very commonplace thought that there tender heart which between them and a bookseller's shop. | It is touching to witness the indications Give another hundred a year of income, and vestiges of sweet and admirable things and the poor struggling parson who preaches which have been subjected to a weight which dull sermons will astonish you by the talent has entirely crushed them down: things he will exhibit when his mind is freed from which would have come out into beauty and the dismal depressing influence of ceaseless excellence if they had been allowed a chance. scheming to keep the wolf from the door. You may witness one of the saddest of all Let the poor little sick child grow strong the losses of nature in various old maids. and well, and with how much better heart What kind hearts are there running to will its father face the work of life! Let waste! What pure and gentle affections the clergyman, who preached, in a spiritless blossom to be blighted! I dare say you ́enough way, to a handful of uneducated have heard a young lady of more than forty rustics, be placed in a charge where weekly sing; and you have seen her eyes fill with he has to address a large cultivated congre- tears at the pathos of gation; and with the new stimulus, latent verse. Have you not powers may manifest themselves which no was the indication of a one fancied he possessed, and he may prove might have made some good man happy; quite an eloquent and attractive preacher. and, in doing so, made herself happy too? A dull, quiet man, whom you esteemed as a But it was not to be. Still, it is sad to blockhead, may suddenly be valued very dif- think that sometimes upon cats and dogs ferently when circumstances unexpectedly there should be wasted the affection of a call out the solid qualities he possesses, un- kindly human being! And you know, too, suspected before. A man devoid of bril- how often the fairest promise of human exliancy, may on occasion show that he pos- cellence is never suffered to come to fruit. sesses great good sense; or that he has the You must look upon gravestones to find power of sticking to his task, in spite of the names of those who promised to be the discouragement. Let a man be placed where best and noblest specimens of the race. dogged perseverance will stand him in stead, They died in early youth; perhaps in early and you may see what he can do when he childhood. Their pleasant faces, their sinhas but a chance. The especial weight which gular words and ways, remain, not often has held some men back-the thing which talked of, in the memories of subdued parkept them from doing great things and at- ents, or of brothers and sisters now grown taining great fame-has been just this: that old, but never forgetting how that one of they were not able to say or to write what the family that was as the flower of the flock they have thought and felt. And indeed, a was the first to fade. It has been a provergreat poet is nothing more than the one bial saying, you know, even from heathen man in a million who has the gift to express ages, that those whom the gods love die that which has been in the mind and heart young. It is but an inferior order of human of multitudes. If even the most common- beings that makes the living succession to place of human beings could write all the carry on the human race. poetry he has felt, he would produce something that would go straight to the hearts of many. A. K. H. B. In a western suburb of London a few persons have been admitted to witness a work of art in the coffiu way. An artist-upholsterer having furnished an opera-box much to the satisfaction of the lady who gave the order, she further commissioned him to provide her with a "fourteenth-century coffin." A very superb article has been produced accordingly. The modernantique is unexceptionable in form and adorn ment, including some gorgeous white satin in the interior, in which lies a large quantity of the same material which is to serve for a“ wrappingsheet" when the time for opera-boxes has altogether passed away. Meanwhile, it will do duty as an article of furniture; and as serving to illustrate a social trait of the present time, is not unworthy of having record made of it here.— Athenæum. From All the Year Round. IN AND OUT OF SCHOOL. Ir is an old notion, and in the main a true one, that we do not often get original thought out of a man with an extensive memory. Memory comes of attention, and one cannot easily have the strength of an equal memory without the weakness of an equal disposition to attend to everything. I never am impressed with stories about Julius Cæsar and others, who were able to do half a dozen things at once-read a letter on one subject, hear a letter on another, write a letter on a third, and dictate a letter on a fourth, while they beat time with their feet to one tune, whistled another in the intervals of dictation, played a game of chess with the left hand, and took part by expressive grimace in a theologic controversy, all during the odd minutes when they were being shaved and washed, and brushed and oiled, and put into their clothes. Very well I know that whenever Julius Cæsar had anything serious to attend to, he gave his entire mind to it, and, for the time being, had spare attention to bestow on nothing else. Here is the whole history and mystery of the bad general memory of men