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many of our present readers remember that speare, Goldsmith, and Cowper, and from the proverb which has such a true homely Aytoun's " Bothwell. After all, there are English sound that it seems as though it must several which seem curiously out of place be a nativein this second division; the well known "Balnea, vina, Venus" hardly comes under the category of "Moral; and we doubt whether the subject of the following, whether spinster or widow, would have received it as panegyrical" :

"There's many a slip,

"Twixt the cup and the lip."

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"Though age has changed thee, late so fair,
I love thee ne'er the worse;
For when he took thy golden hair,
He filled with gold thy purse."
Some of the older complimentary verses
are really elegant and worth preserving.
Take this on the beautiful Duchess of Devon-
shire canvassing Westminster for Charles
Fox:-

"Arrayed in matchless beauty, Devon's Fair,
In Fox's favor takes a zealous part;
But, oh! where'er the pilferer comes, beware-
She supplicates a vote and steals a heart."

is the merest literal translation of a Greek verse-an epigram in the original sensean inscription on a drinking-cup? Did the French king know, when he uttered the famous mot, " Après moi le deluge," that he was merely quoting an anonymous Greek, of no one knows how many centuries before him? We forget in what English divine's published devotions we noted a thought which struck us at the time as very beautiful-and original, till we turned it up in the old Anthologia" Give us those things which be good for us even though we ask them not; and those things which be hurtful to us, even if we ask them, withhold." Heathens, were those Greeks? they were not altogether wrong We do not care much for tributes of this in the matter of prayer at any rate. "Fas est et ab hoste doceri." There is a temptation kind to anonymous young ladies, though some of them are prettily turned enough. As to linger among the classics (especially after has been remarked before, epigrams which reading through a book of English epigrams have a personal history are by far the most -like the tailor who stands up to rest) to interesting. Of these Mr. Booth has omitted which we plead guilty, and for which we several which were very easy to be found, hope we have shown some excuse. recommend, in reparation to the "country of his selections. and better in their way than very many Such as these surely gentlemen," an inscription for their clocks or deserved a place for every reason:sun-dials well worth adopting, and which may have the merit of novelty, for we have never yet seen it in an English version-another Greek" epigram," in the real sense of the word-a beautiful variation of the hackneyed moral," Tempus fugit; " we give the original below, to make amends for any shortcoming in our translations

Let us

"Brief while the rose doth bloom; gather it straight;

No rose, but thorns, remain for those that wait."

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ON MISS VASSAL (LADY HOLLAND) AT A MAS-
QUERADE, FEB. 27, 1786.
"Imperial nymph! ill-suited is thy name
To speak the wonders of that radiant frame;
Where'er thy sovereign form on earth is seen,
All eyes are Vassals-thou alone a queen."

"ON THE TWO BEAUTIFUL MISS GUNNINGS.
"Sly Cupid, perceiving our modern beaux' hearts
Were proof to the sharpest and best of his darts,
His power to maintain, the young urchin, grown
cunning,

Has laid down his bow, and now conquers by
Gunning."

66 ERSKINE TO LADY PAYNE.

(He had complained of feeling unwell at her house.)

Of course, even in English, there are epigrams which can be classed as "Moral and Panegyrical," as well as "Satirical and Humorous; " though the present editor can find only ninety pages of these latter to balance some two hundred of the more piquant and better remembered class, and even to do this, has thought himself at liberty to include a good many extracts that are not epigrams And in spite of its being anonymous (so far at all, such as long passages from Shak- as we know) both as to author and subject, we should like to add this last to the editor's

* Το ῥόδον ἀκμάζει Βαιὸν χρόνον· ἢν δὲ παρέλθῃ, Ζητῶν εὑρήσεις οὐ ῥόδον, ἀλλὰ βάτου.

"Tis true I am ill, but I need not complain, For he never knew pleasure that never knew | Payne."

collection:-
:-

"ON A PATCH ON A LADY'S FACE.

"That artful speck upon her face

Had been a foil in one less fair;
In her it hides a killing grace,

perhaps not very easy; but this kind of division into "Humorous " and " Monumental" is certainly the most illogical that ever was attempted. We wonder under which heading the editor would have classed the following verses, if he had happened to meet with them. They are an anticipatory dirge for Professor Buckland, at that time the great popular geologist, from the pen of Archbishop Whately. We do not know that they have been printed, except in the columns of a newspaper.

