The Press. — London, England, 1855-09-08 00:00:00

860 yittraturt. OLD AND NEW GREEK LEXICOGRAPHY. 1, &ilia Lexicon. Post Ludolphum Kuste ruin, ad Codices Manuseriptos recensuit Thomas Gaisford, S.T.P., /Edis Christi Deoanus, neonon Grteem Linguae Professor Regius, Oxonii, a Typographeo Academico, MDCCCXXXIV. 2. Liddell and Scott's New Lexicon of the] Greek Language. Various Editions and Abridg ments up to 1855. 4to. and Bvo. IN reviewing the question of lexicography, we are struck by the circumstance of two sue oeisive, and those the highest, dignitaries a one college having so highly distinguished themselves as representatives of the old and new schools of lexicography. Equal, probably, in sound learning, though different in some of their views, the names of the late and the present Deans of Christ Church must be spoken of by all scholars with feelings of high regard. If we look back to the days of our best English (and most English) grumbler, Dr. Johnson, we shall find that lexicography has ever been esteemed a painful, laborious, and but half -rewarding occupation. The imagina tion kept at a total, a dead rest—the memory yet taxed to the utmost—the feelings of taste forced into a collapse of tact—above all, an unwearied hunting after words to which you are to affix thoughts—a ceaseless toil in reconciling contradictory views of meanings, or still more contradictory derivations—such are but a few of the difficulties which the lexicographer has to encounter. But, as every question must have its limit, let us keep to the question of Greek lexico graphy, and take a brief review of the efforts of past and present scholars ; and it will not, perhaps, be too much to assert that iu no department of literature, at all times, has so much patient industry, so much scholastic self-denial, so much true gentleness of taste or brilliancy of judgment, been displayed. If Byron sought to raise Greece into her once political existence, our universities have at least sought to restore and reproduce her literature, her language, pure and unsullied. Lexicography must lie at the bottom of our knowledge of any language. We can no more understand sentences without knowing the meaning of the words that compose them, than we can make a woolsack into a Prime Minister. But there are other far more delicate points connected with the use of words. We have to consider not only their direct, but their indirect, their figurative and metaphorical, meanings ; we have to carefully and painfully investigate their provincial or urbane character ; to sift cautiously, and through much hard reading, " what is in good taste ;" to find out, with wearisome discrimina tion, the differences between " eld,'i "now," and " middle" " Attic," and then to puxale ourselves, and, better still, to work ourselves into the power of appreciating the di ff erences of dialect which make Herodotus so soft and gentle a writer, Theacritns so Burns-like a poet, Sappho (in her few Longinus-saved poems) so mysteriously beautiful. Great and good have been the patient labours of our English and German scholars for years past; but, as a practical matter, we nay, perhaps, put forward the above men tioned works as the best specimens of recent lexicographical efforts as regards our favorite language. It may be well to take a review of the earlier state of Greek lexicography berme venturing on a review of what may be fairly considered its best representative up to the present time. " Quis Suidas, aut quando " vixerit, frustra (pia qtuesiverit," are the quaint but emphatic words in which Ludolph Raster was forced to speak of our beet Greek lexicographer, of whom, probably, we have re ceived the best edition from the hands of the late regretted Dean of Christ Church. Suidas, as 4 POpflPilPr of an uncertain ea, we have preserved to us many of the most valuable fragments both of ancient authors, and Of'the`seholiasts on those authors, Who, at the rOivarbt +4OOO lite ra ture in •• . • • • • THE PRESS. Italy, lent a zest of refinement and infused a clearsightedness into our views of the great dead of past ages. Although &titles appears before us as the choicest interpreter of the grandest wit of an tiquity—of Aristophanes, the Sydney Smith in his refinement, the Swift in his unhappy ten dency to coarseness —although he preserves to us some of the most important interpreta tions of such writers as Thuoydides and Poly bius, he must still rest his merits on his claims as a valuable and painstaking lexicographer, or rather encyclopaedist. Throughout the middle ages a passion for collecting particulars de omni scibili sprang up, a taste as much exemplified in the varied and wondrous sculp tures at Chartres as in the miscellaneous work of Vincent de Beauvais. Such were the early Greek lexicons. Philology had not yet dis criminated between what belonged to one age and another. Taste had not led scholars to distinguish between Xenophon and Zonaras (a clover imitator, it may be fairly admittel); and our knowledge of Greek was, we might say, filtered through ages of care and reading ere it reached us in the state in which it appears before us though such scholars as Gaisford and Liddell. Let us briefly run through the history of Suidas, as far as we can gather anything touching this " Wandering Jew " of Greek literature, from the careful and elegantly written prefaces of Kiister and Gaisford. That Kiister laboured under many difficulties from which his successor was happily exempt cannot he doubted, any more than that the real edge of the labour was taken of by his efforts. Our readers will hardly thank us, now-a days, for a minute enumeration of the editions of Suidas dating from the curious Italian edition of 1499, but they will probably be will ing to hear, briefly, the chief characteristics of the noble edition which forms one of our chief points of notice in the present article. The first place in the first volume is given to the preface of Kiister. Then follows the elaborate dissertation of Fabricius (perhaps the most indefatigable scholar since the days of Meursius). A useful preface of Ernesti on the "glossae same," or explanations of words found in Scripture (of which he published a useful and judicious volume), is followed by the prefaces of M. C G. Muller and John