Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 7.djvu/508

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NOTES AND QUERIES. EIO s. vn. MAY 25, 1007.

garded either as a mere epicurean, or as the best poet of Persia, Firdausi and Sadi bein<* above him.

The new letters are not dated, but we con- jecture from the reference to Mr. Herbert Paul's ' Life of Froude,' which appeared in 1905, that they are of recent composition. Mr. Lang rightly emphasizes the fact that, whatever Fronde's pre- judices, his is history that can be read, owing to his great gifts as a writer. Froude is told that he is " extremely English," and "so, almost alone of historians, you could palliate the beefy ruffianism of Henry VIII."

Horace Walpole is an apt subject for a writer of Mr. Lang's tastes, and he is well hit off here, with some amusing references to his depreciatory critic, Macaulay : " Our gratitude to you is unfeigned ; you are of the few writers who never weary us, and it seems to me that diffidence, no great defect, accounts for most of what Lord Macaulay took to be vices in you. He, too, never wearies, but, ah, what a habit he has of dissecting character with a cleaver ! "

Richardson receives qualified commendation, and the weakness of Pamela's story a point, by the by, which is vieux jeu by this time is laid bare with delicate innuendo ; e.g., the tale of the prisoned and oppressed virgin is, says Mr. Lang, " the ancient stock - piece or romance, though no moat surrounds the chateau of Mr. B ."

Fielding is compared with Thackeray and with the novelists of to-day. He is not informed that the magnificent compliment paid to him by Gibbon in ' Memoirs of my Life,' concerning his descent from the Hapsburgs, has been demonstrated to be a " bam " by Dr. J. H. Round in The Genealogist.

With M. F. Tupper, who concludes the series, Mr. Lang has great tun. He congratulates him on his wide reputation arid hosts of admirers : " As you once told us, on visiting a home of the mentally afflicted in the United States of America, you learned that your poem, ' Never Give Up,' was a great favourite, and that each inmate set it to music of his own composition." We condole with Mr. Lang on his i natality to procure a copy of ' Proverbial Philosophy.' It lies before us, and has long supplied us with a wealth of classical allusion and ingenious paraphrase. Why, the very potato figures as

That nutritious root, the boon of far Peru.

The Quarterly Review : April. (John Murray.) PROF. J. C. EWART contributes an excellent paper on the origin of the modern horse. It is a subject which has many attractions, and has been much discussed of late years. Up to the present time no definite solution of the equine pedigree has been reached. Prof. Ewart's paper indicates unwearying research, and ought to be considered by all who devote themselves to the zoology of later geological time.

The article on the first Earl of Lytton is un- signed. It has evidently been written by some one who had a deep regard for his memory, though we do not think ne estimates the poetry so highly as its merits deserve. When a child the Earl was devoted to fairy tales, and was permitted to enjoy them, as we conceive, without having his mind ruffled by being told day by day that such stories were not true. At a Very early period he knew by heart much of the poetry of Walter Scott. This, perhaps, may not nave been so strange as it appears. We know of another example : that of a

solitary boy who lived in circumstances so de pressing that enmity was shown to every kind ot intellectual endeavour. He is now old, but his memory is as vivid as in youth. He attributes and we know with complete justice the develop- ment of the literary side of his life to the acci- dental access which he had on rare occasions to Scott's verse at a period when, he was unable to appreciate the novels. .

Sir Frederick Pollock devotes himself to an estimate of the late Prof. Maitland, who raised himself to the highest rank among British his- torians -a position which, as the writer wisely points out, he has not gained among the non- studious classes, on account of the " useful- knowledge illusion which infested the world in the days of our fathers' youth." Maitland, we are told, loved the Vulgate "as a good mediaeval scholar should." We wish that he had left behind him an essay on its place in the world's literature. He might possibly nave been believed, while few, if any, or his contemporaries would have been listened to. He would have told us that, though it was not of the golden or even the silver age, it is a treasury of noble Latin, and that to Jerome and Augustine we in a great measure owe the scholastic and chronicle Latin of the Middle Ages. It was the men of the new learning, as they were called not the Protestants as such who caused the writers of the early Church to go out of fashion. There were some of the men of the Renaissance who even went so far as to condemn the reading of the Vulgate on account of what they regarded as its inelegant phraseology,

Prof. P. Hume Brown has a dispassionate article on Goethe, which is useful reading in view of the unstinted admiration and depreciation which are both current.

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WE cannot undertake to answer queries privately, nor can we advise correspondents as to the value of old books and other objects or as to the means of disposing of them.

M. N. ("Parson's nose"). See 8 S. xi. 33, 92; xii. 58 ; 9 S. viii. 113.

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