moved in parliament by one whom it is needless to name, and would be superfluous to eulogize; whose bounty is as catholic as his charity; and who, while his praise is, as it deserves to be, in all the churches,-and in all the meeting-houses too,-is, and rejoices in being, a devout and dutiful member of the Church of England, and will ever be numbered among her worthies. Had Mr. Dymond's days been prolonged time would, in many points, have matured his judgment, and taken off the edge of his antipathies. A quaker he would probably have remained, because personal feelings would have come strongly in aid of inherited prejudices; a prophet is honoured in his own sect; and no sectarians instil into their children their opinions and peculiarities more carefully than the quakers-praiseworthy for this and for many other things, notwithstanding the sandy foundation on which their system is erected. But experience and observation would have convinced him, that the institutions of society are not altogether so bad as he had supposed them to be; and the public not so enlightened, nor so far advanced in the march of improvement, nor so certainly in the right road. He might have retained his persuasion concerning the unlawfulness of war; but he would have seen reason to be thankful, that fleets and armies protect the British quakers against foreign enemies, and that penal laws protect them against violence at home. He might still have hoped, that an age would come when society would require no tribunals, no laws, no magistrates, no priesthood, but every father of a family be like a patriarch, high-priest, and absolute lord in his own household, and all one family in Christ; but the older he grew the more distant that hope would have appeared to him, and the less distinct. He would have learnt, that before society can be reduced to the level platform which he desired, chaos must come again; and not such a chaos as existed when the earth was without form and void, and all things being in solution might settle into such uniformity; but the chaos that is brought about by convulsions, which never take place upon this inhabited globe without producing inequalities. Let us hope that those persons among whom these volumes hitherto have chiefly been circulated, and by whom they are likely to be received with great respect and deference, may enter uureservedly into the moral and religious principles of the author, but weigh the matter well before they assent to any of his political applications. ART. ART. IV.-1. Introduction to the Study of the Greek Classic Poets. By Henry Nelson Coleridge, Esq., M. A. Part I.-General Introduction.-Homer. London. 1880. 2. Ideen über Homer und sein Zeitalter. Von K. E. Schubarth. Breslau. 1821. 3. Ueber das Zeitalter und Vaterland des Homer. Von Dr. Bernhard Thiersch. Halberstadt. 1824. 4. Vorfrage über Homeros, seine Zeit und Gesänge. Von J. Kreuser. Ister theil. Frankfort am Main. 1828. 5. Ueber Homers Leben und Gesänge. Von J. H. J. Köppen. Durchgesehen und verbessert vom D. F. E. Ruhkopf. Hanover. 1821. 6. Versuch die poetische Einheit der Iliade zu Bestimmen. Von G. Lange. Darmstadt. 7. Ulysse Homère. 1829. 1826. Par Constantin Koliader. Folio. Paris. 8. Ueber Homerische Geographie und Weltkunde. K. H. W. Völcker. Hanover. 1830. MR. Von Dr. R. COLERIDGE'S work not only deserves the praise of a clear, eloquent, and scholarlike exposition of the preliminary matter, which is necessary in order to understand and enter into the character of the great Poet of antiquity, but it has likewise the more rare merit of being admirably adapted for its acknowledged purpose. It is written in that fresh and ardent spirit, which, to the congenial mind of youth, will convey instruction in the most effective manner, by awakening the desire of it— and by enlisting the lively and buoyant feelings in the cause of useful and improving study; while, by its pregnant brevity, it is more likely to stimulate than to supersede more profound and extensive research. If then, as it is avowedly intended for the use of the younger readers of Homer, and, as it is impossible not to discover, with a more particular view to the great school to which the author owes his education, we shall be much mistaken if it does not become as popular as it will be useful in that celebrated establishment. Shall we be forgiven, if we assert that, although strongly impregnated with a more modern tone of criticismthough we cannot but trace, or imagine that we trace the influence of a well-known writer, connected with Mr. Coleridge by a double tie, a writer, who, instead of striking out occasional snatches of poetry, of sweeter melody than most which in our day has caught the public ear, ought to have perpetuated his fame by some higher and more finished effort; and instead of casting fitful gleams of light on many of the profoundest subjects of human speculation, ought to have shone with concentered power on some one one great question;-still the work before us has something in its general cast and expression peculiarly Etonian. Of this great school it is the practical excellence, that it has so frequently awakened the enthusiasm of its sons towards the studies which it has been its chief aim to commend; ardorem illum amoris sine quo, cum in vitá, tum in eloquentiá, nihil magnum effici possit; that it is regarded not merely with the blind and passionate, or poetic attachment to its ancient buildings and beautiful fields, the scene of the fresh and buoyant enjoyments of youth, of delightful associations and fervent friendships, but of rational and conscientious gratitude for the direction of the mind towards pursuits, without the awakening influence of which it might have stagnated in careless indolence, or abandoned itself to the more strenuous and more fatal idleness of dissipation. In few, perhaps, it may have assisted in implanting that early and unconquerable love of reading,' which Gibbon declared, in his old age, he would not exchange for the treasures of India. But in how many has it awakened that love for classical learning, that admiration for the great writers of antiquity, which, while it seems to possess a sort of peculiar and talismanic influence, a kind of kindred affinity, beyond other branches of learning, with the mind of youth, is cherished in the mature strength of the understanding; which not seldom adds dignity to the argument of the statesman, and perspicuity to the style of the orator, and lucid order to the narrative of the historian; and even in old age has afforded to the strongest and most active minds an inexhaustible occupation, the most valued by those who possess it in the highest degree. It is not to youth alone, in the first ardour of admiration, that the glowing language of Mr. Coleridge will scarcely appear too high drawn. 