Latin verse composition. We have no space for examples of the grace, facility, and smoothness of the poems which this elegant Latinist left behind him. Suffice it to quote one neat epigram, as much for its fulfilment of the just requirements of epigrammatic poetry, as for the sound sense which it brings to bear on the vexed question of Private' v. Public Education.' It is on the thesis of Martial's familiar pentameter:- 'Poteris tutior esse domi.' 'Dum mater metuit virgæ ne verbera lædant, Whether the amusement of turning neat Latin epigrams is likely to decline in the favour of educated Englishmen must depend in a great measure on the spirit in which our public schools accept the recommendations of the recent Blue Books. If the time spent on composition, particularly composition in verse, is at all seriously curtailed, it can hardly be that the next generation will find such charm in clothing witty thoughts in equivalent Latin as our scholars up to this date have derived from the occupation. How many a drawer in a scholar's escritoire contains, if we might rifle it, buried treasure of this kind, thrown off, perhaps, in lightness of mood, passed about to a friend or two, and then laid by and forgotten. It is the peculiarity of these 'jeux d'esprit' that they often discover a vein of wit in men whom the world knew as learned thinkers, and nothing beside; and that their casual preservation occasionally serves some historical or archæological purpose. Little in form, slight in the time and pains they have cost, they are ofttimes little prized by their authors. Many of them float awhile on the lips of the few that can enjoy them, and then slip clean out of memory, because there is no observant scribe to Boswellize the talk' of such as utter them. It is a pity that these are not more carefully caught up, as they drop, and communicated on the spur of the moment to Notes and Queries,' where, at least, they would attain a longer and larger fame than their careless and indifferent progenitors have cared to secure for them. One of these foundlings came across us the other day: an epigram by 'Anonymus,' on a clergyman who preached Archdeacon Hare's sermons instead of trusting to his own manufactures. It runs thus 'Ne lepores vendas alienos: prome leporem This is so neat and happy, that it may suffice to prove that, as R yet yet at least, there is no fear lest this talent should become extinct. Something remains to be said of English epigrams, for our poets have mostly done a little in this line, though few of them have cared to found on such light basis their chief title to fame. The number of epigrams-good, bad, and indifferent-in our language is probably immense; the tale of those which have the necessary characteristics of the epigram-proper might be easily counted. A great number err in point of impurity, inuendo, and personality. Many collections, professing to eliminate all such as are likely to offend, contain nevertheless page after page which must exclude such volumes from the drawing-room table and the reach of the young. Freer from this fault than its predecessors is the collection of epigrams in Elegant Extracts;' nor can any blame on this score attach to Mr. Booth's 'Epigrams Ancient and Modern,' published in 1863. The fault of this last volume is that little pains have been taken to trace epigrams home to their authors, or to classify them on any chronological principle that would assist a history of epigrams. Hence, a work which might have been made useful as well as entertaining, has earned little or no title to the former epithet; while there may also be a question as to the judgment with which selections have been made. A number of ephemeral lampoons from 'Punch' have found admission, while many really good epigrams, interesting from the independent connection of their authors with English literature and its history, are entirely absent. Thus of one of our earliest epigrammatists (1612), Sir John Harrington, we find but one epigram cited, and that one neither so good, nor so calculated to enhance his fame, as the three which we subjoin. The first against writers that carp at other men's books': The readers and the hearers like my books, I would my guests should praise it, not my cooks,' is not so familiar as the other two, which are well known in themselves, though seldom tacked to their author: 6 On Treason. Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason? On Fortune. Fortune, they say, doth give too much to many; But yet she never gave enough to any,' an an amplification, of course, of the Latin line, Fortuna multis,' &c. We miss, too, in Booth's monumental section, Herrick's pretty epitaph On a child that died,' so simple, so touchingly sweet, that no collection should be without it; and this lack is ill-compensated by his satirical epigram about Gout in the Hand,' a hit without mercy at the avarice of one Urbes, a miser. Again, no later epigrammatist so well understood what an epigram should be as rare Ben Jonson: none was more imbued with Greek taste and scholarship. He strays, indeed, far wide of his principles in several scurrilous and several unpresentable epigrams, yet he may be pardoned these for the sake of several epitaphs, which it may be doubted if English writer has ever surpassed. We marvel that but three of Jonson's epigrams are cited by Booth: one, of course, the famous epitaph on 'Sydney's sister, Pembroke's mother;' while the other two fall beneath numberless specimens which might have been adduced. Why did he omit the beautiful lines on Elizabeth L. H. (cxxiv.)