There is nothing real in the Georgics, except, to be sure, the verse.1 Mere didactics of practice, unless seasoned with the personal interests of the time or author, are inexpressibly dull to me. Such didactic poetry as that of the Works and Days followed naturally upon legislation and the first ordering of municipalities. All genius is metaphysical; because the ultimate end of genius is ideal, however it may be actualised by incidental and accidental circumstances. Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions. Sancho is the common sense of the social man-animal, unenlightened and unsanctified by the reason. You see how he reverences his master at the very time he is cheating him. AUGUST 14, 1832. Steinmetz.-Keats. POOR dear Steinmetz is gone, his state of sure blessed ness accelerated; or, it may be, he is buried in Christ, and there in that mysterious depth grows on to the spirit of a just man made perfect! Could I for a moment doubt this, the grass would become black beneath my feet, and this earthly frame a charnel-house. I never knew any man so illustrate the difference between the feminine and the effeminate. SO Of Javan or Gadire, With all her bravery on, and tackle trim, Sails fill'd, and streamers waving, Courted by all the winds that hold them play; An amber-scent of odorous perfume Her harbinger, a damsel train behind!"-H. N. C. 1 I used to fancy Mr. Coleridge paulo iniquior Vergilio, and told him ; to which he replied, that, like all Eton men, I swore per Maronem. This was far enough from being the case; but I acknowledge that Mr. C.'s apparent indifference to the tenderness and dignity of Virgil excited my surprise.-H. N. C. 1 knew him, and A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. and myself in a lane near Highgate. spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back and said: "Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!"-"There is death in that hand,” I said to when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly. THE 66 AUGUST 16, 1832. Christ's Hospital.—Bowyer. HE discipline at Christ's Hospital in my time was ultra-Spartan; all domestic ties were to be put aside. "Boy!" I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays, Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no more crying!" No tongue can express good Mrs. Bowyer. Val. le Grice and I were once going to be flogged for some domestic misdeed, and Bowyer was thundering away at us by way of prologue, when Mrs. B. looked in, and said, "Flog them soundly, sir, I beg!" This saved us. Bowyer was so nettled at the interruption that he growled out, "Away, woman! away!" and we were let off. THE AUGUST 28, 1832. St. Paul's Melita.-The Maltese.* HE belief that Malta is the island on which St. Paul was wrecked is so rooted in the common Maltese, and 1 According to Sara Coleridge, this was Mr. Green, who first knew Coleridge in 1817. She thinks the meeting probably took place early in 1819, and cites Mr. Green as authority for the statement. Lord Houghton, in his Life of Keats, suggests October, 1817, as the probable date, at which time Keats was at Hampstead. is cherished with such a superstitious nationality, that the Government would run the chance of exciting a tumult, if it, or its representatives, unwarily ridiculed it. The supposition itself is quite absurd. Not to argue the matter at length, consider these few conclusive facts:-The narrative speaks of the "barbarous people," and "barbarians," of the island. Now, our Malta was at that time fully peopled and highly civilized, as we may surely infer from Cicero and other writers. A viper comes out from the sticks 1 Acts xxvii. 2 and 4. Mr. C. seemed to think that the Greek words had reference to something more than the fact of the islanders not speaking Latin or Greek; the classical meaning of ẞápbapoi.-H. N. C. 2 Upwards of a century before the reign of Nero, Cicero speaks at considerable length of our Malta in one of the Verrine orations. See Act. ii. lib. iv. c. 46. "Insula est Melita, judices," &c. There was a town, and Verres had established in it a manufactory of the fine cloth or cotton stuffs, the Melitensis vestis, for which the island is uniformly celebrated: "Fertilis est Melite sterili vicina Cocyræ And Silius Italicus has OVID. Fast. iii. 567. Yet it may have been cotton after all-the present product of Malta. Cicero describes an ancient temple of Juno situated on a promontory near the town, so famous and revered, that, even in the time of Masinissa, at least 150 years B.C., that prince had religiously restored