ness and cruelty of the lawyers of those times "sinned up to it still," and even went beyond it. The imaginary trial of Faithful, before a jury composed of personified vices, was just and merciful, when compared with the real trial of Alice Lisle before that tribunal where all the vices sat in the person of Jefferies.

The style of Bunyan is delightful to every reader, and invaluable as a study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English language. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we except a few technical terms of theology, which would puzzle the rudest peasant. We have observed 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 EPISTI ES

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 immemorial law of his tenure to render homage, aids, reliefs, and all other customary services to his lord, avows that he cannot give an opinion about the essay on Heroic Virtue, because he cannot 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 Herder.1

But it might have been expected that those

'Lessing, the great German writer on Art, author of the Laocoön, which Macaulay was never tired of reading, lived between 1729 and 1781 Herder died in 1803.

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 clamoured, 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 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.1

Corneille was said touch

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 defence 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

1 Balzac was a writer of the seventeenth century, patronised by Richelieu.

ived in seclusion, and had become accustomed to regard him-
self 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 travelled 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 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 conjur-
ing; nor can any modern fiddler enchant fishes, fowls, and ser

his He tells us

Physin goras, Democritus, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus celeb pents by Pormance that "Thales, Pythandig

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 diction-
aries, 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

1 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."

2

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.

T

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 Italians, he has omitted Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso; l 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, Spencer, Shakspeare, and Milton.

In the midst of all this vast mass of absurdity one paragraph stands out preeminent. 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

1

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."