have been the prevailing language among | pels, while it lays stress on their fundamentthe Roman Christians, it is a bold negative to al agreement in facts:-"licet varia singuassume that there were no Latin speaking Christians even in Rome, and that they never would write such a piece as this in their own language, even though nothing of this writing has come down to us. But the appearance of strange idioms, answering, if they are taken as dog-Latin interpretations, to many common Greek ones, suggests irresistibly the probability of translation. "Nihil differt credentium fidei," is explicable, and explicable only, if we suppose that it stands for ovdèv diapépei TTV πιστευόντων πίστει. lis evangeliorum libris principia doceantur, nihil tamen differt credentium fidei, cum uno et principali spiritu declarata sint in omnibus omnia," about the main points of our Lord's history. It contains, perhaps, as Dr. Tregelles remarks, the earliest historical notice of St. Peter's martyrdom. The fragment gives St. Paul's Epistles in an order peculiar to itself; and dwells on the analogy between the Seven Churches to which he writes and the Seven Churches of the Apocalypse. The enumeration, from whatever cause (for the fragment may have Dr. Tregelles, besides giving a facsimile gaps), omits four of the books of the presand careful transcript of the fragment, re-ent canon- the Epistle to the Hebrews, views all that has been said to throw light those of St. Peter, and that of St. James; on its many obscurities, and further shows and it gives a warning, in the case of some its place and bearing in reference to the instances of spurious books, against mixing rest of the early evidence upon the New up "gall with honey." It contains an inTestament canon. He offers some ingeni- teresting notice of the "Shepherd" of Herous explanations of the extraordinary Lat-mas, then recently written, and publicly in puzzles of the text, but he is unable to read, but not allowed to claim apostolic or help us much as to the original purpose and prophetic authority. The "Shepherd " is, the source of the extract; for extract there as Dr. Tregelles observes, an odd instance, can be no doubt that it is. He is unable to not only of variety of judgment, but of vaconnect it with any known writer; but he riation within wide limits, on the part of calls attention to the circumstance that in the same judge. In a letter of 1851 Bunone point, and possibly in two, Jerome sen spoke of it as "that good but dull novseems to have had before him either the el which Niebuhr used to say that he pitied book from which the extract is taken, or the Athenian Christians for being obliged the source from which the author of the to hear in their meetings." In reprinting fragment drew his information. This is es- this letter in 1859, the phrase was changed pecially suggested by the curious likeness into "that good, but not very attractive, between the account in the fragment of the novel." In a dissertation printed in the origin of St. John's Gospel, and that given very same volume (Hippolytus and his Age) of it in one place by Jerome of the re- he talks of it as "one of those books which, quest made to St. John by the disciples and like the Divina Commedia and Bunyan's bishops, of the previous joint fast, and of Pilgrim's Progress, captivate the mind by the the revelation following. Jerome's expres- united power of thought and fiction, both sion is, that "ecclesiastical history tells" drawn from the genuiue depths of the human this; but it is found in no extant work ex- soul." It is not easy to imagine a more cept this fragment. Dr. Tregelles hardly grotesque contrast of criticism in the same estimates too highly the importance of the person. fragment as a piece of evidence. It unites and co-ordinates the various threads of proofs dispersed in the writings of contemporary writers, who witness abundantly to single and separate books, but whose witness to a list or canon is first brought to a point in this strangely and fortuitously preserved scrap of antiquity. It is to be observed that it is not only a list; and also, that it bears indications of the tentative process by which the canon was formed. It contains various notices on the different books, such as that of the origin of St. John's Gospel. It recognizes thus early the distinctions of character between the Gos It is possible, as Dr. Tregelles hopes, that the Greek original of the Muratorian fragment may yet turn up, as the Greek of Hermas has been recovered. As we have it, the fragment is one of the most signal instances of the truth that the value of things as evidence is often ludicrously in inverse proportion to the value of the things in themselves. It is a curious instance of the seeming accidents of literature and of the capricious fate attending the evidence of the greatest things, that one of the most important documents connected with the literary history of the New Testament should be an ill-written and bungling ex tract from a clumsy translation, turning up | toric portraits; it banished all subtlety from in the aimless collections of an ignorant his style. Think of Scott's empty romantic commonplace-book-maker of the eighth cen tury. From The Spectator. SIR WALTER SCOTT AND THE DIES IRE. picture of James Fitz-James, and think of "For I was wayward, bold, and wild, THE Controversy which has appeared, partly in