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

appear.
In the present 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, full of resource. He made his
ifortune in the midway of life, and settled near Enfield,
aliere he formed an Italian garden, entertained hie
friends, played whist with Sir Horace Mann, who was his
great acquaintance, and who ha 1 known his brother at
nice as a banker, eat macaroni which 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
millionaires, in which he might probably have enrolled
his own. • That, however, was not our destiny. My
grandfather 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.