the king as to the beggar; that is, in a natural, straightforward, and decided tone. He held in his memory, and continually made use of, an inexhaustible quantity of sayings and rhymes, which he called little gospels. Don Martin was as charitable as religious, he gave with full hands, and without ostentation. He was generous, like a real caballero, placing so little price on his good deeds, and forgetting them so completely, that he was offended if they were remembered or praised in his presence, since he simply and Christianly held that it was not a virtue but a duty for the rich to give to the poor.'

But of this last class of novels, Una en Otra,' in spite of the sinister nature of one portion of its story, contains the most entertaining and characteristic situations. One of its

scenes is sufficiently amusing to tempt us to put it before our readers as a last specimen of Fernan Caballero in her comic vein. Casta is bent on getting rid somehow or other of a tiresome elderly lover, by name Don Judas Taddeo Barbo, and she endeavours to effect her purpose by the assumption of gigantic literary achievements.

"Very well," said Casta; "but I would reply that if ever I went to America it would not be to seek for dollars; if it should happen, it would be to seek for woods, flowers, rivers, and such superb natural beauties." "Ta! ta! ta! ta!" said Don Judas; "what a string of talk. Is Usted a poet like the rest?" "My heart is," replied she; and then following up, as though inspired by a sudden idea, she went on, "Yes, yes, I am; but do not tell anybody. I have no wish that my name should go abroad till I have obtained all the triumphs I aim at. I have caused already some of my works to be printed, but under feigned names, which my friends have been willing to lend me. Thus it is that the poems of Martinez de la Rosa are not his, but mine." The most complete and stupid state of terror was depicted on the countenance of Don Judas. "Usted has composed and printed books!" he exclaimed. Casta, enchanted with the good result of her venture, went on. "I have also made pieces for the theatre, dramatic works which have been enjoyed and applauded to the highest pitch, and which pass as being the best of our modern repertory. Thus the 'Consolations of a Prisoner,' which are attributed to the Duke de Rivas, are not his but mine."

"A literary woman! Ave Maria! A woman who writes and prints! El piendo sen sordo! Do you know, Castilo, that this is a thing against nature? that for a woman to bring forth a book is as if a man were to bring forth a child? Who would have thought it, to see you so young and pretty, so womanly and attractive? For a woman who writes ought to be necessarily old, ugly, and slovenly, a man-woman."

sex.

"These are prejudices, Don Judas. Believe me, genius has no This Buffon has said, and the Father Nunden has repeated it. 'Don Judas made a gesture as if he would desire to stop his ears. "Hear now, Don Judas," went on Casta; hear me. Do you know my Tell?" "Miguel? what Miguel? Miguel the

treasurer?" No, my Tell; my historical novel; my master-work."
"I never read," said Don Judas, "for that injures the eyes." "Then
let Usted hear an extract from it and he will admire
my erudition."
"I am like Napoleon; the great Napoleon only admired women for
their fecundity," said Don Judas, sententiously. "The same thing
which you esteem in your cows and your mares," went on Casta;
"but listen you, Usted, to an extract of my work." Casta wished to
irritate him, to weary him, to put him out of patience, so as to make

him get up and go off. "William Tell was a noble mountaineer of

Scotland, who refused to salute the beaver hat of the English general, Marlborough Malbrun, nailed to a pole for that purpose. From thence came the insurrection and war of Thirty Years, in which, at the end, my hero came out a victor and was proclaimed King of England by the name of William the Conqueror. He tarnished his laurels by causing his wife, the beautiful Ann Boleyn, to be decapitated. To expiate this crime he sent his son, Richard Cœur de Lion, to Palestine. When Richard returned he was imprisoned on account of his religious zeal for Luther, Calvin, Voltaire, and Rousseau, who formed the directory in France, the revolutionary directory which condemned to death the holy king, Louis XIV., and caused him to be executed. Then it was that the king, Don Pedro the Cruel, established the Inquisition in Spain to avoid similar acts, and in that way he got his name." Don Judas was struck aghast, not at the nonsense, but at the erudition of Casta.'

To conclude with a general notice of the volumes we have passed in review: although we cannot help wishing that the authoress had abstained from disfiguring her works by incongruous assaults on modern ideas, which are out of place in a well-conceived work of the imagination, yet we do not fail to recognise the novels of Fernan Caballero as an important addition to the most valued products of modern fiction. Her descriptive powers are of the highest order, as our readers may infer from some of the extracts we have translated, which are far more striking in the picturesque and energetic language of Spain. Here and there we light upon those touches of human nature, in the prattle of childhood, the garrulity of age, or the associations of domestic life, which make the whole world kin. And although these tales are perhaps too essentially Spanish ever to attain a great popularity in foreign countries, they are well calculated to revive the interest of cultivated minds in that noble language and that romantic people. Fernan Caballero has been hailed, in the enthusiastic panegyrics of her countrymen, as the Walter Scott of Spain; and although that title may be the exaggeration of national partiality, it is certain that no living writer has shed so bright a lustre on Spanish literature.

VOL. CXIV. NO. CCXXXI.

K

ART. V.- The Life of Richard Porson, M. A., Professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge from 1792 to 1808. By the Rev. JOHN SELBY WATSON, M.A. London: 1861.

THE age is past for the public in general to take a strong in

terest in the labours of classical scholars. Modern literature has, in the present century, inevitably, and perhaps rightfully, supplanted its elder brother. We still pronounce with reverence the names of the orators, poets, and philosophers of Greece and Rome, but our sympathy is with the moderns, who, being of the time, speak directly to it upon subjects that concern us more nearly than the woes of Thebes and Pelops' line,' or the peril of Athens from the Macedonian. We use the classical writers as the Roman soldiers used the weapons assigned them for drill; modern writers as the same soldiers used their actual weapons in battle. The former are the more massive, and therefore the better suited for bracing and making pliant the sinews, but the latter are the effective instruments for combat, easier to lift, lighter to handle, and better adapted for offence and defence.

