WATSON'S LIFE OF PORSON.*
Tars book is not unlike an orange, which has passed into the con- dition generally known as " sleepy." There is the colour, and the pips, and the inside, and the rind, in an undeniably sound state, and a certain portion of juice may be extracted by compression; but everything like freshness is totally absent: nulli ilium pueri, optaaere puelke. The lives of men of letters have often been said to be necessarily destitute of interest, a belief which an Essayist lately reviewed by us opposed, by suggesting that the man who could make his thoughts interesting to readers, must have had something inte- resting in his life to correspond to them. The remark is acute, but probably true in its full extent only of imaginative writers. It may be doubted whether it would apply to historians or philosophers, un- less there has been something exceptional in their career; still more to scholars, whose success in their peculiar pursuit cannot very well depend upon circumstances which can be made interesting, except as having happened to a man famous in other respects. Much more is this likely to be the case, when the scholarship is of a kind the results of which are, by their nature, confined to the appreciation of the learned world, and are not, like a good deal of antiquarian and expository criticism, capable of being popularized by inferior and more fluent pens. Porson's fame chiefly depends upon his achievements in a branch of scholarship which probably seems the most useless trifling to non-scholastic readers, and for which even the scholar who entirely appreciates its importance, does not always feel very warm enthu- siasm. He might, therefore, be looked upon as a very unfavourable subject for a biographer, had there not been that something ex- ceptional in his career to which we have alluded. Had he been a scholar like Fynes Clinton, who led a simple and regular life, and per- haps never caused or felt mach enmity, nobody would have known much about him while living or have written much about him when dead. But Porson was celebrated in his lifetime; in learned circles as a prodigy of erudition, in society as a convivial companion whose power to amuse was only equalled by his capacity to imbibe, and in controversy as an opponent the vigour of whose expression was as much to be dreaded as the justice of his criticism. On his death, therefore, great interest was excited, and the reviews and magazines contained numerous biographical articles, containing perhaps many inaccuracies, but a tolerable store of anecdote. Since that time our knowledge of his habits—not on the best side—has been enriched by the "Porsoniana" of Rogers's "Table Talk," and by the full and excellent sketch by Mr. Luard, which appeared in one of the later numbers of the Cambridge Essays. Of all these sources Mr. Watson has availed himself, and his account seems to be correct in its details. He seems to have collected his materials diligently enough, and has put them together in a perspicuous form. To the minor points of notes, indices, and the like, he has also paid proper attention, and there is nothing in the getting up of the volume to find fault with. But as a biography, it is quite devoid of flavour or spirit. It is not en- couraging-to find the following platitude as the very first sentence. "The charms of fiction are much less forcible than those of truth," and the moral strain continued by considerations on the attractive- ness of biography in general. Mr. Watson thinks a stupid remark quoted from Styan Thirlby, not only worth extract but comment, and a page or two further, rashes into a dangerous novelty of comparison, by likening one sort of life to a "smoothly flowing river," and ano- ther to "a swiftly rushing flood, agitated and broken with rocks, trunks of trees, and other obstacles." In sketching the career of Gilbert Wakefield—upon whom he bears rather hardly—he says he thought Pitt "a monster, dire as any that had ever issued from the &man flood" and " adopted the vilest Jacobinical notions," which led to a sentence of two years imprisonment, "a punishment which his sedition fully deserved." Mr. Watson's way of thinking and writing, in truth, seem to belong to another age than the present.
• The Life of Richard Porson. By the Rev. John Selby Watson, ILA, Milli' Longman& poison was fond of smoking, and said that when smoking began to gm out of fashion, learning began to go out of fashion too. "Had he lived" says Mr. Watson, in his most edifying manner, "to the present day, he might have seen smoking revived more than ever, but chiefly among those who have little pretensions to learning." There is a sort of tame sententiousness about him which has a cloying effect upon the reader, and makes the book a difficult one to get through, though the matter is, after all, not uninteresting. Some few inaccuracies have been already noticed by our contemporaries ; but the book is in general sound in this respect. But what does Mr. Watson mean by his allusion to "the cups which, unlike Bishop Berkeley's tar-water, cheer, but inebriate." Has he found a prior parentage for Cowper's well known line ? or does he mean to imply that tar-water is a cheerful beverage? It is extremely wholesome, like Mr. Watson's sentiments, but both are as little likely to produce hilarity as intoxication.
The book is, on the whole, amiable and blameless ; but it wants both vigour of narration, and more decided sympathy with its sub- ject. Mr. Watson's scholarship appears to be sufficient for his task, and he shows no ignorance of any of the sources which might eluci- date it. But if Porson lives in any dec'ree in his pages it is owing to his own inherent vitality, not to the skill with which his biographer reproduces him. Mr. Watson is tolerant, however, and must be thanked for having abstained from "improving" the career of his hero for the benefit of youth. He seems, indeed, anxious to find excuses for him, and shows a generous appreciation of the sterling parts of his character. But we do not fancy that he would much have enjoyed Porson's society, for he makes no attempt to give us an idea of what it was like, and does not seem to have very strongly realized the aspect of the time in which he moved. Materials might have been found in works like "Gunning's Reminiscences," and else- where, for showing what was the state of society in Cambridge in the last century, and what was the standard of scholarship generally existing ; the latter being a most important point, not only in esti- mating Porson's talents for the acquisition of language, but for appreciating his genius. For genius in fact it is, which in such cases enables a man to set before himself a higher standard of ex- cellence than that acknowledged by those around him ; and it is the adoption of this higher standard which constitutes Porson's claim to the veneration of scholars. Scholarship, of course, is progressive like everything else, and the amount of knowledge of Greek and Latin which Porson actually possessed has, probably, been often ex- ceeded since his time. It may, perhaps, be questioned whether any man has ever had a more thorough familianty with the Greek dra- matists, but of Greek literature in general his knowledge was not proportionately deep. " Of Thucydides he confessed, according to Mr. Maltby, that he knew comparatively little, and that when he read him he was obliged to mark with a pencil, in almost every page, passages which he did not understand. Being once asked whether he had read all Plutarch, he replied, 'He is too much for me' "- though whether in this he alluded to the difficulty of the style or to some other objection, Mr Watson does not tell us. Such a con- fession as this would seem ludicrous in a Greek professor of our own time, and we can as little fancy its having been made by one of the Scaligers or Stephenses. The comparative narrowness of Por- son's knowledge arose partly from his indolence, and his waste of time in calligraphy and conviviality, partly from his having devoted himself to doing one thing and that thoroughly. He found the science of Greek tragic metre very imperfect, and he left it on an established basis. He did the work so well that be left very little for any one else to do, and all who have since written on the subject have clone little more than arrange his materials. Yet even in the science of metres, though he did all that he professed, he may be said only to have professed a portion of the field. He did not un- dertake to bestow the same attention on the irregular choral metres as upon the anapmstic and iambic, and for acquiring the former the scholar of the present day is not so much indebted to the works of Porson as to subsequent German writers.