these columns, and partly in letters to the Pall Mall Gazette, on the subject of the originality which Mr. Gladstone lately attributed to Sir Walter Scott's "Hymn for the Dead" in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, seems to us to derive its chief interest less from the question directly at issue, than from the remarkable contrast to which it introduces us between the Dies Ira itself and the use which Sir Walter made of it. We cannot help holding so far with those who assailed Mr. Gladstone's criticism, that we think he greatly overrated Scott's general poetical genius, and yet we hold with him. that this hymn is almost entirely original. The true test, we think, of so great a writer as Sir Walter Scott's acclimatization, if one may so speak, in any one department of literature, is the degree to which the special form to which he submits his genius seems to stimulate or to cramp its power. Compare Goethe's dramatic power when he writes in prose and when he writes in verse, and you will see at once the immense gain to him of the poetic form. It seems to us just the reverse with Sir Walter. No one, we think, will assert that, had Scott written only his poems, his name could possibly have attained anything like the eminence which it must still have had, had he never written a poem, but been known only by his prose fictions. The truth is that the poetical form in many directions simply cramped and paralyzed him. Verse stimulated what we may call the heroic side of his imagination; it added to the rapidity and the vigour of his narrative; it increased the rhetorical But as regards Sir Walter Scott's special force of his declamation; it set a rude music appropriation of the Dies Irae to the hymn to the rough gallop of his Border chiefs; it sung by the monks on occasion of the pillent a strong effect of light and shadow to grimage undertaken for the soul of the wizhis free bold sketches of Highland or Low- ard Michael Scott, we must say that the land scenery; but it entirely eclipsed his completeness of the transformation can great dramatic power, and his rich free hardly be exaggerated. It is not so much humour; it turned him from one of the that, of the twelve lines of this short hymn, most real into one of the most vaguely we do not think more than four can in any ideal of romance-writers; it obliterated sense have been borrowed from, or even his wonderful power of giving at once suggested by, the Dies Ira, but still more, splendour and minutely life-like finish to his-that the whole movement and mood of the Whatever Sir Walter Scott's rank as a poet, there can be little doubt that his verse was a far too inelastic medium for his great artistic powers. You might as well try to turn the Frith of Forth into the bed of a Highland torrent, as embody Scott's great creative art in the limits of that rugged, galloping verse which has little or no organic structure in it, no rest, no growth of separate detail, no capacity for interior delicacies of structure. The wash of the sea, the sleep of the sunshine, the sighing of the wind, the flowering of sweet blossoms, have no reflection in Sir Walter's hasty, roughshod verse. It is full of an eager human, or rather equestrian movement, but has little play, and no still depths. hymn is completely metamorphosed. The j Latin Dies Irae, as we shall show presently, has a long, slow, meditative motion of its own, proper to the strictly individual mood of the spirit whose vision it is supposed to embody; it is strictly an act of private devotion, a soliloquy cast in the school of the Augustinian theology, and carefully adapted to reduce the individual soul to complete despair, and then cast it in passionate trust on the love and mercy of the Redeemer. Its movement is almost exactly that of Tennyson's Two Voices, each stanza being a triplet, a metre curiously effective for the purpose of religious meditation, as our own great poet perceived. But Sir Walter Scott's "Hymn for the Dead" has the fervent clang of a chorus of many voices in it, realizing, in common for all awestruck hearts, the awful catastrophe of the universal judgment, and pouring out one united cry for mercy. Nor is this all. It would be a great mistake to ignore the place of this hymn in the Lay of the Last Minstrel. It is sung by the monks, as we have said, on occasion of the pilgrimage to implore rest for the soul of the great wizard, who is supposed to be still haunting the earth. It immediately follows, and is evidently intended to stand in the relation of a sort of religious pendant, or rather superincumbent, to the preternatural event in Branksome Hall, when the elfish page is snatched away amidst the crash of the elements. The dirge of judgment is specially elaborated to recall the lightning flash and rolling thunder which had so lately struck with awe the characters of the tale, and to remind us how vastly the imaginary terrors of the imaginary magician fall short of the sublimer catastrophe, which he, like all men, is delineated in prophetic vision as certain one day to encounter. This was the scene in Branksome Hall: "Then sudden through the darkened air And filled the hall with smouldering smoke adapt to this special purpose the prophetic | his first grand touch, unless the very genvision of the last day, with its parting flame tleness of the last trumpet, the " spargens and rolling thunder, and the