error of the press, that sure card in the hand of a skilful player of the reviewer's favorite game, "Beat my neighbor out of doors," scarcely presents itself, as an offering on the ink-black shrine of Saturnine or Satanic Jealousy, the only universal deity of well-educated society; whose male and female members bend the scowling eye of sullen hate, or turn up the contemptuous nose of wounded self-love, when the talents of a superior in mental or bodily qualities is brought before a crabbed court of critical quill-drivers, or the still more scrutinising eyes of mortified fan-holders.

Under circumstances so disheartening we should have given up the execution of a promise, made some time past, to review the various publications of Jo. Fr. B., did we not feel, that, in some cases, a growling critic, like a surly bull-dog, is seen to wag his tail in token of delight at the approach of a friendly face, or to drop it in sign of fear at the sight of a more powerful animal of the Cynic breed.

Influenced, then, with kind or cowardly feelings, we leave the reader to put whichever construction he pleases on our motives, we enter on a rapid sketch of each publication, taken in its chronological order, not with a view of showing off ourselves, the most powerful incentive to action with semi-anonymous 3

We remember to have read a well-paid review, in which the mistake of percipiat for perspiciat was noticed with all the spite of a blackened heart, and all the weakness of an addle-brain head.

2 Since the ancients have been nearly driven out of the field by the moderns, any allusion to Heathen mythology is voted a bore; and he, who hopes to attract the attention of a religious age, must draw all his ideas from Sacred Writ. In compliance, therefore, with the taste of a favorite sect of writers, who have designated another sect by the sweetsmelling appellation "Satanic," we have been induced to make use of a figure of speech, called Hendyadis, by which one idea is expressed by two words of the same meaning; and thus while in our religious character we yield to the feelings of our readers, we still do not entirely give up our character of profane scholars, by showing that Saturn and Satan are the same personage in two different systems of theology.

3 It was absolutely necessary to coin this new word to express an idea unknown to the mass of readers, yet familiar to those behind the scenes of the critical stage. Of all the anonymous articles in the whole of the numerous reviews of this country, not one can be mentioned of which the author is not known, except in the case of those reviews, where the editor has to dove-tail one article by fitting together the contributions of two or more correspondents; who, finding the printed article so like and unlike their manuscript, are unable to solve the riddle, and, unless eaten up by vanity, are disposed to be mum on the matter, and to console themselves with the Virgilian complaint:

Hos ego versiculos feci, tulit alter honores.

reviewers, but of doing a tardy act of justice to the character of Jo. Fr. Boissonade.

Although the preceding list contains all the works that bear in their respective title-pages the name of J. F. B., yet in various other publications' the same individual is found in the character of a contributor of materials, whose value is scarcely inferior to those furnished by the principals themselves. Among the works so graced by the communications of J. F. B., the first in order of time is the valuable edition of Athenæus, by Schweighauser, where the few yet egregious specimens of talent exhibited by J. F. B. placed him at once with those mighty men, who leap to a conclusion, which others less gifted never attain, or if they do creep to it, who show by the length of time they have consumed in the search, that they were but dull dogs, and unfit to hunt in the same pack with the Scaligers, Casaubons, and Bentleys of Greek criticism; of whom it may be said, as of the greyhound,

Their game is lost, or caught in view.

Of the emendations made by J. F. B. on Athenæus (an author who, from the very nature of his work, must have been exposed to greater chances of corruption than any other author in the whole range of Greek literature, and the restitution of whom is consequently beset with the greatest difficulties, even after the fortunate discovery of the Veneto-Paris Ms. collated by Schweighauser,) such is the pre-eminent character, that they extorted the praise of even the fastidious Porson, whose judgment on points connected with Athenæus, even Reisig and Hermann have never dared to call in question. Nor was Porson the only man in this country, where Greek literature is not quite extinct, though hastening to the darkness and stilness of the grave, who were disposed to augur all things fausta fortunata felicia to their favorite pursuits, from the appearance of a promising French critic, whom the eager eye of expectation pictured to itself as a restoration of the learned, acute, and guileless Isaac Casaubon.

We are aware that in thus selecting Jo. Fr. B. as the conspicuous light-house on the Gallic ground of Greek criticism, we seem to keep out of sight the claims of the dead or living scholars of the same country, contemporaries of Boissonade; all of whom in their respective callings have done honorably for themselves, and usefully for the common cause of Grecian letters. But, with

Of these publications we will give as perfect a list as we can obtain from our Parisian correspondents.

the exception of Villoison, D'Orville, and Larcher, few have been decidedly Philologices, and fewer still are known beyond the circle of the Institute, from the fashion, prevalent among French scholars, of giving the preference to their vernacular tongue over the common language of the learned, even on subjects where modern forms of speech are manifestly' unfavorable to the communication of ideas, and where precision, accuracy, and brevity are absolutely necessary. Foreigners, therefore, who are not in the coterie of French Savans, are frequently strangers to their writings on classical subjects; and, for ourselves we can truly say, that the first knowlege of their existence has been obtained from the publications of Boissonade, who wisely for his fame, though perhaps not well for his purse, still keeps to the old plan of adopting the language of the learned in cases where the learned alone can feel any interest. So long, then, as the scholars of France stick to their native tongue, so long will they confine the circle of information; to extend which is the only aim of publishing the result of our inquiries on any point, and especially on points of Greek and Latin criticism.

