closing words will remind every one of the "fit audience find, though few," of the Paradise Lost. Probably in writing the Latin words, as well as the English, he had before his mind Horace's

neque te ut miretur turba, labores, Contentus paucis lectoribus."

The Junius to whom the volume is inscribed must not be confounded with Junius, the philologist, whose name was Francis; the person meant is Patrick Young, whose biography will be found in Smith's Vitae.

An Erroneous Reference.

Mr. G. H. Lewes, in his History of Philosophy (4th Ed. vol. ii. p. 678), says of Auguste Comte, "He was fond of applying to her [Madame Clotilde de Vaux] the lines of his favorite Dante

Quella che imparadisa la mia mente,

Ogni basso pensier dal cor m' avulse."

This is a mistake; both the lines are not Dante's. The first is, indeed, in the Divina Commedia, Par. xxviii. 3, but the second is Petrarch's, and will be found in his 314th Sonnet. What Mr. Lewes ought to have said is, that the philosopher, by combining the verses, applied to Madame de Vaux, in relation to himself, what the two Italian poets had said, one of his Beatrice, the other of his Laura.

Compact" in Shakspeare.

Mr. Gladstone, in a note on his address at the Liverpool College (John Murray, 1873), says: "Having given Comte credit for imagination, I must confess that I did not suppose him to be of 'imagination all compact'-(Midsummer Night's Dream, v. i.), but rather of imagination all diffuse." I am not sure that I quite understand this statement, and I am not going to examine it as a critical judgment. But the words seem to imply that Mr. Glad

stone takes a view of the syntax and meaning of the Shakspearian passage referred to, which, pace tanti viri I must say, it is impossible to accept. He appears to regard "compact" as an epithet of "imagination," having a sense which can be opposed to "diffuse." But surely when Shakspeare says—

"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact,"

he means simply that they are wholly made up of imagination, and he uses "compact" just as in As you Like it, ii., 7. "If he, compact of jars, grow musical,

We shall have shortly discord in the spheres."

Irish, Welsh, and Basque.

I am sorry to find a writer, who studies minute accuracy so much as Mr. Shilleto, giving his sanction to the often repeated but entirely groundless statement that a Gael (e.g, an Irishman) and a Welshman understand each other's language. (See his Thucydides, Book 1. Chap. cii.) If he had consulted Celtic scholars on the subject, he would have found that the fact is not so. The real affinity between the Cymric and Gaelic forms of Celtic speech gives this notion a prima facie plausibility, which does not belong to another assertion, sometimes just as positively made, that an Irishman and a Basque understand each other. To go no further back for examples, Victor Hugo in his L'homme qui rit, says, “le basque et l'irlandais se comprennent, ils parlent le vieux jargon punique.”—(Vol. I., page 74.) This proposition is not only entirely untrue, but, to any one who knows what Basque is, absurd. But it is, of course, useless to reason with a person-even if that person be a man of geniuswhose philology is so peculiar that he recognizes no line of demarcation between Semitic and Indo-European, and describes as a "jargon" belonging to the former linguistic family, a well-authenticated and highly respectable member of the latter. Argument is impossible between those who differ on first principles.

I

MR. HOGAN'S EDITION OF THE MEDEA. BY ROBERT YELVERTON TYRRELL, A. M., Fellow of Trinity College, and Professor of Latin in the University of Dublin.

THIS edition would have been more valuable if the author had reflected that the Medea is composed in metrical language. On v. 1349,

οὐ παῖδας οὓς ἔφυσα κἀξεθρεψάμην,

Mr. Hogan says, "I would propose to read ¿0pεþáμnv kȧžéφυσα, so as to make a ὕστερον πρότερον.” Now if we dismiss the hypothesis that the Medea is written, not in verse, as the other dramas of Euripides, but in prose, we are bound to observe on this arrangement of the line that the dignity imparted to the rhythm by the violation of the caesura thus introduced is hardly sufficient to reconcile us to the unusual feature of two trochees in an iambic senarius.

