comedy? Assuredly, not because he was a compound of comical qualities, which every one, whether he knew any thing of Socrates, or not, might be sure to recognise in some one or other of his acquaintance. No, but because the poet wanted to laugh at-probably, thought to laugh down-the petty quibblings and disingenuous sophistry of the schools. How far Socrates was justly made the vehicle of his satire is another question: he has certainly succeeded in his intention-made the schoolmen completely ridiculous-but he has not drawn a character. He, indeed, who wishes to draw one, will proceed after a very different fashion. Choosing the passion or habit of mind, which he purposes to hold up to ridicule take avarice, for instance, or a pedantical attachment to any branch of learning-he will not forthwith personify it, as Moliere has the former, in his Avare, and Pope the latter, in his Scriblerus: but he will connect with it many a little trait of peculiarity, which he has treasured up, and which he now finds will assimilate well, or which, perhaps, he observes nature has generally combined, with the character under his hands. Thus we have a being presented to us, of like passions and infirmities with ourselves: we grow familiar with it, and forget, in time, that it is but a creature of the poet's fancy. Compare with Harpagon, and Scriblerus, the Briggs of Miss Burney, or the Walter Shandy of Sterne, and something of this will, we think, be discerned in a moment. Nature never leaves the mind, any more than she does the face, with but one feature: and the poet who exhibits a mind as all anger, for instance, or who brings it forward in those situations only where nothing but anger is visible, is about as true to nature as the portrait painter who should sketch a face all nose. To mix up different qualities into one characterto form a white "workday" light, out of the colours of the rainbow, is the business, and it is no easy one, of the comic poet. The ancients, even when they left off bringing particular personages on their stage, have, from whatever cause, very little of comic character. They had but few elementary ones. Terence has pretty amply enumerated them in two of his prologues. It was the business of the comedian, he says, "To exhibit "Slaves running to and fro, to represent Again, he mentions, "The running slave, "The eating parasite, enrag'd old man, "The bold-faced sharper, covetous procurer,' From these elements the poet was to work when he attempted any thing of general character, and it is wonderful how like one another are their dramatis persona. The running slaves are very Dromios, and the masters Antipholis's. You cannot tell them apart. We look in vain for a character wasted and worked into some whimsical shape, by perpetual tossing and tumbling in the great deep of human life and manners. The ancients were content with drawing a species; but the most exquisite comedy is that which paints the individual-the individual, with the dispositions that nature gave him, and the oddities it has collected, in sweeping through the world. Analyze Falstaff, "unimitated, inimitable Falstaff." A wit and a coward nature made him—and has made many others: "evil communication" with vitious companions moulded him into a drunkard, and a debauchee, and a liar, and a thief; there is a pleasant smack of consequence about him which his knighthood gave him; and his intimacy with Hal makes him swagger with the Lord Chief Justice, and pretend to an acquaintance with Lord John of Lancaster. There is not one heterogeneous quality about the character; and yet Aristophanes might have hunted through all Athens, with the philosopher's lantern to boot, before he met with a Sir John Falstaff to make a farce upon. Where is there any thing like him in all antiquity? or like Sir Roger de Coverley -or Squire Western-or "My Uncle Toby?" To return, however, to Aristophanes. His own genius appears to have inclined him strongly to farce. The incidents, the dialogue, the characters of all his pieces, are those of farce rather than of comedy. In the Frogs, we are alarmed with the appearance of a dead man upon the stage, not for the rational and laudable purpose of being buried, but to refuse the carrying of Bacchus's bundle across the Styx. In the Wasps, a dog makes his appearance; he is, however, a much more modest performer than his brother in the "Witch of Edmonton ;" his whole part, if we are not mistaken, consisting in "hau, hau." A chorus of birds may pass, perhaps; but who but Aristophanes and the Americans, ever heard of such vocal performers as frogs? * Prologues to the Eunuch and Self-Tormentor. VOL. I. New Series. 3 N Colman's translation. All these absurdities, however, while they do not pretend to be natural, are rendered very laughable by Aristophanes. He has a broad humour about him, and a biting wit, that are quite irresistible; and is altogether as superior to our present-day writers of comedy, as-but there is no ratio between a finite quantity and nothing. 