tongue? Whereas in every civilised land, and wherever Catholic and Protestant clergy are to be found, there are some persons connected with the newspapers who can make the Latin anathematisings intelligible to the multitude. Now, too, in England, are we not going to reform our Latin pronunciation, with the distinct view of holding conversation with our Continental friends? So that on this special ground it seems more important than ever that scholars all over the world should have some language common to them all, in which they may communicate both their friendly and indignant thoughts to one another. It is true that our English reformers of pronunciation have hardly made up their minds as to the sounds we are hereafter to utter. It will be a fearful day when we enter a young ladies' school-room-for are not all young ladies going to learn Latin ?—and hear the governess informing them that Kikero was murdered through the connivance of Octavius Kæsar. But setting this aside, if every nation in Europe should ever take to emulate the Germans in learning, as they are imitating them in soldiering, it will be necessary for the student, who wishes to be "posted up" in all the current scholarship of the day, to be acquainted with a variety of vernaculars which we tremble to think of, if this new fashion of writing in one's own vulgar tongue should be adopted all over the world.

To return, however, to our Dutchman. He assures us that no less than six hundred and twenty-one learned authors have written in this same serio-comic vein; and that their works of this sort have been collected and published by one Casparus Dornavius, philosopher and doctor of medicine, under the title of "Amphitheatrum Sapientiæ Socraticæ, Joco Seriæ, hoc est, &c. &c." The rest of the title may be left to the reader to imagine for himself. Then he begins his juridical discussion in full form, with a declaration that he was first induced to meditate seriously on the condition in which Lazarus found himself with regard to his property when he was raised from the dead, through meditating on the narrative of the sacred Scriptures; and he then proceeds to quote at length the eleventh chapter of St. John's Gospel in the Latin version of Theodore Beza; printing all the important words and phrases in capital letters. Indeed this appears to be one of our Dutchman's peculiar devices for giving an air of seriousness to the whole production. His speculations are studded with capital letters and sprinkled with italics throughout to an extent that far exceeds the dashings and the double dashings with which the young lady of the present period is said to emphasize her correspondence with her dearest friends. The reasons, at the same time, for thus distinguishing certain passages are entirely beyond my powers of guessing; unless it is that there is some hidden fun supposed to be displayed in the manufacture of sentences of Latin, defying all ordinary powers of construing, and therefore calling for special attention from the Dutch scholarship of the day. As I turn over his pages, indeed, I can only account for the production of such jesting, even amid the lowest levels of Batavian swamps, by a view of the origin of human dulness

which was once expounded to me by a certain Italian ecclesiastic. Jupiter, he informed me, according to a prologue which is not in Lempriere, when he authorised Prometheus to manufacture a sufficient number of mortal men and women out of the appropriate clay, presented him with a fixed quantity of brain, which he was to distribute fairly among the whole human race. Prometheus, however, not being used to calculating, or being like a schoolboy who is persuaded that there can be no limit to his resources when he finds his pocket well filled at the end of the holidays, was most extravagant in his disposition of this brain amongst the mortals whom he produced; and after a time, to his dismay, found the supply falling short, while the multiplication of men and women went on at an ever increasing rate. In this strait he bethought himself of the existence of an unlimited supply of the vegetable pumpkin which lay at his hand; and then, by a judicious addition of this pumpkin to a very small amount of the original brain, he contrived to turn out as many generations of humanity as it was his office to supply. Hence it was that the early generations of mankind were so far more brilliant than those that followed, whose thoughts and feelings were the result of a pumpkinised brain, and not of the original cerebral substance which came straight from the hand of Jove. Hence, too, when any person now appears more than ordinarily stupid in the midst of a stupid kindred, we are to attribute his abnormal stupidity to the presence of a peculiarly large proportion of pumpkin in his skull. Thus, then, and thus only, can we account for the notion as to what constitutes wit and laughableness in Mynheer Verduyn. Could any man, for instance, who thought with brain and not with pumpkin, have deliberately written as follows, and expected anybody to be amused? The reader who does not understand Latin will pardon the quotation for the sake of his or her more learned brother. "De BIS MORTUIS duæ extant DISPUTATIONES THEOLOGICE; quarum altera in illustri Scholâ DEBRECINA publicè habita à Clarissimo viro D. GEORGIO C. COMARINO, S.S. Theol. Doctore et Profess. Impressa ULTRAJECTI apud THEGNARDUM à DRENNEN anno 1659, in 24mo. Altera verò Præside D. BALTHASARE BEBELIO, S.S. Theol. D. et P.P. FAMIGERATISSIMO, summi Templi Ecclesiaste, et Collegii WILHELMITANI Ephoro gravissimo, &c. Habita ab M. TOBIA WINCKLER, Noribergensis, anno 1672. ARGENTORATI, Typis IOANNIS WELPERI, in 4to."

Then he proceeds with his argument, discussing, first of all, whether Lazarus made a will before he died of the sickness recorded in the Bible; remarking that a will is to be considered as the last expression of the intentions of the testator, and that until he dies his legatees cannot come into possession; which remark is confirmed by the following highly intelligible passage of references, all printed in italics. The non-Latin-reading reader will once more pardon the quotation, and if he understands Dutch will be more able than I am to decide whether its concluding sentence is genuine Dutch or the reverse :- -§ 1. Institut. de hered. qualit. et differ. l. heredita 62 l. ad ea 157. § in contractibus 2. D. de Regul. jur. l. nihil ex 24.

De. de verbor. signif. I. testamentum 1 D. qui testam. fac. poss. juncia 1. heres. in 37. D. de acquir. vel omitt. hered. Grotii Inlegdung 2 boek 14 deel § des overledens en't 21 deel § Verlatinge.

