The Press. — London, England, 1857-12-12 00:00:00

5,534,520 votes, and for Cavaignac 1,448,302 votes. But under the circumstances of those times, under the pressure of the crisis, any one might see that it was a mere question of years, possibly of months, when the Empire would be erected. A variety of passages through the two volumes appear to justify this conclusion; and though Lord Normanby makes no ease for any side, the noble author's statements, without distortion, supply abundant materials for the justification of the course followed by his Imperial Majesty. The following contrast between the tempers of Louis Napoleon and Cavaignac is curious. Alluding to the ceremony of the installation of Lo Napoleon as Emperor, Lord Nor mauby writes : I may as well add that Cavaignac got very well through all the first part of the ceremony, but when Louis Napo eon, after descending from the tribune, walked up to the back bench, where the general had retired, and, in the most becoming manner, held out his hand to him, Cavaignac took it, but never got up, and turned away his head to his next neighbour. It was one of those momenta when a bad temper is a man's worst enemy, for all remarked and regretted it. Certainly the Prince's whole deportment has at all times been as good as possible, and there is a calm, quiet " impass!bilite " about him which is very rare in a Frenchman. There was much gentle kindness and no ostentation iu the manner in which he approached Cavaignac, which contrasted favourably with the rudeness of the other. However, one must make allowance for the difference of the position of the two men. It is easier to be generous in success than to be complaisant tinder ex tinction ; sod the result has been nothing less to Cavaig nac and all his party. Tocqueville, rather quaintly, said to me yesterday, " There only remains now one question, whether it is the Republicans or the Republic itself which the country cannot abide." The concluding remark of De Tocqueville is a good mot. The following anecdote has been told in various ways. It is very interesting : I recorded, during the last days of December, that one of the first guests at a breakfast at the Elysee was the curt': of the fortress at Ham, who had been the Prince's spiritual director as well as one of his principal social resources during his imprisonment; and at the same breakfast was likewise present the faithful dog who had been his more constant companion, and, most unwittingly, had nearly destroyed his master's chance of escape. I premise that I never was at Ham, and have no personal acquaintance with the locality, but repeat the story as it was told, at the time, to me :—" The Prince, disguised as one of the tile of workmen going forth to their dinner, had passed the drawbridge, when the director, whose duty it was to examine them in parsing, caught bis eye, and turned to interrogate the foreman as to his identity, when his attention was diverted by some defect in a work then in progress. Whilst his inquiries in reference to this were going on, the line of workmen passed out and the Prince amongst them. He then took a separate direction, which bad been before arranged, to the summit of a bare acclivity. Casting hie eye around, he saw that his dog, which had been shut up to prevent the chance of betrayal, had made his escape, had caught sight of him, known him in spite of his disguise, and was bounding and careering after him at full speed, little aware how fatal, at such a moment, would be any habitual demonstration of his affection. Had the Prince hurried his pace whilst yet in sight, that very act would probably have caused instant suspicion. With what intense anxiety had he therefore to calculate the possibility of passing the brow of the bill before this unconscious cause of danger reached him. The intermediate summit of the undulating ground was already behind him, and just concealed him from the fortress, when the delightel animal jumped upon his shoulder and was welcomed in safety, and I understand has never since left him." How much of future political destiny, perhaps, bung upon the comparative speed at which the dog and his master had passed the interve nin g distance. We have cited enough to show the great im portance of these volumes to the future histo• rian of the year 1848. We may return to them on another occasion in order to examine some of the statements on Lamartine and others. In the meantime we must record our opinion, that although Lord Normanby cannot be said to have gained great success as a writer, these volumes are of decided value, and we have felt much interest in perusing them. BIBLIOTHECA CLASSICA. Edited by George Long, M.A , and the Rev. A. J. Macleane, M.A. London : Whittaker and Co. 1. D. J. Jurenalis et Persii Satirm With a Commentary by the Rev. A. J. Ma eleane. 