CURRENT LITERATURE. •
Westminster School, Past and Present. By Frederic H. Forshall. (Wyman and Sons.)—An account of Westminster School is naturally written in the first instance for Old Westminaters. These will look for an account of the Di minorum gentian?, as well as of the Di majorum.• Hence we find, in the list of worthies many obscure names, interesting of course to the clans which frequent Westminster, but of not much account in the eyes of the outside world. We have no reason, however, to complain of this. It is quite right in the com+ piler of each a work as this to include as much information as he can in it, and to postpone literary form to this important consideration. And, indeed, the worthies properly so called are amazingly numerous. Of late years the school has not done so much in the way of distinc- tion; but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had a succession of great alumni who • rose to high place in Church and State. But there are other interesting matters in the book besides the roll of scholars. There is a minute and naturally interest- ing account of the studies of the school as they were conducted in the slays of Queen Elizabeth, and afterwards under the Stuarts. Then we have the time-table for 1845, and that, again, for last year.- A chapter is given to " Prologues and Epilogues ;" some of the latter have been among the best specimens of modern Latin versification of the humorous kind. We should like to have seen two or three of the best of these given at full length, and some of the somewhat tedious lists of names displaced, if need be, to make room for them. We remember one in particular, in which the Bloomer costume, then a prominent topic, was ridiculed. Thais, dressed a in Bloomer, invited the hero to emigrate with her. He answers :—
" Ah I me mare terret Ipsaque to terre', horrida imago marts."
Mr. Forshall gives a number of Latin inscriptions and memorial verses, appending translatiols of his oivo—which, we feel bound to say, are somewhat wanting in point and not always very exact. The very pretty lines we give might well have been more forcibly • rendered "Tu nostrae memor asque seholae, dem vita manebat ; Musa nee immemores woe sink esss tui.
Ipso loci to mooret anions a-mourn, Et luctu pietas nos propriore ferit. Nohiscum assumes dooto puerascere luau, Fotlit et iugenitoa crudes seneeta sales. Chars Sena: Puer hoc to saltem carmine donat; Ingratum pueri nee tibi menus erit."
" To thee, our school's fond friend while life was thine, Our grateful Muse owes some memorial line ; • If e'en these cloisters mourn thy footsteps gone, What deeper grief should our affection own ! 'Teas thine to gild our sports—a boy-like sage— With jocund sallies of thy green old age Thou dear old man I slight record this of love! Yet from a boy 'twill not unwelcome prose."
As the compiler has given us a copy of his own iambics which seems • to have no connection with Westminster, we may be permitted to . remark that it is not usual to construct II with the subjunctive. -
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