And really, upon getting out of bed, where the cramp most frequently occurred, pressing the sole of the foot on the cold floor, and then repeating this charm with the acts configurative thereupon prescribed, I can safely affirm that I do not remember an instance in which the cramp did not go away in a few seconds.

I should not wonder if it were equally good for a stitch in the side; but I cannot say I ever tried it for that.

July 7. 1832.

GREEK.-DUAL, NEUTER PLURAL, AND

VERB SINGULAR.

- THETA.

IT is hardly possible to conceive a language more perfect than the Greek. If you compare it with the modern European tongues, in the points of the position and relative bearing of the vowels and consonants on each other, and of the variety of terminations, it is incalculably before all in the former par

ticulars, and only equalled in the last by German. But it is in variety of termination alone that the German surpasses the other modern languages as to sound; for, as to position, Nature seems to have dropped an acid into the language, when a-forming, which curdled the vowels, and made all the consonants flow together. The Spanish is excellent for variety of termination; the Italian, in this particular, the most deficient. Italian prose is excessively monotonous.

It is very natural to have a dual, duality being a conception quite distinct from plurality. Most very primitive languages have a dual, as the Greek, Welsh, and the native Chilese, as you will see in the Abbé Raynal.

The neuter plural governing, as they call it, a verb singular is one of the many instances in Greek of the inward and metaphysic grammar resisting successfully the tyranny of formal grammar. In truth, there

may be Multeity in things; but there can only be Plurality in persons.

Observe also that, in fact, a neuter noun in Greek has no real nominative case, though it has a formal one, that is to say, the same word with the accusative. The reason is a thing has no subjectivity, or nominative case it exists only as an object in the accusative or oblique case.

It is extraordinary that the Germans should not have retained or assumed the two beautifully discriminated sounds of the soft and hard theta; as in, thy thoughts the thin ether that, &c. How particularly fine the hard theta is in an English termination, as in that grand word-Death- for which the Germans gutturize a sound that puts you in mind of nothing but a loathsome toad.

July 8. 1832.

TALENTED.

I REGRET to see that vile and barbarous vocable talented, stealing out of the newspapers into the leading reviews and most respectable publications of the day. Why not shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced, &c.? The formation of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse. If mere convenience is to justify such attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come from America.*

Never take an iambus as a Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do very well.

* They do; and I dare say, since Mr. Washington Irving's "Tour on the Prairies," the best English, upon the whole, he has yet written, - we shall have " eventuate" in next year's Annuals, &c.—ED.

I HAVE the firmest conviction that Homer is a mere traditional synonyme with, or figure for, the Iliad. You cannot conceive for a moment any thing about the poet, as you call him, apart from that poem. Difference in men there was in degree, but not in kind; one man was, perhaps, a better poet than another; but he was a poet upon the same ground and with the same feelings as the

rest.

The want of adverbs in the Iliad is very characteristic. With more adverbs there

*Rotha is a beautiful name indeed, and now finding its way southward from the lovely stream from which it was taken. - ED.