minor or connecting canal. Cupids made of lead, fat, winged, and punchy, are likewise now and then observed standing on one foot and lifting up the other, as if these attempts at a flying motion had suddenly been converted into a fossil state, for nothing can appear of a more fixed or immoveable nature than such heathen gods of Dutch fashioning. Flower-beds in stiff rows, and flower-pots, no less formally arranged, are also conspicuous adornments in the garden of Mynheer. All is, of course, very neat, for I am convinced the flowers themselves would be scrubbed and dusted would they admit such rough handling."

Again,

"As you drive on you see the speckled cows of Paul Potter and Berghem grazing on every side in low marshy fields, one field being divided from another, not by hedge-rows as in England, but by ditches and canals. Cows and pasturage are most abundant; yet I never once tasted butter in Holland that I could eat, accustomed as I had been to the excellent butter of Devonshire. Considering the quantity of fine grass there is in this country, I never could comprehend how this could be, till it was by chance explained to me soon after our return to England. My husband held a court, as lord of the manor of Cudlipp town, near Tavistock, and I went with him to keep the feast: many farmers were present; from one, a most intelligent old man, who had a great knowledge of cattle, I learned, that experience had proved to him beyond all question, that the excellence of the cream from which butter is made, and on which the flavour of butter entirely depends, arises solely from the purity of the water drunk by the cows: no wonder, therefore that the Dutch cows, that suck in nothing better than the impurities of ditch-water in marshy grounds and duck-weeded canals, produce a cream that becomes rancid and disagreeable when formed into butter. And I may here also remark, that the water used generally for drinking in Holland is so extremely unwholesome, that it frequently makes strangers very ill this is more especially the case in Rotterdam.”

We conclude with two anecdotes. The first keeps us still in Dutch-land :

"The king is in the habit of speaking to his subjects with the utmost kindness and familiarity. As he was walking in one of the bye-streets of the Hague, on being overtaken by a shower of rain, he saw some children at play near the door of a poor dwelling, and asked if he might shelter himself under it. Being requested by their mother to walk in, he inquired where her husband was; when, bursting into tears, she said that he had long been buried in the field of Waterloo. The king asked her name, and, on hearing it, said he did not recollect that it was on the pension-list, and expressed his wonder that she had not presented her petition. She said that she had done so again and again, but that the minister refused to receive it. The king then took down her name, and all particulars respecting her late husband; saw the minister, and expressed his displeasure, telling him that he would discard him if he so conducted himself again, and ordered the pension, together with the arrears, to be paid to the poor

widow. His majesty once was passing by when a milk-woman fell with her barrow, and so hurt herself that she could not proceed with it. He not only helped her up, gave her more than the worth of what she had lost, but wheeled the barrow himself to the spot whither she was going."

This of Fuseli, at Zurich:

"The following anecdote respecting Fuseli's extravagance as a painter was related to me by poor Charles Stothard :-He called one day on Fuseli, and found him very busy. A canvass so large as to fill one side of his painting room was before him-the work far advanced. In one of the lower corners might be seen a bit of the end of a boat. At the top of the picture, in the opposite corner, a bit of the top of a rock, darkness and water between. Stretched right across the whole canvas, one peaked toe just touching the boat, the uplifted arm, on the other side, just touching the rock above, was seen the flying figure of a man of proportions as colossal as the canvas, all the muscles of his form marked as strongly as if they had been bared by the dissecting knife; his eyes flaring, his mouth open, his hair standing on end. Mr. Fuseli,' said Charles Stothard, what have we here?' -'Dat is Villiam Tell, jompping out of de boate,' exclaimed Fuseli, in a stentorian voice, flourishing in one hand the pallet, and in the other the pencil. Bless me, Mr. Fuseli, where will he alight when landed?"

6

These ample specimens cannot but recommend Mrs. Bray's "Mountains and Lakes of Switzerland;" and shew that the work is informing as well as gossiping; and above all that it is unique.

ART. XV.