2. Euripides. With an English Com mentary by F. A Paley, M.A. 3. Publii Terentii Coniadhe Se.v. With a Commentary b the Rev. Edward S. John Parry, M.A. THESE three volumes form the last instalment of the " Dibliotheca Chtisica "—a series of TH E PRESS, DECEMBER 12, 1857. classical authors edited for the most part by the freshest and best of the scholars of our two Universities. As the learned works of German and other foreign commentators have been fully consulted, and a variety of MSS. compared, expressly for these volumes, we might naturally expect that they would con tain the most recent suggestions and emenda tions of continental editors. Nor are we mis taken. We are bound to say that the series, as far as it has gone, has realised our expecta tions. We must own that the iEsehylus of Mr. Paley, the Herodotus of Mr. Blakesley, the Horace of Mr. Macleane, and the Cicero of Mr. Long, which have been already published at intervals, are a vast improvement on the old Delphins, with their Latin notes full of pedantic trifling, which we used to thumb years ago under the playosus orbilius of our early )outh. A question may possibly he raised, whether, more especially for the use of schools, the English notes given in the " Bibliotheca Classica " might not have been better placed by themselves at the end of the respective volumes; and critics will differ, of course, as to the propriety of printing at full length a variety of certain passages in the Satires of Juvenal and the Epodes and Satires of Horace which are conspicuous for their utter indecency. The present editors have judged it best to lot these passages stand, and have touched them with a delicate hand, coin ' menting on them only so far as has been found necessary to illustrate the context; and for a defence of the plan we must refer our readers to the prefatory remarks of Mr. Macleane to his Juvenal. _ _ _ 1. Mr. Macleane, in his Juvenal and Persius, we think has done right in not servilely tying himself down to the text or judgment of any cne preceding editor, but in following Hein rich in the main ; whilst admitting the opinions of Ctsaubon, Lubinus, Koenig, and others of ' the best known commentators. As might be expected, his references to Dr. Smith's well known Dictionaries of Antiquities, Biography, and Geography are not only many and fre quent, but well chosen, and throw a consider able light on passages which in our schooldays were hopelessly obscure. In his treatment of Persius—the most difficult perhaps of all Latin classical authors—he has borrowed largely from the notes of Jahn. The life of Juvenal prefixed to the volume contributes to add materially to its value, being almost wholly drawn from what we had hitherto believed (in Juvenal's case at least) to be a very scanty source of information,—the allu sions of the poet to his own circumstances and affairs. Mr. Macleane, at all events, has proved that Horace is not the only ancient writer whose works reflect their author. The life of Persius is translated from an old biogra phy ascribed to Suetonius. Here and there a hypercritical student might, we think. find some ground of complaint against Mr. Macleane for the absence of illustrations by way of parallel passages in such places as the allusion to the tombs along the highways in the sub urbs of Rome (Sat. i. 171), and the absence of nearly all note and comment on a passage so difficult and probably so corrupt as Sat. xiv. 227-30. And again, we may fairly object to the substitution of " Late titans " for " Dania sippus " in Sat. viii. 147, 141, and 167, on what we cannot but consider insufficient grounds. Surely we can see in England that the same man may ruin himself with horseraeing, and also take to the stage consumptis opibus, like our old friend Damasippus—" the tamer of horses "—most appropriate title. An uncom monly positive, not to say arrogant, mode of expressing himself towards previous critics, who are sometimes more correct than himself; might also fairly lay him open to censure. 