The Press. — London, England, 1858-09-18 00:00:00

THE PRE S S, SEPTEMBER 18, 1858. notice, in due season, the other volumes as they a ppear. In the presen t edition there is a memoir of the author from the pen of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is taken from the previous edition of P 348. It is gracefully and smoothly written, and breathes much filial affection, blended with a fine spirit of critical appreciation. Some of our readers may not have seen this memoir, and we extract from it the following notice of the Dis raeli family : My grandfather, who became an English Denizen in 1748, was all Italian descendant front one of those Hebrew families whom the Inquisition forced to emigrate from the Spanish Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century, and who found a refuge in the more tolerant territories of the Venetian Republic. His ancestors had dropped their ijethic surname on their settlement in the Terra Firma, and grateful to the God of Jacob who had sustained them through unprecedented trials and guarded them through unheard-of perils, they assumed the name of Disraeli, a name never borne before or since by any other family, in order that tbeir race might be for ever recognized. Un disturbed and unmolested, they flourished as merchants for more than two centuries under the protection of the lion of St. Mark, which was but just, as the patron saint of the Republic was himself a child of Israel. But towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the altered circum stances of England, favourable, as it was then supposed, to commerce and religious liberty, attracted the attention of any great•grandfather to this island, and be resolved that the youngest of his two sons, Benjamin, the " son of his right hand," should settle in a country where the dynasty seemed at length established, through the recent failure of Prince Charles Edward, and where public opinion appeared definitively adverse to persecution on matters cf creed and conscience. The Jewish families who were then settled in England were few, though, front their wealth and other =cum. stances, they were far from unimportant. They were all of them Sephardim, that is to say, children of Israel, who had never quitted the shores of the Midland Ocean, until Torquamada had driven them from their pleasant resi dences and rich estates in Arragon, and Andalusia, and Portugal, to seek greater blessings, even than a clear atmo sphere and a glowing sun, amid the marshes of Holland and the fogs of Britain. Most of these families, who held themselves aloof from the Hebrews of Northern Europe, then only occasionally stealing into England, as from an in ferior caste, and whose synagogue was reserved only for Sephardim, are now extinct ; while the branch of the great family, which, notwithstanding their own sufferings from prejudice, they had the hardihood to look down upon, have achieved an amount of wealth and consideration which the Sephardim, even with the patronage of Mr. _Pelham, never could have contemplated. Nevertheless, at the time when my grandfather settled in England, and when Mr. Pelham, who was very favourable to the Jews, was Prime Minister, there might be found, ainor.g other Jewish families flourishing in this country, the Villa Reals, who brought wealth to these shores almost as great as their name, though that is the second in Portugal, and who have twice allied themselves with the English aristocracy, the Medinas—the Imes, who were our kinsmen—and the Mendez da Coates, who, I believe, still exist. Whether it were that my grandfather, on his arrival, was not encouraged 'oy those to whom he had a right to look up,—which is often our hard case in the outset of life, — or whether he was alarmed at the unexpected consequences of Mr. Pelham's favourable disposition to his countrymen in the disgraceful repeal of the Jew Bill, which occurred a very few years after his arrival in this country, I know not; but certainly he appears never to have cordially or intimately mixed with his community. This tendency t 3 alienation was, no doubt, subsequently encouraged by his marriage, which took place in 1765. My grandmother, the beautiful daughter of a family who had suffered much from persecution, bad imbibed that dislike for her race which the vain are tot) apt to adopt when they find that they are born to public contempt. The indignant feeling that should be reserved for the persecutor, in the mortification of their disturbed sensibility, is too often visited on the yic•im ; and the cause of annoyance is recognized not in the ignorant malevolence of the powerful, but in the conscientious conviction of the innocent sufferer. Seventeen years, however, elapsed before my grand father entered into this union, and during that interval he had not been idle. He was only eighteen when he commenced his career, and when a great responsibility devolved upon him. He was not unequal to it. He was a man of ardent character; sanguine, courageous, speculative, and fortunate ; with a temper which no disappointment could disturb, and a brain, amid reverses, f u ll o f resource . H e ma de hi s i fortune in the midway of life, and settled near Enfield, aliere he form e d an It a li an gar d en , enter t a i ne d hie friends, played whist with Sir Horace Mann, who was his great acquaint ance , an d w h o h a 1 k nown hi s brother at nice as a b an k er , ea t macaron i w hi c h was dressed by ethe Venetian Consul, sang canzonettas, and notwith standing a wife who never pardoned him for his name, and a son who disappointed all his plans, and who to the last hour of his life was an enigma to him, lived till he was nearly ninety, and then died in 1817, in the full enjoyment of prolonged existence. My grandfather retired from active business on the eve of that great financial epoch, to grapple with which his talents were well adapted; and when the wars and loans of the Revolution were about to create those families of millionaire s , in which h e might probably have enrolled his o wn. • That, however, was not our destiny. My g r andfather had only one child, mitt nature had disqualified hint, from his zradle, for the busy pursuits of men. A pale, pensive child, with large daik brown eyes, and owing hair, such as may be beheld in one of the portraits annexed to these volumes, had grown up beneath this roof of worldly energy and enjoyment, indicating even in his infancy, by the whole carriage of his life, that he was or a different order from those amor.g whom he lived. And with respect to the association of the Dis raeli family with the county of Buckingham, there occurs the following passage : It was amid these rambles in Stoke-park, amid the scenes of Gray's genius, the elegiac churchyard, and the picturesque fragments of the Long Story, talking over the deeds of the " Grveat Rebellion " with the descendants of Cavaliers and Parliament men, that my father 6rst imbibed that feeling for the county of Buckingham, which induced him occasionally to be a dweller in its limits, and ulti mately, more than a quarter of a century afterwards, to establish his household gods in its heart. And here, perhaps, I may be permitted to mention a circumstance, which is indeed trifling, and yet, as a coincidence, not, I think, without interest. Mr. Pye was the great-grandson of Sir Robert Pye, of Bradenham, who married Anne, the eldest daughter of Mr. Hampden. How little could my father dream, sixty years ago, that he would pass the last quarter of his life in the mansion-house of Bradenham ; that his name would become intimately connected with the county of Buckingham ; and that his own remains would he interred in the vault of the chancel of Bradenham Church, among the coffins of the descendants of the Hampdens and the Pyes. All which should teach us that, whatever may be our natural bent, there is a power in the disposal of events greater than human will. Since that paragraph was written the name of Disraeli has received additional laurels. For the second time it has been associated with the leadership of the House of Commons, and its connection with the county of Buckingham has been rivetted by the strongest ties of personal and political affection. It is certainly one of the " curiosities" of political " literature," that in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the shire of Buckingham should be linked with such dominating names in op posite eras as those of Hampden, Grenville, and Disraeli. P. Vergili Maronig Opera. The Works of Virgil, with a Commentary by John Coning ton, M.A., Professor of Latin, and Fellow of Corpus Christi College ; Late Fellow of Uni versity College, Oxford. Vol. I. Containing the Eclogues and Georgics. London : Whit taker. THE editors of the "Bibliotheca Classico " have always endeavoured to give their books a peculiar stamp. Following the example set by Arnold in his edition of Thucydides, they have not contented themselves with elucidating their author line by line and word by word, but have endeavoured to illustrate his subject-matter, and even to estimate his literary merits, in historical, legal, or testhetical essays, according as their author be a historian, an orator, or a poet. No previous editor, however, has ventured so far in this direction as Mr. Conington, who besides two dissertations upon the bucolic and didactic poets who followed Virgil—a subject which cannot concern him as an editor of Virgil. unless the editor of a poet is bound to review all his imitators,—has written nearly fifty pages of literary criticism upon the I3ucol►cs and Georgics, dissecting each poem as carefully and in almost as popular a style as a recent volume of poems by Tennyson or Wronger might be reviewed in the Edinburgh or the Revue des Deux Mondes. The dissertations upon Virgil's imitators might, we think, have been spared. In a life of Nemesianus or Serenus Sammonicus it would be very proper to mention that those poets imitated Virgil, for the fact belongs strictly to their biography. In a life of Virgil we expect to be informed what were his obligations to llesiod, Theocritus, and others, for this belongs to his biography. To know it is to know some thing of Virgil. But Virgil is not affected by the fact that