1. Elegiac Extracts from Tibullus and Ovid: with English Introductions and Notes. By WILLIAM RAMSAY. M.A. London: Nutt. 1840. 2. Nuces Philosophica; or the Philosophy of Things as developed from the study of the Philosophy of Words. By ED. JOHNSON, ESQ. No. I. London: Simpkin. 1840.

THERE is an affinity in the purpose of these two publications, although they go to work in very different ways; and indeed in the competency and taste of the authors; for Mr. Ramsay is not only a ripe scholar, accurately accomplished, but a man of sound enlarged judgment, while the other is about as opinionative and superficial a person as it was ever our misfortune to encounter.

Mr. Kamsay's Extracts, he being Professor of Humanity in the University of Glasgow, is intended for students, but addressed to them in a spirit and with an ability, as well as measured discretion, calculated to be of great service to the advanced classical scholar; while it must tend to form the taste of the generous and hearty inquirer into the principles of language and the meaning of things. And all this the book does by means of engaging the student's en

thusiasm instead of occupying him with dry, empty, or abstract ideas; so that had boys at school or lads at college been generally habituated to Mr. Ramsay's system of reading the Latin Classics, we should have had multitudes of warm instead of pedantic scholars, and thousands of readers who, instead of regarding words alone in their literary repulsiveness, would have weighed and estimated them according to their intrinsic signification, as well as discovered in their etymological history curious and instructive incidents, or evidences of things.

The method of pursuing the study of the ancient classics has not only been absurd but unnatural, if one considers the real and useful purposes of studying dead languages, which are the parents of the living, and the treasures of bygone intelligence; for one of the consequences most generally experienced has been thorough dislike of all that has been learnt at school or college in these departments, and an unpractical waste of years. The system has been so monstrously absurd and preposterous, as not merely to hammer into boys the translations of Greek and Roman authors, before they had any accurate, not to say warm knowledge of their mother tongue, but before they were capable of understanding the philosophy of language, or the beauty of investiture which the human mind is cupable of bestowing upon its natural thoughts. And as if to render the study the more repulsive and unprofitable, the system as been to confine boys or students to what appear to them to be arbitrary rules of declension and conjugation, construction and syntax, rather than to enliven their minds with lessons and illustrations on the genius of the language, its remarkable indexes of thought, and its consanguinity, with all other expressions of mind and meaning in the student's own tongue, and the tongues of other nations.

Now Professor Ramsay has gone to work in a way totally different from the hackneyed and repulsive system of our schools and public seminaries, and in a rational as well as engaging manner too; for while he analyzes and pursues interesting researches in an interesting style, generalizing at the same time, he brings home the instance and the lesson to our moral as well as our intellectual appreciations, shewing also how relatively and in the wide fields of association every word, idea, and thought is combined, ramified and rendered suggestive.

We may outline Mr. Ramsay's method as well as purpose by saying that in his Introductions and annotations he has sought, in a manly and rational spirit, and, as if deeply sensible that he was addressing thinking and associating beings, to make the student take an interest in the life as well as in the literary remains of his choice authors; bringing also to his illustrations and comments a rich variety of kindred proofs and authorities, so as not merely to exhibit the meaning and value of words, but the manner in which they have

been transmuted and employed by different writers. Besides thus explaining words and phrases and fortifying their derivative as well as primitive meanings, the Professor has made his instances and quotations to illuminate the reader as respects the mythology, the antiquities, the philosophy, the coincidences with Scripture, &c. In thus illustrating customs, allusions, and doctrines, the student is led to read and appreciate cognate authors, and take delight in kindred and diversified thought; at the very moment too, becoming more and more acquainted with the principles of language, special and universal, the meaning of terms, the forms of construction, and the several styles and states of mind. The study, according to the Professor's instances and indications is both individual and general, positive and relative, direct and diffuse. He deals with reasons as well as with facts; and although he may have to encounter uncertainties, he never misses to educe serviceable instruction.