Mr. Hogan says in his Preface, "I have to express my most grateful thanks to Dr. Veitch of Edinburgh for his kindness in revising the MS. of this work, and for the many valuable suggestions with which he has favoured me; I have carefully weighed all his remarks, and while compelled to disagree with him on some points, have embodied in my notes many of his suggestions." May we conjecture that the note on v. 1349, quoted above, was one on which the Editor was compelled to disagree with that eminent scholar, and may we refer it to the beneficent influence of the same that he has after much heart-searching refrained from introducing an anapaest into the fourth foot of a senarius in v. 494 ? On v. 971,

ἱκετεύετ', ἐξαιτεῖσθε μὴ φεύγειν χθόνα,

The Medea of Euripides, with Introduction and Explanatory Notes,

for Schools, by John H. Hogan. Williams and Norgate, London, 1873.

we have an instance of that tempered roxń which is the crowning virtue of a scholar; "for peúyev," says Mr. Hogan, "some read puyev so as to keep an iambic (sic) in the fifth foot of a senarius; but although in this foot the forms θανεῖν, παθεῖν, &c., are more usual, still we also find θνήσκειν, πάσχειν, &c.”

It is a pity that Mr. Hogan did not consult Dr. Veitch on the following abstruse points :-whether when the Scholiast says of a line, "¿v Пediáoi koriv," he really refers to "a tragedy which was called the Peleus" (p. 106); whether the first syllable of ärn is short or long (see note on v. 986); whether "Tapidwкav" is "a later Atticism for the regular form παρέδοσαν” (n. on v. 627); whether s 'thus' should be accented (n. on v. 584); whether anaλλáσou in v. 339, and кvíšε in v. 555, may not be the 2nd pers. sing., as has been hitherto assumed, and not the 3rd pers., as Mr. Hogan thinks; whether ipiola is a part of the verb sirev (n. on v. 61); whether ä in v. 209 may not possibly be the fem. sing., not neut. plur. ; whether the Greek writers habitually "put öde for ourws" (n. on. v. 687); and, finally, it is a pity that he did not put to Dr. Veitch three direct questions:—what is a strophe ? what is an antistrophe ? what is an enclitic? The note on v. 726 shows the spectacle of an Editor of the Medea puzzled by the accent on οὔ in the words οὔ σ ̓ ἄγειν βουλήσομαι, and in his notes on the choral portions of the play he has betrayed passim that he is not aware of the existence of any strophic correspondence. Had Mr. Hogan, with the assistance of Dr. Veitch, solved for us these intricate problems, we could almost have grasped without his aid, and believed without his authority, the following truths :-that "'Apуous σkápos is put by periphrasis for the ship itself" (n. on v. 1); that "with diac we must supply xɛpaç” (n. on v. 19); that "the student should not confuse kaλòç, adj., 'good,' and káλws, subst., a rope'" (n. on v. 278); and that "тovμov déμaç is put by periphrasis for iμè” (n. on v. 529). We could have spared too his correction of v. 1354, in which he makes an

easy line unintelligible by introducing a mark of interrogation; and his conjecture on v. 1304,

μή μοί τι δράσωσ ̓ οἱ προσήκοντες γένει,

μοι

where he says, "for μo I have ventured to substitute roic, supplying TEKvois from the preceding line, from my own conjecture." We fear moreover that in a work like the present we can hardly attribute to the printer ipóvɛa on p. xli., or ouk 'twice on p. 67.

Mr. Hogan deplores that "the metres of his (Euripides') later plays want the impressive rhythm and majestic beat of the Aeschylean senarius," and in another place he complains of "the laxity of the metre of the senarius" in the hands of Euripides; but we may hope for a great improvement in the rhythm of the poet, if future Editors follow his example in ignoring strophic correspondence, and introducing trochees into iambic verses. If Mr. Hogan had printed the article of the Westminster Review on Euripides in extenso, instead of giving it in scraps ushered in by phrases like, "as a writer in the Westminster Review ably observes," one might have enjoyed more the perusal of his Introduction; and if he had carried out in practice the principle (to which in theory he expresses his deference) of acknowledging the source of remarks adopted from the works of others, he would have been less open to a charge of violation of editorial etiquette.

We have made the above remarks because we wish to endeavour to induce the Editor to reconsider his determination of "attempting an edition of the Hippolytus of our poet, or possibly an edition of all his plays," until he has made himself acquainted with the rudiments of Greek accidence and the structure of an iambic trimeter.