The time, however, is not remote from us, in which to be a first-rate Greek or Latin scholar was also a first-rate testimonial for employment in church and state. The man who could write Ovidian elegies on the birth, the marriage, or death of kings, or treat in Ciceronian prose of what the Turk or what the Pope intended, or correct the text of Eschylus or Polybius, was deemed to have passed his competitive examination. The great Henry angled for Joseph Scaliger and caught Isaac Casaubon for his Royal Library at Paris, after negotiations nearly as prolix as would now suffice for a commercial treaty. Queen Christina appointed Hugo Grotius her envoy to France and drew to her arctic zone that master of erudition Claudius Salmasius, and that professor of ancient graces Meibomius - even him who professed to understand what nobody before or since has understood, the music of the Greeks, and who performed, in the presence of the Queen and courtiers, the Pyrrhic dance, attired in a Spartan kilt and cuirass, with the thermometer probably below zero. But the Astræa of scholarship, no less than of justice, has now quitted the earth. Even to have edited a Greek play no longer leads up to the episcopal bench; indeed, if we may judge by some recent appointments, barbarians have a better chance than Greeks of wearing aprons and lawn sleeves. The graceful Iambics of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the

classical accomplishments of the Home Secretary, still attest the vitality of English scholarship, and do honour to our Universities; but these statesmen owe their political eminence to parliamentary oratory and modern political science.

Had learning in his day been considered the proper discipline for a cabinet minister, no man would have had a better chance of office than Richard Bentley. He had not indeed the spirit of wisdom or of meekness, but he possessed beyond his fellows the spirit of government. We must send Bentley,' Bishop Stillingfleet is reported to have said, 'to rule the turbulent fellows of Trinity. If anybody can do it he is the man, for I am sure that he has ruled my family ever since he entered it.' However this may have been, Bentley, when he came to his realm in Trinity College, showed no prentice hand in winning the humble and bending the necks of the proud. Nor were Miller and Colbatch, or 'fiddling Conyers'—with which title Bentley saddled no less a person than Dr. Conyers Middleton, the biographer of Cicero,by any means contemptible adversaries. To Bentley — though Miller was an expert lawyer, and Colbatch and Middleton were well-trained casuists- they and the turbulent fellows' of Trinity, though doubly exasperated by the master's attacks on their purses and their privileges, succumbed. He was really invincible, and the gods fought on his side.' Fortune, it may be said, highly favoured him, inasmuch as obstacles vanished at the very moment when it was most important for Bentley that they should do so. Yet although ministers changed, and the Bishop of Ely and Queen Anne were even obliging enough to die at the most critical moment of the contest, and by so changing or dying released Bentley from the toils into which, after repeatedly breaking the nets, he had been at last forced by the hunters, yet not to Fortune entirely belongs the credit of his escape or of his final triumph. Indeed he was never so dangerous as when he was apparently defeated. His plans were so skilfully laid; his vigilance was so unceasing; his activity was so portentous a very répas of activity, as Cicero said of Cæsar —his vis inertia, when sullen resistance was needed, so strong; he was so complete a bully, he was so adroit a courtier, that he might justly attribute to his own right hand his final victory.

But for the community of their pursuits, Richard Porson, whose history we are now briefly to survey, belonged to a different order of men from this the elder brood of scholastic Titans. Neither king nor minister made, or hearkened to proposals to make, him even a gentleman-usher or a poor knight of Windsor. Yet Porson fairly earned, and fully deserved, the reputation he had in life, and holds to the present moment; and

that he was by universal consent, as well as by Dr. Parr's admission, the first Greek scholar in Europe,' was not his only nor his most conspicuous merit. Why we esteem him so highly, in spite of one notorious vice and some coarseness of nature, we shall attempt to show in the following sketch of him.

There have been many sketches, contemporary and posthumous, of Richard Porson; and he has been attacked and defended by more than one bishop, and by several continental and English scholars. The book now before us

'throws into some kind of order the several particulars concerning him which have hitherto been suffered, for the most part, to lie scattered and unconnected, and to combine with them any additional information regarding him that might be discoverable.'

Mr. Watson has performed his task, on the whole, carefully and conscientiously; and, though he is neither a graceful nor a lively writer, he has perhaps told us all that can or need be told of one whose life was almost as incoherent as Horace's imaginary picture of a human head set on a horse's shoulders.

Mr. Watson needed some judicious friend to counsel him in more than one chapter of his book. He is prone to indulge in solemn platitudes and the genre ennuyeux' of writing, - that style which Voltaire pronounced the only one that was entirely bad. He opens his narrative with remarks on biography which seem inspired by the spirit of Sir John Hawkins himself. Even the Tract Society, in its memoirs of pattern men, does not prose more tediously than our biographer in his prefatory remarks.

We have also to complain that Mr. Watson has done Porson a two-fold wrong: first, by translating some of his excellent Latin into indifferent English, and then by doing or having done into indifferent Latin some of his excellent English. Now no one, we imagine, who is not to some extent clerkly, will take up this book for amusement; and every one who is clerkly will be able to construe easily a few pages of as perspicuous Latin as was ever penned by a modern hand. For transposing a few lines from the Orgies of Bacchus under the obscurity of a learned language, we can see no possible pre

text.

Out of a pulpit, the passage is as free from objection as a paragraph from the Whole Duty of Man.

We now come to a graver offence. If the anathema against those who have been beforehand with us in the utterance of a jest or maxim be just, much more should those who mar a tale in telling it be abominable and excommunicate. Now this is Mr. Watson's crime in the following striking, and in some less grave instances :