who excel greatly in any one pursuit, by giving to it as far as the way of the world permits a whole and sole attention. With their busy minds attentive to their own work while their bodies are inactive, and while they may look like the very idlers, they withdraw so much attention from the odds and ends of talk and incident by which they are surrounded, that these never take a fair hold on the mind. The scholar's absence of mind is the absence of his mind from that which is not his affair, and the presence of it with his own proper work in life. To that only, he is able to give undivided and continuous attention. A diffuse and too universally ready memory is, therefore, no sign of intellectual strength; and even in children-as we commonly read that the man of genius was taken for a dunce at school-slowness of general apprehension may be the result of an earnestness that fastens with especial energy upon some chosen objects of attention. From the first moment of a baby's "taking notice," to the fixed heavenward gaze from the death-bed, the power of attention is as the very life-blood of our minds and souls. It is not a thing to be spilt idly, though the world is full of bores who are ready at every turn to bleed us of it with their little pins and fleams of talk. To nourish and strengthen it in childhood and youth, is to do for the mind what we do for the body by securing to its life-blood purity and fulness. It is not only that during early years of life the secret of successful teaching for good or for evil is the full securing of attention, but it is necessary that the youth should pass into manhood blessed in his mind with a sound habit of attention, if his intellectual life is not to be through manhood weak. Of the truth of this old principle, which has been dwelt upon for many a year by the metaphysicians, practical evidence of the most striking kind has lately been brought together in a body of facts that would seem to many people very nearly incredible, if they were not fully supported by each other, and authenticated by the best of witnesses. For, it is set forth, not as mere probability, but as a proved fact, that half a day is better than a whole day of school-teaching. If three hours instead of six be given daily to the schoolmaster, and be so managed that the pupil is physically and mentally able to give bright undivided attention to the whole of his work, he not only can learn absolutely as much as the child who is compelled through a six-hour routine; it is his further gain that what he knows he knows more literally "by heart," knows with a relish; while he is sent out into the world with a habit of close study, so assured that he hardly knows what it is to apply his mind with half attention to a duty. The second half of the day, which now, being spent in the schoolroom spoils the whole, if it be devoted to gymnastics, drill, athletic sport, or-in the case of those who must work with their parents for the bread they eat-to labor in the house and field, can and does serve to train a sound body while helping to a fuller ripeness of the mind. We say, not theoretically that it would do, but practically, and from the wide experience of many, that it does this. Here, for example, is a heap of evidence. Mr. William Stuckey, who is teaching eighty children at Richmond, and has worked for more than a quarter of a century in Latin granum, or the French grain, which signifies a seed or corn. There is, however, a species of oak, or ilex, common on all the Mediterranean coasts, and especially in Spain, which is frequented by an insect the dried body of which furnishes a variety of red dyes. This insect was called coccus, and the prepared coccum was, on account of its seedlike form, spoken of simply as granum, or grain. According to Pliny, Spain paid half of its tribute in this granum, or coccum, and hence the still living name of Granada. Although ancient writers distinguish carefully between the coccum, the cheaper dye, and the more costly shell-fish, purple, the color of the coccus, must have approached very nearly to that of the Tyrian murex. Purpureus in Latin comprised more shades of color than our modern purple, which is generally confined to the violet hue. Milton clearly used grain in the sense of purple in the following lines : "Over his lucid arms A military vest of purple flowed In time of truce; Iris had dipped the woof." In a third passage, grain is still more clearly used by Milton, not in the sense of color in general, but of the special color of purple : "Six wings he wore, to shade His lineaments divine; the pair that clad Here "tis in grain," simply means, that it is in the original dye, and therefore fast or unchangeable. Thus, what is ingrained in our mind is, as it were, incorporated like a little think of the cheap Spanish dye which color with the natural substance, though we formed the fundamental color, afterwards tempered by the more precious purple of Tyre, when we now speak of ingrained prej udices. The same insect which the Romans received from Spain was known to the Indians at the time of Ctesias. (Ctesias, c, 21. ed. Bahr.) They likewise used it for dyeing, and called it Krimi, the worm. The Persians called it Kirm, a word borrowed by the Jews, who called it Karmil, the English carmine. The Arabs changed it to Kirmiz, which as Kermes became the title by