consisting of such articles as the following: "Jones, William, an eminent Orientalist, and one of the Judges of the Supreme Court of Judicature in Bengal.Davy, a fiend who destroys ships. Thomas, a foundling, brought up by Mr. Allworthy." It is from such sources as these that Temple seems to have learned all that he knew about the ancients. He puts the story of Orpheus between the Olympic games and the battle of Arbela; as if we had exactly the same reasons for believing that Orpheus led beasts with his lyre, which we have for believing that there were races at Pisa, or that Alexander conquered Darius.

He manages little better when he comes to the moderns. He gives a catalogue of those whom he regards as the greatest writers of later times. It is sufficient to say that, in his list of

(') Dr. Sydenham was the most eminent practical physician of our country in the seventeenth century. Michael Scott is the wizard of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," and Merlin is the wizard of Mr. Tennyson's "Idyls of the King."

Italians, he has omitted Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso; in his list of Spaniards, Lope and Calderon; in his list of French, Pascal, Bossuet, Molière, Corneille, Racine, and Boileau; and in his list of English, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton.

In the midst of all this vast mass of absurdity one paragraph stands out pre-eminent. The doctrine of Temple, not a very comfortable doctrine, is that the human race is constantly degenerating, and that the oldest books in every kind are the best. In confirmation of this notion, he remarks that the "Fables of Æsop" are the best fables, and the "Letters of Phalaris" the best letters in the world.(') On the merit of the "Letters of Phalaris" he dwells with great warmth and with extraordinary felicity of language. Indeed, we could hardly select a more favorable specimen of the graceful and easy majesty to which his style sometimes rises than this unlucky passage. He knows, he says, that some learned men, or men who pass for learned, such as Politian, have doubted the genuineness of these letters; but of such doubts he speaks with the greatest contempt. Now it is perfectly certain, first, that the letters are very bad; secondly, that they are spurious; and, thirdly, that, whether they be bad or good, spurious or genuine, Temple could know nothing of the matter; inasmuch as he was no more able to construe a line of them than to decipher an Egyptian obelisk.

This essay, silly as it is, was exceedingly well received, both in England and on the Continent. And the reason is evi

(') Phalaris was the Greek tyrant who governed Agrigentum, in Sicily, more than 500 years before the Christian era. Some literary man of the later Roman Empire composed a series of letters, which purported to have been written by Phalaris. Such a tour de force was then the fashion of the day. In his biography of Atterbury, Macaulay declares the evidence against the genuineness of the letters to be overwhelming. At the revival of Greek literature in Europe "they were pronounced spurious by Politian, the greatest scholar in Italy, and by Erasmus, the greatest scholar on our side of the Alps." Indeed, Macaulay is of opinion that it would be as easy to persuade an educated Englishman that one of Johnson's "Ramblers "" was the work of William Wallace as to persuade a man like Erasmus that a pedantic exercise, pieced together by a sophist in the days of Julian, was the work of "a crafty and ferocious Dorian, who roasted people alive many years before there existed a volume of prose in the Greek language."