are of great importance to Hellenists, though almost universally neglected by writers on Greek grammar. In some respects, they are of the highest authority. They are original documents; whereas all the texts of all the Greek authors have passed through the hands of innumerable transcribers and editors, losing, of course, something of their authority at each remove from the autograph of the author. But in the inscriptions, we have the very letters as they were chiselled by the hands of the Greeks themselves; and though they do not, at least in many instances, show any critical accuracy, in the modern sense of the term, they exhibit the language as it existed in the mouths of the people; they show how words were popularly written, and what changes took place in letters, when words were combined into sentences; and they throw much light on Greek pronunciation in general, and clear up many points in grammar. Mr. Sophocles has elicited a variety of interesting facts from them, and, by their authority, established the truth, in several controverted grammatical questions. The volume closes with a valuable essay on the Greek alphabet.

We are satisfied that this little volume will be considered by scholars as one of the richest and most important contributions to Greek philological literature of our times, and we take especial pride in introducing it to our readers as a production of Greek scholarship in the United States.

5.- Grammar of the Greek Language for the use of High Schools and Colleges. By DR. RAPHAEL KÜHNER, Corrector of the Lyceum, Hanover. Translated from the German by B. B. EDWARDS, Professor in the Theological Seminary, and S. H. TAYLOR, Principal of Phillips Academy, Andover. Andover: Allen, Morrill, & Wardwell. 1844. 8vo. pp. 603.

DR. KÜHNER has been, for some time, known as one of the most distinguished classical scholars and teachers in Germany. He received his early education in the Gymnasium at Gotha, and then studied at the University of Göttingen under Mitscherlich, Dissen, and Ottfried Müller. On the completion of his university studies, he became an instructer in the Lyceum at Hanover, and has since taken a high rank among the philological scholars of Germany, by a series of excellent works on the Greek and Latin languages. He has published three Greek grammars, adapted to the different stages of classical education, and all marked by clearness of conception, judgment in arranging the

materials, and scientific order in the development of the grammatical principles of the language. The middle one of the three, called Schulgrammatik der Griechischen Sprache, is the work which Mr. Edwards and Mr. Taylor have given to the public in the translation, the title of which is copied above. It is a grammar of the highest excellence, indicating a thorough knowledge of the Greek language in all its stages, and that completeness of arrangement, which can only result from long experience as a classical teacher. The principles which control the formation of the language are explained with fulness and precision. But the most important improvements are in the mode of treatment to which Dr. Kühner has subjected the syntax, the principles of which are laid down in accordance with the natural and logical relations of words with each other, as representatives of intellectual conceptions and thoughts. Language is treated, not as a stiff, mechanical contrivance, subjected to unbending rules, but as a natural, though wonderful, growth and organization, adapting itself with magical flexibility to the subtlest processes of thought. Grammar becomes, under this mode of treatment, a highly interesting and intellectual study, and one closely related to the philosophy of the human mind.

The Greek language, having early received a rich and beautiful development in the sacred hymns, the epic narratives, and the didactic poems, of a race of bards who chanted their compositions to listening multitudes; and afterwards, by the varied productions of the lyric genius of Greece, in many local dialects of equal excellence; by the tragic and comic pieces that were brought upon the stage before the thronging spectators of the festivals; by the chronicles of historians, which were read to enthusiastic assemblies; by the harangues of orators, the discourses of teachers, the lectures and dialogues of philosophers, all composed to act upon present hearers, and with reference to the excited sympathies of a living audience; - the language, extended to its richest compass by such influences, long before grammarians existed, and without the restraints of priggish and pedantic purists, attained to an extraordinary degree of completeness as an exponent of human thought, under all the modifications of poetry, history, popular eloquence, and philosophy. Such a language cannot be brought under the rubric of a dead and merely mechanical system of rules and exceptions; but the multiplicity of its forms, springing from, and coextensive with, the relations of thought, must be taken up in a genial and comprehensive spirit, and arranged according to a philosophical apprehension of all the phenomena of the Hellenic intellect, so far as they have been embodied in written. records.

This is a problem which Dr. Kühner seems to have accomplished better than any other grammarian with whose works we are acquainted. The German language approaches the Greek more nearly, in richness and flexibility, than any other modern tongue. It has been so much employed in the most subtile discussions of philosophy and philology; it has such boundless native resources to draw from, when new terms and fresh combinations of words are required for the expression of new and peculiar relations of thought, that a science like that of Greek grammar may be fully and variously developed in it with comparative facility. Dr. Kühner has brought the capacities of his native language to a severe test, in attempting to express the phenomena of Hellenic thought and the most subtile modes of conception, by corresponding expressions and combinations.

The translators of the present work one of them well known as a learned theologian, and an accomplished scholar, the other as one of the ablest and most promising classical teachers in New England, and earnestly devoted to his profession-have manifested signal power in overcoming the obstacles which lay in their path. They have made a close and faithful version of Kühner, which, where it does not adhere verbally to the original, gives always its spirit and substance, and is at the same time true to the idioms of the English language. The copious illustrations of Kühner are retained, and all his references to the classical authors have been carefully verified. For the analogies adduced in the original, the translators have supplied corresponding analogies from the English, and have sometimes furnished ingenious parallels where none are found in the German.

