THE NEW EDITION OF LUCAN'S " PHA.RSALIA."* As this edition
is expressly designed for "Students at the University and the higher forms in schools," it is difficult to understand why Mr. Haskings has deviated from the common spelling which his fellow-labourer follows. It would be waste of time, indeed, to discuss this deviation; but unless a great change has come over tutors and students of Latin daring the past decade, Mr. Haskings will meet with no gratitude from those for whom he has written. His substitution of " u " for "v" before a vowel in words that do not begin with a capital— for he writes " Varna " and " narins," " Veios " and " uer "—may be characterised, not uncharitably, as " lackadaisical and whimsical," and must shift for itself as best it can. There is an additional touch of wilfulness in it, as Mr. Haskings deliberately "makes no attempt to produce a critical text ;" but the question which this wilfulness raises is clearly below discussion. His notes—so far as we have examined them— are meritorious chiefly fm their brevity. But this brevity has pitfalls of its own to cope with. In the famous phrase which Byron has made a household word for thousands who will never read a line of Liman, University students and schoolboys may easily miss something which the "natural selection" of a wily examiner will forcibly bring home to them. " Stat magni nominis umbra" is the phrase in ques- tion, and for its elucidation Mr. Haskiugs gives no more than an easy rendering of the last three words in it,—" the shadow of a mighty name." What, then, is his nominative to dad? Pompeius, perhaps; but might not umbra be Lucan's nomina- tive, and might not his meaning be, " the shadow cast by his great name is stable,"—or, paraphrastically, "is his stay," or "is his strength "P Again, it is possible that umbra may be an ablative, and the meaning may be, "his stay lies in the shadow cast by his name, the Great" (Magnus). In any case, the notion that Pompey was only the shadow of his former self, so far as his " great name " went, is disputable, if not untenable. A few lines lower (i., 143) we find more food for reflection on the possible exigencies of examiners Sed non in Czesare tantum Nomen erat nec fame ducis." For Mr. Haskings is satisfied with treating tantum as an adverb, "not a mere name alone," and with ignoring the fact that it is conceivably and probably an adjective. And in another famous senientia," Salyer nocuit differre paratis," it is by no means so clear as the imperious brevity of the note implies, that pantile is masculine. It is plain, however, that this edition marks a great advance over any others for the practical use of the students for whom it has been compiled; and if the Pharsalia were worth reading through continuously, the pains which Mr. Haskings has taken would deserve warm recognition. But the Pharsalia has outlived the reputation which it undeservedly enjoyed from Dante's days to Bentley's, and the best use that could be made of it for educational purposes was indicated more than half-a-century ago by Bernhardy. He thought—and his view seems to have found acceptance with his ,industrions countrymen—that Lucan's masterpiece was a work that would not repay the coat of editing in the thorough-going way which German editors of the classics so meritoriously take when they think that the game is worth the candle. He held, therefore, that an anthology of Lucan's great passages and senteatice—we shall return to this word directly—would be the best form in which his undoubted. merits could be best disclosed. A perusal of Mr. Heitland's " Introduction " will make few readers doubt that Bernhardy's view is correct; bat it is difficult to speak of that "Introduction" without falling into the Scylla of carping criticism, or into the Charybdis of misleading eulogy.
m..,13.!la'aragongiriVt, vEl.meIZO`d71rAN.otr",471.2.:Neati"sgaii • The Bride of the Nile. By Georg Mere. From the German, by Clara Fell. Sons. 1837. New York: William 5. Gottsberger. London Trebuer arod Co. As Mr. Heitland, however, has chosen to speak of the result of his labour as "still lamentably crude and incomplete," and as he describes it generally as "a kind of work " which " brings neither money nor repute," he is hardly justified, we think, in asking from "the few who will read his pages an indulgent reception." The money that he will fail to make, and the tiresome interruptions that he has met with while " working," as he puts it, "at litera- ture as literature," and while tasting the reward that "the study even of a second-rate author " ensures to its pursuer, are matters that concern no reader of Loma of any sort or condition. It is more to the purpose, perhaps, to be able to show, out of Mr. Heit- land's own mouth, that Lucan is hardly entitled to be considered even a second-rate author. Shelley seems to have shared a por- tion of Dante's enthusiasm for Lucan, for the man of Corduba rises amongst "the inheritors of unfulfilled renown " to welcome Adonais. But without stopping to inquire too curiously into the precise position of such "inheritors," it may be said, pace Mr. Heitland, that Lucan's portion of renown has been quite as great as it would have been if length of days had been vouchsafed to him,—or, to pot the case more truly, if he had secured length of days for himself by common prudence. Speculations of the kind that a proposition like this suggests are barren, and see leave them to consider what Mr. Heitland has himself laid down as reasons for justifying the low place that the revolutions of the suns are apparently assigning to the Pharsalia :— " Rhetoric and Stoic dogma were," he says, "an essential part of Lucas's family heritage ; they were also the staple of his mental training. For a mach-petted, quick-witted youth, plunged into such a society as that of Rome in the first century of our era, hardly any training could be more mischievous. In most natures the self. conscious morality of Stoicism tended to beget an unwarrantable arrogance and contempt for others ; while the rhetoric of the schools, made up of phrase-worrying and devotion to tinsel ornament, was well suited to make young minds mistake words for things, and vitiate a man's taste through life. In an old man perhaps the evil might have been found corrected, his taste mellowed, and his pride abased, by the experience of life and the chastening uses of the world. But in a youth at least this was well-nigh impossible : and young Lucas, puffed up with presumed merits and the applause of the lecture-room, became a shallow rhetorician intoxicated with the exuberance' of his own fatal fluency, ready to write and declaim on any subject in verse or prose."
Mr. Heitland may say, of course, that these remarks apply to the early crudities of the author of Pharsalia. But the first three books of that ultra-civilised epic were written when Lucas was in the early bloom of his crudities ; and we, at least, have no doubt, though Mr. Heitland has, that Lucan reached the high- water mark of his versified declamations in the first book of the Pliarsalia. Mr. Heitland reads imitandus in Quintilian'e brief criticism of Lucan,—" Oratoribus potins (foam poetic imi- tandus." We greatly prefer Zumpee reading, annunterandus, because Quintilian was not the man to travel out of his record to give lessons to poets. The reading, however, is of no great importance otherwise ; and the great critic's meaning was clearly to class Lucan as an orator rather than a poet. And here, as Mr. Heitland has elaborately worked out Lucan's relation to -Virgil, so far as verbal matters go, we cannot help saying that we would gladly have exchanged his thankless and practically unreadable lists of phrases, for two or three fine rhetorical passages from Virgil set in contrast with the pick of Lucan's. A critic of Mr. Heitland's reading and insight would have no difficulty in showing how the pure gold of Virgil's oratory—quite apart from its poetry—outshines the pale and ineffectual shimmer of Lucan's pinchbeck. It would be needless to say more than Mr. Heitland has briefly said about the worthlessness of the Pharsalia as a historical document. But this utter worthlessness does at least add piquancy to the way in which its author assures Cesar of immortality because "Pliarsalia noslra v,vet." We have nothing further to say of Mr. Heitland's unequal preface beyond expressing our belief that he might safely have allowed the eealeuliee, which Quintilian praised so highly, to cover something more than the poet's ivivlcac. These deserve the epithets which Mr. Heitland gives to them; but by eenteniice Quintilian evidently means something more than these shreds and patches of trite and commonplace morality.
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