shirk his share in military service;-in caitiff, one who suffers himself to be taken "captive," and craven, one who has "craved" his life at the enemies' hand, instead of resisting to the death;-in dunce, i. e. dunsman, from Duns Scotus (though he was "certainly one of the keenest and most subtle-witted of men");-in mammetry, from Mahometry (another curiously perverted usage);-in tariff, from the Moorish fortress Tarifa, from which all merchant ships passing the Straits of Gibraltar were watched, and taxed according to a fixed scale ;-in bigot, from the Spanish "bigote," or mustachio-the Spaniard being in old times the standing representative, to English Protestantism, of the bigot and persecutor, as we see, for example, in the pictures of the early editions of Fox's "Book of Martyrs," where "the pagan persecutors of the first Christians are usually arrayed in the armour of Spanish soldiers, and sometimes graced with tremendous bigotes." Trust Mr. Trench for a slap at Popery, whenever within reach. In illustration of the truth that many a single word is in itself a concentrated poem, having stores of poetical thought and imagery laid up in it, Mr. Trench adduces the word " dilapidated;" observing that he who spake first of a dilapidated fortune, must have had before his mind's eye impressive imagery of some falling house or palace, stone detaching itself from stone, till all had gradually sunk into desolation and ruin. "Many a man had gazed, we may be sure, at the jagged and indented mountain ridges of Spain, before one called them sierras,' or saws, the name by which they are now known, as Sierra Morena, Sierra Nevada; but that man coined his imagination into a word which will endure as long as the everlasting hills which he named." There are some valuable hints, too, on the manner in which new words arise in a language-how the philosophic is superadded on the picturesque; with apt references to the philological contributions or expositions of such Students of Words as Horne Tooke, De Quincey,* and Coleridge. The chapter on Synonyms, again, is rich with erudition, conveyed chiefly by hint and suggestion. When he does develop his meaning, it is with a felicitous completeness which leaves nothing to be desired, but more of the same kind. example, turn to the distinction drawn between "invention" and "discovery"-between "opposite" and "contrary"-and between "abandon" and "desert"—which last diversity is memorably associated with Lord Somers' speech, that "masterly specimen of synonymous discrimination," on the abdication of James II. For Still better calculated for popular acceptance, wide and hearty, was the little treatise on the "Lessons in Proverbs." What though Lord * In quoting a passage from the Opium-Eater's "Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been neglected," Mr. Trench observes, "Though it only says over again what is said above [on Wordsworth's great philosophic distinction between Fancy and Imagination], yet it does this so much more forcibly and fully, that I shall not hesitate to quote it, and the more readily that these letters, in many respects so valuable, have never been reprinted, but lie buried in the old numbers of a magazine, like so many other of the disjecta membra of this illustrious master of English prose." Yes; but we do hope at length to see these letters, and all his contributions to the London Magazine, reprinted in the edition of his writings now in progress. Could you but have seen us, domine illustrissime! many a time and oft, besieging book-stalls during broiling dog-days and under pitiless snow-showers, in quest of your disjecta membra, surely we had not waited so long. many Chesterfield superbly declared that no man of fashion would have anything to do with proverbs? Aristotle collected them; Plautus rejoiced in them; and so did Rabelais and Montaigne, Shakspeare and Cervantes, Fuller and Butler. Whole nations love them. Indeed, however they may be defined, popularity, or popular recognition, is an essential condition to their being; for without it, no saying, as Mr. Trench rightly affirms, however brief, however wise, however seasoned with salt, however worthy on all these accounts to have become a proverb, however fulfilling all its other conditions, can yet be esteemed as such. As an instance, he cites a mot of Goethe's (or Schiller's?): "A man need not be an architect to live in a house," which seems to have every essential of a proverb, except only that it has not passed over upon the lips of men, not received the stamp of popular acceptance; and however wise it may be, still it is not (at least in this form) the wisdom of many; it has not stood the test of experience; nor embodies the consenting voice of and at different times to its wisdom and truth; it has not the value, because it has not the currency of the recognised coin of the realm.