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'Venio nunc ad testes; in quibus docebo non modo nullam fidem et auctoritatem, sed ne speciem quidem esse aut imaginem testium.—— Etenim fidem primum ipsa tollit consensio, quæ late facta est compromisso Sardorum et conjuratione rogitata. Deinde illa cupiditas quæ suscepta est spe et promissione præmiorum. Postremo ipsa Natio, cujus tanta vanitas est, ut libertatem a servitute nulla re alia, nisi mentiendi licentia distinguendam putet. Neque ego Sardorum querellis moveri nos nunquam oportere aio. Non sum aut tam inhumanus, aut tam alienus a Sardis, præsertim cum frater meus nuper ab his decesserit, cum rei frumentaria Gn. Pompeii missu præfuisset. Qui et ipse illis pro sua fide et humanitate consuluit, et eis vicissim percarus et jucundus fuit. Pateat vero hoc perfugium dolori, pateat justis querellis: conjuratio vi intercludatur, obsidietur insidiis. Neque hoc in Sardis magis quam in Gallis, in Afris, in Hispanis. Damnatus est L. Albucius, et C. Megaboccus ex Sardinia, nonnullis etiam laudantibus Sardis. Ita fidem majorem varietas ipsa faciebat. Testibus enim æquis, tabulis incorruptis tenebantur. Nunc est una vox, una mens non expressa dolore sed simulata, neque hujus injuriis, sed promissis aliorum et premiis excitata. At creditum est aliquando Sardis; et fortasse credetur aliquando; si integri venerint, si incorrupti, si sua sponte, si non alicujus impulsu, si soluti, si liberi. Que si erunt, tamen sibi credi gaudeant et mirentur. Cum vero omnia absint, tamen se non respicient, non gentis suæ famam perhorrescent?'—p. 11.

Mr. Mai detected also, in another of the Bobian MSS. which contained the acts of the council of Chalcedon in Latin, some short unpublished fragments of three other orations of Cicero, viz. in P. Clodium et Curionem, de are alieno Milonis, et de rege Alexandrino, with ancient commentaries upon them, and upon the orations pro Archia, pro Sylla, pro Planco, in Vatinium. It not having been known before, that Cicero had ever composed an oration de ære alieno Milonis, the learned editor exclaims with pardonable, but perhaps ludicrous enthusiasm, that this one discovery affords a sufficient ground for extolling the singular felicity of our age.' The author of the commentary he supposes to be Asconius Pædianus. But there are some expressions scattered here and there, which seem to bespeak the Latinity of an age more recent than that of Asconius.

From the same palimpsestus are published parts of eight speeches of Q. Aurelius Symmachus, a Roman orator very celebrated in his day, but hitherto known to the moderns only by his Epistles. He is said by Macrobius to have been 'nullo veterum minor,' and is highly extolled for his eloquence by St. Ambrose, and by the Christian poet Prudentius. These fragments of his panegyrical orations, which seems to have been the only style of speaking much practised in the latter ages of the Roman empire, are considerable, and certainly curious. They manifest a luxuriant imagination and great command of words; but these are accompanied with the defects incidental to the state of literature and

liberty

liberty in which he lived, viz. a redundance of puerile conceits, and a tone of base and abject adulation. We think that it is easy to perceive in the orations of Symmachus the rudiments of the artificial and exaggerated eloquence of modern Italy.

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Next in the list stand the works of M. Cornelius Fronto, tutor to the emperors M. Aurelius and L. Verus, extracted from the same copy of the acts of the council of Chalcedon. Of Fronto, who was a very celebrated author in his day, we had scarcely any thing before this discovery, which has brought to light ninety-six Latin Epistles to and from Fronto, two books de Orationibus,' fragments of some orations, of his treatise ad M. Antonium de Bello Parthico,' of his Principia Historiæ,' of his Laudes Fumi et Pulveris,' and 'Laudes Negligentiæ,' and lastly, seven Epistles written in Greek. To these the editor has subjoined a collection of those fragments of Fronto which are extant in more recent writers. Amongst the epistles are several from the Emperors Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Lucius Verus, which will be read with great interest, and which are highly honourable both to Fronto and to his royal pupils. Several fragments of ancient Latin poets, now lost, are interspersed.

