Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 4.djvu/289

 10"-8. IV. SEPT. 16,1995.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 239 Ansonins. Sometimes, again, we have humorous comments, as in " Nemo repente fuit turpissimus," "It takes five years to make a solicitor, or a pun such as that on eqnam in a quotation from Horace by Lord North: see p. 60. Following these come ' Mottoes,' one of the earliest of which for golf (from Virgil's ' Georgics,' ii. 129) is very droll:— Miscuerunt herbas et non innoxia verbs. Modern applications of the classics are largely taken from parliamentary proceedings in the time of Pitt and Gladstone. At p. 52 are given the verses (imitated from The Taller, No. 6) on Virgil's use—to characterize. Kucus—of the words " Pius," " Pater," and "Dux Trojanus." (Whoseare these lines?) Some short essays on Roman comedy and other subjects, which follow, are interesting and valuable, and the entire book is a delight. It might, as the author admits, be indefinitely expanded. Here area few specimens, which we supply:— You may break, you may ruin, the vase if you will, But the scent of the roses will cling to it still. (We quote from memory.) Quo *"tn c.l est imlnii it recens, servabit odorem Testa diu.—Hor., Epist. I. ii. 69-70. Tennyson ('Life,' ii. 289) supports Mr. Platt by noting " What a bad, hissing line is that in the poem on the death of Thomson : The year's best sweets shall duteous rise." And he is represented as saying, " What dire offence from amorous causes springs. ' Amrus causiz springs'; horrible ! I would sooner die than write such a line!! Trench was the only critic who said of my first volume, ' What a singular absence of the 's '!" The best-known source of quotation among lite- rary men is the splendid Latin Bible. Yet it is not available, as our columns have recently shown, in a decently printed English edition. V hat could be more splendid than the sentence applied to Queen Victoria's Jubilee Medal? " Longitude dierum in dextra ejus, et in sinistra gloria." Mr. Platt does not give many applications of Greek, so we mav introduce a passage from the 4 Memoirs of my Life,' by an author whose fame may outlive the most potent of parliamentarians. Gibbon thus prefaces a quotation in Greek from the twelfth of the Olympian Odes: " Whatsoever may have been the fruits of my education, they must be ascribed to the fortunate banishment which placed me at Lausanne. I have sometimes applied to my own fate the verses of Pindar, which remind an Olympic champion that his victory was the con- sequence of his exile: and that at home, like a domestic fowl, his days might have rolled away inactive or inglorious. Not much of Ovid has passed into current use among scholars; but one phrase (in 'Tristia,' IV. i. 51) has been very widely used: " Virgilium vidi tantum." Gibbon employs it of his glimpse of Vol- taire, Scott of the look and word he got from Burns. Mi Platt has done little or nothing in the way of mediteval allusions in Latin, yet these have given as Scylla and Charybdis, and " Rome was not built in a dav." traced at 9th S. iv. 327. Mr. Platt is quite right in saying that the so- called "vivid present" is less used in English than in Latin. Our own columns have dealt with this idiom. It is not advisable in English, and is generally a sign of inexperience rather than skill. Carlyle has some acres of it in his ' French Revo- lution,' where it seems more forced than forcible, and grows very wearisome. In his preface Mr. Platt speaks of words which have no equivalent in Latin as throwing light on the history of morals. There is one word which i» essentially Latin in its origin, but which we defy any scholar to translate into Latin—and that is- " Romanticism." The popular and medical mispronunciation of " angina " was dissipated by some dons of Trinity, Canibridge, as may be seen in the 'Life' of Arch- bishop Benson. "Infandum, regina," .tc., seems to have been a favourite quotation with Fielding, for we have noted it three times in ' Tom Jones': once when a barber regrets that he is not, as of old, a barber-surgeon, and twice in the mouth of Partridge, who thinks it suitable for a discourse on love, and for any occasion when he sees an old woman, the whole race of them being mischievous. We think that many Johnsonian references to Latin besides those given deserve collection— e.g., this in BpswelPs book, under 'Age 74': "On1 the frame of his [Johnson's] portrait, Mr. Beauclerk. had inscribed Ingenium ingens Inculto latet hoc sub corpore. After Mr. Beauclerk's death, when it became Mr, Langton's property, he had the inscription- defaced. Johnson said, complacently, 'It was kind of you to take it off'; ana then, after a short pause, added, 'and not unkind in him to put it on.'" The following admirable Oxford allusion we came across recently. A gentleman named Money had a new wife, and became daily more uxoriously fmul. as she was in that state in which those who love their lords wish to be—to quote a Dickensian para- phrase. With an exquisite fineness of point which is almost too good, as is, according to Lamb, the quip, about the lady's mantua and the gentleman s Cremona violin, somebody quoted :— (Jresc.it amor nummi, quantum ipsa pecunia crescit* The Church in Madras. By the Rev. Frank Penny, LL.M. (Smith, Elder & Co.) IN this handsome, accurate, and well-illustrated, volume the Rev. Frank Penny, an ex-chaplain of the Indian Service (Madras Establishment) and a well-known contributor to our columns, has ren- dered an important service to the student of the growth and development of our Indian empire. No attempt is made to supply a complete history of religious progress in the place and period dealt with, nor even a full record of missionary enter- prise in Southern India. His principal aim is to demonstrate how ecclesiastical events were in- fluenced by the action of the East India Company and its local government at Fort St. George. What is given consists largely of extracts from the- dispatches of the Directors to the Government of Fort St. George, with others from the replies, and is, accordingly, official and, in the full sense, autho- ritative. Mr. Penny's work starts with the begin- ning of the seventeenth century, when the char- tered Company owned no land in the East and wa»- under no obligation to provide chaplains. As students of Hakluyt—an author to be closely fol- lowed by those who seek to benefit by Mr. Penny's early chapters—will know, the London merchants in whose hands was our early commerce with the East were God-fearing men, who, however disposed they