the horizon almost twenty miles to the westward. On the opposite side ranges the long line of the Chiltern Hills.

a

This central spot was long known as Garsington Green; being an open common, affording too obvious temptation to the lovers of bull-baiting and Sunday cricket. Being allotted at the time of the inclosure to W. Plumer Halsey, Esq. in lieu of right to soil of commons and waste grounds, the present proprietor of the North End manor, Thomas Plumer Halsey, Esq. of Temple Dinsley, Herts, demised the same by lease for 999 years, from 11th Oct. 1839, to the president, fellows, and scholars of Trinity college, Oxford, in trust, among other things, that the rector, for the time being, should, within two years from the said date, build a school, with a house for the master and mistress, that the children of the poor may therein be instructed in the tenets and principles of the church of England, as now established, &c.; the rector to have the appointment of the master and mistress, and the general superintendence of the school. Between five and six hundred pounds have been liberally subscribed for this purpose; * but, as more than double that sum will be required for the fabric alone, it is hoped, that additional contributions may lead to the completion of the work in the spirit in which it has been begun and conducted.

MR. URBAN, Dorchester, Nov. 18.

I NEED not tell you of the existence of an opinion among a class of utilitarians of this age, that in studying the dead languages, scholars learn nothing but words; and I cannot better state that opinion than by quoting from "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal for April 1840," paragraph of "Wyse on Education," upon which I would, by your kind permission, offer a few observations.

He says, "Of what advantage to a merchant, to the head of a manufactory, to a military man, or to any of the numerous classes, dependent on our public offices, the most complete knowledge of the ancient languages? It is a luxury but luxuries are but poor substitutes for necessaries; men cannot live on cakes, neither will erudition conduct through life. If they will read the ancient authors, let them read them in translation. It is not the best, but the best is attainable at too dear a rate. We live too fast in the present age to spend so much time in words. THINGS press upon us at every step, and an education dealing with THINGS, a real or reality education, as the Germans term it, is the education best fitted for the practical, the reality men, for the active classes of the community."

Now, the dead languages shew us an ancient, and, but for them, an unknown world: the history, institutions, religion and opinions, arts and

sciences, manners, habits, wisdom, and folly of nations which have long been swept from the face of the earth; and it is impossible to read the dead languages without learning more or less of these things, as can be shewn by a few examples.

Such a sentence as this-" qui efferetur vix reliquerit," (C. Nepos de Aristide) means, as long as a reader learns only words, "He left scarcely anything by which he might be carried out," and is therefore unintelligible till the reader knows one thing, which is, that the ancients buried without their cities; and consequently that qui efferetur, by which he might be carried out, means by which he might be buried; and when we read in the Greek Testament (Matt. 26, v. 20.) that Jesus

one

σε άνακειτο μετὰ τῶν δώδεκα,”
lay down with the twelve,

cannot understand the word ávakeITO, lay down, without learning something of the ancient custom of lying down, or reclining on triclinia at meals, that is, without learning a thing. The words biremis and triremis traced to their roots, teach us something of the construction of the ancient ships; as from toga and tunica we learn the character of the Roman dress. From such words as vinea, testudo, and aries; we understand something of ancient warfare, as we do of Roman writing and books, from such as tabula, stylus, and volumen. The distinctive terms βασιλευς, a constitutional king, and rupavvos, a king by conquest, shew us the unsteady state of ancient kingdoms from the frequent overthrow of lawful rulers by invaders; nor can we well comprehend the different meanings of vaòs, iepov, and Teμevos, without getting a clear idea of the sacred buildings of Greece. Truly, I should like to know how Mr. Wyse makes it out that a youth can read the Latin authors without gaining an accession to his knowledge of things, and that Horace, Livy, or Cæsar can be read without learning anything of Roman men and manners, laws, religion, or warfare. Adams thought otherwise when he collected the account of things called Roman Antiquities.

