Halliwell's edition of the Harrowing of Hell, a Miracle Play, written in the reign of Edward II.' This, though no Miracle Play,' but simply a narrative poem, partly in dialogue, is extremely curious, and would have furnished an editor of a different stamp with materials for many interesting remarks respecting the dialect, the grammar and prosody, and the style and composition of the piece. Mr. Halliwell has, however, contrived to overlook everything of real interest, and his publication is only remarkable for the shallowness and irrelevancy of the preface, the farthingcandle style of the notes, and the slovenly inaccuracy of what he calls the translation. The only term that he attempts to explain, amidst a number of very unusual ones, is 'thridde half yer,' a phrase familiar to every reader of modern German; and his only effort at criticism is to pronounce the contest between Jesus and Satan to be miserable doggrel.' Such things are matters of taste; we for our part think it much superior to the editor's version of the whole piece, both in force and propriety of expression. There are indeed some ludicrous deviations from modern ideas of congruity, as well as some curious special pleading. If honest Sancho Panza had taken cognizance of the piece, he would doubtless have remarked on the oddity of making the devil swear Par ma fey,' like a good Old Christian, and putting a metaphor taken from the game of hazard in the mouth of the Saviour, A professed editor might lawfully enough have made the same observation, but all that Mr. Halliwell has done is to obscure the matter as much as possible. Thus : 'Still be thou, Sathanas! The is fallen ambes-aas i.e. ames-ace, the lowest throw on the dice. This he has chosen to render 'Be quiet, Satan! Thou art defeated.' But observe how he can pervert the sense of the very plainest passages: 'When thou bilevest [i. e. losest, renouncest] all thine one, Halliwell.-' When thou hast none but thine own left, the precise contrary of the sense meant to be conveyed. Again 'Habraham, ych wot ful wel Wet thou seidest everuchdel, That mi leve moder wes Boren and shaped of thi fleyhs [flesh].' Halliwell. Halliwell. Abraham, I well know Everything thou sayest, That my beloved mother was Born and formed of thine!' Here the plain declaration that the Virgin was of the seed of Abraham is distorted to something which the author never dreamt of. Such are the fruits of people meddling with matters which they have neither learning to understand nor wit to guess at. Mr. Wright, the coadjutor in the Reliquiæ,' and one of the chief working members of the Camden and some other societies, has employed himself during a pretty long period with the literature of the middle ages, and has had considerable practice in extracting and editing MSS. reliques of various sorts. the strength of this he has in a manner constituted himself editor-general in Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Middle-English, and Middle-Latin, and seems to be regarded by a certain clique as a supreme authority in all departments of archæology. He has indeed some requisites for making himself useful in a field where industrious workmen are greatly wanted. But his activity is so counterbalanced by want of scholarship and acumen, that he can never be more than a third or fourth rate personage, bearing about the same relationship to a scientific philologist and antiquarian that a law-stationer does to a barrister, or a country druggist to a physician. 6 We have stated that we have had no means of testing the accuracy of Mr. Wright's first Camden publication-the Poems on Richard II.' The second, entitled Political Songs of England, from John to Edward II.,' swarms with errors of transcription and interpretation equally gross; we need not hesitate to assert that no work more fatal to all claims of editorial competency has appeared since Hartshorne's Ancient Metrical Tales.' A single page will justify this assertion. One piece (pp. 44-46) is a song levelled against simoniacal prelates. The poem is perfectly easy to any one who understands the most ordinary classical and scriptural allusions; but a man who understands neither, and whose acquaintance with Latin idiom and syntax is matter of history or romance, may very possibly make sad havoc of it. Passing over the memorable 'fungar vice totis'*-an enormity which only one graduate * P. 44, 1. 3, of the poem-Fungar tamen vice totis,' appropriately rendered 'I will assume all characters in turn.' It is hardly necessary to say that 'cotis' stands as plainly in the MS. as in any black-letter Horace. We subjoin a few random specimens of the editor's happy perception of the sense of his originals, when he has succeeded in reading them rightly. P.11: Noah, David, and Daniel-'morum vigore nobiles `-are complimented on being 'noble in the vigour of good breeding. Again, p. 14 • Vitium graduate of five years' standing was capable of perpetratingwe request attention to the following stanza : ' Donum Dei non donatur Nisi gratis conferatur ; Quod qui vendit vel mercatur, Quem sic ambit ambitus Here the satirist, who has just been complaining of the scandalous trafficking in sacramental ordinances, proceeds to declare that the man who sells or buys the gift of God is infected with the leprosy of (Naaman) the Syrian (transferred to Gehazi as a punishment for his covetousness); and adds alluding to well-known passages in the Epistles of St. Paul-that he whom pecuniary corruption, which is idolatry, thus influences, is no member of the temple of the Holy Spirit. We beg the reader to observe how admirably this has been understood by the translator:: 'God's gift is not given if it be not conferred gratis; and he who sells and makes merchandize of it, is, in so doing, struck with the leprosy of Syrus: the service of idols, at which-[head of Priscian! servitus -quem !]-his ambition thus aims, may not be engrafted on the temple of the Holy Spirit.' Translated indeed! The rendering of the concluding stanza of the poem is equally absurd; but we have not space for it. Partridge, or Hugh Strap, would have shown himself a Bentley in comparison. We proceed to examine his quali P. 32 Vitium est in opere, virtus est in ore.' 