ter, and none who belong to what they term the "arti vili," such as butchers, fishmongers, servants in livery, coachmen, cobblers, sausage-makers, and barbers. We may smile at these exceptions, but let it be remembered we have our own prejudices against surgeons and butchers on a jury; and that while a tailor is but a ninth part of a man in England, he does not so much as appear in the list of "arti vili” in Tuscany.

They hold themselves compelled to attend on any emergency, wherein their offices may be beneficial. Silence and exactness of discipline are strictly enforced on pain of expulsion. They are provided with the apparatus of our English Humane Society. It is their duty to convey the sick to the hospital, or from one house to another, as they may be required. If they are sent for, as it sometimes happens under peculiar circumstances, to attend the beds of the sick, they watch by them night and day, and perform every office of the kindest nurses; and that without respect of persons, for it was not long since that they performed this duty towards a Jew. Should they be witnesses, in the houses of the poor, to any painful scene of want, they are permitted to give relief in money out of their own pockets, and this is done to a considerable extent; and they are bound to make a report of the poverty of a sick person, when he is assisted by the Company from a fund raised by some of the Brothers, who undertake to go about the city, always in their usual disguise, with a box to crave alms for the sick poor. As these alms are divided weekly, and with a certainty against deception, a Florentine, or the stranger within his gates, inclined to be charitable, knows where to lodge his moncy to the best purpose.

For so many benefits to the public, such constancy, such toil, the rewards, beyond the honour of the Brotherhood, are small. When sick, provided he is a "Capo di Guardia," the stipend is six livres a week; if a "Giornante," only four; and he is visited by their own physician. Those of the third order have no claim in case of illness; but all are buried at the expense of the Company, and they possess a burial ground for themselves, bestowed on them by the Government. Their physician has fourteen crowns a year, their secretary sixteen— little more than honorary salaries; but their actual servants, whose time is fully employed, have sufficient wages for their support. There is also a small dower, should it be demanded, of ten crowns, granted to the daughters of such as have acted for a certain time as nurses to the sick. It is prohibited that the Brothers should receive any thing, on their own account, from the public, with the single exception of a draught of water.

In answer to my inquiries respecting their funds, I learned that they have enough, but are by no means rich. Their property lies in land and houses.

An abuse, of an aristocratical nature, has crept into the institution since the days of the Republic: nobles are made "Capi di Guardia,” without earning the dignity by diligence. Leopold the First frequently slipped on his sackcloth, and bore the litter in his turn among the Brothers. His son, the late Ferdinand, and the present Leopold, never paid the Company that personal respect. When Leopold the First became Emperor of Germany, he endeavoured to establish the

Misericordia at Vienna, without success. "La Compagnia della Consolazione," at Rome, is rather a company of guardians and attendants to a hospital; and among the imitations of the Misericordia in other parts of Italy, its best spirit is lost, while in all the principal towns of Tuscany it exists in the full force of the original in Florence. Tuscans have more humanity, in all the relations of life, than their neighbours; and in any urgent case, when the delay of a few minutes might be fatal, instead of waiting for the Brotherhood, they render every assistance at the moment. As an instance of this, it was but a few days since that two men nearly lost their lives in saving a girl who had thrown herself into the Arno. Whether a society of the Brotherhood of Mercy is necessary in London, or whether it could be established there, are questions not easy to determine. In the first place, Englishmen might object to the disguise, which is necessary to prevent the recognition of friends that would obstruct them in their duty; as well as for the sake of separating every thing tending to personal vanity from the pure benevolent feeling. No thanks are here due except to the Society in a body. There are no anniversary dinners, no toasts and sentiments with three times three, no blazing accounts in the newspapers of their activity, heroism, and charity. All goes on quietly, modestly. The Brothers know how much they are beloved, and are content without a display of their influence. Every mark of respect is however paid to them; the military present arms, and individuals take off their hats, whenever they pass the streets.