† Not however that proverbs are mostly to be traced to the populace as their author as well as authority. They spring rather from the sound healthy kernel of the nation, whether in high place or in low; and it is surely worthy of note, how large a proportion of those with the generation of which we are acquainted, owe their existence to the foremost men of their time, to its philosophers, its princes, and its kings; as it would not be difficult to show." Lord Bacon's saying, that the genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs, is enforced and illustrated, briefly but satisfactorily, by Mr. Trench. He shows that we may learn from the proverbs current among a people what is nearest and dearest to their hearts, the aspects under which they contemplate life, how honour and dishonour are distributed among them, what is of good and what of evil report in their eyes. He passes in review the proverbs of the Greeks, which testify of a people leavened through and through with the most intimate knowledge of its own mythology, history, and poetry-teeming with an infinite multitude of slight and fine allusions to legend and national chronicle, with delicate side glances at Hesiodic theogony and Homeric tale;-those of the Romans, comparatively few * One definition of a proverb being, that it is a synthesis of shortness, sense, and salt-i. e. it must be (1) succinct, utterable in a breath; (2) shrewd, and not the mere small-talk of conversation; (3) pointed and pungent, having a sting in it, a barb which shall not suffer it to drop lightly from the memory. With this explanation of the proverb, Mr. Trench aptly compares Martial's admirable epigram upon epigrams: "Omne epigramma sit instar apis; sit aculeus illi, which he thus renders: "Three things must epigrams, like bees, have all— † Mr. Trench believes the explanation of the word "proverb" to lie in the confidence with which a man appeals to it, as it were from his mere self and single fallible judgment, to a larger experience and wider conviction, He uses it pro verbo; he employs for and instead of his own individual word, this more general word which is every man's. Lord John Russell is said to have defined a proverb thus: "The wit of one man, the wisdom of many." and unrefined, but often expressing a vigorous moral sense-business-like and practical, frugal and severe;-those of Spain, foremost in both quantity and quality-so rich in humour, so double-shotted with sensegravely thoughtful, too, and breathing the very spirit of chivalry and honour and freedom;-those of Italy, too often glorifying artifice and cunning as the true guides and only safe leaders through the labyrinth of life, but sometimes not only delicately beautiful, and of a subtle wisdom not yet degenerated into cunning and deceit, but also noble and elevating; -those of modern Egypt, bespeaking the selfishness, the utter extinction of all public spirit, the poor, mean, sordid, and ignoble stump of the whole character of the people, with only a few faintest glimpses of that romance which one usually attaches to the East. And so on with other ethnological groups. His comments on some of the proverbs he selects for elucidation are generally thoughtful and interesting. In the German saying, One foe is too many: an hundred friends are too few, he points out the sense of the sorry truth that hate is often a much more active principle than love-the hundred friends will wish you well, but the one foe will do you ill—their benevolence will be ordinarily passive, his malevolence will be constantly active, will be animosity, or spiritedness in evil. He quotes, Where the devil cannot come, he will send, as setting out to us the penetrative character of temptations, and the certainty that they will follow and find men out in their secretest retreats, and so rebuking the absurd supposition that by any outward arrangements, closet retirements, flights into the wilderness, sin can be kept at a distance-for temptations will inevitably overleap all these outward and merely artificial barriers. In the French proverb, It is easy to go afoot, when one leads one's horse by the bridle, we are taught how easy it is to stoop from state when that state may be resumed at will-how easy for one to part with luxuries and indulgences, which he only parts with exactly so long as may please himself. "No reason indeed is to be found in this comparative easiness for the not 'going afoot;' on the contrary, it may be a most profitable exercise; but every reason for not esteeming the doing so too highly, nor setting it in value beside the trudging upon foot of him, who has no horse to fall back on at whatever moment he may please." In another French proverb, Take the first advice of a woman, and not the second, we are certified, that in processes of reasoning, out of which the second counsels would spring, women may and will be, inferior to men; but in intuitions, moral ones above all, they surpass them far-having what Montaigne ascribes to them in a remarkable word, l'esprit primesautier, that which, if it is to take its prey, must take it at the first bound. Our own, A burnt child fears the fire, good as it is, is shown to be inferior to that proverb of many tongues, A scalded dog fears cold water;-for while the former expresses only that those who have once suffered will henceforward be timid in respect of that same thing from which they have suffered, the latter adds the tendency to exaggerate such fears, so that now they shall fear even where no fear is a fact which clothes itself in a rich variety of forms: thus, one Italian proverb says, A dog which has been beaten with a stick, is afraid of its shadow; and another, which could only have had its birth in the sunny south, where the glancing but Oct.