which even inspired men have at times experienced. And the history of the Church furnishes numerous similar instances of a well-nigh despairing wail extorted from grandly heroic souls in the days of their keen disappointment and reverse. Yet how wickedly unjust to judge the great Hebrew leader from any such momentary spiritual obscuration, or to make this the key to unlock the deep problems of his life of moral sublimity! Not more defensible is the course of Alzog relative to Luther, or that of Döllinger when he discusses the nature and effects of the Reformation. The Reformation involved many hard and before unsolved problems. The struggles were often fierce and passionate. The motives were often flecked with selfishness and obstinacy. The determining element in many a conflict was unchristlike. The agents and chief actors in this great politico-religious drama were very fallible men; they had many and serious defects of character, and were subject to all the infirmities of their race and age. The results have been such as must ever come from the acceptance of a condition of human freedom relative to the profound problems of doctrine, life, and destiny. But when the grand resultant of this great protest against Rome is determined, Protestants feel an honest pride, and give devout thanks to the great Head of the Church that such Coryphaci for right as Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, Zwingle, and their coadjutors, should bring in a better and brighter day for humanity.

The limits of this article having been reached, we shall leave to others to point out more specifically the excellencies and errors of this Church history when it treats of the post-Reformation period. We have only time to say that much of this history is exceptionally excellent, many passages are truly eloquent, and the range of authorities quoted is generally wide and ample. We regret that many parts are weakened by erroneous statement, and sometimes marred by the indulgence of a spirit of bigotry and religious partisanship which is entirely unbecoming the dignity of a theme so noble as that of the history of the Church of Christ. These errors and this partisan zeal are especially manifest in Alzog's account of the Huguenots in France, of the French Revolution, and in what seems to be the translator's account of the Jesuit missionary labors in North America, and of the pontificate of Pius IX.

We rejoice that so good a Church history has been made accessible to the many students of Catholic schools and colleges of America; for it is an almost infinite gain over all their former manuals. We regret, however, that this history is marred by so many errors, and is at times so unjustly partisan; for the profound pity is, the unlearned will readily accept these most crude and unworthy statements as genuine history, and to the more bigoted of every communion denunciation is more effective than scholarly examination.

ART. VI.-HARPERS' LATIN DICTIONARY.

Harpers' Latin Dictionary. A New Latin Dictionary, founded on the Translation of Freund's Latin-German Lexicon. Edited by E. A. ANDREWS, LL.D. Revised, enlarged, and in great part rewritten, by CHARLTON T. LEWIS, Ph.D., and CHARLES SHORT, LL.D., Professor of Latin in Columbia College, New York. New York: Harper & Brothers. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. 1879.

THE Roman youth who was put to the study of his native language had to depend on the oral instructions of his teachers, both for a knowledge of the grammatical principles which governed its structure, and for the vocabulary of its words, and their meanings and proper use; or, if sufficiently advanced, he might also consult the writings of standard Latin authors, provided he were so fortunate as to possess a copy of their works in manuscript; for "the art preservative of all arts" was not then at hand to lend him its kindly assistance by supplying copies of the best literary productions of his country, or to facilitate his labor by the timely offering of a printed grammar and dictionary of his mother tongue. If the great Roman orator and philosopher whose writings form the accepted models and tests of purest Latinity could have had laid before him so full a vocabulary of the words of his own language, illustrated by so varied, numerous, and pertinent examples, and enriched by the results of such far-reaching and scholarly investigations into its origin, its history, its etymological and grammatical relations to other members of the family of cognate tongues, as are to be found in the publication standing at the head of this article, we may well imagine his astonishment and delight. In the fervor of a quickened pride and faith in the capabilities of that form of FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXII.—35

human speech through which he himself had displayed the almost matchless force of the magic spell of oratory, had constrained applause and approval from an unfriendly populace, or bent the wills of haughty senators to his own, he only the more earnestly would have urged "that the Latin language is not only not deficient, so as to deserve to be generally disparaged, but that it is even more copious than the Greek. For when have either we ourselves, or when has any good orator or noble poet, at least after there was any one for him to imitate, found himself at a loss for any richness or ornament of diction with which to set off his sentiments?" (Cic., De Finibus, 1, 3, 10; pp. 99-100 of Yonge's translation, Bohn, London, 1853.) We may fancy, moreover, that his exultation would have somewhat sobered down when a careful examination of the more than two thousand compactly filled pages of the volume before him disclosed no Latin name for the kind and character of book which he was examining. He would have been reminded of the fact that his Latin tongue, with all its vaunted copiousness, possessed no term to express the idea, so familiar to our minds, of a dictionary, because, in fact, strictly speaking, no such composition was then to be found in the range of Latin literature. The thing itself and the name were alike unknown. The word glossa, borrowed from the Greek, and used to designate collections of obsolete or foreign words, with explanations thereof, is, indeed, found in the work of the learned M. Terentius Varro, entitled, De Lingua Latina; but nowhere do we find, in Latin authors preceding or contemporaneous with Cicero, a word which designated a compilation of the current words of the language, arranged in alphabetical or some other convenient order, with explanations of their forms, meanings, and applications, and fulfilling with respect to the language the office that an encyclopedia does to art, science, and literature. (See Amer. Cyclop., s. v. "Dictionary.") It was not until about thirteen hundred years after the age of Cicero, and at a period when the dominant influence of ecclesiastical literature and modes of thought had relegated his writings and those of his classic compeers to comparative obscurity, that an English grammarian and poet coined the word dictionarius, which has been naturalized in several modern languages, and in English has become a standard term to designate systematically arranged,