But the paragraph answers to all this reasoning, "if they will read the

ancient authors, let them read them in translation," a sentence which, I believe, a man who could read them otherwise would never utter; since scholars know it to be impossible to make English versions of ancient works which could give a reader that knowledge of things which is carried in the works themselves, since no languages but those which were formed to express those things can do so correctly. Most of the productions and operations of the useful arts, and the houses, furniture, shipping, and weapons of the ancient nations, as well as their manners and institutions, were dif ferent from anything that we have; so that we have not, in our tongues, any names for many of them; and in writing versions of Greek and Latin books, we must either use their original names as untranslatable, and therefore unintelligible to an English reader, without a knowledge of the things which they stand for; or we must substitute for them, as we commonly do, the English names of such things as are most like them, in which case the English reader cannot acquire any correct idea of them from his translation, which is, in fact, a misnamed translation of what cannot be translated at all. The word effero, for example, as applied to the dead, is translated to bury, and thus loses its reference to the necropolis

or

66

Icity of the dead," without the city of the living;" and avakeiμaι loses its reference to the reclining posture at meals from being rendered by the verb to sit. If we render Tupavvos by tyrant, we shall not give its true meaning; and if we call a tunica a coat, or a toga a cloak, we shall give an idea of a modern garment, such as a Roman could never dream of. A simple verbal translation of Horace would be as unintelligible to an English reader as the original.

It is said, I think, by an Arabic proverb, that a man, by learning a second language, becomes two; and this is metaphorically true. He, for example, who reads the Greek authors is so far a Greek as he is carried back in mind among the ancient inhabitants of Greece, identifies himself with them, lives under their laws, sees and learns their manners, beholds their productions, and witnesses their deeds; converses with them in their own

tongue, and learns their very thoughts delivered by themselves in their own words while a man who knows nothing but English is, as far as relates to a deep, full, face-to-face knowledge of ancient nations, ignorant of them. It is commonly believed that a man gains great advantages from travel, as it corrects his false estimate of other nations, and consequently of his own, and makes him a better judge of men and manners, laws and institutions at home; and the man who reads the ancient authors seems to me to have nearly the same advantage over the one who has not done so, as he who has travelled in Greece and Italy over him who has only read of them. Nations who know little or nothing of others, from the Chinese to the Esquimaux, are apt to fancy themselves and their ways the wisest of the world; and some readers of a modern mathematical work may pity the ignorance of such nations as the ancient Egyptians and Hindoos, though others know that the former were a nation learned in the sciences, when the inhabitants of Europe were wild in the woods; and, as appears from a paper read a few years since, before the Royal Society, (see Gent. Mag. vol. CII. Part II.) the Hindoos applied a system of fluxions of their own to the quadrature of the circle before Sir Isaac Newton or Leibnitz was born.

But allowing that things as well as words are learnt through the dead languages, the paragraph which I have quoted still demands of what advantage are those things, "to the head of a manufactory, to a military man, or to any of the numerous classes dependent on our public offices?" Of what advantage, I would ask, to either of those men or classes is a knowledge of such things as come under the denomination of philosophy; such, for example, as some of those subjects which are treated of in the number of the Edinburgh Journal, in which I find the paragraph in question? Of what advantage to either of those men or classes is a knowledge of the

changes of level of the earth's surface," of " 'the printing office," of

"how the Coral islands are clothed with vegetation," of "Boodhism," of

geographical circumstances affecting the distribution of races ?" I do not 3

ask these questions believing that a knowledge of such subjects is of no advantage, for I have read the articles treating of them with much pleasure and profit. I feel a knowledge of them to be of advantage, and I feel the knowledge of things to be acquired through the dead languages to be of the same kind of advantage. If a man has no advantage in knowing anything beyond his profession, why are men everywhere giving lectures and writing popular works on the sciences?

An editorial note to Mr. Wyse's paragraph says, "It should be a fixed rule with all who wish to see youth instructed in a knowledge of things instead of words, never at any time, or in any circumstances, to use a single Latin or Greek expression." O ye Youngs, Champollions, and Wilkinsons! you have toiled to drag from the tombs the language of the Egyptians, when you would have acted more wisely in labouring to bury others that are dead!

Men who have not the advantage of knowing the dead languages, have commonly, I think, too low an opinion of the ancient intelligence of the world of time, and thence some are in danger of imagining that all the common sense institutions of man, and even the blessed Gospel itself, having originated among ignorant generations, have struggled through ignorant generations only to have their worthlessness discovered by the surpassing knowledge and wisdom of two or three modern nations.