which the dye produced by the coccus insect was, and is still, known in commerce. this, again the English crimson. The Romans, though adopting the Greek name coccus, berry, which still lives in the Italian coccinilia, the French cochenille, were sufficiently aware of the real nature of the Kirmis to apply to it a native title, vermiculum, From Each shoulder broad came mantling o'er his (Hieronymi Epist. lxiv. 19), the little worm, breast, With regal ornament; the middle pair 66 the Italian vermiglio, the English vermilion. These names, crimson as well as vermilion, though signifying originally an animal dye alone, came to be used as names of colors, so that people now speak of the Kermesmineral-a contradiction in terms, if taken in its etymological sense of worm-mineral, but readily understood in the sense of a crimson mineral dye. In the same way, too, has vermilion lost its etymological purport of worm-color, and is restricted in technical language to the sulphuret of mercury. Sky-tinctured grain" could never mean on Milton's lips "sky-tinctured color." It is the purple of the sky, and the same purple color was intended by the poet in the darkest grain in which he robes his melancholy. There is another offshoot of this word. Grain, as we have seen, was used for dyeing "Our natural tung," as Richard Mulcasin red or purple. It was a fast color, and ter said, "cummeth on us by hudle;" and Pliny tells us that it was usual after dyeing it is always interesting to see it unhudled by wool in grain, to dye it afterwards in the an ingenious and careful scholar like Mr. SECOND NOTICE. MR. MARSH'S Lectures treat of so many subjects full of interest not only to the scholar but to the general reader, that it seems but fair both to the author and to the public to devote a second notice to his valuable work on the English language. Though it is not a work which has added materially to the stock of knowledge brought together by the laborious researches of English and Continental scholars, its author has made excellent use of the labors of his predecessors, and his lectures are written in an easy and unpretending style, his arguments distinguished by fairness and good sense. We hardly know of any work that we could more honestly recommend to those who, without wishing to dive very deep into Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, and Gothic, would be glad to learn all that is known about the origin, the history, and character of their own tongue; and though some of the lectures are a little rhetorical, and now and then some pages filled with irrelevant matter, the book, as a whole, is full of pleasant reading and useful learning. Marsh. But the very instance which we have here selected from his Lectures shows how impossible it would be to separate the study of English from that of its cognate languages. Goethe's remark, that "he who is acquainted with no foreign tongue knows nothing of his own," is true from whatever side we look at it. Mr. Marsh has completely misunderstood the bearing of this remark. He takes it in the only sense in which Goethe could not have meant it, and it is extraordinary that in the several pages which he devotes to the refutation of this apophthegm, it should never have struck him that the German words could by no possibility have conveyed the meaning which he labors to demolish. There was no necessity for reminding Goethe that Homer knew Greek, though he did not know any other language, or that David was a great poet, though he probably never learnt his grammar. "The indiscriminate admiration," he writes, "with which this great writer is regarded by his followers, leads them to consider his most trivial, and unguarded utterances as oracles." Now Goethe's remark may be called trivial, but it certainly was not unguarded. It only expresses in a telling way the old truth that all our knowledge is founded on comparison" On the Sources, Composition, and Etymothat we are cognizant of the individual by means of the general. His remark acquires, however, still greater truth as applied to a subject like language, with which we are so familiar that our very familiarity is apt to breed, if not contempt, at least heedlessness; and Mr. Marsh ought at least to have remembered that the first scientific treatment of language, even in its simplest form, owed its impulse to the study of foreign languages. Surely, no one would quarrel with a comparative anatomist who should venture to assert that he who is not acquainted with the anatomy of other animals knows nothing of the anatomy of his own body, or with a botanist who should maintain that an acquaintance with more than one plant was necessary for a knowledge of botany. If the remark is more strikingly true with regard to language than to any other subject, it is all the more inexcusable for a student of language not to have perceived the drift of the poet's dictum. There are some interesting remarks on what we might call the statistics of the English language in Mr. Marsh's sixth lecture, logical proportions of English." Observations of this kind are mostly scattered about in treatises on special authors, and the mere collecting them is therefore highly valuable. It is curious how far devotion to some special work will carry a student, and in particular an editor. The labors of the Rabbis are generally quoted as the most striking