Commencing his career of criticism under auspices so favorable to his future fame, what is there which J. F. B. might not have attempted? and judging, as we do, from his subsequent publications, what is there, we ask, he could not have accomplished for the benefit of Greek literature, by devoting himself exclusively to first-rate authors? But in an evil hour his hot pursuit of universal knowlege led him into a wilderness of dead and living languages, where, it is true, his own attention has been kept alive by the ardor of the chace, but in which few can follow him, and where fewer still feel the least interest in the exertions he is continually making to unearth some obscure author, whose works, in print or in manuscript, are to be found only in the dusty corners of an overgrown library-the tomb and the temple of dead and living intellect. When, therefore, the

'Not only in France, but in other parts of Europe, the common language of the learned is giving place to the vernacular tongue, on all subjects connected with classical literature. It requires no ghost to tell us, that the universal adoption of such a practice will deprive the next age of the means of reading Greek and Latin authors in the original. True it is, that the present short cuts to information are favorable to the diffusion of superficial knowlege; and as true is it, that a boy will construe with greater facility, and in less time, a passage by the aid of a translation than he can do without it:-but what is the real value of information, unless it be retained? and what is ever retained, if it be easily acquired? Male parta facile dilabuntur; or as we say in English, Quickly come, as quickly go.

name of J. F. Boissonade first appeared in the title-page of the Heroica of Philostratus, the learned world,-that is to say, about fifty persons in Europe, who read Greek for its own sake, and not as connected with their future advancement in life, and thus scorn to convert the tablets of the Muses into those of the money-lender,were puzzled to find what motives could lead a man of refined taste, and conversant with the literature of Greece in its best and brightest days of intellectual glory, to edit the strange composition of a sophist, who lived in the time of Antonine, and whose vain attempt to decry the veracity of Homer, a point that no human being seriously asserted, is only equalled by the silliness of the conception, which dresses a fiction in the garb of truth to destroy a fable, that would lose all its charm, if it could be driven from its prescriptive spot in the soul-subduing warmth of fairy-land, and fixed within the frigid zone of historical facts.

It is true, that the edition of Olearius had been condemned as a wretched specimen of incompetence on the part of an editor to do justice to his author; still, as an edition of an author like Philostratus, it answered all the purposes of reading and reference; nor was there the least necessity for a man of Boissonade's talents to pay a marked attention to any member of the whole family of sophists, until he had found that the united labors of the learned had been exhausted in the illustration and emendation of authors of greater value, when it would have been time enough to do something for the writers of the brazen age of Grecian literature, whose only merit is to recal, like an Oasis in the Desert, the feelings of a fatigued traveller to the remembrance of more delightful spots in a less barren soil.

If, however, any portion of the writings that pass under the name of Philostratus were to be honored by the notice of Boissonade, we are free to express our regret that the little work of

Our regret on this point is so much the greater, from our perceiving that Mss. which contain the Eikóves of the younger Philostratus are scarce in other countries; and even if they were more numerous, their authority would be little or none, compared with that of the Ms. of the 11th or 12th century, in the Royal Library at Paris; the collation of which would be absolutely necessary for any future editor of the work in question.

Since writing the above, we have a distant recollection of having seen in a Leipsig catalogue, the announcement of an intended edition of Philostratus and Callistratus, whose description of certain statues generally accompanies the Eikóves of the former; but of the edition itself, if it ever appeared, we have never seen a copy. Some pretty emendations of the Eikóves are given by Pierson, the prince of conjecturists, and the prime

the younger (if he be younger) Philostratus on pictures had not been the object of his first love; a production extremely curious in the eyes of a classical virtuoso, as being the most ancient specimen of a regular catalogue raisonné of pictures, where the descriptions are made up of the very words of the authors, chiefly dramatic, who either gave the subject of the picture, or else made allusions to it in their respective works, of which, though the greater part are lost, still enough remaius, either in fragments, or in the translations of Latin poets, to enable a man of learning and taste to compare the descriptions given by Philostratus with those of the originals, from which the copy still existing was taken. Our meaning will be best understood by any one reading first the Baccha of Euripides, and then turning to the description of the picture representing the story of Pentheus, as detailed by Philostratus; where it will be seen that the writer of the catalogue had a copy of that beautiful play, more perfect thau the one which has come down to us, but which still existed in its original state in the time of John Tzetzes, the author of the Greek cento which passes under the name of ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΠΑΣΧΩΝ. But this by the way. We return to Boissonade and his Philostratus.

Of this perversion of his talents to subjects beneath him, Boissonade seems to have been aware; and he has deemed it necessary to quiet the upbraidings of conscience, to which the unanimous language of friends to him and Greece gave only the echo, by the following apology for self-murder, in his preface to Ni

cetas:

6

"Sunt viri quidam docti, et de me, quod mihi sint amicissimi, sentientes nimis quam benigne, qui illud meum in edendis non bonæ notæ scriptoribus consiliuni mihi exprobrent, et cuipiam hanc tenuem curam, licet forsan non inutilem, aliis me relinquere, ac sepositis proletariis, ad classicos assiduosque auctorum aspirare. Reclamo et repono, quod ille olim, facere me, quod vulgo haud solent, ut quid me sit dignum sciam;' argui me immerito, quod mihi campus tenuis aretur, cum sit ingeniolum tenue, et, quod jam professus sum, neminem posse in nugas dicere plura meas, ipse ego quam dixi. Auctores lingua et facundia præstabiles et amo et assidua verso manu, lego ac perlego quam diligentissime, ad ipsa illorum penetralia pergens

favorite of his master Valckenaer, in his Verisimilia; and the second volume of Jacob's Exercitationes Criticæ is devoted to the same interesting subject.