A man must be very careful indeed of his Latin
who is in- clined to acts of ecclesiastical audacity, like Dean Stanley. He has been very severely attacked this week, nominally for using " coram" with a noun that denotes a thing and not a person (like sepulchre), in the inscription which he wrote for the marble bust of the Princess of Hohenlohe which has been placed by the Queen below the mausoleum of the Duchess of Kent at Frogmore, —really, no doubt, for letting Professor Max Midler lecture on Missions in Westminster Abbey. A letter in another column (as well as one which appeared in yesterday's Times, in which the Vulgate, not, of course, a classical authority, but still a good authority for a certain not inelegant Latinity, is quoted as using coram altari in the same sense), seems to show that the Dean made no blunder at all, though a number of infuriated Latinists, anxious to hit a blot in his reputation, in a peculiarly sensi- tive plexus of social nerves, if they could, thought that he had. There is something very quaint in this approximation to the sensitiveness of a domestic repute, in the feeling about a clergy- man's Latinity. The Prussian chaplain accused of the great Coram Street murder was hardly supposed to be more com- pletely extinguished for the time, than the English Dean accused of the great" Coram sepulehro " blunder.
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