Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/429

Rh art, especially when repeated. It's a pity, too, when a line from Virgil or Horace won't scan, or a sonorous phrase from Tacitus won't parse. Nor is it quite comme il faut in a great historian to confound Caligula with Commodus, little as there may be to choose between those Arcades ambo; or, in a French scholar and critical chronicler, to interpret M. de Serre's celebrated Jamais (in the amnesty debate of 1819) by Never!—"the regicides, never!" "In the irrevocable category should be placed the family of Buonaparte and the regicide voters. The rest are only exiled for a time. To conclude in one word—the regicides, never!" So M. de Serres is made to declaim; and, persistent in his negation of the force of jamais, Sir Archibald afterwards remarks, "The expression used by M. de Serres, jamais (never), made an immense sensation." But granting that the meaning of jamais must be "never," what then becomes of the meaning of the context? —which, by the context, is just what De Serres did not, as it is what jamais need not, mean.

Nor does the learned baronet seem to gain in accuracy of style with years and experience. In his latest volume (iii.) we have superabundant specimens of his old manners—e. g., "These [Asiatic] names will convey but little ideas to a European reader:"—"Along the parapet is also placed, at certain distances, square, loopholed blockhouses:"—"The whole palisades and outer walls were conquered by the Russians:"—"the innate jealousy of the Russians at the English in the East:"—"He (Wittgenstein, 1829) was allowed to retire accordingly, a step rested on his age and infirmities; and he received for his successor Count Diebitch, the chief of his staff," who , it is added, "expressed himself in flattering terms to his respectable predecessor:"—"the divergence of his opinions with those of his colleagues" [speaking of La Bourdonnaye, 1829]:—"It is impossible to qualify in too strong terms the conduct of Opposition in recent circumstances," is made to say M. de Chantelauze, in 1830:—"the military histories of France. … is a striking proof how strongly .. the public mind had been turned to warlike achievements" (p. 633):—the vehement gesticulation of the French school of acting, arises partly "from the experienced necessity of supplying, by the intensity of the representation, for the measured language and stately voice of the poet." But perhaps, on the whole, there is less verbosity in our historian's more recent labours—less of the tumid, turgid wordiness at which Mr. Disraeli sometime sneered, when he told us how "Mr. Rigby impressed on Coningsby … to make himself master of History of the late War in twenty volumes, a capital work, which proved that Providence was on the side of the Tories." Mr. Disraeli has enjoyed the sweets of office, and has made Mr. Wordy honorary amends, by a baronetcy to wit, since that little pleasantry was indited.

It is edifying to note Sir Archibald's historical parallels, as stated in a grand climacteric sort of way. He has a set of historical uniques, ancient and modern; severely adjusted correlatives, each to each, and admitting of no other comparison than the one exclusively assigned by his uncompromising rhetoric. No words, he assures us, for instance, can convey an idea of the transports of joy which pervaded entire Greece when the news of the battle of Navarino was received:—"Never since the defeat of Hasdrubal by the consul Nero, on the banks of the Metaurus, had such a sensation pervaded the heart of a nation." One might suppose that