At the end of the second volume, the editor has added the Exempla Elocutionum, which have been hitherto usually attributed to Arusianus Messus; but which, in a MS. of the Ambrosian Library, are ascribed to Cornelius Fronto. The MS. however is very modern, and not one of the Codices Bobiani. Our opinion is, that it is not the work of Fronto. It is scarcely credible that a philosopher in the time of Antoninus Pius should have employed himself in noting down the common idioms of his native tongue, e. g. 'Plenus hac re. Virg. Georg. ii. 4. tuis hic omnia plena muneribus. Post. interposita fu casus alterius. Id. vi. 409. Longo post tempore venit.'

We We come next to some fragments of Plautus, and some commentaries on Terence. The former are taken from a palimpsestus which Mr. Mai considers to be as ancient as the time of the Antonines. It contains all the published comedies of Plautus, except the Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, and Curculio, but in a mutilated state; and, besides these, some fragments of the Vidularia, one of those plays which Varro considered to be the undoubted work of Plautus. The MS. from which the scholia on Terence and some pictorial illustrations are taken, is of the ninth century.

In the same volume, we have the complete oration of Isæus, de hæreditate Cleonymi, of which before we possessed about onethird. This, however, is not taken from a palimpsestus, but from a MS. of the fourteenth century. And here we cannot refrain from expostulating with Mr. Mai, for indulging in that

prolixity

prolixity of disquisition upon trite and obvious points, for which the Italian prose-writers are generally remarkable. We have in these volumes long dissertations upon the merits of Cicero, Plautus, Terence, and Isæus, which we conceive to have been pretty well elucidated some hundred years ago. This savours a little of book-making. After Isæus, follows an oration of Themistius, prefaced of course with a Themistii Commendatio.

The last publication of Mr. Mai is an Epitome of part of the Antiquitates Romana of Dionysius Halicarnessensis, extending from the year of the city 315 to the year 685, which is valuable, inasmuch as this portion of the original work is not known to exist. The MS. from which this Epitome is published is very recent; and the editor has omitted so much of it as relates to the eleven first books of the history, in doing which he has, in our opinion, acted injudiciously. He supposes that this Epitome is the same as that which is said by Photius to have been made by Dionysius himself; but it seems pretty clear that this is not the work to which Photius and Stephanus Byzantinus allude; for, as an Italian scholar, Professor Ciampi, has judiciously observed, it is not, properly speaking, an Epitome, but should rather be entitled Excerpta. It is obviously made upon the same plan with the Excerpta Legationum, &c. which were first published by Fulvius Ursinus. These fragments are given to the world in a most unscholar-like manner, in capital letters, without any accents or spirits, which are frequently of the greatest consequence in determining the true reading, and for omitting which there was no reason, as the MS. is not old enough to be without them. We e are presented, as a matter of course, with a long discussion of the merits of Dionysius, which the learned editor, with an excusable partiality, estimates more highly than perhaps they deserve. After describing him as endowed with imaginable requisite for a good historian, he concludes, 'Atque ut rem uno verbo expediam, historiam nusquam absolutiorem reperies, quum a Dionysio discesseris.' And again, Ecce tibi Aumen orationis aureum fundit Dionysius, magnificoque verborum apparatu, al'a sensuum ubertate, exquisita disserendi elegantia, plurimis artis lenociniis adhibitis miram propinat lectoribus voluptatem.' To these animated eulogies of the Italian scholar, we will oppose the judgment of a more sagacious, though less humane critic, from the colder temperature of Germany. Dionysius historiam scribit, non ut homo civilis, non ut auctor pragmaticus, sed plane ut professor, h. e. ludimagister. Grammaticum dissimulare non novit. Sophistarum ad modum sæpe locorum declamat. De rebus, e. c. de causis legum, interdum perquam inepte disputat atque pueriliter. Nimis perspicue Romanis palpatur.-Præterea dictione utitur ita prorsus peregrina et abnormi, ut cum Xenophontea aut Thucydidea

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comparata, eodem sit loco habenda, quem Apuleiana latinitas ad Livianam tenet.'

