LITERARY NOTICES.

{724}

LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. Delivered at the royal Institution of Great Britain in April, May, and June, 1861. By MAX MULLER, Fellow of All Souls College, etc. From the second London edition, revised. New-York: Charles Scribner, Boston: A.K. Loring. 1862.

Within the memory of man one could in England or America be 'very well educated,' as the word went, and yet remain grossly ignorant of the simplest elements of the history of language. In those days Latin was held by scholars to be derived from Greek—where the Greek came from nobody knew or cared, though it was thought, from Hebrew. German was a jargon, Provençal a 'patois,' and Sanscrit an obsolete tongue, held in reverence by Hindoo savages. The vast connections of language with history were generally ignored. Hebrew was assumed, as a matter of course, to have been the primeval language, and it was wicked to doubt it. Then came Sir William Jones, Carey, Wilkins, Forster, Colebrooke, and the other Anglo-Indian scholars, and the world learned what it ought to have learned from the Jesuits, that there was in the East a very ancient language—Sanscrit—'of wonderful structure, more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, more exquisitely refined than either; bearing to both a strong affinity,' and stranger still, containing a vast amount of words almost identical with many in all European and many Oriental tongues. This was an apocalypse of truth to many—but a source of grief to the orthodox believers that Greek and Latin were either aboriginal languages, or modifications of Hebrew. Hence the blind, and in some cases untruthful warfare made on the Sanscrit discoveries, as in the case of Dugald Stewart.

'Dugald Stewart was too wise not to see that the conclusions drawn from the facts about Sanscrit were inevitable. He therefore denied the reality of such a language as Sanscrit altogether, and wrote his famous essay to prove that Sanscrit had been put together, after the model of Greek and Latin, by those arch forgers and liars, the Brahmins, and that the whole of Sanscrit literature was an imposture.'

But it was all of no avail. In 1808 Frederick Schlegel's work, On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, first 'boldly faced the facts and conclusions of Sanscrit scholarship, and became,' with all its faults, the 'foundation for the science of language.' Its great result may be given in one sentence—it embraced at a glance the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Northern Europe, and riveted them by the simple name 'Indo-Germanic.' Then in this school, begun by English industry and shaped by German genius, came Franz Bopp, with his great comparative grammar of the Indo-Germanic tongues, and the enormous labors of Lassen, Rosen, Burnouf, and W. von Humboldt—a man to whose incredible ability of every kind, as to his secret diplomatic influence, history has never done justice. Grimm, and Rask—the first great Zend scholar—were among these early explorers, who have been followed by so many scholars, until some knowledge not merely of Greek and Latin, but of the relations of all languages, has become essential to a truly good education.

Yet after all, Sanscrit, it was soon seen, was not the parent, but 'the elder sister' of the Indo-Germanic languages. Behind Greek, Latin, and Sanscrit, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic tongues, lurks a lost language—the mysterious Aryan, which, reëchoed through the tones of those six remaining Pleiades, its sisters,{725} speaks of a mighty race which once, it may be, ruled supreme over a hundred lands, or perchance sole in the Caucasus. It is strange to see philologists slowly reconstructing, here and there, fragments of the Aryan,

'And speak in a tongue which man speaks no more.'

Among the many excellent elementary and introductory works on philology which have appeared of late years, this of Müller's is on several accounts the best. It is clearly written, so as to be within the comprehension of any reader of ordinary intelligence, and we can hardly conceive that any such person would not find it an extremely entertaining book. Its author is a genial writer—he writes with a relish and with real power—he loves knowledge, and wishes others to share it with him. Language, he holds—though the idea is not new with him—springs from a very few hundred roots, which are the phonetic types produced by a power inherent in human nature. Every substance has its peculiar ring when struck—man, under the action of certain laws, must develop first onomato-poietic sounds, and finally language. With this we take leave of this excellent work, trusting that the public will extend to it the favor which it so amply deserves.

THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF WASHINGTON IRVING. By his Nephew, PIERRE M. IRVING. Vol. I. New-York: G.P. Putnam. Boston: A.K. Loring. 1862.

This work has a strong, we might say an extraordinary claim to the interest of the most general reader, in its very first paragraph, since in it we are told that Washington Irving, on committing to his nephew Pierre the vast mass of papers requisite to his biography, remarked: 'Somebody will be writing my life when I am gone, and I wish you to do it. You must promise me that you will.' So with unusual wealth of material, gathered together for the purpose by the subject of the biography himself, the work has been begun, by the person whom Irving judged best fitted for it.

