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traced to the habit of satisfying his own mind as to the precise sense in which he himself made use of words. Mr. Tooke, though he had no objection to puzzle others, was mightily averse to being puzzled or mystified himself. All was to his determined mind either complete light or complete darkness. There was no hazy, doubtful chiaro-scuro in his understanding. He wanted something "palpable to feeling as to sight." "What," he would say to himself, "do I mean when I use the conjunction That? Is it an anomaly, a class by itself, a word sealed against all inquisitive attempts? Is it enough to call it a copula, a bridge, a link, a word connecting sentences? That is undoubtedly its use; but what is its origin ?" Mr. Tooke thought he had answered this question satisfactorily; and loosened the Gordian knot of grammarians "familiar as his garter," when he said, "It is the common pronoun, adjective, or participle That, with the noun Thing or Proposition implied, and the particular example following it." So he thought, and so every reader has thought since, with the exception of teachers and writers upon grammar. Mr. Windham, indeed, who was a sophist, but not a logician, charged him with having found "a mare's-nest;" but it is not to be doubted that Mr. Tooke's etymologies will stand the test and last longer than Mr. Windham's ingenious derivation of the practice of bull-baiting from the principles of humanity!

Having thus laid the corner-stone, he proceeded to apply the same method of reasoning to other undecyphered and impracticable terms. Thus the word And he explained clearly enough to be the verb add, or a corruption of the old Saxon anandad. "Two and two make four," that is, "Two add two make four." Mr. Tooke, in fact, treated words as the chemists do substances; he distinguished those which are compounded of others from those which are not decompoundable. He did not explain the obscure by the more obscure, but the difficult by the plain, the complex by the simple. This alone is proceeding upon the true principles of science.; the rest is pedantry and petit-maitreship. Our philosophical writer distinguished all words by names of things and directions added for joining them together, or originally by Nouns and Verbs. It is a pity that he has left this matter short, by omitting to define the Verb. After enumerating sixteen different definitions (all of which he dismisses with scorn and contumely), at the end of two quarto volumes he refers the reader for the true solution to a third volume, which he did not live to finish. This extraordinary man was in the habit of tantalising his guests on a Sunday with divers abstruse speculations, and putting them off to the following week for a satisfaction of their doubts; but why should he treat posterity in the same scurvy manner, or leave the world without quitting scores with it? I question whether Mr. Tooke was himself in possession of his pretended nostrum, and whether, after trying hard at a definition of the verb as a distinct part of speech, as a terrier-dog mumbles a hedgehog, he did not find it too much for him, and leave it to its fate. It is also a pity that Mr. Tooke spun out his great work with prolix and dogmatical dissertations on irrelevant matters; and, after denying the old metaphysical theories of language, that he should attempt to found a metaphysical theory of his own on the nature and mechanism of language. The nature of words, he contended, (it was the basis of his whole system,)

had no connexion with the nature of things or of thought; yet he afterwards strove to limit the nature of things and of the human mind by the technical structure of language. Thus he endeavours to shew that there are no abstract ideas, by enumerating two thousand instances of words, expressing abstract ideas, that are the past participles of certain verbs. It is difficult to know what he means by this. On the other hand, he maintains that "a complex idea is as great an absurdity as a complex star," and that words only are complex. He also makes out a very triumphant list of metaphysical and moral non-entities, proved to be so on the pure principle that the names of these non-entities are participles, not nouns, or names of things. That is strange in so close a reasoner, and in one who maintained that all language was a masquerade of words, and that the class to which they grammatically belonged had nothing to do with the class of ideas they represented.

It is now above twenty years since the two quarto volumes of "The Diversions of Purley" were published, and fifty since the same theory was promulgated in the celebrated "Letter to Dunning." Yet it is a curious example of the "Spirit of the Age," that Mr. Lindley Murray's Grammar has proceeded to the thirtieth edition in complete defiance of all the facts and arguments there laid down. He defines a noun to be the name of a thing. Is quackery a thing, i. e. a substance? He defines a verb to be a word signifying to be, to do, or to suffer. Are being, action, suffering, verbs? He defines an adjective to be the name of a quality. Are not wooden, golden, substantial, adjectives? He maintains that there are six cases in English nouns; that is, six various terminations without any change of termination at all; and that English verbs have all the moods, tenses, and persons that the Latin ones have. This is an extraordinary stretch of blindness and obstinacy. That is, he translates the Latin grammar into English, as so many had done before him, and fancies he has written an English grammar; and divines applaud, and schoolmas ters usher him into the polite world, and English scholars carry on the jest, while Horne Tooke's genuine anatomy of our native tongue is laid on the shelf. Can it be that our politicians smell a rat in the Member for Old Sarum? That our clergy do not relish Parson Horne? That the world at large are alarmed at acuteness and originality greater than their own? What has all this to do with the formation of the English language, or with the first condition and necessary foundation of speech itself? Is there nothing above the reach of prejudice and party-spirit? It seems in this, as in so many other instances, as if there was a patent for absurdity in the natural bias of the human mind, and that folly should be stereotyped!