But what is Mr. Johnson's purpose, and what his execution? His purpose appears to be to arrive at the meaning of words by pursuing them to their roots, and also to prove that every word had at first one distinct meaning, was significant of one distinct thing. We quote two or three passages :—

"I look upon language as a dish of nuts, every word being a nut, and having a little bit of moral philosophy for its kernel. A word is the shell of the nut, and the meaning of the word its kernel. And as every shell contains its own proper kernel, so every word contains its own proper meaning. And as shells which contain no kernels are of no earthly use, save to amuse children, so words having no fixed signification, serve no other purpose than to amuse 'children of a larger growth,' unless it be to afford them matter of contention.

"This being my opinion of words, it follows that we have only to crack these nuts, and the gross sum of all the kernels will give us the gross sum of all moral and political knowledge. But let me further illustrate, by another fable, the fact that words used in an arbitrary sense-words not having a fixed, universal, and determinate meaning not only do, but of necessity must produce error, confusion, and mischief."

"If the legislators of a country would but first settle among themselves, what is to be uniformly understood by such words as right, wrong, good, bad, better, justice, improvement, reform, honour, dishonour, law, principle &c. &c., I think it is clear that much sound knowledge would take the place of much ridiculous opinion, that good argument would succeed to a mere noisy jargon, and confusion and much misery be superseded by good order, and an increase of human happiness. It would no longer happen as it does now, that the morality of one man is heinous in the eyes of anotherthat the 'right' of to-day is the 'wrong' of to-morrow-that what one man considers improvement, another believes to be deterioration-that justice often becomes injustice-honour, dishonour-principle, no principle at all -and law itself unlawful."

Speaking of a positive standard by which the meaning of words may be regulated and universally established, Mr. Johnson says that he means

"A standard by which all men, not only oUGHT to regulate the meanings of the words they use, but by which they MUST regulate them, or else MUST pay the penalty of that confusion, discord, mismanagement, and jarring interests, which we see everywhere pervading the great family of mankind; just as certainly as confusion, mismanagement, and failure, must be the lot of any fleet where the signals used to regulate the conduct of the ships are not understood by those who use them, or by those for whose information they are exhibited. In either case it is not a matter of doubt-but a matter of absolute and inevitable necessity."

"I mean that the word and its meaning are naturally, and necessarily, not arbitrarily, so associated in the mind, that whenever the word is pronounced, it instantly excites in the mind the idea or ideas of which that word is the signal. I say that this association in the mind is the reason of that word having been made the sign of that or those ideas, and no other. I say that every word carries with it its own meaning, and that if it do not, it has no meaning at all. I say that the meaning of a word is not and cannot be arbitrary, but is inherent and intrinsic-that the word and its meaning are inseperable-that the meaning of a word belongs to it as a part of itself that the word is given to the meaning and not the meaning to the word that they are to each other in the relation of cause and effect, and the meaning is the cause of the word-that there is, therefore, a natural relation between the sign and the thing signified, from which the word results-and that this natural relation is indestructible so long as the word remains a word, for as soon as that relation is destroyed, there is no longer any reason why a particular word should be made the sign of any one idea or set of ideas more than another, unless indeed it be universal consent, which can only be obtained with regard to the very commonest sensible objects-and, there being now no longer any reason why that particular word should represent any one particular idea, or set of ideas, more than another, it will soon be made the sign of fifty different ideas by fifty different people—and as soon as this happens, it ceases to be a word, having lost the great attribute of words, viz. the power of communicating ideas, and becomes a mere empty and senseless sound, meaning anything which he who uses it may choose to attach to it, and, therefore, meaning nothing at all to others, since it is manifest that a word which may mean anything, does, in reality, mean nothing. '

He says, in reference to the study of moral metaphysics, that—

"The ignorance and error, in which the subject is wrapt, have chiefly arisen from the ignorance and error which prevail with regard to the nature, the uses, and significations of words.

"The earlier writers on language taught first that words are the signs of things, and afterwards that they are the signs of ideas; from which men have jumped to the conclusion that each separate word is the sign of a se