On the whole, although the discoveries which Mr. Mai has made in the Ambrosian library, are curious and interesting to the classical antiquary, they are not of that importance which the learned editor himself attaches to them; nor do they satisfy the expectations which the first intelligence of them had excited in our minds. We fear that no further hope is to be entertained, of recovering any material part of those treasures of antiquity, which have now for so many ages been lost. Even the rolls of papyrus from Herculaneum, as far as they have hitherto been deciphered, have proved to be of little value or importance. Some interesting discoveries have been made by Mr. Schneider amongst the MSS. of a dissolved monastery at Breslau, but no addition to the stock of authors. We are anxious that some able scholar should search the Laurentian library, at Florence, of which even the printed catalogue, so ably compiled by Bandini, proves that it contains much deserving of investigation but in addition to the MSS. specified, we are informed that a great number have, within a few years, been added to the library from suppressed convents, of which there is no catalogue. There is one circumstance which might lead us to expect something from the libraries of the lower part of Italy, (especially those of Naples, which have not been carefully examined,) and that is the late prevalence of the Greek language in those countries which were anciently called Magna Græcia.

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Galateus, who lived about the year 1500, assures us that when he was a boy, they spoke Greek in Callipolis, (Gallipoli,) a town on the east coast of the Bay of Taranto. And Barrius, who lived about fifty years later, says in his Antiquitates Calabria,' that the Archiepiscopal church of Rossano, in upper Calabria, retained the Greek tongue and liturgy till his time: and this was the case in many churches of Calabria till the middle of the fifteenth century. It appears that Barlaam, a Calabrian monk, who instructed Petrarca in Greek, spoke it as his native tongue, and knew but little of Latin.

Before our readers take leave of Mr. Mai, it may be as well to inform them, that He is preparing for publication a fac-simile of a very ancient MS. containing about 800 lines of the Iliad, with paintings illustrative of the descriptions of the poem. The character of this MS. which is of parchment, is very remarkable. On one side of the leaf are the paintings, on the reverse the poetry; but this reverse had been covered with silk paper, on which are written some scholia, and the arguments of some books of the Iliad. Mr. Mai separated the paper from the parchment, which bast he thinks was written on at least 1400 years ago. The Aristarchean

tarchean edition of Homer appears to have furnished the text of this MS. From another of the Ambrosian manuscripts, M. Andrea Mystoxides, a Greek of Corcyra, has published the oration of Isocrates Tepì avridóσews, with an addition of about eighty pages; but he has not fulfilled his task in a very critical or workmanlike

manner.

ART. III. Narrative of a Residence in Ireland during the Summer of 1814, and that of 1815. By Anne Plumptre, Author of Narrative of a Three Years' Residence in France, &c. illustrated with numerous Engravings of Remarkable Scenery. London. 4to. pp. 398.

WE were about to begin by exclaiming Sir John Carr in

petticoats! but our respect for Sir John induced us to desist from a comparison which he does not deserve. Sir John was, it must be confessed, trivial and superficial, but he was not, like Miss Plumptre, pedantic and dull; his taste was not very good, nor his pleasantry always select, but he was not, like Miss Plumptre, gross and vulgar: he had a sufficient share of personal vanity, but he had not all the conceit of Miss Plumptre; and accordingly we find that his works, laughed out of literary life as they have deservedly been, are in most respects less ridiculous, and in every point of view, less revolting, than the trash which Miss Plumptre has, with an unlucky industry, gleaned after him.

A combination of circumstances rendered Miss Plumptre desirous of seeing Dublin and the North of Ireland, and she gladly accepted a proposal made by her friends, Mr. and Mrs. C (We really pity the persons who have visited Ireland in the last two or three years, and whose names begin with this unfortunate letter.) Liverpool was the place fixed for embarkation; but a friend of Mr. C's convinced him that it would be cheaper and better to go to Bristol and there take the accommodation of a trading vessel to Dublin; but alas! on their arrival at Bristol, this economical scheme was overthrown-their friend, it seems proved false, and very, very false,' for there was no trader sailing for Dublin, and they had now only the alternative of going in the packet to Waterford, which would have cost three guineas! and left them still sixty miles from Dublin; or of crossing the country to Liverpool, whence they could reach Dublin in the regular packets for 17. 1s. This last consideration determined the tourists, and by the help of all the cross stage-coaches in the North-west of England, they arrived

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