traced to the habit of satisfying his own mind as to the precise sense in which he himself made use of words. Mr. Tooke, though he had no objection to puzzle others, was mightily averse to being puzzled or mystified himself. All was to his determined mind either complete light or complete darkness. There was no hazy, doubtful chiaro-scuro in his understanding. He wanted something "palpable to feeling as to sight." "What," he would say to himself, "do I mean when I use the conjunction That? Is it an anomaly, a class by itself, a word sealed against all inquisitive attempts? Is it enough to call it a copula, a bridge, a link, a word connecting sentences? That is undoubtedly its use; but what is its origin?" Mr. Tooke thought he had answered this question satisfactorily; and loosened the Gordian knot of grammarians "familiar as his garter," when he said, "It is the common pronoun, adjective, or participle That, with the noun Thing or Proposition implied, and the particular example following it." So he thought, and so every reader has thought since, with the exception of teachers and writers upon grammar. Mr. Windham, indeed, who was a sophist, but not a logician, charged him with having found "a mare's-nest;" but it is not to be doubted that Mr. Tooke's etymologies will stand the test and last longer than Mr. Windham's ingenious derivation of the practice of bull-baiting from the principles of humanity! Having thus laid the corner-stone, he proceeded to apply the same method of reasoning to other undecyphered and impracticable terms. Thus the word And he explained clearly enough to be the verb add, or a corruption of the old Saxon anandad. "Two and two make four," that is, "Two add two make four." Mr. Tooke, in fact, treated words as the chemists do substances; he distinguished those which are compounded of others from those which are not decompoundable. He did not explain the obscure by the more obscure, but the difficult by the plain, the complex by the simple. This alone is proceeding upon the true principles of science; the rest is pedantry and petit-maitreship. Our philosophical writer distinguished all words by names of things and directions added for joining them together, or originally by Nouns and Verbs. It is a pity that he has left this matter short, by omitting to define the Verb. After enumerating sixteen different definitions (all of which he dismisses with scorn and contumely), at the end of two quarto volumes he refers the reader for the true solution to a third volume, which he did not live to finish. This extraordinary man was in the habit of tantalising his guests on a Sunday with divers abstruse speculations, and putting them off to the following week for a satisfaction of their doubts; but why should he treat posterity in the same scurvy manner, or leave the world without quitting scores with it? I question whether Mr. Tooke was himself in possession of his pretended nostrum, and whether, after trying hard at a definition of the verb as a distinct part of speech, as a terrier-dog mumbles a hedgehog, he did not find it too much for him, and leave it to its fate. It is also a pity that Mr. Tooke spun out his great work with prolix and dogmatical dissertations on irrelevant matters; and, after denying the old metaphysical theories of language, that he should attempt to found a metaphysical theory of his own on the nature and mechanism of language. The nature of words, he contended, (it was the basis of his whole system,) had no connexion with the nature of things or of thought; yet he afterwards strove to limit the nature of things and of the human mind by the technical structure of language. Thus he endeavours to shew that there are no abstract ideas, by enumerating two thousand instances of words, expressing abstract ideas, that are the past participles of certain verbs. It is difficult to know what he means by this. On the other hand, he maintains that "a complex idea is as great an absurdity as a complex star," and that words only are complex. He also makes out a very triumphant list of metaphysical and moral non-entities, proved to be so on the pure principle that the names of these non-entities are participles, not nouns, or names of things. That is strange in so close a reasoner, and in one who maintained that all language was a masquerade of words, and that the class to which they grammatically belonged had nothing to do with the class of ideas they represented. It is now above twenty years since the two quarto volumes of "The Diversions of Purley" were published, and fifty since the same theory was promulgated in the celebrated "Letter to Dunning." Yet it is a curious example of the "Spirit of the Age," that Mr. Lindley Murray's Grammar has proceeded to the thirtieth edition in complete defiance of all the facts and arguments there laid down. He defines a noun to be the name of a thing. Is quackery a thing, i. c. a substance? He defines a verb to be a word signifying to be, to do, or to suffer. Are being, action, suffering, verbs? He defines an adjective to be the name of a quality. Are not wooden, golden, substantial, adjectives? He maintains that there are six cases in English nouns ; that is, six various terminations without any change of termination at all; and that English verbs have all the moods, tenses, and persons that the Latin ones have. This is an extraordinary stretch of blindness and obstinacy. That is, he translates the Latin grammar into English, as so many had done before him, and fancies he has written an English grammar; and divines applaud, and schoolmasters usher him into the polite world, and English scholars carry on the jest, while Horne Tooke's genuine anatomy of our native tongue is laid on the shelf. Can it be that our politicians smell a rat in the Member for Old Sarum? That our clergy do not relish Parson Horne? That the world at large are alarmed at acuteness and originality greater than their own? What has all this to do with the formation of the English language, or with the first condition and necessary foundation of speech itself? Is there nothing above the reach of prejudice and party-spirit? It seems in this, as in so many other instances, as if there was a patent for absurdity in the natural bias of the human mind, and that folly should be stereotyped! This work is not without merit in the details and examples of English construction. But its fault even in that part is, that he confounds the genius of the English language, making it periphrastic and literal, instead of elliptical and idiomatic. According to Mr. Murray, hardly any of our best writers ever wrote a word of English. 