NOTE

TO ARTICLE 1.

We made a blunder in ascribing the intrigue with Lady Grosvenor to his Majesty, the reigning king of Hanover. It was not "this Duke of Cumberland," but his relative and immediate predecessor in bearing the title, whose amour with her Ladyship, in the latter part of the last century, gratified the English love of scandal, and fostered the English respect for rank and royal blood. The mistake is of no importance to the course of our remarks, for the honor of the affair is still all in the family. In our paper on English morals, manners, and poetry, in the present number, we said that the line of epic poets closed with Robert Pollok. We were never more mistaken in our lives;

it ends with John Fitchett. Since that article was printed, we have received from England literary intelligence of the highest importance. We regret extremely, that the steamship which crossed the Atlantic Ocean, freighted with such interesting news, should have been delayed by an adverse fate too long for us to make the great announcement in the body of our article. The epic genius of Britain has risen to the vertical point,"his beams at noon

Culminate from the equator,"

and henceforth he can only descend towards the setting. A new epic poet, of such gigantic dimensions, that the great men of other ages seem dwarfed to pigmies in his presence, has unexpectedly burst, a hundred and thirty thousand verses strong, upon the startled world. The light of his genius has had no dawn, but has blazed forth, like the meridian sun, or the intrusive comet of 1843, with strange fear perplexing the critics. The journals advertise, as just from the press," King Alfred, a Poem by John Fitchett," six volumes, 8vo.: Pickering, London. All the English magazines are aghast. Editors, unable to curb their impatience, have hastened, before reading the poem through, to give the world the benefit of their partial observations upon this stupendous phenomenon. Mr. Forster, the able and accomplished literary editor of the London Examiner, speaks in the following flattering terms of this sudden avatar, this overwhelming avalanche of poetry. "It is contained in six large octavo volumes; each volume comprising eight books of the poem. Each book of the poem has its average of nearly three thousand lines. We have called an experienced accountant to our help, and find that the sum total of lines is one hundred and thirtyone thousand two hundred and thirty-eight. The same authority has ascertained for us, that Homer's Iliad can boast but fifteen thousand six hundred and ninety-three lines; the Eneid of Virgil, but nine thousand eight hundred and ninety-five; and the Paradise Lost of Milton, no more than ten thousand five hundred and sixty-five. Thus four Iliads, four Eneids, and four Paradise Losts are, summed all together, about the quantity of one King Alfred."

Mr. John Fitchett was a country lawyer. He devoted leisure, fortune, and life to the composition of "King Alfred"; resolved, cost what it might, to outdo the immortal work of Joseph Cottle. He was forty years in travelling the great and terrible desert of this epic,-just the time the Israelites were occupied in getting through the wilderness, and did not reach the promised land of publication, at last. He died in 1838; nor ought any reasonable person to be surprised at the melancholy event.

The volumes are published by his surviving friends,- that any should have survived "King Alfred"! — as a monument to his memory, a cenotaph to his fame. The poem was not entirely finished at his lamented demise, but, more fortunate than Virgil, or the famous Londoner, who

"left half told

The story of Cambuscan bold,"

he had a friend who took up the tale, all told to be sure, except the last few pages of the sixth volume,—and without pause or faltering sung it out to the end.

"Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Graii."

We regret extremely, that we cannot give our readers a fuller account of this, the last and greatest work of the British epic muse. The English reviewers are so full of wonder and admiration, that they cease to be as perspicuous and didactic as usual. In the midst of their rhapsodies, however, we discern the fact, that the machinery consists of demons, headed by Satan, on the part of the Danes, and of an angelic host which supports Alfred and the English. A writer in the London Spectator, by way we suppose of proving him to be a true John Bull of a poet, remarks, that the work shows Mr. Fitchett to have had "not the least idea of the manners of a barbarous age, or of any other." He then proceeds to quote, with such panegyrical comments as he seems to think the poetry deserved, a lofty description of the portent by which the archangel Michael stops the career of the Danes in the midst of victory. We subjoin only a few lines, by way of whet to our readers' appetite for the whole, which they will have by and by, if they want it.

"Immediate from the victor host arose

Shrieks horrible of terror and dismay,

Filling heaven's concave; shouts and cries succeed,
That stun all ears. Lo! wondrous to relate,

Suddenly stops the universal mass

In height of victory. Nor the hot pursuit,

Nor lust of battle, claims one wandering thought;
Sole towards the awful omen each man bends

His total soul";

or his demned total, as Mr. Mantalini says. The addition of this new and illustrious name to the records of British poetry has been discussed with the respect which so thrilling an event deserved; and it gives us no common pleasure to inform our readers, that the compass of English epic genius is enlarged to the magic number five. The euphonious pentade comprises the great names of Cowley, Glover, Cottle, Pollok, and Fitchett.