99.66 upon We are, therefore, very glad to see a beginning made towards putting him in an English dress. The present volume consists of four plays, the Clouds, as translated by Cumberland, and long known to the English reader; the Plutus, by Henry Fielding, Esq. and the Rev. Mr. Young; the Frogs, by Dunster; and the Birds, now first translated by "a member of one of the universities." "If the, plan," says this "member of one of the universities,' which the Birds has been executed, shall be found acceptable to the public, we shall speedily commit to the press a second volume, containing a version of the Wasps, the Acharnians, the Peace, and the Knights." For our parts, we are inclined to think that "the plan" will not be found "acceptable to the public." The Birds is rendered, with a singular want of judgment, into plain prose, as the Plutus had been before it "a sort of comico prosaic style," as the "member of one of the universities" is pleased to call it. Those who think that a familiar and colloquial blank verse, rising, as occasion may require, into poetry, or descending into the looseness of prose, is the best style for comedy in general, may have their opinion confirmed by consulting the preface of Colman to his translation of Terence. We have only time to remark here, that Aristophanes himself wrote in metre, which is, of itself, with us, a sufficient reason why his translator should do so too; and that he introduces, sometimes in banter, and sometimes in earnest, very dignified and splendid passages into his pieces, to the proper representation of which mere prose is wholly inadequate. How, for instance, would the dispute of the two tragedians in the Frogs have appeared in prose? Or what has prose to do with the solemn strains of the following theogony? O mortals, heirs of darkness, feeble race, In older times, ere earth, or heaven, or light, BIRDS, v. 686. of the original. Or the fluent nonsense of this pretty namby-pamby? "Muse, that lov'st the wood and spring, Tio, tio, tio, tinæ, Tio, tio, tio, tinæ, I have poured thro' mellow throat, To the goddess of the hill, Toto, toto, toto, tinæ, Whilst from the sweet-breathing measure, Storing up the honied treasure. Tio, tio, tio, tinæ." BIRDS, v. 737. of the original. Yet these passages are actually done into threadbare prose in the work before us. The translator has, we will venture decidedly to say, entirely mistaken the manner of his original, and has rendered the whole in the broad coarse style of modern farce. We can assure the "member of one of the universities," that such was not the style of Aristophanes. Had he never met with the hackneyed distich Αἱ χαριτες τέμενος τι λαβειν οπερ 8χὶ πεσειται 468 Elements of Chymical Philosophy. By Sir Humphry Davy, L. L. D. Secretary to the Royal Society. Part I. v. 1. [From the British Review.] WE opened this work with great expectation; we have not been disappointed. It is the work of a man whose discoveries have formed an era in chymistry-who has studied the science not merely in books, but in the operations of the laboratory, and in the phenomena of nature; and who has been for many years accustomed to deliver popular illustrations of it. No person has better qualifications for a work upon the elements of chymical philosophy; and we bestow no mean praise when we say, that we think he has executed the task in a manner worthy of himself. The materials, and the arrangement of the materials, are equally new. Respecting the former we shall speak last, as we have most to say upon it. The arrangement is simple and clear, and the parts well connected. An elegant, learned, and concise history of chymistry forms the introduction. It is the first which has appeared that is not a copy of Bergmann's. Sir H. Davy has not, like the Swedish chymist, gone into remote antiquity in search of the origin of chymistry;-to Cain and Tubal-cain-but has shown that chymistry was not even known to the Greeks; that its birthplace was the furnace of the alchymist, and that its native country was Arabia. He has brought down his historical sketch to the present time, and thus traced the progress of chymistry from an art to a science. The present volume constitutes only the first part of the whole work, but it is all that has yet appeared. The subjects treated are," the laws of chymical changes; and the undecompounded bodies, with their primary combinations." The first division of the work relates to the powers of matter in general; the second, to radiant or ethereal matter, as heat, light, electricity, and magnetism; the third, to empyreal, undecompounded substances, viz. oxygen and chlorine, and their combinations with each other; the fourth, to the undecompounded inflammable substances not metallic, and their combinations with the preceding bodies and with each other; the fifth, to the metals and their primary combinations; the sixth, to substances the nature of which is not fully known, and the seventh and last, to the analogies between the undecompounded substances, speculations respecting their nature, and the relations of their compounds. |