Those who think too little or too much of a knowledge of antiquity should bear in mind the opinion of Bacon, who says Nov. Org. I. 56, as quoted by Dr. Bloomfield in his preface to his Greek Testament:

"Reperiuntur ingenia alia in admirationem Antiquitatis, alia in amorem et amplexum Novitatis effusa; pauca vero ejus temperamenti sunt, ut modum tenere possint, quin aut quæ rectè posita sunt ab Antiquis convellant, aut ea contemnant quæ rectè afferuntur a Novis. Hoc vero magno scientiarum et philosophiæ detrimento fit, quum studia potius sint Antiquitatis et Novitatis, quam judicia: Veritas autem non a felicitate temporis alicujus, quæ res varia est; sed a lumine naturæ et experientiæ, quod æternum est, petenda est.'

W. BARNES.

MR. URBAN,

Cork, Nov. 10. YOUR correspondent MR. JOHN HOLMES, in furnishing, through your number for the current month, (p. 483,) a catalogue of the French Ambassadors to the English Court, from the close of the fourteenth century, modestly solicits the correction of any error, and the communication of any additional information arising from the subject. In answer to this appeal, I am induced to submit some observations that occurred to me, as I perused the series of names presented in the list, most of which were more or less familiar to my recollection, though many are too obscure, and acted too subordinate a part, to entitle them to particular elucidation. It is, indeed, obvious, that a large proportion of the personages, here apparently figuring as ambassadors, were only assistants, or attachés, probably associated in the commissions, but not distinctly invested with the title and dignity of these high functionaries ; for, otherwise, we must assume, that no less than six succeeded each other in 1445, and similarly, on subsequent occasions, where several appear under a single year.

Omissions, too, in the long separated intervals here indicated, will necessarily strike the reader. Thus, passing slightly the first name "Nicholas Du Bosc, in 1396," of whom it is sufficient to add, that he died in 1408, Chancellor of France, we stop at "Louis de Bourbon, Caunt of Vendôme, in 1445." But this prince, the great-grandson of Robert of France, sixth son of Louis IX. (St. Louis), and great-grandfather of Antoine King of Navarre, father of Henry IV., had already, on the accession of our Henry V. to the throne, filled a similar mis. sion, with the view of diverting the English monarch from the comtemplated invasion of France. He was empowered to offer Henry the hand of his future consort, Catharine, daughter of Charles VI. with a certain number of the French provinces, &c. but our young and ambitious King would accept nothing less than the princess, for whom he professed an ardent passion, with her father's entire dominions for dower. (L'Art de Vérifier les Dates, tome xii.) On the GENT, MAG. VOL. XV.

failure of his object, Louis de Vendôme returned to France, and in 1415 was numbered among the captives of Agincourt, when, not being able to collect the large ransom demanded for his liberation, exceeding 80,000l. of our present currency, he remained a prisoner until 1426. His ensuing fortunes it is not my purpose to dilate on; and I need, therefore, only add, that his embassy in 1445, here produced by Mr. Holmes, and undertaken in the hope of a conclusive peace between England and France, achieved no more than a truce of eighteen months. He died at the close of the following year, and, as the progenitor of the three reigning houses of France, Spain, and Naples, may claim a more considerable space than it can be requisite, or is my intention, to devote to most other ambassadors.

"Jean Juvenal des Ursins," who succeeds the Comte de Vendôme in the list, and who formed part, I presume, of that prince's embassy, in order to combine the advantage of talent with the lustre of rank, is not unknown to history. The see of Laon, as well as the metropolitan one of Rheims, equally conferred the dignity, a very high one, of Dukes and Peers of France, of which the ecclesiatical number, until the accession of Paris in 1622, did not exceed six, and of these Rheims held the primary station. In 1456, des Ursins, probably of English, certainly not of the illustrious Italian, descent, was president of the commission of bishops appointed to revise the judgment, and vindicate the character of the Maid of Orleans, from the imputations under which she had been condemned to death by the English on the 30th of May 1431. M. Walkenaer, an eminent living writer, in his recital of the young heroine's trial, asserts that the Bishop of Beauvais, (Pierre Cauchon,) on leaving the prison and victim, laughingly addressed the Earl of Warwick, (Richard Beauchamp,)- -"Farewell, Farewell! words of mere valedictory import, corresponding to adieu, adieu! but which M. Walkenaer renders, "Faites bonne chère,-il en est fait," as if in congratulation of the atrocious verdict, which, however, was equally the act of French as of English judges. Such,