some relics which his admiral had taken from it. The plunder of this very temple is an article of accusation against Verres; and a deputation of Maltese (legati Melitenses) came to Rome to establish the charge. These are all the facts, I think, which can be gathered from Cicero; because I consider his expression of nudate urbes, in the working up of this article, a piece of rhetoric. Strabo merely marks the position of Melita, and says that the lap-dogs called kuvidia Meλiraia were sent from this island, though some writers attribute them to the other Melite in the Adriatic (lib. vi.). Diodorus, however, a Sicilian himself by birth, gives the following remarkable testimony as to the state of the island in his time, which, it will be remembered, was considerably before the date of St. Paul's shipwreck. “There are three islands to the south of Sicily, each of which has a city or town (Tóλ), and harbours fitted for the safe reception of ships. The first of these is Melite, distant about 800 stadia from Syracuse, and possessing several harbours of surpassing excellence. Its inhabitants are rich and luxurious (τοὺς κατοικοῦντας ταῖς οὐσίαις upon the fire being lighted; the men are not surprised at the appearance of the snake, but imagine first a murderer, and then a god from the harmless attack. Now, in our Malta there are, I may say, no snakes at all; which, to be sure, the Maltese attribute to St. Paul's having cursed them away. Melita in the Adriatic was a perfectly barbarous island as to its native population, and was, and is now, infested with serpents. Besides, the context shows that the scene is in the Adriatic. The Maltese seem to have preserved a fondness and taste for architecture from the time of the knightsnaturally enough occasioned by the incomparable materials at hand.1 AUGUST 19, 1832. English and German.-Best state of Society. IT may be doubted whether a composite language like the English, is not a happier instrument of expression than a homogeneous one like the German. We possess a wonderful richness and variety of modified meanings in our Saxon and Latin quasi-synonymes, which the Germans have not. For "the pomp and prodigality of Heaven," the Germans must have said, "the spendthriftness.' spere is particularly happy in his use of the Latin synonymes, and in distinguishing between them and the Saxon. 2 Shak εὐδαίμονας). There are artisans of every kind (παντοδαπούς ταῖς pyaoiaus); the best are those who weave cloth of a singular fineness and softness. The houses are worthy of admiration for their superb adornment with eaves and brilliant whitewashing (οἰκίας ἀξιολόγους καὶ κατεσκευασμένας φιλοτίμως γείσσοις καὶ κονιάμασι περιττότερον).”Lib. Mela (ii. c. 7) and Pliny (iii. 14), simply mark the position. V. c. 12. H. N. C. 1 The passage which I have cited from Diodorus, shows that the origin was much earlier.-H. N. C. Verschwendung, I suppose.-H. N. C. This idea is more fully drawn out in Coleridge's "Lectures and Notes on Shakspere," p. 71. (Standard Library Edition.) That is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy of the man. IN SEPTEMBER 1, 1832. Great Minds Androgynous.-Philosopher's ordinary Language. N chemistry and nosology, by extending the degree to a certain point, the constituent proportion may be destroyed, and a new kind produced. I have known strong minds, with imposing, undoubting, Cobbett-like manners; but I have never met a great mind of this sort. And of the former, they are at least as often wrong as right. The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous. Great minds-Swedenborg's for instanceare never wrong, but in consequence of being in the right, but imperfectly. A philosopher's ordinary language and admissions, in general conversation or writings ad populum, are as his watch compared with his astronomical timepiece. He sets the former by the town-clock, not because he believes it right, but because his neighbours and his cook go by it. JANUARY 2, 1833. Juries.-Barristers' and Physicians' Fees.-Quacks.-Cæsarean Operation.-Inherited Disease.-Hope.* I CERTAINLY think that juries would be more conscientious, if they were allowed a larger discretion. But, after all, juries cannot be better than the mass out of which they are taken. And if juries are not honest and single-minded, they are the worst, because the least responsible, instruments of judicial or popular tyranny. I should be sorry to see the honorary character of the fees of barristers and physicians done away with. Though it seems a shadowy distinction, I believe it to be beneficial |