ceit, which, judging by the customs of this day and hour, we fancy him to be. Many forms of speech still used by old men of the highest rank and most cultivated minds, are already disused by the middle-aged generations such as expressing intention by prefixing " for to" to a verb, and the word apricock (pomum præcox), latterly corrupted into apricot. The purists have done much in the way of innovation. With them the last syllable of evil is distinctly articulated; Abel's name no longer rhymes to stable; a cowcumber is a cucumber, and sparrowgrass is asparagus. The school of writers who flourished under Anne, and the early Brunswicks, used a great precision in their metre. Their couplets were terse and complete, seldom, if ever, running into one another, but concluding the sense, or some distinct portion of the sense, in two lines. The reason of it was, that the ear might pause upon the rhyme. The rhyme was the wedding-ring which united the harmonious pair in such an exclusive union; yet, strange to say, an opinion has grown up, that the regular couplet of Pope, Gay, Garth, or Parnell, may be concluded by syllables of which the vocal sound is entirely different, provided the same written characters meet the eye. And that opinion, so fatal to our rhymed verse, is supposed to rest upon the authority and practice of those very poets who introduced, from Boileau and the French, such an exact observance of the rhyming couplet. Love, grove, and move, are thus accounted rhymes to one another, but are not, and the ear refuses what critics accept. It is my belief that the syllables which do not rhyme as we read Pope, did rhyme as he read them himself. Many words, no doubt, could not then be pronounced as they are by us. Also, it is probable that the number of words which are of equivocal sound-(as yet, yit; adorn, adōrn; Rome, Roome; gold, goold; behove, behoove; join, jine; Mahon, Mahoon; Jersey, Jarsey; agen, again; marchant, merchant; hurd, or heerd, for the past tense of to hear)-was considerably greater than it now is. Some of the above have been, and are, so persecuted by the purists that another generation will probably not believe that their sound was equivocal in our time. He would therefore be a bold man that would affirm that Pope said luv or moove, instead of love or move; or that he always said either move or moove, and not muv, or grove and not gruv. We know, in truth, nothing at all about it; except so far as he assures us, by his practice, that these were rhymes, and by his fastidiousness of ear, which led him to a frequent sacrifice of sense to sound, that they were good rhymes. We can best appreciate past changes by being able to observe an actual transition going on under our eyes, and to apply such observation to the past. Old gentlemen of quality and classical education are still living who do not articulate the in fault, but say, "It was my faut," after the French reading of it. That word is even yet an equivocal one, though but few remain who hold out against the purists. Pope, therefore, admitted no false rhyme when he wrote "Oh, born in sin, and forth in folly brought! Works damn'd, or to be damn'd! your father's fault." It is not yet very uncommon to hear get pronounced git, especially in the participle, as gitting old, or gitting well again, and the compound begit. Consequently some of our fathers who are still living would read no dissonant rhyme in this couplet "All that on Folly Frenzy could beget, Fruits of dull heat, and sooterkins of wit." I am not afraid of following my premises to their conclusions. Poetry was originally, and is essentially, an oral art. Abundance of materials, indolence, and defect of memory, have made it more dependent upon writing than it was of old time, and the amatory sighs which were borne upon the zephyrs are now carried by the twopenny-postman. But its law is a lex non scripta; and the rhyme, whose correspondency is to the eye of the reader, and not to the hearer's ear, is a solecism in metre. To this law our great poet was obedient when he wrote "Intrepid then o'er seas and lands he flew, Nor do I doubt that, while he respected identity of sound under dissimilar symbols, he was generally in the habit of disregarding the resemblance of spelling where it gave him no recurring cadence. In the following couplet, "But high above, more solid learning shone, a perfect rhyme was offered; for I know those who now express none as a rhyme to shone, and one as the word wan (pale) is expressed. Where owls is the rhyme to fools, look to spoke, &c., I am not satisfied that he intended to violate the great rule of his versification, though I am aware what an insuperable mass of prejudice will be opposed to me, and what pricks I am kicking against. Difficile est animum a sensibus abducere et a consuetudine revocare. But it is not too much for me to affirm, and for others to admit, that the real instances of dissonance in the school of our exact poets falls