2. On Mr. Paley's Euripides we shall have more to say when the second volume appears The .present volume gives us plays—the Rhesus, Medea, Hippolytus, Alcestis, Herne lithe, Troades, and Suppliants,—most of them plays in which most of his materials lay ready to hand. The labours of Porson and of Monk on these portions of the works of Euripides have not been neglected by Mr. Paley, who, however, in his carefully-written introductions to each separate play, gives us what we never had before,—the " argument " or plot. briefly sad yet completely set before us. Ills notes 1209 also are scholarlike, and show considerable research. The essay on the character and opinions of Euripides, in which Mr. Paley endeavours to disprove the atheistical tone of his writing and teaching, though able and plausible, strikes us as rather a piece of special pleading. It gives us pain to differ from so able a scholar as Mr. Paley, and we wish we could indeed persuade ourselves with him that in his sneers against the gods and religious philosophy of his day Euripides was only '• anxiously wishing to elevate his hearers " above the low standard of popular theology." We, as Christians, can treat the vulgar Athenian notions about Zeus, Apollo, and the rest of the heathen divinities, with contempt and ridicule, because we have a revelation which teaches us that " as for all the gods of " the heathen, they are but idols, but it is the " Lord that made the heavens ;" but surely the poet who taught his warmhearted country men that those deities were silly phantoms, while he could give them nothing better in their stead for Athenian faith to repose upon, could have exercised no wholesome influence upou the religious practice and the morality of a country whose inhabitants, while they were gay, free, and thoughtless as the pure air they breathed, were still, even at a later age, aliTthti t AGYiTTl i Ot—" inclined to reverence the deities "—if we may believe St. Paul. With all duo deference, we believe that the accusa tions of Aristophanes against Euripides on this head were just; and we cannot but ob serve with regret that even whilst drawing attention to an expression in the " Hecuba" to the effect that "chance is the disposer of " all events," and admitting the possibility of the charge of pantheism against him being true, Mr. Paley still maintains that Euripides was ."no atheist " according to Greek notions. Perhaps the best remarks on this much de bated subject are to be found in Mr. Walford's " Handbook of tho Greek Drama ": In the days of Euripides men were beginning to look at every question through the medium of metaphysics. He seems to a certain extent to have caught the jargon of the school without the deeper meaning ; but at the same time he had his own peculiar views on the subject of the dealings of God with man. He appears to have thought that whatever was was right, but that at the same time it was impossible to fathom the ways of the Deity. This theory would seem to show itself in many of those half sneering, half-desponding apophthegms for which Euri pides is famous Unfortunately, the mind which has once drifted away from the sure anchorage of traditional and hereditary religion, is but too prone to WI into worse errors than even the disparagement of intel• lee:nal exertions. Such a man is ever apt to surrender himself to the illusions of a heated imagination, and, having deserted the wisdom of ages, is driven to lay heavier stress upon the wisdom of the moralist. 3. We confess that of the three volumes before us we like best the Terence of Mr Parry, who was one of Dr. Arnold's most promising scholars at Rugby, and who, as we observe whilst these sheets are passing through the press, has just been appointed to the Leadship of Leamington College. His introduction com prises a sketch of the life and literary position of Terence, and a treatise on his language and metres, either of which, taken singly, would Le sufficient to stamp him as a first-rate scholar. The latter we have perused most carefully, and we own it has fully convinced us that his theory of Terentiau synizesis, or syllabic contraction, is correct, and that Bentley and other critics were wrong in ex plaining it away on the principle of an hiatus wh !re the final syllable was shortened before an initial vcwel, as in Virgil's well-known line, " Credemus, an qui amant," &c As Mr. Parry justly observes, Cicero helps us, by a story which he tells of Crassus, to settle the question as to whether Terence means to write "dive sis" or "cave sis." He writes, as our readers will remember, in his 2nd Book 1)e Divin., chap. 40,—" Quum M. Crassus exer cituin Brundisii imponeret, quidam in portu, " caritas Cauno advectas vendens, Cauneas " clamitabat. Dicamus, si placet, monitum ab "eo Crassum, eaveret ne iret." The story is intelligible enough on Mr. Parry's theory, while that of Bentley makes it simply unmeaning and unintelligible. Of course what is true of " cave" is true also of such words a: modo, sibi, tibi, milli, novas, storm., tace : and no doubt this is the true explanation of the abbreviation of owl words as " duce," - dice," face," "fere," into " doo," ° clic," " fat.," nail