and a more systematic regard to the ethical qualities of their productions, will do much towards winning back to them the educated and intellectual classes of the community. We would not exclude spectacle, but restrict it to theatres where the space is favourable to gorgeous display. We would not banish all importations of foreign librettos, but we would recommend the adaptation of them to our own social habits and principles. We would borrow from them, not as dependents, but as pupils willing to be instructed. We have happily not arrived at an era of such corruption or degradation as stifled the theatres of Athens and Rome. With a literature a literature which still commands respect; with a press unshackled, yet for the most part salutarily controlled by public opinion; with much that is imaginative and lofty in the character of the age; with an incalculable diffusion of our masculine and harmonious language; we have still a lively and steadfast faith that the nineteenth century will even yet develope, as among its befitting exponents, an intellectual, moral, and vigorous national drama. Our expectations may appear sanguine to the many who regard the drama as the pastime of an idle hour, and not as a vital branch of the intellectual life of an age. We do not ask such persons to affect a spurious enthusiasm for times which, being more symbolic in their character, were proportionably more dramatic also than the present. We would recommend theatrical pedantry as little as ecclesiastical or artistic. The recreations of the day, as well as its ritual and its arts, must express its contemporary feelings, and not borrow the exponents of them from past phases of society. Literature has unquestionably borne off many 'spolia opima' from the theatre; the material development of the age has given a new direction to its humours and passions -yet, in spite of these abatements, the dramatic spirit is neither dead nor sleeping among us; it has thrown off many incumbrances of stilted diction and spurious sentiment; it has embraced new categories of mirth and earnestness; it has enlisted accessories unknown to our forefathers. In the heart of the chaos which the modern stage too generally exhibits we possess living germs of a drama that, skilfully trained and organised, may yet become as expressive of the material and intellectual genius of the day as the Sophoclean tragedy was of an ethnic commonwealth, or the romantic play of a Christian monarchy. In developing these materials, authors, managers, and the public have a common interest, and the first step towards so desirable a change is the recognition, by each in their own sphere and function, of the duty of re-organising the whole system of theatrical entertainments. ART. (89) ART. 1V-1. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Edited by W. Smith, LL.D. 3 vols. 8vo. London. 1844-1851. 2. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. By the same. 2nd edit. 1 vol. 8vo. London. 1851. 3. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography. By the same. Vol. I. 8vo. London. 1854. 4. A Smaller Dictionary of Antiquities, Selected and Abridged from the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 2nd edit. By the same. London. 5. A new Classical Dictionary of Ancient Biography, Mythology, and Geography. By the same. 2nd edit. 1 vol. 8vo. London. 6. A smaller Classical Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Mythology and Geography; abridged from the larger work. By the same. 2nd edit. 1 vol. post 8vo. London. 1854. 7. Real-Encyclopädie der Classischen Alterthumswissenschaft; herausgegeben von August Pauly. 7 vols. 8vo. Stuttgardt. 1839-1852. IT T is an old theory, sanctioned by Plato, and since very generally received, that the art of writing and the spread of literature are injurious to the faculty of Memory. Men, it is said, when provided with artificial means of recording events, are no longer at pains to cultivate the talent with which nature endowed them for that purpose, and which consequently becomes impaired. Even in the face of such high authority we venture to maintain that this theory is a fallacy; and that literary culture, far from impairing, has been the means of strengthening and extending the powers of the memory, much in the ratio in which it has extended the range of facts and ideas to be remembered.s The chief or only argument that has been urged in favour of Plato's doctrine, is an appeal to the high degree of perfection in which the faculty was possessed by the organs of popular tradition in illiterate states of society, especially by the professional minstrels of the heroic age of Greece. To this it may be replied, that the habit of learning by heart and repeating verses, the only species of memory for which these personages were distinguished, is but a very partial and limited exercise of its powers. But, even admitting that a superiority as to this particular kind of memory in seini-barbarous ages could form, had it existed, a valid argument on the one side, against those derivable from the numerous other modes in which the faculty is called into action in civilised times--we shall make bold to deny the fact of any such superiority. The talent for oral recital may perhaps have been more extensively cultivated in those days than now, owing to the greater inducement held out to its exercise; but it does not follow that a greater amount of such talent existed. We believe there are as many men in England at the present time, as there were in Greece in the time of Homer, qualified to commit to memory a poem of equal length with the Iliad, if they thought it worth while to make the effort; and who, moreover, from the aids which literature supplies, would master their task more easily than the illiterate bard. There can, indeed, be very little doubt that the ranks of our professional orators, preachers, and play-actors, would furnish an abundance of champions able successfully to compete for honours in this arena of mental exertion with the most accomplished poetical reciter of semibarbarous times. But the mere habit of learning and repeating poetry, to whatever perfection it may be carried, can elicit but a small portion of those powers of memory which are daily brought into action in the mind of every highly educated European gentleman. A man who can read with facility five or six languages, and write or speak fluently one-half of them, although he may not be able to say off by heart Johnson's Dictionary or Facciolati's Lexicon, has his mind stored with more words and sentences, not to mention facts and ideas, than the rhapsodist who could recite in their order the whole series of Cyclic poems. The Platonic doctrine