reckoned this below an ingenuous well-bred person. A harp takes not away the figure and comeliness; but a pipe swells a man's face that his familiar friends can hardly know him: besides, one may sing to a harp; but a pipe stops up the mouth, and obstructs the voice: and therefore, said he, to play upon it is fit only for the Boeotian boys, who cannot be taught to speak: we of Athens will follow the example of Minerva, who cast away hers, and of Apollo, who caused the piper Marsyas's skin to be pulled over his ears. And hence it came to pass that the Athenians utterly banished this faculty out of the circle of the liberal sciences. "And what has been said concerning the face holds true also of all the parts and members of the body; it is unseemly to blare out your tongue, and to rub and clap your hands, and to laugh at the wagging of a feather, and to twist your beard, and to stretch your body, and make a strange noise, as though you wanted sleep, and to fetch deep sighs for nothing, as if your very heart would break. "Take especial care what gestures and motions you use in talking; for it is obvious to remark, that most men are so intent that they do not consider this; but one nods fantastically with his head, and another looks a-squint, and a third fixes his eyes upon the ground, and a fourth pulls his mouth on one side; and, as Cicero affirms of Marcus Piso, renders his visage more ridiculous than his jests; and a fifth wrinkles up his chin, and looks like Testius Pinarius*, whom Cæsar desired to tell him what he had to say when he had cracked his nut. Some throw their hands about as if they were flapping away flies, and others cough and spit in your face: and all these are very unhandsome misbehaviours. It is the saying of Pindar', That whatsoever is elegant, fine, and pleasant, is done by the hands of Venus and the Graces; what, then, shall we think of those that spit upon their fingers, and lay their legs upon a table, and commit a hundred other indecencies which might here easily be recited? But I shall not go about to collect all into one volume, as Chrysippus did the lies of the oracle of Apollo, lest they should swell to too big a bulk, and appear beyond our skill and industry to reform. All I intend to superadd shall be couched in two words: Be not loose in 1669 σε 'Ανδρὶ μὲν ἀυλετῆρι θεοὶ νόον οὐκ ἐνέφυσαν "Idem illo ferè biduo productus in concionem ab eo, cui sic æquatum præbebas consulatum tuum, cum esses interrogatus quid sentires de consulatu meo. Gravis auctor Calatinus credo aliquis, aut Africanus, aut Maximus, et non Casonius, Semiplacentinus Calventius, respondet altero ad frontem sublato, altero ad mentum depresso supercilio, crudelitatem tibi non placere. Cic. Orat. in L. Pisonem. 3" Facie magis quàm facetiis ridiculis. Lib. 1. ad Attic. Ep. 13. "Utere lactucis, et mollibus utere malvis, Nam faciem duram Phoebe cacantis habes. "Martial. Lib. 3. Ep. 47. 4" Cicero de Orator. Lib. 2. Dic, si quid velis, cum nucem perfregeris. 5 66. Σὺν γὰρ ὑμῖν τὰ τερπνὰ καὶ τὰ γλυκεία Γίνεται πάντα βροτοῖς. Εἰ σοφός, εἰ καλὸς, εἰ ἄγλαος 'Avig, &c. In postremâ Oda Olympiorum. your deportment, nor yet severe; neither all honey nor all gall; but let affability and gravity be sweetly tempered and mixed together. When we call to mind the greatness of the change which has taken place in the instructions that our modern Galateos think applicable to present cases, there is room for speculation. Much stress is now laid upon the arcana of fashionable life-refinement is not the desideratum, but a refinement of a certain shade, which distinguishes a class. Instead of rude precepts against yawning, staring, or lolling, the outcry is against an incorrect or clumsy mode of addressing a person by his title, a sit of the coat or gown, which, though perfectly approved six months ago, is now out of fashion, or the fact of being present or dwelling in some quarter beyond the limits of modish geography. These distinctions, be it observed, arise against a man, not as evidences of unbecoming behaviour, but as proofs of his not belonging to a particular caste of society. We may conclude from hence, that mankind has either so much improved in manners, that now, there being no longer actual distinctions, people resort to artificial ones to show their superiority, or that merit or demerit in manners is no longer regarded: or, what is more likely, that men may be as great brutes as they please, and attend as little as possible to decorum or good breeding, provided they throw over themselves the shield of a particular and privileged class. Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern, with an Historical Introduction and Notes. By William Motherwell. Glasgow. 1827. 4to. HITHERTO We have taken no notice of a class of antiquaries who yield to none in industry, and to few in the interesting nature of their pursuit. The collector of reliques of poetry is not alone influenced in his search by the mere claims of age: unless the charms of truth and pathos belong to the composition he has recovered from destruction, it is seldom that he persists in the work of resuscitation; unless, indeed, he be as destitute of taste as Ritson, and at the same time as ingenious in detecting the marks of antiquity, or exposing the evidences of a later date. From Bishop Percy to Sir Walter Scott, the ballad, the lowly lyric of England and Scotland, has been peculiarly fortunate in finding in its admirers both the taste to appreciate, the learning to illustrate, and the research to discover. The dark corners from "Aversor morum crimina, corpus amo. "Ovid. Lib. 3. Amor. Eleg. 10. "Martial. Lib. 12. Ep. 47." which the Ballad is to be recovered are not those which conceal other antiquities; they are covered not with dust; they are not moth-eater; they do not lie ensconced in parchment in the muniment rooms of ancient families, nor on the shelves of ancient and unfrequented libraries. The collector of ballads must throw himself into the deepest recesses of