examples of this kind of useless scholarship, but they stand by no means alone. If they counted the number of words, of syllables, and even of letters which occur in the Old Testament, the same thing was done by the Brahmins in India, for their sacred books. As early as the third century B.C., they composed a complete index of the Rig Veda, counting every word and every syllable; and at a later time, they drew up lists of all the words consisting of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven or more syllables, of all words ending in m, n, t, and the like. We may pity the man who thus spends his life as a calculating machine; but the results which have been obtained by this drudgery are not so entirely useless as | and perfect as independent vocables. Flüwe are apt to think. Although neither the gel estimated the number of words in his Rabbis nor the Brahmins thought of anything own dictionary at 94,464, of which 65,085 beyond the mere pleasure which they derived are simple, 29,379 compound. This was in from accumulating useless facts, these facts, 1843; and he then expressed a hope that in like many other facts and statistics, may, in his next edition the number of words would the hands of the student of language, lead to far exceed 100,000. This is the number the discovery of new and really important fixed upon by Mr. Marsh (p. 181) as the laws. Thus, in order to discover the exact minimum of the copia vocabulorum in Engproportions of the various elements which lish; but he adds that no dictionary contains enter into the formation of the English more than two-thirds, or at most threetongue, it is absolutely necessary to imitate fourths, of the words which make up the the Rabbis, and to count every word that English language (p. 121). This may be or occurs in the English dictionary. All other not. What we have to consider is whether, attempts at fixing the relation of the Anglo- if we take M. Thommerel's inventory as corSaxon to the Roman words in the English rect for the time when it was made, the new language could not but prove failures. additions in our more recent dictionaries are Hickes, no inconsiderable scholar in his likely to disturb the result of his calculations. time, argued that because there are but three Now, Mr. Marsh is of opinion that the words words of Latin origin in the Lord's Prayer, which are most neglected by lexicographers nine-tenths of the English language are of are those which belong to the arts and to the Saxon origin. Sharon Turner, who extended humbler fields of life, and are chiefly Saxon. his observations over a larger field; came to But if we look to the additions that have the conclusion that four-fifths were of native been made to our dictionaries during the growth. Another writer supposing the whole last fifty years, the largest proportion by far number of English words to amount to 38,- consists of scientific and technical terms; 000, assigns 23,000 to a Saxon and 15,000 to and nearly all of these are of classical origin. a classical source. In fact, it was never There are very few genuine Saxon words that doubted that in English the Saxon element were overlooked by Johnson, and even the could claim a numerical majority until M. dialect of the lower classes supplies new Thommerel took a complete inventory of the meanings rather than new words. The very English language, by counting every word instance which Mr. Marsh mentions of the in the Dictionaries of Robertson and Web- neglect of common mechanical terms, "a tenster. The sum total of English words con- penny nail," only adds a new meaning to the tained in these works was found to be 43,566, usual meanings of penny; it does not add a out of which 29,853 were traced back to new word. "Tenpenny nails," he informs classical, 13,330 to Teutonic, and the rest to us, are so-called because a thousand of them miscellaneous sources. After the confident weigh ten pounds, so that penny in this assertions of Hickes and Sharon Turner, that phrase would seem to be used in the sense nine-tenths or four-fifths of the English lan- of pound. But this new sense would not guage were of native Saxon growth, it was cause a new entry in our dictionaries; wherecertainly startling to find that more than as, we can hardly open a page of what pretwo-thirds of the English Dictionary have to tends to be a complete dictionary without be assigned to a foreign source, leaving not being met by the most uncouth and un-Engquite one-third for the national Saxon ele-lish terms, lately coined by persons well ac ment. quainted with everything but Greek and Mr. Marsh was either not acquainted with Latin. We should think, therefore, that if these statistical tables published by M. the inventory made by Thommerel were to be Thommerel, or he may have considered them taken again with reference to the latest ediantiquated on account of the great increase tion of Flügel, the balance would be even of words in the more recent dictionaries of more in favor of the classical element, whilst the English language. Todd's edition of the Saxon element would dwindle down to Johnson is said to contain 58,000 words, and considerably less than one-third of the whole the later editions of Webster 70,000, count-language. How, then, are we to account ing, however, the participles of the present for statements like those of Dean Trench? |