PARRIANA. NO. 11.

PARK's dislike to puns has been very justly noticed. But I remember on two different occasions, that he made a kind of Latin pun. At the first he laughed immoderately. I have since seen it in some publication, ascribed to somebody else. He was reaching a book from its shelf, when two octavo volumes came tumbling down upon each other. A volume of Hume's Essays had fallen upon a book of criticism by the Abbé du Bos. "There," said he, with a half-suppressed chuckling, "see what has happened;

Procumbit HUMI BOS."

The other occasion alluded to, was when he had a slight cold, and the door and window being accidentally opened at the same time, and a strong current of air having rushed in, "Stop, stop," said he, " that is too much. I am at present only

PAR levibus ventis"

Then he stopped and smiled; but recollecting the other part of the line, he finished it in rather a serious accent,

-volucrique similima somno."

He then shook his head, and said in a low voice, "I fear so. My life has hitherto been little more than a sleep; my proudest projects but day-dreams." We did not encourage so melancholy a current of ideas. Probably, in throwing a rapid glance over his literary life, conscience suddenly struck him, how few memorials of his great knowledge and powerful talents, he had left to survive him, and how much of time and opportunity he had wasted upon the fleeting and perishable controversies of the day.

He had, moreover, in general, a decided repugnance to plays upon words. It betrayed, he said, an intrinsic poverty in the language; rather, I could not help observing, a disputable proposition. He went on. "The richest

language will be found the least susceptible of puns. The Greek is too copious for puns. It supplies many words at the same time for every shade and variety of thought, and never drives you to use words of similar sound, but different acceptation. The Greek language is that music of the mind, which the slightest equivocation of words would derange and put out of tune. Not that there are no Greek puns. You will find plenty, if you look into Athenæus ; and some of Aristophanes's gave great delight to his audience; but then they were elaborated by mere force from the Attic language. They did not come to hand spontaneously, as the puns of an English punster; but they were hammered out, like the lightnings which were forged by the hammers of the Cyclops. Yet, Ælian gives us a tolerably good pun, which must have been an instantaneous one. He tells it of a Greek courtesan; for you know well enough, that the Greek courtesans were the only Grecian ladies who were at all accomplished. She happened to be in company with a conceited, loquacious traveller, who had wearied the whole party with the various places that he had seen, and the different countries that he had visited. And yet after all,' said she, addressing herself to the fop, 'after all the cities and towns you have seen, you appear never to have been at E.'* Now Sige was a well-known town in Attica, and the equivoque silenced him."

Parr was a great admirer of Bishop Jeremy Taylor, and in particular, of the Discourse on Friendship, and the Holy Living and Dying of that eminent divine. In Parr's sarcastic, but eloquent Dedication of Tracts by Warbur ton and a Warburtonian, where he deals a severe blow or two at Bishop Hurd for certain crawling but thriving qualities almost peculiar to that prelate, be speaks with delight of "often wandering amidst the luminous galaxy of Bishop Taylor." But I remember his observing, that it was a style, which dazzled by too much coruscation. The colours were too prismatic. He spoke in admiration of the unintermitted play of illustration and of fancy in Burke, who would have been as redundant as Jeremy Taylor, if he had been left to himself. "But then, Sir, Burke lived in an age when criticism had imposed sumptuary laws upon fine writing. Yet with all his taste, for no man had more, he sometimes forgets his restraints, and bounds, like Homer's horse, over his pastures, when he is emancipated from the chariot." He then rolled out the lines, in which that fine simile is enshrined.

He recommended every student of English composition to become familiarly acquainted with Jeremy Taylor, and Hall, not omitting Fentham's Resolves, as models of eloquence. Few persons, he said, could obtain the copiousness of Taylor, but to fill even a bucket at his salient and sparkling fountain, was no mean acquirement.