the country, into those quarters which the bustle of civilization has not disturbed, where the manners and sentiments of antiquity are most likely to remain in their primitive freshness: it is here that he must listen to the carolings of the peasantry, the chantings of old crones, and the long stories of ancient sires. When a venerable dame has by accident struck into a tragedy which he at once recognises as in the right strain, with ears erect, memory alert, and a pleased countenance of interest and affected belief, he must listen to her doleful story; a note book would disturb the recollection of the minstrel; a smile of incredulity would. effectually seal her lips: and to catch the phrases, and to remember many stanzas together, of a lengthy ditty, is no mean task. When, however, it is successfully completed, great is the joy of the conquest; the soul of a song is resuscitated; a small domain of poetry is saved from the encroaching sea of oblivion; short is the interval between the old chanter and her grave, and to snatch a relic from her as she almost steps. into it is a great triumph. Who does not remember the anecdote of Dr. Leyden, who would stride forty miles into the country on a mere rumour of an old nurse, or broken-down hostler, being in possession of the head or tail of a genuine ballad of antiquity, and then stride back again, chanting and reciting his new-found treasure, as the appropriate solace of his journey, in such tones as indicated his approach long before his huge and ungainly person hove in sight? Mr. Motherwell is a collector of the true breed: with Mr. Ritson's abhorrence of inaccuracy and interpolation, he has that veneration for tradition which becomes a conservator of ancient poetry. His Delphic oracle is an old woman's mouth. Her three-legged stool is sacred as a tripod; and, if she be spinning, or crooning over the embers of a fire, the priestess of Apollo, in her ecstasies of inspiration, is not a more classical or more auspicious spectacle. Great is the number of ballads in this portly volume which have been taken down from recitation; many have been taken from several recitations by various persons, and the discrepancies have been collated with a sedulous accuracy, which we can only parallel by the scrupulous care with which MSS. of Greek plays are examined by your Bruncks and Porsons. Not only have the new ballads, and the newly-recovered parts of old ballads, been procured from the genuine source of oral tradition, but even those which are well known, and have long been in Por D print, have been corrected, amended, or restored from the same source. In this respect, we have no fault to find with the author: on the contrary, we are grateful to him for his contributions to an exceedingly curious and interesting department of poetry. But in such a vehement contemner of those authors who have ventured to fill up lacunæ in ancient ballads by modern additions-in one who so loudly condemns the practice of passing off imitations for originals, or even of introducing an antique-looking composition without prefixing a certificate of its youthfulness, we do think there is matter for blame, when we find undoubted relics of antiquity side by side with things which are as undoubtedly of yesterday; and that without any notification of the difference, save that they are not preceded by an historical voucher. For so industrious and pains-taking a character, there could have been no difficulty in arranging his materials in an order approaching to the chronological; and, assuredly, it would have been better to have placed the ancient and the modern minstrelsy in two distinct divisions. That Mr. Motherwell is fully competent to discharge all the duties of an editor of this species of publication there can be no doubt, from the manner in which the ballads themselves are published and, if there were, such doubt must disappear before a perusal of his historical introduction, which betrays an extraordinary familiarity with his subject. From one who is absolutely intemperate when he speaks of such miscellaneous compilations as those of Mr. Cromek and Mr. Cunningham, we should scarcely have expected to find a song beginning, immediately preceding the ancient ballad of Child Norrice, which, in the true ballad style, immediately strikes up without any preliminary ornament: The very second ballad in the collection, "The Twa Corbies," which, though perhaps the most poetical and picturesque of any ballad existing, the author will assuredly not vindicate as ancient, though he has placed it between the "Earl Marshal" and "Sir Patrick Spens," both ballads laying claim to a remote antiquity. p103121990, sholled "There were twa corbies sat on a tree Large and black as black might be, Shall we go dine by the wild salt sea? I saw a fair ship nigh at land, I waved my wings, I bent my beak, His sword half-drawn, his shafts unshot, When winter storms sing in the tree; There is a character about the ancient ballad which no observer can mistake, and the imitation of which it is hard to sustain without risk of detection. It is invariable. in its kind, and the dialogue is carried on with amazing briskness: we have no unnecessary details either of words or things: just those parts of the dialogue are preserved on which the action depends, and no more. Besides this peculiarity, there is a general stock of subjects which go to make up the minstrel's themes: the situations, whether pathetic or comic, chiefly the former, described in the ballad, and almost all the relations of the parties, are such as might be enumerated. They are all of that class which could only take place in a rude and unsettled state of civilization: love and slaughter are the usual sources of sympathy, and the appeal is made to the heart in the briefest manner possible. Love is as sudden as death: the cause of both lies on the surface: a stout limb in the minstrel's creed is as provocative of one as the other. Cupid's arrow and knight's sword are whipped |