And a delightful work it is, not a page without something of special relish, as might be anticipated in the chronicle of a life which is thickly studded with personal association or correspondence with almost every intellectual eminence either of Europe or America during the past half-century. But apart from this, there is a racy Irving-y flavor from the very beginning, long before the wide world had incorporated Irving into its fraternity of great men, in the details of life, of home travel and of homely incident, as set forth in extracts from his letters, which is irresistibly charming. Full as this portion of the life is, we can not resist the hope that it will be greatly enlarged in subsequent editions, and that more copious extracts will be given from those letters, to the humblest of which the writer invariably communicates an indefinable fascination. In them, as in his regular 'writings,' we find the simplest incident narrated always without exaggeration—always as briefly as possible, yet told so quaintly and humorously withal, that we wonder at the piquancy which it assumes. It is the trouble with great men that they are, for lack of authentic anecdotes and details of their daily life, apt to retire into myths. Such will not be the case with Irving. The reality, the life-likeness of these letters, and of the ana drawn from them, will keep him, Washington Irving the New-Yorker, alive and breathing before the world to all time. In these chapters a vail seems lifted from what was growing obscure in our knowledge of social life in the youth of our fathers. Our only wish, in reading, is for more of it. But the life gathers interest as it proceeds. From America it extends to Europe, and we meet the names of Humboldt, De Staël, Allston, Vanderlyn, Mrs. Siddons, as among his associates even in early youth. So through Home Again and in Europe Again there is a constant succession of personal experience and wide opportunity to know the world. Did our limits permit, we would gladly cite largely from these pages, for it is long since the{726} press has given to the world a book so richly quotable. But the best service we can render the reader is to refer him to the work itself, which is as well worth reading as any thing that its illustrious subject ever wrote, since in it we have most admirably reflected Irving himself; the best loved of our writers, and the man who did more, so far as intellectual effort is concerned, to honor our country than any American who ever lived.

BEAUTIES SELECTED FROM THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS DE QUINCKY. With a Portrait. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

We are not sure that this is not the very first book of other than pictorial beauties which we ever regarded with patience. Books of literary 'beauties' are like musical matinées—the first act of one opera—the grand dying-scene from another—all very pretty, but not on the whole satisfactory, or entitling one to claim from it alone any real knowledge of the original whole. Yet this volume we have found fascinating, have flitted from page to page, backwards and forwards, [it is a great advantage in a book of 'unconnections' that one may conscientiously skip about,] and concluded by thanking in our heart the judicious Eclectic, whoever he may be—who mosaicked these bits into an enduring picture of De Quincey-ism. For really in it, by virtue of selection, collection, and recollection, we have given an authentic cabinet of specimens more directly suggestive of the course and soul-idioms of the author than many minds would gather from reading all that he ever wrote. Only one thing seems needed—the great original commentary or essay on De Quincey, which these Beauties would most happily illustrate. It seems to rise shadowy before us—a sort of dead-letter ghost of a glorious book which craves life and has it not. We trust that our suggestion may induce some admirer of the Opium-Eater to have prepared an interleaved copy of these Beauties, and perfect the suggestion.

THE CHURCH IN THE ARMY; OR THE FOUR CENTURIONS. By Rev. WM. A. SCOTT, D.D., of San Francisco. New-York: Carleton, No. 413 Broadway. Boston: Crosby and Nichols. 1862.

Since every one is doing their 'little utmost' for the army, Mr. Scott hath contributed his mite in a work on the four captains of hundreds mentioned in the Bible—the first whereof was he of Capernaum; the second, the one commanding at the crucifixion; the third, that of Cesarea; and the fourth, Julius, the centurion who had Paul in charge during his voyage to Rome. We are glad to learn, from the close researches and critical acumen of Rev. Mr. Scott, that there is very good ground for concluding that all of these centurions were so impressed by the thrilling scenes which they witnessed, and the society with which they mingled, as to have eventually been converted and saved, a consummation which may possibly have escaped the observation of most readers, who, absorbed in their contemplation of the great dramatis personæ, seldom give thought as to what the effect on the minor characters must have been. It is worth observing that our author is thoroughly earnest in his exhortations—at times almost naively so. If he be often rather over-inclined to threaten grim damnation to an alarming majority, and describe with a relish the eternal horrors which hang around the second death, in good old-fashioned style, still we must remember that he sincerely means what he says, and is a Puritan of the ancient stamp.{727}