very much short of the supposed; and it were to be wished that those who cultivated rhymed poetry would abstain, as far as it is possible, from such an offensive inconsistency, and cease "To palter with us in a double sound, And keep the word of promise to the eye H. *Cicero, Academica. CORRESPONDENCE. The Editor begs to remind his readers that he is not responsible for the opinions VINDICATION OF THE EARLY PARISIAN GREEK PRESS. (Continued from p. 430.) I HAVE not seized upon a mere single slip in one unfortunate passage to bring this charge against Mr. Greswell. At p. 321 he gives his assent to the slander which Mill, 1228, throws on the folio; where he makes the text to be taken in various passages from Colinæus, the Complutensian, and Erasmus. I esteem Mill's Prolegomena to be an invaluable store-house of learning; and I think that a real critic could not employ his talents more usefully than in publishing an edition of them with notes. But all Mill's acuteness seems to have failed, when he came to speak of the old critical editions; and this the most lamentably upon those of Stephanus. With respect to Stephanus's folio, the margin itself decides more than a hundred times over whether the documents, the various readings of which are there given, comprehended the whole of those from which the text had been formed; for the critics themselves tell us,-and tell us truly,—that all the documents, both printed and written, there brought to give opposing readings, actually do oppose the text. I should think, then, that it required no mighty exertion of mind to understand, that the man who published this to the world, and had boasted that he did not give a letter but what was sanctioned by the greater part of his best MSS., had some other MSS. which would bear out his text against the whole of those that he himself brought to oppose it. No: Mill takes the contrary for granted; and upon the strength of that pretty assumption, vents the charge that Mr. Greswell records, of Stephanus taking the text of his folio from the printed editions of Colinée, Froben, Complutensian, &c. And let it be observed, he does this, furnishing his own confutation, 1258; where, speaking of Beza's annotations, he tells you, that they give the readings of ten more MSS. than the fifteen of Stephanus's margin; the readings of those ten being avowedly obtained from no other source than Stephanus's book of collations. This is most wonderful; but it is nothing to the astonishment I feel at the world being held in the full conviction of Stephanus's guilt, by the addition of the little possessive pronoun "his" to the word "all" in the margin, “his third edition often differing from all his MSS., by his own confession" -(Mr. Porson's words, to which we stood pledged to recur)-an improvement this, which is religiously followed by Messrs. Travis, Hales, & Co.; who say for the "book-seller," "All my MSS. are against my text." And Griesbach, after he had been "insulted" by Travis, "because he took this point for granted," (Porson, 58) says, in his 2nd ed., p. xviii. 7, Lond. xxx:-" Hujus vestigiis [Erasmi] sæpissime contra omnium codicum suorum fidem ac auctoritatem in hæsit; quod qui negare vellet, nihil aliud efficeret rei notissimæ ignorantia, quam ut risum commoveret doctorum et prudentium. Stephanus ipse textum, quem edidit, a codicibus suis omnibus plus centies dissonare ingenue in margine professus est." Ev wao, says Stephanus; you have merely to add the possessive suis to omnibus; and instead of his saying that he had other MSS. for the formation of his text, besides all those that he has here taken to oppose it, he makes this ingenuous confession. It is Mr. Porson himself who says, p. 147, " Would you have the writer of the MS. inform his readers, by a marginal note, that he had inserted a spurious verse in his edition ?" I say then, would you have the editor inform his readers, by more than a hundred marginal notes, that he had inserted a reading in violation of his most solemn engagements? Mr. P. adds, " An editor would hardly be mad enough to become such a felo de se." (1217.) I shall hold my disbelief, then, of Stephanus having ingenuously professed to have cheated more than a hundred times. I shall think that the "Docti et Prudentes" have done this, once for all, by the addition of the possessive to the word all-" all his MSS." The word all (εv Taσi or .) never occurs in the 4th part of the sacred text (the Revelations); but only in the three first parts. I have never seen any attempt made by the learned critics to account for this. But the reason is obvious, from the fact of the first selection of the thirteen written copies having none of them gone beyond those three parts; and a new selection, viz., of No. 15 and No. 16, having been made for the Revelation. It could only have tended to perplex and mislead the reader, to refer any longer to them, when you had the reading of two others, besides all of them. Where the