The achievements in learning which made Porson so famous are less appreciated now than formerly—a result due partly to their own nature, partly to the different and wider range of modern scholarship. On the one hand, the work done by Porson was such that, if well done, it did not require to be done again. His discoveries, when once proved, remained where they were, and could not be either ex- tended or reviewed from time to time, like characters of books and men. They took the place of rules, and simply had to be observed by all who wished to read or write Greek tragic verse, whatever excellence they might show in interpreting or translating. He wished, however, to claim for verbal criticism a higher position than it can possibly hold. He complained that the verbal critic was looked upon in much the same light as the maker of a dictionary, and unjustly placed below (what we should now call) the "expository" critic. To settle what an author really wrote, was, in Porson's opinion, a much more useful task than to teach the public what to admire or dislike in him, and ought therefore to stand higher; a notion, of which Mr. Watson points out the fallacy, reminding us that, however indis- pensable textual criticism may be, the indispensable is not, as the world runs, always the most esteemed. In modern times, so far from believing expository criticism a task which every man (as Person thought) can perform for himself, we have developed it to a greater extent than ever, and materials have been furnished for un- derstanding the spirit of ancient literature, and bringing before us the actual life of its writers and readers, with far greater perfection than would even have been thought possible at the beginning of the cen- tury. The idea of scholarship itself has also undergone a considerable extension, and probably Porson himself would, if now alive, be the first to acknowledge the very great value of the light which the sciences of grammar and etymology in general have thrown upon lan- guage and the history of man. His opinions on the usefulness of composition in the classical languages would be more welcome to the most "advanced" school of the present day than to those who still be- lieve in the efficacy of a thorough training in Greek and Latin, in them- selves rather than in their affinities, as the best preparation for other intellectual pursuits. He thought, for instance, that the "Muse Etonenses" were only fit to be "put behind the fire ;" and we find nothing in his opinions to show that he would have in any way approved of the translations from Shakspeare into the language of Euripides, for which the "Porson Prize" has been made the reward. The dilemma which he proposes—that a modern copy of Latin verses must be either a cento or a set of guesses, and therefore either secondhand or, probably, full of mistakes—is not to be evaded; but it wholly leaves out of view the value of such exercises as means of awakening an attention to the peculiarities of classical style to a degree which nothing else will do, and the equally important lesson they give a translator in his own language, by forcing him thoroughly to understand the passage before him. Person never took kindly to the practice of composition while at Eton, and though his charades and his celebrated translation of "Three children sliding on the ice" into Greek iambics show with what ease he could exercise the faculty, he always seems to have underrated it. The acuteness which enabled Porson to detect fragments of verse lying imbedded in Greek prose authors—specimens of which he has collected in a long note on v. 139 of the " Medrea"—was equally present in matters beyond the sphere of Greek and Latin scholar- ship. Thus he saw through the Ireland forgeries, by which so many learned and clever men were taken in, and refused to sign the paper to which they had appended their names, observing that he was slow to subscribe to articles of faith. His greatest achievement in general literature was, of course, the " Letters to Travis," in which he is now acknowledged to have disproved the genuineness of 1 John, v. 7, the verse containing the text of the "three heavenly witnesses."
Mr. Watson gives a full and clear account of this controversy, for which his readers will be obliged to him, and he has also a chapter which will be interesting to scholars on Porson's emendations, which certainly show a marvellous sagacity, combined with a moderation in its exercise, which is unparalleled by any other commentator. He also gives several specimens of Porson's humorous productions, which, as they were what he wrote with the greatest ease, perhaps reflect his mind with the greatest fidelity. They give us some idea of what his conversation might have been, a point in which this volume is—perhaps of necessity—very deficient. Scarcely anything of Porson's talk has been preserved, but either its intrinsic merit or the geniality with which it was uttered, made him the most engrossing of companions. His extraordinary memory interfered, we should imagine, not a little with his original faculty, and great part of the intellectual treat to be expected by his hearers consisted of recita- tions from books, which seem always to have been present at the right moment and with an exactitude of reference which bordered on the ludicrous. The ruling passion was shown most strongly at the time of his death, when it appeared that he found more trouble in speak- ing English than in uttering Greek. Mr. Watson's biography, though we have not been able to recom- mend it as entirely satisfactory, will nevertheless probably raise Porson in the opinion of many who have only a vague idea of his powers and propensities. The book is not otherwise than an impar- tial one, and those who wish to go into details which Mr. Inutrd'a able essay could not admit, will be able to pursue them at leisure and with abundant material in Mr. Watson's pages.
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