It was Parr's practice in the pulpit, to supply certain lacunæ in his sermon with extemporary passages; and these were always highly impressive. He frequently carried with him a volume of Ogden's Sermons†, which are remarkably short, and preached one, sometimes two of them. On one occasion, I remember that at the close of an able sermon of his own, upon the immortality of the soul, after animadverting upon those who treated that great truth with levity, he pulled from his cassock a piece of printed paper, much stained, and apparently very old. He then continued his sermon from the paper. It ran nearly thus: "But to leave those men, whose souls ought to dwell, like Nebuchadnezzar's, in the body of a beast, I will conclude this discourse with an acknowledgement and confession, of great solace, and unutterable delight, which I have found in these dismal and calamitous times, when I contemplated my soul's immortality:-that though she is now tossed about on a stormy sea of affliction, yet, at length, a higher mountain than Ararat is prepared for her to rest upon :-that though, like the wearied dove of the deluge, she now flutters upon a wild waste of waters, which know no shore, so that she can find no rest to her feet; yet she beholds a

* Silence.

Edited by Dr. Hallifax.

window in the celestial ark above, opening wide its friendly portal to receive her. Our life is a warfare; but we have been redeemed at a high price. The great captain of our faith will reward his faithful soldiers better, than with a crown of thorns. Let us not fear; he, who when he gave up the ghost, recommended his soul into the hands of his father, will not leave our souls in hell, nor suffer his Holy ones to see corruption."

Parr told me, that this was not from Jeremy Taylor, as from the spirit and style I had conjectured,-but a fragment from the writings of Alexander Ross, whose works were now almost forgotten, owing, perhaps, in some measure, to the sarcastic distich of Hudibras, whose

Philosopher

Had read Alexander Ross over.

He had rescued nearly the whole volume from a shop, where they sold butter and candles, and thought himself fortunate in having redeemed it from such base uses. He said that it was a discourse written during the civil wars, in answer to Sir Kenelm Digby.

Of Gilbert Wakefield Parr thought well, as a man of virtue and of a stern, unaccommodating love of liberty; but the angry passions, which tinctured all his writings, deducted, he thought, a great deal from their value and usefulness. The tone and temper of his criticisms betrayed, he said, a petulance and impatience unworthy of a scholar. He did not approve in general of Wakefield's conjectural criticism. "Emendations of the text of ancient authors ought not to be entrusted to rash hands. We ought to approach them with timid solicitude, as a son examines the wounds of his parent. Some of Wakefield's substitutions were not unauthorized merely, but quite tasteless." Amongst others, he pointed out a reading, which he had adopted into the text of his Lucretius. It occurred in the fine and affecting picture of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, in the beginning of the first book, where the ministers of the sacrifice concealed the weapon, with which they were to perform it, to spare the feelings of Agamemnon.

Et hunc propter ferrum celare ministros.

Now," said he, "the booby for celare reads celerare, as if they were to hasten her death, to soothe the agonized heart of her father. Sir, it is a sacrifice as atrocious as Agamemnon's! No man can be a good critic, who is not well read in human nature."

I asked Parr whether in the verse alluding to that sacrifice, Lucretius did not mean superstition by the word religion.

use.

Tantum religio potnit suadere malorum.

66

He said, "Yes. In the time of Lucretius, the word superstitio was not in But if you wish to see the distinction and the etymology of the two words, you will find an excellent chapter on the subject in Aulus Gellius." Recurring to the subject of Gilbert Wakefield, he spoke of his having abused Porson in some of his remarks on the Greek tragedians. "And, Sir, can you conceive why he abused him? It was because Porson, in his editions of the six plays of Euripides, had ample opportunities of speaking in praise of Wakefield's emendations, of which he did not avail himself." Here he laughed heartily. Quod occasio labores meos collaudandi subvenerit, quam prætermisit omnino." This led him to notice several instances of the puerility of commentators and editors. He specified the ludicrous absurdity of Brunck, who, in the Preface to his Aristophanes, made a grave apology for the oversights and imperfections of the edition, by remarking how much his attention had been interrupted by young Master Brunck, a child whom he was very fond of, who was capering round the room upon a walking-stick ;-quod parvulus meus, cui valde sum devinctus, baculo gestiebat, &c. &c. &c., or words to that effect. Bentley, he remarked, was a giant amongst them. "When he was angry, Sir, his roar shook the forests!" He spoke highly of that great scholar's Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, as