This work is not without merit in the details and examples of English construction. But its fault even in that part is, that he confounds the genius of the English language, making it periphrastic and literal, instead of elliptical and idiomatic. According to Mr. Murray, hardly any of our best writers ever wrote a word of English.

FROM THE

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CISMA DE L'INGHILTERRA" OF CALDEron.

I SAW her 'twas in Paris! would to Heaven,
Or that I had been blinded at the sight,
Or that to me more eyes had then been given
Than plumes to variegated birds; their light
Had then been Argus-like, or vied with even

Yon starry dome in some clear cloudless night.
But oh, her charms! those worlds of living lights
Outnumber'd all the stars of clearest nights.
I saw her-Would that had been unbeholden
A form of Heaven, too bright for mortal eyes!
Her robe was azure starr'd with planets golden,
She look'd, and I thought only, of the skies-
Thought!-but to feel with flames of love enfolden;
Of Love!-of Hell! Where then this bosom's ice?
Ah, what is love, its lightnings, and its course,
Where all resistance only adds to force?

One diamond cuts another-steel may glow

With fire, when struck by steel-kind yields to kind,
One magnet to another can bestow,

And take, attractive force; far more man's mind!
And did I wonder love this heart of snow

Should melt, when things inanimate and blind,
So hard, untractable, and senseless, feel-

As diamonds, loadstones, lightning, fire, and steel?
She danced-I danced with her! I cannot tell
What confidence my spirits did dilate

She

Amid that dance; its mazes emblem'd well
The heart of woman and its changeful state.
gave me, too, a handkerchief-a spell,
A flattering pledge my hopes to animate-
An astrologic token, fatal prize,

That told too well what tears must weep those

eyes.

I call'd, term'd, thought her rigours mild devices,

Hoped, suffer'd, served, with frenzy's watchful guiles,
Betray'd, told, wrote my passion's mad disguises,
Felt, fear'd, deplored my tyrant's jealous wiles;

Forgot, revived, abandon'd wild surmises;

Enjoy'd, prized, fed on her sweet winning smiles.
The tell-tale day and inarticulate night
Witness'd my passion-deep and infinite.

Scarce did the sun to elder worlds retire,

Crowning an earlier sphere with fires more bright,
When in the gates of morn a borrow'd fire,
A lesser sun I hail'd, and bless'd its light,

Flattering alone to me and my desire.

Scarce on the earth had fallen the tremulous night,
When, fearless of its treachery, in those hours

I breathed my passion to the commonwealth of flowers.
There the cool freshness of night's stilly hour,
The jasmine, that entwined the reedy bower,
The tinkling fount, that rain'd its crystal shower,
The air, that breathed delight from many a flower
Amid the leaves, their trembling paramour,—

All, all was Love! Obedient to its power
I doubt not that the fountains, birds, and flowers,
To feel that calm had each a soul like ours.

Hast thou not seen, officious with delight,
Move through the illumined air about the flower
The bee, that fears to drink its purple light,

Lest danger lurk within the roseate bower?
Hast thou not mark'd the moth's enamour'd flight
Around the taper's flame at evening hour,
Till, kindle in that monumental fire

His sunflower wings their own funereal pyre?
My heart its throbs thus trembling to enfold,
Around that thing of beauty trembling came,
And passion's slave, Distrust, in ashes cold
Smother'd awhile, but could not quench the flame;
Till love, that grows by disappointment bold,
And opportunity had vanquish'd shame;
And, like the bee and moth, in act to close,
I burnt my wings in settling on the rose.
Blest captive thus-had I but gain'd a prize
Unhoped, almost in dreams unvision'd, won
By so much love! Who says that when love dies,
Springs, from its ashes born, oblivion !—
Who says indifferent to a lover's eyes

Change and successful passion are but one,
Nor loves, nor has loved-to the lover's name
▲ traitor, and an ingrate to love's flame!
The sequel of my tale were little worth

Dionis! In her absence I have pined,
The absence of the morn as mourns the Earth
In starless nights.-Consider well the mind,
Its wanderings, and its vain discourses, birth

Of burning love, and you no cause will find
For wonder, that from reason's track afar

I've stray'd, without my guiding light, that northern star.