But ex pede Herculem. This is a specimen of the whole. In every page there occur two or three similar references to imaginary authors, expressed with as much intelligibleness and lucidity as distinguish the sentences I have quoted. The whole, in truth, is an elaborate piece of solemn nonsense; and it is only by reflecting on the quality of the comic periodicals and the comic songs and the burlesques which are at this hour popular in our London itself, interpreted by the apologue of Prometheus and the Pumpkin, that we can believe that such dismal jesting was ever written, and ever read, and ever accounted entertaining. And yet, in all seriousness, what a change must have come over European ways since the year when this portentous fooling was indulged in! Would any man nowadays, who can write Latin, painfully elaborate a ponderous parody like this, taking for his subject an incident in the Bible narratives, and imagine it a jeu d'esprit? It is not merely that no publisher would throw away his money in printing that which no one would read; but would it enter into the head of anybody who could write a sentence of Latin, even such as passes for Latin at Eton and other famous schools, to elaborate such a literary portent, and ask us to laugh at it? Let us, then, at least, be thankful, in the interests of scholarship, that Latin has become an

absolutely dead language to those whose lot it is to amuse certain sections of the British public.

C.

575

Tyrolese House-Mottoes.

IN Lessing's Nathan the Wise the daughter of the wise Jew says to her friend, "I suppose you have not read many books;" and, on being asked why she supposes so, makes answer, "Because you are so upright and downright, so inartificial, so thoroughly and naturally your real self; and my father says that people seldom retain these characteristics who have read many books."

(I quote from memory, and give only the sense of the passage.)

The study of the mottoes which are to be found carved or painted on old-fashioned Tyrolese houses affords a commentary upon, and an illustration of, this saying of Lessing's Nathan. It is manifest that those who chose such mottoes, or invented them, had read but few booksperhaps none; and certainly it would be hard to find more complete specimens of downrightness, inartificiality, and naïveté.

It is true that many of the mottoes are repeated and copied from one house to another; and invariably the later versions of them are improved in orthography-often in syntax; but have somehow lost the stamp of sturdy, unconscious simplicity which marks the older ones. In a word, their writers have been reading many-house-fronts! and have lost in originality what has been gained in correctness. All over the beautiful green land of Tyrol you come upon picturesque, many-gabled old dwellings, with massive vaulted entrance halls and huge projecting eaves. They stand a little backward from the village street, with verdant orchards stretching behind them, and scarlet geraniums flaming in their sleepy old windows. Or it may be that one stands lonely and venerable on a town Platz, surrounded by newer and flimsier constructions, and offers to the passerby a tempting depth of cool shadow beneath its beetle-browed portal. Or, again, you may find such a one solidly defying wind and weather in some mountain solitude: a very patriarch of a house, with a numerous family of barns, out-houses, stables, and peasants' cottages, grouped around him. A great dog, sleek and well fed, as all dumb beasts seem to be among German folk, blinks in the sunshine before the door. Poultry cluck and flutter round the barn, whence comes a fragrant smell of grain and spicy hay. The cattle-bells clink and tinkle from the green, green pastures down by the stream. Even the great stern mountains seem to shimmer and grow soft in the warm autumn air. Only two or three wooden sledges and a snow-plough piled up beside the stable-door remind us that in a month or two bitter winds will blow through the gorge, that the peaks yonder which pierce the blue, will pour down their

dread artillery of hail and stones and torrents and cold, cruel avalanches, and that the old house needs all his strength of wall and roof to resist the assaults of King Winter and his army.

And there on the house-front, whether it be in village, town, or mountain valley, you may read some pious prayer, or pithy sentence, or worldly-wise saw carved in quaint German for the edification of those who pass by. The same thing is common in Switzerland and in many parts of Germany. But our business now is with the Tyrolese inscriptions. More than one collection of these has been made and published by native Tyrolese. But I have met with no volume in which the inscriptions are classified or commented on. They are simply jotted down literally, as one might write them in one's note-book. But even thus barely and simply presented, they are full of interest for the observer of national manners and characteristics. They are gradually and not very slowly disappearing. If by time or accident a motto becomes effaced, it is scarcely ever replaced by the owner of the house. Such things are old-fashioned,-zopfig, as the Germans have it (that is to say, literally, pigtailish an expression to which our "square-toed" may answer), and few persons choose to brave the ridicule of their modern-minded neighbours by carving again the old inscription, with its rude spelling and antique phrase.

It is curious to conjecture how far, and in what manner, new mottoes would differ from the old, if Fashion suddenly took it into her light head to patronise the writing of them up pro bono publico! The religious inscriptions, which are very numerous, would surely change their tone very considerably. They would probably become more or less controversial. And, instead of the comfortable, confident, easy-going kind of piety which seems to take for granted all men's assent to its postulates, we should probably have a taste of the defiant spirit which is aware that its dicta may, likely enough, be contradicted, and therefore utters them with tenfold zeal and emphasis. Nay, in these times of strife and upheaval, it might be that the concoctors or choosers of religious mottoes in the Tyrol should rather seek such words as might serve for missiles against their enemies than pour out thanksgiving and prayer and blessing in the antique fashion.

The most purse-proud and prosperous farmer or merchant would scarcely announce now-a-days to all the world, in letters calculated to last some centuries, that he was "a man of good repute, and with well-filled hands," as a certain Hans Stoffner did, who built in the year 1547. And an innkeeper would think twice before he so wore his heart upon his sleeve as to write up in his tap-room, "Come hither and sit down; but if your purse be light, make off again at once. Come hither, my dear guest, if only you have money in your purse!" which sincere invitation exists in an inn at Klausenbach.

Many causes, doubtless, co-operate to change all that. But amongst them all perhaps increased intercommunication between distant com