66 FROM THE CISMA DE L'INGHILTERRA" OF CALDERON. I SAW her 'twas in Paris! would to Heaven, Yon starry dome in some clear cloudless night. One diamond cuts another-steel may glow With fire, when struck by steel-kind yields to kind, And take, attractive force; far more man's mind! Should melt, when things inanimate and blind, As diamonds, loadstones, lightning, fire, and steel? A flattering pledge my hopes to animate- That told too well what tears must weep those eyes. I call'd, term'd, thought her rigours mild devices, Hoped, suffer'd, served, with frenzy's watchful guiles, Enjoy'd, prized, fed on her sweet winning smiles. Scarce did the sun to elder worlds retire, Crowning an earlier sphere with fires more bright, Flattering alone to me and my desire. Scarce on the earth had fallen the tremulous night, I breathed my passion to the commonwealth of flowers. All, all was Love! Obedient to its power Hast thou not seen, officious with delight, Lest danger lurk within the roseate bower? His sunflower wings their own funereal pyre? Change and successful passion are but one, Dionis! In her absence I have pined, I've stray'd, without my guiding light, that northern star. GAMESTERS AND GAMING. "Je sais bien que le lecteur n'a pas grand besoin de savoir tout cela; mais j'ai besoin, moi, de le lui dire."-J. J. ROUSSEAU, Confessions. Do not be frightened reader; I am not about to inflict upon you twelve books "de rebus ad eum pertinentibus,”—concerning all I ever thought or did I want alike the cynicism and the eloquence to lay bare the disgusting infirmities of the human heart, and to render them endurable in the perusal. The purpose for which the passage that stands at the head of this paper is selected, is merely to intimate that I write (to speak modestly) as much for my own advantage as yours. Not that I allude, or would be understood to allude to the "quiddam honorarium," with which the proprietor of the New Monthly Magazine gratifies his correspondents. "No, I've a soul above buttons ;"-my meaning is, simply, that I write for my health, and make my periodical avatars in the incarnate shape of an essay or a letter to the editor, to clear off the bile and "cleanse the foul bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart." A periodical publication is, to an author of my complexion, what Cheltenham is to an East Indian; and without some such vent for the choler produced by the vices and absurdities of society, there's no saying what might be the consequence The accumulated "peccant matter" pent up in the interior, irritating and vellicating the tender fibres of the cerebral and other delicate structures, and exciting a general subfebricular diathesis, might so inflame, rouse, stimulate, and derange the system, as to occasion that fatal explosion, or exanthematous efflorescence, a libel, which, being of a confluent and malignant sort, would infallibly commit me to the keeping of the great state physician, his Majesty's Attorney-general. Whereas, a course of periodicals, like a course of calomel, carries off little by little the material cause of the disease, sweetens the blood, and, if it does not restore the body to perfect health, at least preserves it from a fatal disorganization. Having premised thus much for the edification of the public, and the ease of mine own conscience, I shall rush at once into the "middle of my subject," and proceed with a new dose of my accustomed remedy. It is the nature of a generous spirit, on all occasions, to take part with the oppressed; and the first tendency of every freeman is to throw the weight of his own personal influence into that scale which seems in the most imminent danger of kicking the beam. There is, in fact, something so antisocial and barbarous in the triumph of brute force, that the bare spectacle of physical infirmity begets an uncalculating sympathy with the weaker party, quite independent of all moral considerations; and it requires a considerable effort of reflection and of volition, even to witness the ducking of a pickpocket, with the requisite sang-froid. This, which in the abstract is a mere animal impulse, becomes sublimated into the highest civilized virtue, when it operates, under the guidance of reason, to maintain right, and to combat the abuses to which power, in the wantonness of its caprice, is prone, whenever it can find a fit opportunity for indulgence. Where such a sympathy is not endemic-where it is not even an object of popular education liberty, if it exists at all, is held by a most precarious tenure; and the political downfal of a community so situated may be predicted nearly with an absolute certainty. It becomes an honest periodical, therefore, to watch with a jealous eye all revolutions of popular opinion; to observe with strictness the passing likes and dislikes of the public as they arise; and to interpose whenever accident or intrigue sets men on hunting down particular classes or individuals, and rouses the passions of society into a mischievous activity. To do the British press justice, it is not deficient either in feeling or in zeal upon such occasions; and though all parties may have their retainers, there is perhaps not more than one instance of a public journal the tone of which is governed by a sordid desire to flatter popular prejudices independently of all principle, and to sell its numbers by chiming in with the error of the day. The love of fair play is inherent in every truly English editor; and it is probably to this laudable spirit of equality that we should attribute much of that fervour with which certain writers have exhausted their own ink and their readers' patience in combating for the Turks against the Greeks-for the French government against the Spaniards-and generally for all despotic monarchs against the people. The spectacle of the logical inferiority of these parties, and of their total deficiency in all sound argument, having been too much for the refined feelings of the writers |