— 'Wouldst thou hear what man can say, In a little,' &c. Or those on a child of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel,' beginning (cxx.)— 'Weep with me all Or, better even than these, his lament over his first daughter: 'Here lies to each her parents ruth Mary the daughter of their youth. But all Heaven's gifts being Heaven's due, It makes her father less to rue. At six months' end she parted hence With safety of her innocence. Whose soul Heaven's queen, whose name she bears, In comfort of her mother's tears, Hath placed among her virgin train, These are classically pure, and of true epigrammatic calibre. But to edit a really standard book of English epigrams is a task demanding greater diligence, research, and discrimination than as yet have been applied to it. There is no one but has some half dozen pet epigrams ready to his tongue; but how few have any idea of the authorship of those which they quote. It would R 2 enhance enhance the interest felt in this style of composition, if readers could pick up, with the words, a little of their history, trace each epigram to its proper period, and gather from each some casual turn of thought or speech that might collaterally illustrate other works of the author. The field of English epigrams is not too poor to claim this toil and pains. Among its cultivators have been Cowley, Waller, Dryden, Pope, Addison, Churchill, Prior, Congreve, Johnson, and Goldsmith; whilst in our own times Hood and Hook, with the Smiths, Horace and James, have not disdained to bestow their wits upon the epigram. The fun of these latter is peculiarly their own, not bitter or acrimonious, but full of genial, sparkling playfulness. Of the former names some have preferred the Greek, some the Latin model. Some have cultivated both, or judiciously blended the one with the other. But it will be found that the greater the poet, the more marked is his addiction to the Greek pattern; while the coarser style, more akin to the Latin, is chiefly met with in the off-hand wit of the mere man of pleasure, who wrote because it was the fashion, and because he had a gift, if indeed that be a gift, which confers the power of being personal, or severe, in as large, if not larger measure than brilliant and terse. Thus we seem to observe the characteristics of the Greek type in Dryden's panegyrical epigrain on Milton, beginning 'Three poets in three distant ages born,' &c., and in Pope's epitaph on Gay, though that is too long by half, and does not so much recall the half-joking, half-melancholy inscriptions on some Greek sepulchres, as Gay's own on himself: - 'Life is a jest, and all things show it: The famous distich of Pope on Sir Isaac Newton is one of the grandest we know, but is scarcely referable to any original :— "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, let Newton be, and all was Light!' Several choice epigrams by lesser hands occur to us, in which there is more of the Greek tone than the Latin. For instance, take this of Dr. Young, Greek in principle and point : 'As in smooth oil the razor best is whet, Their want of edge from their offence is seen, Or Or this happy description of 'Modesty,' by Aaron Hill— The same writer deserves the credit of the words, if not of the philosophy, of the following: "Tender-handed stroke a nettle, And it stings you for your pains: And it soft as silk remains. And the rogues will use you well.' Prior, indeed, was at home in both veins; but he is better to our mind when writing in a Lady's Milton 'With virtue such as yours had Eve been arm'd, than when he strings together bantering lines on the actual age of Phillis; or versifies the misadventures of the glass eye, which Baron Le Cras was disgusted at discovering among the charms of his mistress. Prior, by the way, was most diligent in ransacking Greek, Latin, French, and English store-houses to come by his epigrams. His famous Debt Discharged' (To John I owe great obligation,' &c.), is from Martial, v. 52, while his epitaph for himself is but an expert adaptation of a much older one by John Carnegie, as shown by Mr. Singer in Notes and Queries,' 1st Ser., vol. i., p. 482: 'Johnnie Carnegie lais heer Descendit of Adam and Eve. Gif ony can gang hieher I'se willing gie him leve.' The best epigrams of Horace Walpole and of Lord Lyttleton are as much more akin to the Greek than the Latin, as they are in courtly point and finish to the coarser jeux d'esprit of Swift and |