And she in mercy placed it there." We have not much faith in impromptus, which usually cost their authors much time and pains to compose; but we are glad to see again one of Theodore Hook's (who really had the gift of making them) which if the circumstances of its production are faithfully recorded, is one of the very best that was ever put into print. He is said to have been sitting at the piano, composing and singing one of those extempore songs in which he adapted a verse to the name of each one of the company present, when a Mr. Wynter entered the room quite unexpectedly. Hook at once.

started off as follows:

"Here comes Mr. Wynter, surveyor of taxes,
I advise you to give him whatever he axes;
And that, too, without any nonsense or flummery,
For though his name's Wynter, his actions are
summary."

"Mourn, Ammonites, mourn o'er his funeral

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Whose neck ye must grace no more;
Gneiss, granite and slate,-he settled your date,
And his ye must now deplore.

Weep, caverns, weep, with infiltering drip,
Your recesses he'll cease to explore;
For mineral veins or organic remains,
No stratum again will he bore.

His wit shone like Crystal-his knowledge pro

found

From Gravel to Granite descended;
No Trap could deceive him, no Slip confound,
No specimen, true or pretended.

Where shall we our great Professor inter,
That in peace may rest his bones?
If we hew him a rocky sepulchre,

Of such as are really epigrams in the original sense-inscriptions-one of the best in the book, and perhaps not so commonly known" as some others, is that said to be still visible at the Duke of Richmond Inn, at Goodwood, on the carved figure-head (a lion) of Anson's ship the Centurion :

"Stay, traveller, awhile, and view

I who have travelled more than you;
Quite round the globe in each degree,
Anson and I have plowed the sea;
Torrid and frigid zones have passed,
And safe ashore arrived at last,
In ease and dignity appear-
He in the House of Lords-I here."

The collection is not improved by the addition of a third class, containing "Monumental Epigrams." If intended as a collection of genuine epitaphs remarkable for their terseness or eccentricity, it is anything but complete, and the thing has been much better done before. But in point of fact it is a jumble of old tombstone verses, either genuine, or which have passed for such, with the playful or bitter" last words " which wits have suggested for their friends or enemies. By the side of inscriptions which are known to have a local existence, we find such things as Goldsmith's "Madam Blaize," Moore's lines upon Southey, and Punch's suggested epitaph on a locomotive engine-" Her end was pieces." The classification of epigrams is

He'll get up and break the stones,
And examine each strata that lies around,
For he's quite in his element underground.
"If with mattock and spade his body we lay
In the common alluvial soil;

He'll start up and snatch those tools away
Of his own geological toil;

In a stratum so young the Professor disdains
That embedded should be his organic remains.

"Then exposed to the drip of some case-harden-
ing spring,

And to Oxford the petrified sage let us bring,
When duly encrusted all over;

His carcass let stalactite cover;

There 'mid mammoths and crocodiles, high on the shelf,

Let him stand as a monument raised to himself. "1st Dec. 1820."

The reader will find, in this last class, four Latin lines which have always been a puzzle to curious scholars. They are said to be found on a stone in Lavenham Church, Norfolk

"Quod fuit esse quod est

Quod non fuit esse quod esse

*The ladies of Dr. Buckland's family-if not the professor himself-occasionally wore necklaces of ammonites.

Esse quod non esse

Quod est non est erit esse.

(We prefer leaving out the commas, as we have found the punctuation of other passages, whether the printer's or the editor's, of rather a hap-hazard character.) There is a translation given-one of several which we have seen, perfectly intelligible in themselves, but quite impossible to be got, by any fair grammatical process, out of the original Latin. The most plausible interpretation suggested-and if not the true one, it has, at least, the merit of great ingenuity-goes upon the supposition that the name of the deceased was Toby Watt. Then it comes out something like this: "That which was Toby Watt, is what Toby Watt was not; to be Toby Watt, is not to be what Toby Watt is; Toby is not, he will be." It is true that the Lavenham epitaph is said to be upon one John Wales: but we believe it exists elsewhere, with various readings: and it is by no means impossible the John Wales's relatives borrowed the inscription, admiring it none the less that it was unintelligible. That'some such play upon words is the key to the riddle, seems probably from another epitaph in Mr. Booth's book—

"Hic jacet Plus, plus non est hic,

Plus et non plus-quomodo sic?" Of which the following, said to be in St. Benet's Church, Paul's Wharf, seems to be

a free translation

"Here lies one More, and no more than he ; One More and no more-how can that be?

Why, one More and no more may well lie here alone,

But here lies one More, and that's more than one.",

Such grim puns were not thought irreverent to the dead by the taste of the day. We are not fond either of monumental witticisms or monumental eulogy: if we must needs choose a poetical memorial, there is one in the book (which really exists at Peterborough) whose plain-speaking strikes our fancy:—

"Reader, pass on, nor idly waste your time,
In bad biography, or bitter rhyme;
What I am now, this cumbrous clay insures,
And what I was is no affair of yours."