GAMESTERS AND GAMING.

"Je sais bien que le lecteur n'a pas grand besoin de savoir tout cela; mais j'ai besoin, moi, de le lui dire."-J. J. ROUSSEAU, Confessions.

Do not be frightened reader; I am not about to inflict upon you twelve books "de rebus ad eum pertinentibus,”—concerning all I ever thought or did I want alike the cynicism and the eloquence to lay bare the disgusting infirmities of the human heart, and to render them endurable in the perusal. The purpose for which the passage that stands at the head of this paper is selected, is merely to intimate that I write (to speak modestly) as much for my own advantage as yours. Not that I allude, or would be understood to allude to the "quiddam honorarium," with which the proprietor of the New Monthly Magazine gratifies his correspondents. "No, I've a soul above buttons ;"-my meaning is, simply, that I write for my health, and make my periodical avatars in the incarnate shape of an essay or a letter to the editor, to clear off the bile and "cleanse the foul bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart." A periodical publication is, to an author of my complexion, what Cheltenham is to an East Indian; and without some such vent for the choler produced by the vices and absurdities of society, there's no saying what might be the consequence

The accumulated "peccant matter" pent up in the interior, irritating and vellicating the tender fibres of the cerebral and other delicate structures, and exciting a general subfebricular diathesis, might so inflame, rouse, stimulate, and derange the system, as to occasion that fatal explosion, or exanthematous efflorescence, a libel, which, being of a confluent and malignant sort, would infallibly commit me to the keeping of the great state physician, his Majesty's Attorney-general. Whereas, a course of periodicals, like a course of calomel, carries off little by little the material cause of the disease, sweetens the blood, and, if it does not restore the body to perfect health, at least preserves it from a fatal disorganization.

Having premised thus much for the edification of the public, and the ease of mine own conscience, I shall rush at once into the "middle of my subject," and proceed with a new dose of my accustomed remedy. It is the nature of a generous spirit, on all occasions, to take part with the oppressed; and the first tendency of every freeman is to throw the weight of his own personal influence into that scale which seems in the most imminent danger of kicking the beam. There is, in fact, something so antisocial and barbarous in the triumph of brute force, that the bare spectacle of physical infirmity begets an uncalculating sympathy with the weaker party, quite independent of all moral considerations; and it requires a considerable effort of reflection and of volition, even to witness the ducking of a pickpocket, with the requisite sang-froid. This, which in the abstract is a mere animal impulse, becomes sublimated into the highest civilized virtue, when it operates, under the guidance of reason, to maintain right, and to combat the abuses to which power, in the wantonness of its caprice, is prone, whenever it can find a fit opportunity for indulgence. Where such a sym

pathy is not endemic-where it is not even an object of popular education liberty, if it exists at all, is held by a most precarious tenure; and the political downfal of a community so situated may be predicted nearly with an absolute certainty.

It becomes an honest periodical, therefore, to watch with a jealous eye all revolutions of popular opinion; to observe with strictness the passing likes and dislikes of the public as they arise; and to interpose whenever accident or intrigue sets men on hunting down particular classes or individuals, and rouses the passions of society into a mischievous activity. To do the British press justice, it is not deficient either in feeling or in zeal upon such occasions; and though all parties may have their retainers, there is perhaps not more than one instance of a public journal the tone of which is governed by a sordid desire to flatter popular prejudices independently of all principle, and to sell its numbers by chiming in with the error of the day. The love of fair play is inherent in every truly English editor; and it is probably to this laudable spirit of equality that we should attribute much of that fervour with which certain writers have exhausted their own ink and their readers' patience in combating for the Turks against the Greeks-for the French government against the Spaniards-and generally for all despotic monarchs against the people. The spectacle of the logical inferiority of these parties, and of their total deficiency in all sound argument, having been too much for the refined feelings of the writers

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