'Greek-the shrine of the genius of the old world; as universal as our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, of indefatigable strength, with the complication and the distinctness of nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the mind like English; with words like pictures, with words like the gossamer film of the summer; at once the variety and picturesqueness of Homer, the gloom and the intensity of schylus; not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, not fathomed to the bottom by Plato ;-not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its ardours, even under the Promethean touch of Demosthenes. And Latin-the voice of empire and of war, of law, and of the state; inferior to its halfparent, and rival, in the embodying of passion, and in the distinguishing of thought, but equal to it in sustaining the measured march of history, and superior to it in the indignant declamation of moral satire; stamped with the mark of an imperial and despotizing re public; public; rigid in its construction, parsimonious in its synonymes; reluctantly yielding to the flowery yoke of Horace, although opening glimpses of Greek-like splendour in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius; proved indeed to the uttermost by Cicero, and by him found wanting; yet majestic in its barrenness, impressive in its conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the spirit of nations, and not with the passions of individuals; breathing the maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit, whether touched by the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive Livy, by the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus.'* We must not, however, forget that the subject of our article is not Eton, but Homer. We have associated with Mr. Coleridge's work a number of tracts which have appeared from time to time in Germany and elsewhere, relating to the history of the Homeric poems, in almost all of which those who take an interest in the subject will find something worthy of their notice. We cannot pretend to keep pace with the prolific rapidity of the foreign press, on a topic which affords such ample scope for the industry of the philologist, the speculations of the philosophical, or the imagination of the more visionary scholar. Some works, therefore, may have escaped our notice, others we have not been able to obtain; many valuable writers have incidentally thrown out their Homeric views in works on other subjects; with these we would not be considered entirely unacquainted, and may occasionally avail ourselves of their assistance.† Without professing to fill up the outline of the introduction to Homer,' we shall enter more at length into those points, on which the author has been most concise. Mr. Coleridge has done so well what he has done most fully, that we shall leave him, in some parts, master of his own ground; and though, on several points, we may contest his opinions, it will, we trust, be rather in the tone of amicable conference, than of hostile disputation. Those were happy days, when with easy and undoubting faith men read the whole works of every author as the unquestioned property of the venerable name which appeared in the title-page; when Cicero was undisputed master of all his orations and epistles, and Plato of his dialogues; when literary was almost as rare as religious scepticism; when to have separated the Iliad and Odyssey, as the works of different bards, would have been We do not think any Greek could have understood or sympathized with Juvenal. Is it possible to put into Greek such lines as these?— Summum crede nefas vitam preferre pudori, Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. viii. 83, 84. +We must acknowledge our ignorance of the works of two of the principal maintainers of the Wolfian hypothesis, William Müller and Weisse, resisted resisted as a scandalous and unwarrantable outrage against the venerable name of the poet, and one would as soon have thrown a doubt on the existence of Alexander or Julius Cæsar as of Homer. Me occidistis, amici, Non servastis, ait, cui sic extorta voluptas, Et demtus per vim mentis gratissimus error. But, though in some cases the cool and sagacious spirit of philosophical criticism may have been urged to excess, yet against most of its decrees we fear that there lies no appeal. Where the general authority of scholars has admitted the edict of disfranchisement, there is little hope that the work will be restored to the honours and privileges of authenticity. We can only then acquiesce in the severe but inexorable decree, And blush to think how fondly we believed. But while other authors, though lopped of some of their excrescent and superfluous branches, have still been left in peaceful possession of the larger part of their former glory, the axe has been boldly laid at the root of the great poems of Grecian antiquity. They have been resolved into a number of disconnected rhapsodies, collected and arranged at a late period of Grecian history-the minstrelsy of the Grecian border modelled into a continuous story; and Homer himself, from the blind and venerable father of poesy, the honour of whose birth was disputed by the most illustrious cities of Greece, has sunk first to an itenerant rhapsodist, doling forth his unconnected ballads, till at length his very existence has been denied, his name reduced to an appellative either derived from the not unusual blindness of that wandering race, or from words which imply the stringing together of these separate poetic fragments-or from other etymologies not less uncertain and arbitrary. Mr. Coleridge has stated, with sufficient fulness and perspicuity, the present state of belief concerning the origin of the Iliad. Upon the whole, therefore, it being quite clear that the Iliad assumed substantially its present shape in the age of Pisistratus, there are three distinct points of view in which this collection may be placed: 1st. That Homer wrote the Iliad in its present form; that by means of the desultory recitations of parts only by the itinerant rhapsodists, its original unity of form was lost in western Greece, and that Pisistratus and his son did no more than collect all these parts, and re-arrange them in their primitive order. 2d. That Homer wrote the existing verses constituting the Iliad, in such short songs or rhapsodies as he himself, an itinerant rhapsodist, could sing or recite separately; and that these songs were, for the first time, put into one body, and disposed in their epic form, by Pisistratus as aforesaid. 3d. That several rhapsodists originally composed the songs, out |