Toup. IVe may now notice the introduction of the recent editor. The late regretted Dr. Gaisford has diligently re-examined the same manuscripts to which Kiister had, from various circumstances, been enabled to give a less finished attention at the same time devotieg much care to indicating the sources from which Suidas drew both his in formation and his quotations. In this task much had been done by Porius, by Ruhnken, Toup, Porson, and a host of scholars, and we feat that the contribution to skis department of the edition reflects more credit on the late editor as a compiler of other men's labours than as an original investigator. At the same time we must bear in mind the fact that almost every practicable source (excel,t a few Grieco- Byzantine coilectuttea, themselves taken at second-hand) had been well nigh exhausted by a mass of scholars, especially by the deep. Dutch school of Homsterhuis, Valckenaer, Pearson, and the like, which narrowed the field, and left the ears of critical wheat still more dis persed, still more scanty, and still more diffi cult to be gathered, even by the veteran Greek professor. As to the vast body of notes accompanying the text, we can only marvel at the patient and honoftrable industry which has reduced so vast a mass of scattered materials—in some cases involving important manueartpt matter — into so clear, so practical, and so elegant a form. While every valuable note of previous editors has been scrupulously retithied, dili gent search appears to have been made after everything, however far remote, that could shed further illustration upon Greek lexico graphy, as exemplified in this curious miscel leeea of men, things, and words. Innumerable remarks (we may exemplify the one on the peculiar use of 'OT , among the later Greeks, at vol. i., pp. 7.8) have been brought forward and reclaimed front oblivion, all proving the temperate and patient spirit of investigation in which our late professor of Greek worked. Eituth is his !fp*, and sash id OA Work co 4- S ATURDAY, panion, the noble edition of the " litymologi con Magnum" (to which we may perhaps have the chance of referring in a future re view). Such is, perhaps, the best proof that a Greek professorship in his hands has been no sinecure---that, though silent in the lecture room, his hands have been telling more per manent truths—that, though young minds were not stimulated by his personal cheerings, older heads may look for valued materials amid the labours to which his quiet and re tiring habits gave birth—such were labours, not meant to gather the many, but to enchain the few. No one will speak of our late Dean of Christ Church as a mere sinecurist, when we think of the wear and tear of mind and body consumed, one way or another, over well nigh five thousand folio columns of close Greek type in one work, to say nothing of editions, and oft-repeated ones, of other authors. At the same time we cannot (with our best feelings) accord this eminent scholar the praise of much critical sagacity. Timidity oftentimes overcame judgment; of conjectural criticism (which, with all its mad extra vagances, is yet a necessary element in the true scholar) he possessed but little ; still less was he gifted with apprecia- tiou of poetic beauty or of the manifold minutia) of graceful expression. But here let our blame—or rather our qualification of praise—end ; and from our hearty and sin cerely-meant eulogium of one now gone from us let us turn to the more cheerful specula tion as to what man we are likely to find in the present successor at once to the same ecclesiastical honours and to a no less ie sponsible position, as representative of the more modern school of lexicography. We may observe, in iimine,thet the e present lexicon is a Beaumont and Fletcher produc tion, being the joint work of the present Dean and of the Rev. Robert Scott, whose name is honourably divided between Christ Church and Balliol. Their co-operation in the de sign, if not in the commencement, of this elaborate work, commenced, we believe, during their undergraduate days: nor did the pre sent Dean, amidst his manifold labours as college tutor, censor, lecturer, examiner, pro fessor of moral philosophy, proctor, and finally head master of Westminster School, ever relax I his attention from what had evidently been the favorite scheme of his ambition—the con stant improvement of the best practical Greek and English lexicon that has yet appeared. Grounded as the work was on the German one of Passow (who in turn had availed himself of the admirable labours of Schneider), still there were thousands of omissions to be supplied, thousands of the delicate shades of meaning (in which Greek stands so pre-eminently ileh) to be developed and set forth : above all, the barbarous but almost fixed conventional system of translating word by word, rather than meaning by meaning, had to be set aside, and this, not only despite a very hydra of difficul ties, and a boundless necessity for the investi gation of every passage either quoted or referred to, but in the face of a host of preju dices from those who, themselves trained under the now obsolete system, looked with pedantic contempt at a mode of construing which sought to display the meaning, do honour to the thoughts of the author, rather than treat him as a collective mass of verbs, nouns, and their auxiliaries—an animal merely to be parsed ! Truly may it be said that the present taste for spirited and elegant, rather than crude and merely literal, translations of Greek authors, which has become universal even among tyros of any promise, has been warmed and strengthened, if not created, by the now con• stant use of this lexicon. Recollecting, as we do, the strict and stern accuracy of Dr. Liddell. in his tutorial Icapacity—his insistence upon the use of pure Saxon-English as opposed to the derivative elaborateness of Dr. Johnson — remembering, with fond gratitude, how no flaw in meaning was suffered to stand, how no bad expression was permitted when a better one could be found, and how richly be proved that knowing Greek is no reason fur a man's murdering his own language—we can over call to our minds, es we look into its Pages, the careful, early cultivation of a nut tyle, a Am and won, elopsnig t VANO I Ili