E

when it suits their purpose, are the interpreters of languages, who act, as M. Villemain, the present Minister of Public Instruction, says of Voltaire's studied vituperation of Shakspere, that the more effectually to traduce, he translated, the English poet. Just so, in order to enhance the odium of the deed, M. Walkenaer perverted the meaning of the English words, though there can be no doubt of the satisfaction of the French Bishop and our Earl at the condemnation, which declared the enthusiastic maid—“ relapse, excommuniée, et rejettée du sein de l'Eglise ; but the sense ascribed to the prelate's expressions is not more correct than if we were similarly to resolve their equivalent-Adieuinto its original elements, and render it -To God. It is, however, more likely that the language used on this occasion was French; and the words that passed, as I find elsewhere, were— "C'en est fait; nous la tenons." The fatal sentence, be it observed,

* Amongst the monuments that decorate the newly-instituted Museum of Versailles, that which cannot fail to arrest and detain the visitor's eye in delighted contemplation, is the statue of Jeanne d'Arc, or Pucelle, by the late Princess Mary of Orleans, wife of Prince Alexander of Wirtemberg. Nothing can be more chaste in design, more natural in expression, or more faultless, altogether, in simple felicity of execution. Nor is the recognition of genius the sole impression which it is destined to produce, for, in viewing it, we yield to the pleasing, the almost necessary conviction, equally imparted, we are told, by the Madonnas of Raffaelle, that this perfection of taste has its source as much in the heart as the mind; and most just would be the conclusion, for the lamented princess was as good and amiable as she was accomplished. questionably the early talent, here so eminently displayed, would have been an unerring prelude to the first order of excellence, had the pursuit of the art been compatible with her exalted station, and had it pleased heaven to prolong her days. Like her royal father, no pressure of circumstances could have deprived so gifted a lady of ample and honourable bread. Ο Ζέυ! Ολα τεχνίτης παραπόλλυται -may an enthusiast of the arts here exclaim, as of old, though applicable to a far different personage.

Un

received the sanction of the University of Paris. (Lingard, Henry VI. chap. ii.)

Guy (11) Comte de Laval" (same year,) was the seventh in descent from Mathieu de Montmorency, by his second wife, Emma de Laval, and forefather of the present Duke of Montmorency-Laval. (See Gent. Mag. for Sept. 1840, p. 249.) This Guy died in 1484.

"Bertrand de Beauveau was brother of Louis, chief favourite of Réné d'Anjou, titular sovereign of Sicily, Naples, and Jerusalem, and father of our Margaret, wife of Henry VI. The house of Beauveau latterly assumed the title of Prince de Craon. (Gent. Mag. for November, 1838, note.)

"Guillaume Cousinot was one of Louis XI's council of state, as may be seen in "Les Mémoires de Comines," particularly in that monarch's hostile declaration in 1470, against Charles the Bold of Burgundy, (tome iv. ed. 1727, p. 313,) and elsewhere.

It would be little interesting, I apprehend, to the English reader, and cannot be necessary, to pursue in detail many of the succeeding persons, generally attendants, and not principals, even within the abridged limits which I have assigned to the foregoing, and which I offer as a specimen, though a very imperfect one, of what the subject is susceptible, were it desirable to enter more minutely in illustration of it.

to

therefore, pass on

"Tristan de Salazar, Arch1490. bishop of Sens," and his associates ; of whom I shall cursorily notice, Philippe de Crévecoeur, Seigneur des (not de) Cordes, of whom it is related that when, after the capture of various places for Louis XI. this searching prince demanded a rigorous account of the sums expended in the achievement, de Crêvecueur indignantly replied-" Give me back my cities, and you shall have your money."—" Par la pasque-Dieu!" replied Louis, “il vaut mieux laisser le moustier où il est." -Crêvecueur died in 1494. It is thus (Crêvecueur) his name is written in Comines.

The unnamed "First President of the Parliament," who follows, was Jean de la Vacquerie, previously the