-VOL. XCIX. NO. CCCXCIV. M harmless lizard so often darts across your path, He who has been bitten by a serpent is alarmed by a lizard-another reading of what the Jewish Rabbis had said long before, He who has been bitten by a serpent, is afraid of a rope's end; even that which bears so remote a resemblance to a serpent as this does, shall now inspire him with terror; and similarly the Cingalese, with imagery borrowed from their own tropic clime, say, The man who has received a beating from a firebrand, runs away at sight of a fire-fly. Another proverb of many tongues, One sword keeps another in the scabbard, furnishes Mr. Trench with a text against the "puling yet mischievous babble of our shallow Peace Societies, which, while they profess to embody, and they only to embody, the true spirit of Christianity, proclaim themselves in fact ignorant of all which it teaches; for they dream of having peace the fruit, while the evil root out of which have grown all the wars and fightings that have ever been in the world, namely, the lusts which stir in men's members, remain as vigorous and strong as ever." And another, Far-off water will not quench near fire, is his motto for an appeal to keep our English coasts guarded by an English fleet:"for let us only suppose that a blow were struck at the empire's heart, at the home and sanctuary of its greatness-no improbable supposition, when force and fraud are met together, and are watching their opportunity to strike it—what profit would it be then that her mighty armaments covered the distant seas, that her soldiers were winning comparatively barren victories in Africa and India?" By the way, Mr. Trench loses no opportunity of "taking a rise" out of a certain imperial personage-bidding us observe, for instance, in confirmation of the proverb Extremes meet, how, "as lately in France, a wild and frantic democracy may be transformed by the base trick of a conjuror into an atrocious military tyranny;"-and again, still more bitterly, in noticing the too characteristic Egyptian proverb, If the monkey reigns, dance before him, he proceeds to say, "The monkey may reign in other lands besides those of the East; but the examples in a neighbouring land, not merely of statesmen and warriors, of men such as Guizot and Changarnier, but of many more in every class, erect amid a too general prostration, abundantly testify that reign as the monkey may, simia in purpurâ, all will not therefore count it their part and their wisdom to dance before him." If Napoléon-le-petit should settle in Buckingham Palace, let not Mr. Trench count on a private chaplaincy: indeed, as a matter of "prudential morality," it might be well (verbum sap.) to eschew a too frequent discussion of so ill-esteemed a character, if regard be had to the proverb, Talk of So-and-so in Black, and he's sure to appear. Fancy the French Imperator's "sure appearance," press-censors en suite, and Mr. Trench within shot-or invited to dinner, without a long spoon. DISCOVERY OF THE BLUE GROTTO IN THE ISLE OF CAPRI. ONE summer day I landed with my friend Ernest Fries in the beautiful bay on the north coast of Capri. The sun was fast approaching the distant Ischia as we sprang on the rattling shingle, and never will I forget the pleasing emotions I then experienced, and which came crowding on me now that my long cherished desire to tread this lovely island was at length fulfilled. The waves, lashing with boisterous though harmonious fury on those wondrous masses of rock which had already excited my admiring attention from Naples, seemed to me to be singing of my departure from a lively town to this humble cliff, inhabited only by simple fishermen and gardeners, where the horse's hoof never reverberates, and brilliant equipages are unknown. The island, with its rocks and caves, its weather-beaten ruins and newly-erected towns, its hanging-gardens and steps boldly cut in the face of the rock, had, however, from a distance, almost impressed me with the idea that it was a little world in itself, filled with wonders, and surrounded with traditionary lore; and as I was by no means limited to time, I resolved thoroughly to search each nook and corner, and anticipated no small degree of pleasure in the result. The beach, shortly after our arrival, was crowded with the inhabitants of both towns, who, by their pleasing aspect, strongly reminded us of their ancestors the Greeks, by whom the place was originally peopled. They received the small cargo of the market-boat in which we had crossed, and with wonderful activity carried part up the steps hewn in the rock, to the town of Anticapri, and the remainder to Capri by a more gentle ascent. A brisk lad shouldered our valise, and we followed slowly in the latter course. We soon found ourselves in what bore the appearance of a vast amphitheatre. In front was a row of white flat-roofed houses, over which was raised terrace above terrace clad with the graceful vine, until a bold rock crowned with the overhanging town shut out all further view. Our path wound along these terraces, which were ornamented here and there with myrtles, laurels, and luxurious evergreens, interspersed with graceful palms and mastich-trees. A few birds passed us on the way to their nests in the surrounding clefts; and the cheerful though monotonous hum of brilliant insects which abounded in the olivetrees rendered the path less wearisome than we should otherwise have found it. It was a delightful evening, and all that I had heard of this beautiful spot was recalled to my memory by the lovely scene before me. On casting our eyes behind, the enchanting Bay of Naples, Ischia, Procida, and all the Pontine islands, bathed in the glowing colours of the setting sun, were presented to our gaze, and combined to enhance a prospect seldom excelled. We at length reached the heights, and passed through a gateway into the small town of Capri, which is built somewhat after the Oriental style, and were conducted by the youth who bore our luggage to the cleanlooking locanda of Don Guiseppo Pagano, where, for a moderate remuneration, we received a hearty welcome. |