It will be seen that we have been unable

to compliment the present editor on his selection. Especially we regret to see some of the modern personalities of Punch copied into his pages. They may be excused in an ephemeral publication; they are not really malicious-indeed, nothing is more remarkable than their general good-humor and freedom from bitterness, when the temptations of the professional joker are considered-and they answer the intended purpose of raising a laugh. But in a book intended for the drawing-room table, as this seems to be, the same sense of propriety which has excluded some of the wittiest epigrams of former generations on account of their grossness, should also have suffered verses of no remarkable

brilliancy, which described living and late bishops (whose names are supplied in a note as Soapey" and " Cheesey," to remain in the files of periodical papers, or in the memories of their admirers.

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a "History of the Rebellion." Dr. Allibone's "Dictionary of Authors" is getting towards completion, and the MS. of the second volume will soon be in the printer's hands-the letter S., and the Smiths in particular (there being no less than 680 authors of that name, of whom more than eighty are Johns) having been a sad stumbling-block in the compiler's way.

FROM the "American Publishers' Circular" | curious matter; and Mr. B. J. Lossing announces for May, just received from Messrs. Trubner & Co., we find that Messrs. Ticknor and Fields, of Boston, announce a "Life of W. H. Prescott," by Dr. George Ticknor, to be published in quarto, with illustrations; Messrs. Lippincott & Co., of Philadelphia, have in press the " "History of Charles the Bold," by the late Mr. Prescott's assistant, Mr. John F. Kirk; Messrs. Mason Brothers, of New York, will shortly publish a "History of General Butler's Campaign and Administration at New Orleans," by Mr. Parton, whose "Life of Benjamin Franklin" has been looked forward to for several years; the Hon. Edward Everett is completing the manuscript of "The Law of Nations," a book to which the present state of America will furnish much new and

MICHEL CHEVALIER is engaged at this moment, by command of Napoleon III., on a large work on the internal resources of Mexico, drawn from reports prepared by special messengers, sent out for the purpose in the train of the French army of invasion.

From The Reader.

DE QUINCEY'S REMAINS.

Edinburgh, in the vicinity of which he then had his home-varied by occasional disappearances, during which he could not be traced-were passed the last years of a man who, some fifty years before, had been the companion of Wordsworth and Southey and Coleridge in the Lake-district, who had thereafter started out from that illustrious group as an intellectual notability sui generis, and who, for thirty years or more, had been famous in London and everywhere as the English Opium-eater, and one of the finest writers in the English language. Quietly and furtively, with all this retrospect of notoriety behind him, like some small and enfeebled ticket-of-leave man, amazingly afraid of the police, and dimly conscious that they might still have a right to him, did De Quincey flit about lanes and country-roads in his last obscure retreat-occasionally clutched and borne away in a cab (which was the only way

DE QUINCEY'S Writings hardly belong to what can be called "current literature." They are now rather a portion of that past English literature of which we are proud as a national inheritance. Hence the completion of the collected edition of De Quincey's works in fifteen volumes by Messrs. A. and C. Black of Edinburgh is a topic rather for our leading article than for one of our reviews. But it is an event that ought not to go by unchronicled. A few years ago, while De Quincey was yet alive, the only collected edition of his writings was an American edition, which had been very creditably undertaken by an American publisher in order to meet the demand in the United States caused by De Quincey's fame. Based on this edition there at last came forth a British edition, superintended by De Quincey himself, and all but finished when he died. The present of securing him) to be the lion of an Edinis a re-issue of that edition, with improvements and additions. The fifteen volumes ought to be in every library that aims at containing what is most excellent in English literature. For De Quincey is one of our classics, one of our real immortals, and his remains are one of the richest and most peculiar bequests that have recently fallen in to the great accumulation of our standard English prose. Whoever knows not De Quincey has his education in our higher English literature still to complete.

What a strange life was De Quincey's! A dream rather than a life, a passive flitting to and fro, almost a disembodied existence, unbound, unregulated by any of the ties and punctualities that bind and regulate ordinary lives! The end of it is within recent recollection. You were walking, perhaps, with a friend in one of the quiet country-lanes near Edinburgh; and there passed you timidly a strange diminutive creature, with his hat hung on the back of his head, at whom you could not help looking back, and whom, when you did look back, you found also stopping, as if in suspicious alarm, and looking back at you. "That is De Quincey," your friend would whisper; and the diminutive creature would hastily move on, as if fearful of being caught, and disappear round the first turning, the rim of his hat still sloping back over his shabby coat-collar. And so, in wanderings about in the lanes and country-roads near

burgh evening-party, when, after he had discoursed most beautiful talk for hours, the problem would arise how on earth to get him away again. At last, on impulse or on suasion, "out into the Night," as the German novelists have it, he would go; and what became of him no one knew, and no one cared.