rests, in fact, simply on a confusion between the ideas Memory and Repeating by rote-on the error of taking a part for the whole; and the question at issue may be more fairly stated as follows:-Literary culture is unfavourable to the committal of poetical compositions to memory, in so far as it obviates the necessity for such exertion. But it is not only not prejudicial to any one essential exercise of the faculty in the wider sense, but indispensable to its full development and cultivation. These remarks naturally suggest themselves, as introductory to the critical notice of a series of works belonging to the class familiarly known, among other titles, by that of Aids to the memory. Our estimate of the value of this title, as applied to them, must depend on how far we admit or reject the theory above examined. In the former case they could be considered but as an artificial compensation for the natural decay of the faculty consequent on the general spread of literature. In the latter case they would be entitled to rank as its powerful coadjutors, not only in availing itself of its existing stores, but in the further accumulation of that boundless stock of materials which literature provides for its exercise. It is in this latter point of view that we propose to consider them. Another Another similar fallacy, still more immediately bearing on our present subject, is the doctrine that comprehensive works of reference are detrimental to real science, by enabling young scholars to find, ready to their hand, knowledge which they would otherwise be obliged to acquire by their own unaided researches. If this be true, the Thesaurus of Stephanus must have blocked up rather than opened the road to Greek learning. This doctrine is in literature analogous to another once popular in statistical science-that those improvements of manufacturing machinery, which enable ten men to produce as much of the necessaries of life as a hundred did formerly, are injurious to national industry. The one fallacy is now generally exploded, but the other still maintains its ground in some quarters. It is certainly not easy to see how facility of access to what is already known can be an obstacle to the acquisition of knowledge. The age which produced the body of contributors to whose united efforts we are indebted for Dr. Smith's volumes, cannot be much behind in the pursuit of learning; and the generation qualified to profit by their labours is not likely to stop short in the march of improvement. The cognate terms Dictionary and Lexicon denote, in their primary import, simply a collection of words or phrases. The now general practice requires that to this definition should be added that of alphabetical arrangement, which method, in the earlier stages of lexicography, seems to have been but partially adopted. Such works may be ranged under the two heads of Philological, and Historical or Descriptive-Dictionaries of words and Dictionaries of things.* Those of the former class illustrate the terms or phrases collected; those of the latter, the objects or ideas which the terms denote. The two classes united form that comprehensive order of literature entitled Works of reference; such works being almost invariably embodied in alphabetic form. It is to the latter of the two that the volumes selected for consideration in this article belong; but as the limits of each are, in the elementary stages of lexicography, but imperfectly defined, it will be proper to include both in the concise general summary which we here propose to offer of the origin and early progress of this entire branch of scientific pursuit. Lexicography, like other cognate departments of speculative literature, first began to be cultivated at a comparatively advanced period of Greek polite learning, when the art of origi For this latter definition the Germans have invented the uncouth GalloGrecian compounds, Real-Lexicon and Real-Encyclopädie, to which we have no equivalents in our own vocabulary. nal nal composition, in all its leading varieties, had already reached its maturity, and when its productions had so multiplied as to hold out inducements to theorise on its principles, and resort to artificial means of extending its benefits or arresting its decline. Among those means one of the first was the illustration, in works specially devoted to the purpose, of choice words or expressions, used by standard authors. These works were by the earlier grammarians entitled Collections of Glossæ or Lexis (idioms or phrases), and their authors Glossographers. The substantive terms Glossary and Lexicon are of much later introduction, the former dating not prior to the Roman empire, while the latter first occurs during the Byzantine age. Another term, also in use from an early period, was Onomasticon, denoting properly a collection of names or nouns, rather than of miscellaneous phrases, but which, in familiar usage, appears to have compres hended also the other kinds of compilation above described. One principal cause of the rapid accumulation of such works in Greece may be traced to that peculiar feature which distinguishes Greek literature from all others--the special cultivation ber stowed on the separate dialects of the language, in connexion for the most part with particular styles of composition. The comparative usages of these several dialects and styles opened out a proportionally wide field of critical speculation. Hence, in the more advanced stages of grammatical art, almost every dialect or style, and every popular author in each, had their special glossaries and glossographers. " " The earliest lexicographic work on record is an 'Onomasticon of uncertain character, ascribed to the Sicilian rhetor Gorgias (440 B.C.), the first popular teacher of the arts of Attic eloquence. Among the miscellaneous compositions of his younger contemporary, Democritus of Abdera, mention also occurs of an onomasticon of Homeric, and generally of elegant, phraseology. Philetas, the lyric poet and grammarian of Cos, by some supposed a contemporary of Democritus, by others of Aristarchus (200 B.C.), compiled a similar work of a more comprehensive character; and from the Alexandrian age downwards we have a copious list of authors and books of a like description. That the alphabetic mode of arrangement was in these times by no means general, appears from the care taken in the citations of works where it was adopted, to specify that such was the case; nor, from the preserved specimens, does such arrangement seem ever to have been characterized by the same order and regularity which the laws of modern criticism prescribe in similar compilations. Although, as appears from these notices, Greek lexicography was |