yourself that you fail of understanding them for their quick speaking foreigners do not, in general, speak so quick as we English do in their tongue. It is rather because the words they use are out of the range of your hold of the language-perhaps of your ideas. How much do you understand of every conversation, above mere chit-chat, that takes place among your own countrymen? Can there be no topics started with which you are unfamiliar, and which yet, by the interest they excite, and otherwise, you would not disparage as unworthy to be known? Suppose the talkers to have been foreigners, and conversing in their own tongue, how would you have understood them, though you knew that tongue as well as your own? What is the necessary pre-condition of your understanding the talk in either case? Plainly this, that you should be acquainted with the subject. Acquaint yourself, therefore, with as many subjects as you can, get all the information you can in your own language as a foundation for talking, reading, writing, and understanding in another.

XVII.

ON PINDAR AND THE SO-CALLED

康

PINDARIC.

HE function of poetry is rather to remind than inform, to recall vividly that with which we are

not unfamiliar, than to communicate absolutely new knowledge. This truth, consciously or not, will be found to lie at the root of all ancient art-work. The subjects of their poems, and their sculpture, were broadly familiar to the people. Their epics, and their serious dramas, were notoriously from their history and

religion. The epic and the tragic muse in no instance departed from this, the necessary law; and, if the comic seemed to claim exemption, it was but seeming; for, if the incidents were new, they were so imbedded in the known, familiar, every-day customs of the people, that the newness was reduced to its minimum. The story was the simplest; for complexity of interest-an involved Spanish plot, for example—a Greek would have rejected as a complicate confusion, incompatible with the clearness and calm, in which alone beauty, as they understood it, could grow up. Hence their poverty of plot, hence their little scruple in repeating it, as we find Menander did, according to Terence.

And I am not sure that we should conclude the plot of any of Menander's plays to have been new to the audience at the first representation of the piece. The antiquity of apparently modern stories is very great. A fund of floating lore of this cast would seem to have been the nτñμa Es así of our race from the earliest period, and to have clung to them in all their migrations and vicissitudes. Storytelling was a necessity of unreading ages, as newspapers are of the present day, where they are to be had. The stories would have a chameleon-like facility of colouring to the manners of a tribe, changing to all its changes, while the substance remained.

A well-known story, that used to appear in our books of natural history, among anecdotes of dogs, affords an illustration of a seemingly modern anecdote dating indefinitely back to a very remote antiquity; I allude to that of the countryman, who went to his work leaving his child in the cradle in charge of his dog, and returning and seeing the cradle overturned, and covered with blood, and the dog running to meet him with jaws also dropping blood, concluded it to have gone mad and destroyed the child, and so he killed the poor animal on the spot. Then pro

ceeding to set the cradle right, found the child alive and well, and, searching further, came upon a dead wolf, which his faithful dog had encountered and slain in the child's defence. This story, under the title of the Knight and the Serpent, appears in that favourite of the Middle Ages, "The Seven Wise Masters," a collection of stories derived from the ancient Sanskrit original of what the Arabs and Persians call the "Book of Calila and Dimna." See L'Oiseleur Deslongschamps, “Essai sur les Fables Indiennes," Paris, 1838.

To return, however, to our subject, the affluent genius of Shakespeare recognized, in his practice, the principle of working on the known and familiar as a foundation, and rarely, if ever, condescended to invent a plot; but, in his histories, followed the chroniclers, and, in his tragedies and comedies, took the stories that had been common European property before his time. And this too had been the practice of the ancients. Notoriety of subject was a necessity of poem or play. An ancient legend answered this; or a recent fact, if known to all, would equally answer it. Hence the odes of Pindar were upon a notorious fact at which all were present, and so as notorious as the International Exhibition is with us of this present year 1862.

Ignorance of this prominent feature of ancient art, its election of the familiar, has made many entirely miss the spirit of the ancient original that they have set themselves to copy. This misapprehension, in kind, prevails more or less, as to all the great poets of antiquity, and shows itself often in translations, and yet oftener in the so-called imitations of their manner. But of them all, perhaps Pindar has been the subject of the greatest misconception. His mode of treatment of subject, in the odes that have come Town to us, has been so little understood that the term

daric has become suggestive, I had almost said the

synonyme, of abrupt and startling transition. The modern writers of odes which they call Pindaric, with Cowley at their head, would seem to have thought that they might say what they pleased, and how they pleased, leave their subject, and return to it, as the whim took them, the more abrupt the brisker; taking abruptness for a sort of sublimity, and to be aimed at, and to go out of the way for. But Pindar was not abrupt, nor did he permit himself a transition which the meanest capacity in his audience could not follow with ease. Any such jerky, disjointed composition of the kind that has been called Pindaric, would have shocked assembled Greece, and have shut the unlucky poet from all further audience of his country

men.

Dr. Johnson, in censuring certain trivial lines in Cowley, is surprised "that a man of the first rank in learning and wit could in writing them imagine that he imitated Pindar." It was, however, neither learning nor wit that could have preserved Cowley from an error, which he shared in common with the learned and the sprightly, viz., that among the characteristics of Pindar was abrupt transition, and inconsecutive treatment. Dr. Johnson was himself under the impression, as where he says that Cowley, as "The imitator, ought to have adopted what he found, and to have added what was wanting; to have preserved a constant return of the same numbers, and to have supplied smoothness of transition, and continuity of thought."

Pindar, however, had to deal with a trite subject, and had no fear of not being understood, but very great fear of being tedious. So he sweeps from peak to peak, over the summits of his subject, with eagle-flight, before the admiring gaze of a clear-visioned audience. Pindar, no more than any other ancient poet, epic or dramatic, would have ventured a step in advance of the quick apprehension of

his audience. The orator's necessity of carrying his hearers with him, so that they understand what he utters as he is speaking, without an instant's need of pause to reflect, lay on all poets that addressed an assembly. Pindar was not likely to have ventured on an abruptness that endangered the ready reception of his song. The stepping-stones that cross its strong flood, may be too wide apart for our unfamiliar footing, but not for his countrymen and contemporaries, born to the manner, and with the subject-matter bodily before them. For them there was nothing abrupt in his transition from one topic to another, nor anything arbitrary in the topics themselves. Ancestry and religion interested the Greeks with a national interest. The occasion that drew them together threw a halo round all connected with it, so that the poem found an audience, rare in these days, yearning to hear, and qualified to understand it. No subtlety, no conceits, but everything broad, open, and free.

XVIII.

KNOWLEDGE NOT PRIVILEGE.

NOWLEDGE is not privilege; and would, indeed, that final decree were once for all pronounced by competent court between them— that competent court, the common-sense of mankind; for no good will come, or much short of what should be, till this temper prevail upon the matter, that a man be no more proud of knowing much, be it mastery of language, of science, of art, or what not, than of being in good health, and no more boast of it than that he hath no touch of asthma.