text is against all the three documents (a, uɛ, iç,) selected to oppose it in the 4th part (the Revelations), the expression is EV TOLS μETEρOLS avriуpapois, as at Rev. vii. 5. In the former parts, where the first selection continues, when the expression is given at full length, it is, as at the end of Rom. xiv., εv Taσɩ Tоis aνriyрupois. But Stephanus never combines the two words πασι and ἡμετέροις,he never says, εν πασι τοις ἡμετέροις αντιγράφοις, as the Docti et Prudentes do for him" All my MSS." The words that he does use could not any where mean more than the documents that are collated in that place; and they themselves distinctly lay it down, that in the gospels, where the number was the greatest, it amounted only to ten. In the gospels, therefore the part most favourable to them-the "ingenue in margine suo professus est" was really saying, that his text there was contrary to all the ten opposing MSS. Wetsten knew, and every one who has read what Wetsten said on the Codd. Barberini, knows, that ev raσ never could signify more than this. This collation of Caryophilus was to be set aside, like all the old editions; and the means that Wetsten takes to effect this, is by making the Barberini Codd. to be nothing more than those of Stephanus's margin. The number that Caryophilus had in the gospels, and in the epistles, exactly coincided with those of Stephanus's margin. This was enough for Wetsten. Though Caryophilus had four in the Revelations, while Stephanus's second selection of MSS. was only two, this was easily settled, by assuming that Caryophilus took in two erroneVOL. III.-May, 1833. 3 z ous references there, whilst he was supposed to have corrected all the similar errors in both the former parts. The number, then, in the different parts, for Stephanus and Caryophilus, thus becoming the same, Wetsten makes no difficulty in assuming that the number of the different MSS. must be the same for each; and from the identity of number it is nothing to assume the identity of the MSS. Now, from the lucky circumstance that Wetsten thus took Stephanus for getting rid of Caryophilus, arises his own testimony against himself, and the rest of the Docti et Prudentes, in favour of Stephanus. Bengel made an objection to Wetsten's theory, in answering which the truth was elicited. No. 112, p. 62, 162 Semler, he says, Dissentit hic a nobis I. A. Bengelius, ratione tamen non satis firma usus," Unum" inquit Introd. in Crisin, p. 440, [sec. xxxix. p. 76,]" dabimus exemplar. Io. I. 42, citantur Bareriani decem, ubi differentia articuli Vulgatum non tangit, et Stephani margo planc vocat.' Fateor Stephani marginem vacare, at hoc ipso argumento Caryophilus ductus putasse videtur, inde consequi, Stephani codices decem, i. e., omnes legisse Xpioroc cum articulo, uti in textu editum est-contra editionem Complutensem et Erasmi quæ legunt Xporos sine articulo." Here we have the fact, under the hand of the Docti et Prudentes themselves. It is, " decem, i. e., omnes." They set the man down to be "mad enough to become such a felo de se" as to vary in his third edition often from all his MSS., even by his own confession-" contra omnium codicum suorum fidem et auctoritatem;" and in their exultation over the confitentem reum, they add, " nec quicquam sive ab ipso sive ab admiratoribus ejus prolatum legimus quo servile excusari posset obsequium." And what is infinitely beyond this, the "servile obsequium" is admitted, and prolatum legimus ab admiratore ejus, A. D. 1833, « If in the exercise of the δευτεραι φροντίδες, he was led, &c., ought this to be made a ground of such severe reflections?" (329.) When the peal of laughter has abated, with which the Docti et Prudentes will salute the man who still thinks that Stephanus's boast was not utterly false, he will whisper the words of Wetsten, "decem, i. e., omnes," and, "he that hath ears to hear, let him hear." Push the conspiring critics a little, and they are themselves forced to admit, that the bookseller's hundred-fold confession of guilt is no more than "decem, i. e. omnes;" and in other cases, no more than octo, i. e., omnes. Stephanus's words tell you-and by no possibility can they tell you more- -that ten out of the first selection for opposing the folio-or eight of them, as the case may be-are against his text,—that is, at the utmost, not one-third of the whole number that he had to form the text of that edition, and only twothirds of those that were taken, at both the selections, to oppose it. Curcellæus, misled, I suppose, by good father Morin's insertion of the possessive "suis," missed this, at the fourth page of his Preface. "Imo aliquando observavi, et miratus sum, ipsum in textum recepisse lectiones quibus nullum prorsus istorum xvi. exemplarium favebat." This is rather more than any one can assert; say the first xiv. of them, if you please. Wetsten makes use of Curcellæus as a decoy duck, "Observavit atque suo jure miratus est," (p. 142, first edition, |