Space fails us to enter upon the analysis of the works of Goethe. Faust is universally acknowledged to be his chief production. It is marked by a potent intellect and an intimate acquaintance with human virtue. In all its scenes, there seems to be reality; in its character, individuality. Vice is described in the fathomless depths of its misery. The details of the work are often gross and offensive; the general effect is beyond that of any other production of poetry, to fill the soul with horror at vice, to make us shudder and shrink from a career, that leads to unsated possession and interminable wo. Milton invests Satan with the majesty of an archangel, but Mephistopheles is a very devil, ridiculing all noble feeling, scoffing at human knowledge and human aspirations, mean, low, and detestable; and yet he holds Faust so rivetted to him, that the poor victim neither can nor will free himself from subjection. Faust pretends to command, and all the while is hurried on by his base companion from one excess to another, till his mind becomes without principle and without hope, an abyss of gloom.

Byron's Manfred was probably suggested by Goethe's Faust. The poems are as unlike each other as the poets. Manfred is a noble spirit, that struggles with himself, corrupts and destroys himself, in the excitement of restless solitude, He is a being whose energies are thrown back upon themselves, and who perishes by the intense action of his own powers. Switzerland, its glaciers, and its innocent inhabitants, its waterfalls, its stern, awful sublimity, are in keeping with the spirit of the piece; but the action, all passes within Manfred's own mind. Now Goethe's drama describes the travels of a philosopher through the world, with the devil for his valet. Natural scenery furnishes no part of the attractions of the piece. We see but the man, who wanders among his kind with the foul fiend at his elbow, prompting him to every thing wrong, and turning every generous emotion into torture. The dramatic life which is exhibited in Faust is nowhere to be found in Byron. Goethe can send a city out of its gates to celebrate Easter day after European fashion, or carry his reader to a drinking house, or the chamber of a student, or the cottage of an innocent girl, or assemble a throng in the streets; and the beings, whom he calls up, come forth in distinct shapes, full of life and motion, and swayed by human impulses.

And so at the close, we have but again to concede to Goethe that quality, which distinguishes Scott, and in which Shakspeare was of all English writers pre-eminent-Truth in his descriptions. His persons are not creatures of romance and the stage, but are of real life; and as he has drawn his inspiration from the inexhaustible sources of natural feelings, so his reputation will be safe in all the vicissitudes of literary taste.

ART. VII.-Johnson's English Dictionary, as improved by Todd, and abridged by Chalmers; with Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary combined: To which is added, Walker's Key to the Classical Pronunciation of Greek, Latin and Scripture Proper Names. Edited by JOSEPH E. WORCESTER. 8vo. Boston, 1828.

THE present edition of Johnson's Dictionary seems to be entitled to a more particular notice, than the ordinary re-publication of such a work would require; because in point of utility, it is superior to any one hitherto published in this country; and it is, besides, printed in stereotype, with so much accuracy, that it will probably for a long time be the only edition which will be consulted as an authority.

We have already had several American editions of Johnson and Walker; but either from faults in the English copies, or from blunders in our reprints, or perhaps from both these causes together, none has come under our notice, upon which such entire reliance could be placed, as on the present. To illustrate this remark by one instance only, which occurs to us at this moment. The word legislature, a term which is in continual use from one end of the United States to the other, and the pronunciation of which varies in different parts of our country, has probably remained thus unsettled, in consequence of mere typographical errors in the notation of the dictionaries. In some of the common editions of Walker, both the large and the small, the nota tion of the final syllable of this word is ture, instead of tshure; which would naturally lead the reader to consider this syllable as an accented one, and of course to pronounce it legislature, (sounding the u as in pure,) or, according to the old-fashioned mode, of the New-England states in particular, legislatóore. Yet every one who has attended to the principles of pronunciation, and the analogies of the language, would know, that this final syllable is un-accented, and, consequently, whether we place the principal accent on the penultima, legislature, (as Johnson and several other lexicographers formerly did,) or upon its first syllable, législature, according to the orthoepists of the present day, still the notation of the final syllable ought to be like that of the un-accented final syllable of other words of the same class; which, according to Walker's, method, would be tshure, as in nomenclature, náture, créature, etc. Accordingly we find in Walker's fourth edition, in quarto, which is the most correct, and the last that was revised by the author himself, the notation of this word is led-jis-la-tshure; which is very properly followed by the present American editor. We have noticed this as one in

stance in which our lexicographers and critics have idly disputed among themselves, and with the orthoepists of our mother country, literally about words, and about the authority of Walker as an orthoepist; some of the disputants condemning him as inconsistent with himself, and as a teacher of a vicious pronunciation, while others have vainly attempted to vindicate him, where his printer and not himself should be held responsible, and where he would never have thought of defending his own work. The editor of the present volume, who has been long and advantageously known to every American reader, as an indefatigable and highly estimated labourer in another department of literature, has very judiciously selected as his standard, Walker's fourth edition, already mentioned, and of which the laborious and exact author himself says, with his accustomed modesty— "This edition, the result of much fatigue and anxiety, has, I flatter myself, fewer faults than any work of the same delicacy, extent, and complexity;" a remark, which we believe will be fully warranted by a comparison with any book in our language.

It is by no means our intention, at this day, to attempt the idle task of reviewing the merits of Johnson or Walker. They have both obtained an established character in their respective departments; and the introductory remark of the present editor's preface, is perfectly well founded in regard to both of them-that "to Dr. Johnson is universally conceded the first rank among English lexicographers, and to Mr. Walker is assigned a similar rank among English orthoepists." We are well aware, that some writers in England and America have denied them any thing like that rank; but the great body of readers and speakers in both countries have acquiesced in giving them that elevated station, and have looked upon the few who have asssailed their fame, rather as malcontents in the republic of letters, than as men who were vindicating the essential rights of our language.