Nemesianus and Sammonicus imitated him. If they had never lived, he and his works would be precisely the same. They are indeed monuments of his influence. This fact might justify the mention of their names, but not the insertion of a number of extracts from their works. The influence of Virgil has indeed been so great that few poems have been written since his time which do not bear the marks of it. If Mr. Conington proposed to discuss the large question of Virgil's influence upon poetry, he should have discussed it completely ; but, had he done so, we should still have been of opinion that the space would have been more legitimately occupied by an investigation of the state of lite rature when Virgil arose, by a careful review of Lucretius, by an inquiry into the extent and nature of the influence exerted in Italy by the philosophy of Epicurus. These are subjects which have still to be treated satisfactorily, and which Mr. Conington was certainly under no obligation to treat at length. But, by doing so, he would have thrown some light upon the cha racter and the poetry of Virgil which he has not done by his review of Calpurnius, Manilius, and Nemesianus. On the other hand, we are disposed to approve of the testhetical dissertations. They will not, indeed, be interesting to schoolboys, and to scholars little which they contain will be new. Yet even scholars, we think, may derive advantage from perusing essays in which many interesting reflections, which they will themselves have made in reading Virgil, are luminously de veloped and expressed. Meanwhile, to under graduates at the Universities, and to those who love the classics but want leisure to become pro foundly versed in them, these essays will be welcome. It may seem that an editor insults his reader when he instructs him what to ad mire in the poet and what to disapprove. This is a very just impression when the poet be longs to the same age and country as the reader for whom the edition is prepared. But time and a foreign language raise a mist around a poem, and though poets used in old times to boast that their writings would continue for ever fresh, very few, perhaps none, have had so for tunate a lot. Almost all have contracted a certain strangeness ; they seem to belong to a different world. We are like men who over hear a discourse intended for other ears. We stand in need of interpreters, not only to ex plain to us the language and the allusions, but to explain the poet himself, to put us in moral rapport with him. There is an ample field for the commentator in the language and allusions of the Georgics; by his success here of course he must be tried. But Virgil himself is more difficult than his Georgics, and harder than any crabbed passage in any of them is the question why and with what purpose they were written. These essays present a somewhat curious illus tration of the progress we have made in philoso phical criticism. Mr. Conington is naturally a warm admirer of elegance and perfection in style. Rapid composition, vigorous, spontaneous, and abundant, does not attract him, but he is won by ingenious expressions, studied elegances, balanced periods. Naturally, therefore, he delights in Virgil ; naturally, a short time since, he ex pressed his admiration of Pope. This, then, is just the writer who a century ago would have maintained Virgil to be the first of poets, and have echoed the dictum of Voltaire that if Homer made Virgil it was his greatest work. Yet so obvious has it become to everyone that design is before and above execution, and that even in style sincerity is more than elegance, that even Mr. Conington, in spite of his evident natural ten dencies. does not hesitate to pronounce Virgil to have failed and to have mistaken the ends at which a poet ought to aim both in his Bucolics and in his Georgics. It is impossible, we think, not to admit, on the whole, the justice of this opinion, as on the other hand no one can dispute the merits, as rare in their kind as eminent in degree, of both these works. It must be admitted that the Bucolics are servile imitations, and that in everything but style and metre they are inferior to their models. It is plain that whereas in Theocritus we contem plate clear, consistent, and intelligible pictures, m Virgil, on the other hand, all is contused, hybrid, and conventional. This is manifest enough, and Mr. Conington's notes give us no new impression, but only deepen the old one, when he points out, chiefly after Mr. Keightley, the medley of Lombard and Sicilian scenery which they exhibit. On the other hand, who can exaggerate in praising the metre and the style ? These are the poems, almost, of a school boy brought up to consider rhetorical amplifica tion the first of accomplishments. Yet there is no taint of rhetoric in them, no strain of bombast. The sentiment is often poor, here and there—as in most pastorals—rather silly, but it is always expressed with a delicate simplicity ; the words are never too many, nor too few, nor ill-chosen, nor misplaced. quoties, et quee mecum Galsteslocuta est ! Paa tem aliquam, venti, dicittu referaus ad sures. ll