pink, inlaid as panels in the tomb of Edward I. Whence, in the days of Edward, could the English stone-cutter have procured Egyptian porphyry? I was enabled to form, at least, a guess on the subject, from possessing a small piece of exactly the same stone, which had been picked up amid heaps of rubbish in the deep rocky ravine of Siloam, and which, as it does not occur in situ in Judea, was supposed to have formed at one time a portion of the Temple. Is it not probable that these slabs, which, so far as is yet known, Europe could not have furnished, were brought by Edward, the last of the crusading princes of England, from the Holy Land, to confer sanctity on his place of burial, mayhap originally, though Edward himself never got so far, from that identical ravine of Siloam which supplied my specimen? It was not uncommon for the crusader to take from Palestine the earth in which his body was to be deposited; and if Edward succeeded in procuring a genuine bit of the true Temple, and an exceedingly pretty bit to boot, it seems in meet accordance with the character of the age, that it should have been borne home with him in triumph to serve a similar purpose.'-P. 353. We must now take our leave of Mr. Miller. Though we have consulted our readers' interests in selecting such portions as we thought likely to be most acceptable to them, yet we are far from having exhausted the volume; and, indeed, have altogether abstained from the geological observations, which form a main feature of the volume, and which will be read with pleasnre by the unscientific reader. 314 ART. III.-1. J. D. Fuss, De Poesi et Poetis Neolatinis Dissertatio Leod. 1837. 2. Matthiæ Casimiri Sarbierii Carmina. Argentorati, 1803. We never enter a large library without fully sympathizing with him who, at the sight of so many books now totally unread and unknown, and at the thought of the laborious days and sleepless nights wasted in their composition, burst into a flood of tears. No sight more humiliating to the pride of man than the dust which envelopes, and the worms which devour volumes, the authors of which fondly hoped that they would delight, instruct, and profit future generations. Such works, we mean, as those which are consigned to the narrow, dark, topmost shelves of libraries: works only to be attained by mounting the highest ladder the establishment can furnish:-and when attained, needing a five minutes' purification from cobwebs and dirt, before the scholar can venture to open them. But perhaps of all the works which the voice of the learned is unanimous in consigning to oblivion, none are more absolutely, and (on the whole) more justly condemned, than the writers of modern Latin poetry. The immense mass of compositions in this branch is but little known. The Delicia of the English, French, Italian, Dutch, and German poets, who wrote in Latin between the revival of learning and the year 1600, occupy twenty-five thick and closely printed duodecimo volumes: that is, contain the bulk of about one hundred Eneids. Now these Delicia extract but a few lines from some, a few pages from other, voluminous writers: the immense mass of the whole is almost beyond conception. And when it is considered that at least as much more was written between the years 1600 and 1700, the idea of the time and labour thus employed, and, as the event proved, thrown away, becomes quite overwhelming. And yet some portion of this mass was deserving of a better fate-and from time to time attempts have been made to reintroduce some of these forgotten writers to public notice. Pope, in the year 1740, republished a selection from the works of the Italian poets; and the two volumes thus occupied, are creditable both to himself and to his publisher. Were a Pleiades, after the example of the Alexandrian grammarians, to be selected from the writers of modern Latin poetry, the usual literary verdict would, we suppose, honour the following authors: John Baptist Spagnoli, better known as Mantuanus, Vida, Casimir Sarbiewski, Buchanan, San Nor are we nazar, the Cardinal de Polignac, and Vanier. inclined to dispute the justice of this selection, with the exceptions of Mantuan and Buchanan: for whom we should substitute Fracastor, or Balde, or (if moral considerations were left out of the question) Secundus. All of the above-named writers, except Buchanan, were members of the Roman Communion: and most of them more or less connected with sacred subjects. Whatever praise may be conceded to sacred poems composed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their effect, when compared with the hymns of the earlier Church, is precisely that of a cinque cento building when contrasted with that of a Gothic cathedral. Compare an ode of Horace with a primitive or mediæval hymn on a similar subject:-the change is astonishing. Set side by side their treatment of any topic connected with death,-that of consolation to surviving friends. Contrast Horace's 'Tu frustra pius, heu! non ita creditum, Poscis Quintilium Deos,' with the noble anapæsts of Prudentius : 'Deus ignee fons animarum, But take the same Horace in contrast with one of the writers of the seventeenth century. How strongly does Casimir's 'Ode ad D. Virginem Matrem, cum illi dicata navis in Indiam solveret,' recall an ode to Diana or Venus! 'Diva ventorum pelagique præses, Nor can we see that the adoption of a classical measure was the occasion of this difference. We can point to hexametrical poems of medieval writers which have all the solemnity of the measures more usually adopted by the Church. We make no apology for quoting an entire poem written by Marbodus, Bishop of Rennes, towards the year 1000: because it strikes us as unusually solemn and impressive. Its subject is the death of some Abbat, with whom the author appears to have been acquainted. 'Summe Pater Christi, Qui semper es atque fuisti, Vivificum Flamen, Patris Prolisque Ligamen, Per totum mundum Cui, Nati dicta secundum, Vivens o vere! defunctorum miserere!' We find no difference in the spirit of these lines from that of the Stabat Mater, the Dies Ira, or any other glorious mediaval hymn. By way of contrast, the reader may examine the hymns of Pope Urban VIII., which came out with all the luxury of Roman typography from the papal press. A more wretched cento from the works of Horace can hardly be imagined. A few remarks may here find a place on the measures of the hymns principally employed by the Church. Of these the principal is Iambic Dimeter (long measure). It is written either metrically, as by Prudentius; or rhythmically, as by S. Ambrose; although the latter kind of hymn was almost invariably, and, with very bad taste, got rid of in the great revision of the Roman Breviary. Take as an example the Tristes Erant Apostoli, which has been indeed cramped into metre, but has lost nearly all its sweetness. UNREFORMED. 'Tristes erant Apostoli,1 In sempiterna secula.’ REFORMED. 'Tristes erant Apostoli, The hymns, Kar' çoxnv, of the church, have all been written in this measure, with but one or two exceptions. For example, 1 It is odd enough that Mr. Newman should, in his Hymni Ecclesiastici, give the reformed editions of the hymns as the compositions of S. Ambrose. the Veni Creator Spiritus,-the Vexilla Regis prodeunt, the Deus Tuorum Militum, the Ad Regias Agni Dapes; and last, but not least, though officially unauthorized by the Church, the exquisite poem of S. Bernard, De Nomine JESU. Rhyme very seldom occurs in these stanzas: though assonances sometimes do. Our readers are probably aware that assonances are the rhymes of vowels, leaving the consonants out of the question. Thus bad, war, mat, are assonant to each other. This verse is an example: 'Pœnas cucurrit fortiter, Et sustulit viriliter : Pro Te effundens sanguinem, Again, Trochaic tetrameter catalectic, 'As at Porto Bello lying On the gently swelling flood,' is another very favourite measure of the Church's. The rhymes are usually perfect, and very often run in triplets, as : 'Pange lingua gloriosi Assonances here also occur sometimes; as in the De Paradiso of S. Peter Damian, a few stanzas of which we will quote for their very beauty: 'Non alternat luna vices, Sol vel cursus siderum: Carnis bella nesciunt: Et mens unum sentiunt; Nullis patent casibus; Senectus juvenibus. Hic perenne tenent esse, Nam transire transiit; |