'While vice is in the work, virtue is in the face. Et extorquent lacrimas ut emungant dona.' The archbishops tread under foot the necks of the clergy, and extort tears, that they may be dried by gifts. We imagine that emungere dona' would be more likely to empty the pockets of the inferior clergy than to dry up their tears. With equal felicity, 'opum metuenda facultas' (p. 34) is rendered, the revered possession of riches;' and 'rerum mersus in ardorem' [absorbed in the passion for wealth], ' immersed in the heat of temporary [temporal?] affairs.' It will not avail to say that all or any of the above blunders originated in typographical errors. A hardworked man might possibly overlook even such a misprint as 'totis' for cotis;' but when he ventures on translation he volunteers the measure of his foot. We may add from the Appendix, p. 344, a pleasant example of skill in the language of the middle ages:- Pride hath in his paunter [net; panthera-Fr. pantière] kauht the heie and the lowe;' the said paunter being gravely expounded in a glossarial note by pantry. We presume the editor had heard of people eaten up with pride,' and concluded that this voracious personage must needs have a larder for his provender. Not a bad parallel to Le Roux de Lincy's transmutation of Bran the Blessed' into Bran le Blessé.' 6 fications fications in two departments in which he has made himself tolerably prominent-Anglo-Saxon and Early English. The first piece we had occasion to bring to the test was a metrical fragment on the Virgin Mary, apparently a production of the thirteenth century, printed in Reliquiæ Antiquæ,' vol. i. p. 104. In this, consisting of just six lines, there are five false readings, three of them destructive of the sense-on for hu, oaweth for haweth, and owre for ewre ;-to say nothing of two obvious corruptions, unintelligible as they now stand, but removable by two monosyllables in brackets. We were next startled, in a metrical version of the Ave Maria' of the same period (p. 22), at the totally unknown formula the lavird thich the,' which turned out, as everybody can foresee, to be a blunder for the lavird with the'-(Dominus tecum !) One of the few really good things in the volume is an elegant and spirited paraphrase of the Gloria in excelsis' (p. 34), evidently of the best age of Anglo-Saxon poetry. On inquiring whether this had fared any better than the rest, we found, besides minor errors, the following gross corruptions;-sigeræst for sigefæst (victorious), dretunes for dreames (joy), and ge-meredes for ge-neredes (salvasti)— words not even Anglo-Saxon, and totally unauthorized by the MS., which, like all of that period (ninth century), is perfectly easy to read. Nor is this all; the editor has contrived to expose himself still more glaringly in a passage where he has preserved the letters of the original. The well-known expression of the Vulgate, et in terra pax hominibus bonæ voluntatis,' is almost literally reproduced in the paraphrase— 'And on eorthan sibb gumena ge-hwileum which last line is actually printed in the Reliquiæ Godes willan' -voluntate Dei! On the very next page is a prose version of the Pater Noster, apparently of the tenth century. Hoping that this had surely escaped, we soon found that we had supposed too fast-alyf, permit, staring us in the face instead of alys, deliver! Thus we have a phenomenon reserved for the present age-an editor of large pretensions who not only tramples on the most ordinary rules of Latin syntax, but has shown himself totally ignorant of the most hackneyed phrase of Horace, the story of Naaman, the words of one of the most familiar Psalms, the Gloria in excelsis,' the Angelical Salutation, and the Pater Noster! A performer capable of blundering so dreadfully where everything is easy and straightforward, cannot be expected to succeed 6 ་ very well where there is a little scope for criticism. Among the pieces contributed by Mr. Wright to the Reliquiæ Antiquæ' is a collection of Middle-English (and Anglo-Norman) Glosses by Walter de Bibblesworth. It has been observed on a former occasion in this journal (vol. liv. p. 329) that ancient glossaries, though highly valuable in themselves, are better let alone by novices, as it requires considerable knowledge of languages, and a certain skill in conjectural criticism, to use them to any good purpose. For example, with regard to honde, aleine,' it is necessary not only to be aware of the capricious employment and omission of the aspirate, but to know onde, breath,'-a very uncommon word in that sense-in order to restore the gloss to its true form, 'onde, haleine.' We therefore find no fault with Mr. Wright for not having grappled with the numerous difficulties of the above piece, some of which might baffle a scholar; but we cannot help saying that he has displayed an absolutely astounding degree of ignorance with respect to some of the easiest and most common terms in both languages. Thus it requires no great conjuration to see thattharine' and 'henete' are not even English words, and that the corresponding bouele' and 'lezart' absolutely require tharme' [A. S. thearm; Germ. darm] and 'hevete' [evet or eft]. Should any inquisitive German or Dane attempt to sift this vocabulary for etymological materials, we beg to inform him that'szynere, une lesche,' is not a guinea-called in flash language a shiner-but a shiver or slice of bread; and that segle is neither rick nor rice, which 'ric' might be conjectured to stand for, but what gods call secale cereale, and mortals rye. We would also hint that there is no such English plant as 'sarnel,' nor any French one known by the unpronounceable name of 'le necl,' but that darnel, Fr. ivraie, and néele-hodiè nielle-Anglicè cockle, are better known than liked in both countries. We trust to his own sagacity for discovering that tode, crapant,' should be crapaut, and that neither a feldefare,' nor any other member of the genus Turdus, was ever called 'grue,'-a fowl which, if it were carnivorously disposed, could eat a dozen fieldfares to breakfast,-but very possibly 'grive.' Some of the articles are quite as enigmatical as Mr. Halliwell's Arbor Lencester; for example, we find, p. 79, col. 1, 'bore, tru-of a nalkin, de fubiloun.' A great bore indeed!-in its present shape -but reducible to reasonable dimensions by substituting, from one of the editor's own authorities, tru de subiloun-bore of an alsene, i. e. awl,'—a good old-fashioned name for that classical implement and still preserved in the elsin of our northern counties. Occasionally the editor has the grace to manifest a little misgiving that all is not right, sometimes with reason and sometimes |