To assert that blunders are not to be found in Johnson's dictionary, particularly in the Etymological part, would be to claim for it a degree of perfection, which does not fall to the lot of any human production; and which he, great as his abilities were, would never have claimed with one half the boldness which we have seen in some of his assailants, who have not possessed one half of his merits. Johnson, himself, as Boswell relates, candidly declared that he had not satisfied his own expectations."

The first and most deeply felt attack ever made upon his Dictionary, was by that second Ishmael, John Horne Tooke, who, with the adroitness of a practised combatant, skilfully selected for his point of attack, the most vulnerable part of the workthe Etymologies; and a part, too, for which Johnson could

hardly be held responsible; because he avowedly relied upon his predecessors for etymological learning; and upon Junius and Skinner in particular, for the northern or Teutonick etymologies, which Tooke has so mercilessly attacked. The truth is, that for a considerable length of time, English lexicography had been in an extremely low state; and this first onset of Tooke, being supported by an array of learning drawn from the northern languages of Europe, which had not become an object of study with many English scholars, produced a shock which was then severely felt, and from which the followers of Johnson have not yet entirely recovered. Even Johnson himself, we are told, was so completely overpowered by that tempest of Gothic learning, that he said, if he were to make a new edition of his dictionary, he should (as Tooke states it in unqualified terms,) adopt his derivations." If he had indeed adopted them without exception, he would unquestionably have adopted many false and imperfectly developed etymologies. But it is probable that Boswell's statement of Johnson's remark upon this subject is the most correct-that Johnson said he should adopt "several" of them.

The partisans of Tooke, accordingly, both in England and in our own country, sung the song of triumph. Dr. Darwin, a man of genius, but nevertheless of an ardent temperament, and assuredly a much more competent judge of questions in botany or physic, which he had studied, than of the science of philology, which he had not-Dr. Darwin, we say, in that curious work called Zoönomia, proclaimed to the world, that Horne Tooke had "unfolded by a single flash of light the whole theory of language, which had so long been buried beneath the learned lumber of the Schools." The influence of opinions like these would be naturally felt in our country, where philological learning was quite as low, to say the least, as it was in England. Tooke was accordingly hailed as an oracle, and Johnson was decried as a numskull. Our learned countryman, Mr. Webster, who has experienced the fate of a "prophet in his own country," and has not yet been able, even as far as his real learning gave him a right, to guide the opinions of a free country-he, we say, in his earlier life, caught the flame kindled by the "Diversions of Purley," and promulgated with the usual ardour of youth, the opinions of Tooke, without that discrimination among them, which his own subsequent researches have obliged him to make. This fervour, however, is now much abated; the very questions to which Tooke's publication gave rise, obliged the scholars of England to commence the long-neglected study of their own language, and its kindred dialects of the North; and among them, as well as among the scholars of the continent of Europe, the subject of general philology began to excite attention.

It was, of course, very soon discovered, that in tracing the

English language, it was not enough to stop our inquiries where Horne Tooke did, at the Northern languages; but it was found necessary to pursue even those languages and our own to the East, the grand "cunabula gentium." It was soon perceived that Tooke's knowledge of the Northern languages was not profound; and that, as to the Oriental, he was quite ignorant; and thus, acute and able as he was by nature, he proved to be essentially deficient in a fundamental qualification of an etymologist. Accordingly, one of the main principles of Tooke's work is exactly the reverse of what it ought to be. He asserts, that “a great part of the Latin is the language of our northern ancestors, grafted upon the Greek; and to our northern language the etymologist must go, for that part of the Latin, which the Greek will not furnish ;"*-which, to readers who have studied the history of languages, is doing in sober earnest just what Swift proposed jocosely, that is, to derive Greek and Latin from the English! Now we have the best evidence possible in such a case, that what Tooke hastily pronounced to be northern primitives, grafted on the Latin, were nothing but Latin words, pillaged and mutilated by the barbarians of the North, who laid waste the cultivated languages, as they had done the fair fields of Latinum. This single fact sweeps away a vast portion of the curious and amusing, but unsubstantial fabric of the Philosopher of Purley. The primitive language of the North, however strange it may seem to persons who have not studied the emigrations of our roving race, was Oriental. It will doubtless appear extraordinary to such persons, that incontestable affinities, and to a great extent, are now ascertained between the Russian and other languages of the North, and the Sanscrit in the East, (we say nothing here of the Greek, which also has Sanscrit affinities,) and that the German language is derived from the Oriental stock, through the Persian, which it resembles, not merely in a considerable number of radical words and sounds, but also in its syllables of formation, and its grammatical forms. In like manner, the radical words of the English are, even with our present knowledge, to be clearly traced through the northern families, to the Latin, Greek, and Oriental languages; and the monosyllabic character of our old Saxon words, as we call them, may possibly lead future inquirers even to the Chinese, the source of that vast family of monosyllabic languages, which are spoken by so large a proportion of our race on the Eastern Continent.

Great, therefore, as the fame of Tooke was, for a time, and justly as he deserved praise for his sagacity in following out his theory of the particles, as it was called, (and of which he might have been a discoverer, though the same theory had been ap

* Diversions of Purley, vol. 2, p. 110, Philadelphia edition.