And yet this strange life must, from first to last, have been a life of singular industry and labor. This singular being, this migratory and almost disembodied intellect, this little wandering anatomy, topped with a brain, whom a habit of opium-eating contracted in its early youth had loosened, as it seemed, from all the social realities of life, and almost from all sense of worldly responsibility, had been leading an indefatigable life of its own-all observation, all memory, all reverie, all speculation. Howsoever and whensoever he had acquired his scholarship, there were few such learned and accomplished men in his day as De Quincey. He had read enormously, without ever seeming to have books by him, much less a library. He had made himself his own encyclopædia, and, wherever he was, could quote all that he wanted to quote, dates and references included, from memory. Then, not belonging to the world, but only as some merely intellectual spirit moving about in the world, he had taken note of everything in it, serious or humorous, and had forgotten nothing that he had once noted. With a memory thus

of the volumes-probably for the practical reason, that the classes of writings theoretically discriminated shade into each other; but, theoretically, the classification is perfect; and, had it been possible, we should have preferred an arrangement of the writings according to it to any other arrangement except the strictly chronological. In a collected edition of an author's writings, and especially in a posthumous edition, the chronological

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full and ever becoming fuller, and with a fication followed in the actual arrangement tendency at the same time to investigation, reasoning, and fantastic constructions of his own ideas, he had, nearly all his life, and in the main for the mere purpose of earning the necessary sustenance of bread or opium, been in the habit of throwing off-nay, not throwing off, for they were carefully written, with corrections and interlineations-articles for magazines and other periodicals. Each article, when written, seems to have been thrown over his shoulder, unregistered, un- arrangement, where possible, is always the filed, uncared-for; and yet, incessantly and laboriously, he was writing fresh articles. Of books, or things originally shaped as books, he gave but one or two to the world; his whole literary life was a succession of articles for periodicals. It seemed to be the same to him where his articles went, provided they brought him the small immediate payment he wanted—whether to periodicals of note or to obscure periodicals; and it is one of the oddest things we know that this English literary celebrity, this veteran man of genius, whose services the greatest periodical in the land might have been glad to command at any price, should have spent some of his last years in composing articles for local periodicals, posting the packets of manuscript at the Lasswade post-office, and fearing lest, from being too late, they should be rejected altogether. Not till the very end of his life, and then probably less on his own motion than on the urging of friends, did he set about collecting his scattered papers, or indicating, from the lists in his memory, from what miscellaneous quarters they might be collected. And yet these scattered articles in all sorts of periodicals for some thirty or forty years were what De Quincey was and now is to the world; and the fifteen volumes in which they are now collected are, with the exception of a book or two, and some articles left out as scarcely worth reprinting, De Quincey's total remains.

very best. Leaving that matter, however, let us attend to De Quincey's theoretical distribution of the contents of these fifteen volumes. They might be distributed, he said, into three classes :-I. Writings of fact, reminiscence, and historical narration. Under such · a head, though not precisely so named, De Quincey included a large and very interesting portion of the contents of these fifteen volumes. He cited the " Autobiographic Sketches as an example. These "Autobiographic Sketches" contain recollections of his own life, and of his acquaintance with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and others; but there are, in the fifteen volumes, many papers of the same order, not autobiographic, but more generally historical or biographic, which are extremely substantial and valuable. All De Quincey's literary biographies are worth reading; and we recollect his sketch of Bentley's life as especially interesting and thorough. On the whole, we will make but one remark on this portion of De Quincey's writings; and that is that, whereas we have found that the statements of all opium-eaters of facts relating to themselves are to be received with caution, or even, where they are very picturesque, are to be punctually disbelieved, we have found, on the other hand, that, in general matters of history, opiumeaters are not necessarily inventive, but may be extraordinarily exact and accurate. II. Speculative writings, or writings addressed to the purely rational faculty. A large proportion of De Quincey's writings are of this kind; and, in our opinion, these-or those others in which criticism and speculation are blended with biography and history-are in the preface to the collected edition of among his best. His was, indeed, a singuhis writings which he himself superintended, larly subtle and, as the Germans say, spitzproposed a classification of these writings findig intellect; and, out of the class of exwhich cannot be improved upon. Neither in pressly systematic thinkers, we do not know that edition nor in the present is the classi-a recent writer whose investigations of vexed

It is seldom that an author attempts a classification of his own writings, and more seldom still that a classification which an author does propose of his own writings is satisfactory to others. De Quincey, how

ever,

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