general or limited, compilations of the words of the language, or of terms belonging to some special branch of knowledge, with explanations of their meanings and uses. John Garland, (Latinized Joannes de Garlandia,) who flourished in the thirteenth century A. D., was the author of some poems of a religious nature, and of several works on subjects connected with language, among which was a composition entitled dictionarius sive de dictionibus obscuris, which was published by Géraud in his Paris sous Philippe le Bel, (Paris, 1837,) forming a part of the Documens Inédits sur l'histoire de France. The work is of the sort called a classed vocabulary, and is a curious production, containing a medley of notions, often incomplete, but interesting, on a variety of subjects, and is especially deserving of notice here as furnishing the first known example of the use of the word dictionarius. Referring to the title adopted by him, the author says, "This little book is called a dictionary from the more necessary dictions which every scholar should keep, not merely in a book-case made of wood, but firmly held in the casket of his memory."* The work of Varro, De Lingua Latina, before mentioned, has come down to our times in a very incomplete condition. Of the original twenty-four books only six (from the fifth to the tenth inclusive) are extant, and these are "disfigured by numerous blanks, corruptions, and interpolations." The best edition is that of Müller, Leipsic, 1833, 8vo., (reproduced by Egger, Paris, 1837.) Though not a dictionary of the language, it is strictly philological in character, and has been of great value to Latin lexicography by means of the information it supplies respecting the origin and uses of words, (many of which would otherwise have perished or become unintelligible,) and the light thrown by it upon points of grammar and etymology, notwithstanding the many absurd and incorrect views expressed. The study of the Greek language was, at this period, deemed an important part of the curriculum to be pursued by those who aspired to the distinction of being ranked among the well educated, and the spirit of Greek literature and philosophy permeated all forms of intellectual life and activity at Rome. It was, conse

Dictionarius dicitur libellus iste a dictionibus magis necessariis, quas tenetur quilibet scolaris, non tantum in scrinio de lignis facto, sed in cordis armariolo firmitur retinere.

quently, much the fashion then to have recourse exclusively to the Greek for the solution of difficult and doubtful questions regarding the Latin. Varro, however, did not follow this vicious custom, but adopted the sound principle "of connecting Latin words, as far as possible, with the ancient dialects of Italy," and thus pointed out the way to most important results, had it been followed up rightly.

Following the order of time, the next name in the history of Latin lexicography that claims notice is Verrius Flaccus, a grammarian and archeologist, who lived about the beginning of the Christian era. Though belonging to the class of manumitted slaves, he became so eminent for learning and skill in teaching as to secure the favor of the emperor Augustus, who intrusted to him the education of his grandsons, Caius and Lucius Cæsar. Besides many other works of value, he composed an elaborate and voluminous one, entitled, De Significatu Verborum, which, from its scope and method, and partially alphabetical arrangement of the articles, may be regarded as an imperfect prototype of the Latin dictionary of to-day. This work, together with Varro's, constituted the weightiest authority then known in regard to the sources and history of the Latin language, and was often quoted by the writers of the first ages of the empire and by subsequent grammarians. With the exception of short fragments, the original work of Flaccus has entirely perished, but it was made the basis of a similar, though less extensive, compilation by Sextius Pompeius Festus, a grammarian or lexicographer, whose date is uncertainly fixed somewhere in the third or fourth century, A. D. Of this work of Festus only one MS. has been preserved to our times, and that in a very unsatisfactory and incomplete condition. The curious and interesting story of the misfortunes which befell the MS. copies of Festus well illustrates the perils to which the written records of ancient learning were exposed before the agency of printing was invoked to rescue such monuments of the labors and genius of past ages from further despoilment, and endow them with a perpetuity of life more enduring even than fire-born brass or sculptured marble can assure. Festus abridged and condensed into much less space the voluminous work of Flaccus. He omitted the obsolete words, (intermortua et sepulta verba,) made some other changes, and