an example of the union of eloquence and reason in the highest possible degree. It was only not inferior to another noble specimen of intellectual gladiatorship, Gibbon's Vindication of his chapters, in reply to the two Oxford dunces, Davies and Chelsum. He observed to me on another occasion, when we were talking of Bentley, that he himself had no bigotry with respect to the Eolic Digamma. Homer's harmony would be felt whether we interposed the digamma or not. The solar years rolled on the same, before days were intercalated, as they have done since. Besides, a hard breathing made a consonant of two vowels.

I told him that Mr. Windham was strongly adverse to unnecessary innovations upon our language. He had termed them wanton defilements of the old English well, and had good-humouredly reproved Sir John Hippisley for using the phrase, "advocate a cause," which, he said, was an American corruption, and imported from Congress into our houses of Parliament; at the same time remarking, that Dr. Franklin had himself written a paper to admonish his countrymen against that, among many other innovations of the English language, equally licentious. Parr said, "Windham is right, and Windham is excellent authority. His discernment never slumbers. Depend on it, the lawyers first introduced the phrase here. They are great corruptors. Our tongue is considerably Latinized, it is true; but when we introduce a Latin word, as we are obliged to do it from the same causes that made Lucretius introduce Greek ones,

Propter egestatem linguæ, et rerum novitatem,'

care should be taken that the Latin words should be of a good age. Adrocare aliquem, in Cicero's time, did not mean to defend any one, but to summon him. The verb was not often used actively. The modern phrase of "advocating a cause," was not a Latin phrase till the middle ages. You will find the verb so used in Ducange's Lexicon of Middle Latinity. Lawyers corrupted all languages; even their own Norman French. Quoad hoc was a legal barbarism. Quoad hujus would be correct."

I told him also that Windham went so far, as to object to the phrase "rallying round a standard,” “rallying round the Constitution," &c. &c. "There," he observed, "there are his anti-Gallican prejudices peeping out. It is a good phrase, and may be found (I think he said) in Clarendon. Why, sir, if Windham means to banish every French word from our language, he must have a grammatical alien act." Talking of lawyers again, he said "that Lord Kenyon, who was an honest, though choleric man, but a bad scholar, was fond of quoting Latin from the bench, and had once quoted a whole line from Juvenal, as an aphorism of Lord Nottingham's. It was in some argument in a criminal case, when the judge observed, that it was a maxim of my Lord Nottingham's,-

-Cunctatio longa est,'

and an excellent maxim it was, and every way worthy of Lord Nottingham's humanity and good sense. Kenyon did not know that it was a verse at all; much less that it was one of Juvenal's!"

I applied to Parr for the explanation of an obscure passage in the Agamemnon of schylus,-when Clytemnestra sees a messenger coming in haste from the Grecian camp, for so I think he is, she observes, "for the parching dust, the conterminous sister of the mud, tells me so."

this reason.

μαρτυρεῖ δέ μοι κάσις

Πηλού ξύνουρος διψια κόνις τάδε.

For

"It is an audacious metaphor," said Parr. "The literal meaning is, the parching dust, the conterminous sister of the mud, tells me this. But why sister, and why a conterminous, that is, to the same extent, a sister? That which in summer is dust, is converted to its whole extent into mud in winter. Speaking of the piety and the devotional feeling that pervade that noble drama, he remarked that, from beginning to end, it was a magnificent hymn to the Supreme Being.”