glimpses of the mirum sonum," be itself a grand touch. divine pity beyond. Then the Bible is cited in a singularly prosaic verse as the record of revealed wisdom by which man shall be tried. The revelation of all secret sins follows, and as a consequence the helplessness of the sinner who should choose to be judged by his works. Then comes the grandest stanza of the whole, hinging entirely on the faith that God alone can justify, and even He perhaps only those who are predestined to salvation, Now turn to the Dies Ira itself, of which we furnish as good a version as we are able, line for line, beside the original, having departed from extreme literalness only when it seemed necessary to secure some approach to the spirit of the original. [We do not copy the Dies Ira, of which "The Living Age" has lately contained translations.] Here there is absolutely no great scenic effect. The "shrivelling" heavens are not here; and there is nothing at all to correspond to the crash of doom in Scott's "When louder yet and yet more dread Swells the high trump that wakes the dead." num 66 -- "Spargens mirum sonum" is a phrase of infinite gentleness. The trumpet sheds (literally, sprinkles") its music like a kind of vivifying light on the darkness of those far-distributed tombs. Sir Walter Scott's lines, if intended as a translation, could not have been a completer failure, but evidently they were not so meant. The "mirum sowas not "wonderful" for its shock, but for its suasive coercion. It was of a silver-toned trumpet that the writer was, we suspect, thinking, of flute-like notes, not of what we call the "crack of doom." All the grand verses of this hymn are those which describe the love of the Saviour, and the agony of entreaty on the part of the sinner. There is no grand physical imagery about it. It begins with a meditative statement of the fact of a day of judgment, calling witnesses that the writer may the better realize it, 66 so David (ie., the Psalmists) and the Sybil agree in asserting. Nothing could be more characteristic than this sign of the mood of individual meditation in which the whole is cast. Scott could not have put this line into his psalm without spoiling his drift altogether. Then the writer realizes what dread will fall on him when the time comes, when the trumpet breaks the silence of the tomb, and by an invisible compulsion charms all before the judgment-seat. Then, for the first time, he gets sublime, not at the physical grandeur of the scene, but at the stupefaction of Nature and Death at a resurrection of the creature,Mors stupebit et Natura." It is "Rex tremendæ majestatis, Qui salvandos salvas gratis, This terse and majestic and intense verse is the very key of the whole hymn. It is an individual appeal on the part of an individual soul which has been following up slowly the whole train of thought connected with the scene in which it will have to play a part. And thus realizing that Christ's will to save is his only hope, the writer goes on to draw out a personal appeal to Christ why He should not lose even this single grain of His possible harvest. Was it not Christ's love for each individual sinner that brought Him down from heaven to earth, that moved Him to wander over the earth where He had nowhere to lay His head, that inspired Him when he sat weary by the well of Samaria, that led Him to bear His cross and endure his passion? Should such acts as these fail of their effect, even in the case of the worst of sinners who desires to be saved? The writer hopes nothing from his own prayers, but much from the love shown in the pardon of such sinners as Mary Magdelene and the thief upon the cross. The whole tenor of the hymn is one of personal appeal, of loving devotion, of humble contrition. When it is grandest it is sweetest, and contains least of physical imagery. It winds its long path of meditative Augustinian piety from the beginning to the close without a single peal of thunder like that of Sir Walter Scott's second verse. As it seems to us, no poems so equally fine of their kind - could be cast in more different styles, or express more different moods of poetry, than Sir Walter Scott's "Hymn for the Dead," intended evidently as a fitting close to the legendary terrors of Michael Scott's sorcery, and the Dies Irae, by which it was avowedly suggested. DAVID GARBICK.* From The Saturday Review. manners, with those of the handsome and In the familiar group of statesmen, wits, authors, and artists who represent the intellectual activity of England between 1740 and 1780 there is no more prominent or agreeable figure than that of David Garrick. It is continually passing before us in the correspondence of Walpole and Gray, in the memoirs of Cumberland, Madame D'Arblay, and Hannah More; and it is his name and doings which lend the chief interest to the biographies of Macklin, Mrs. Bellamy, Tate Wilkinson, and others of his stage, contemporaries. In Boswell's "Johnson he is a conspicuous figure. In Boswell's very first interview with his hero, his ignorance of Johnson's strangely inverted love Of his powers as an actor, or indeed of for the actor, which was constantly venting what powers go to make a great actor, itself in splenetic sallies against him, but Johnson was clearly no judge. To him an would never listen with patience to a word actor was a mere declaimer of other people's said in disparagement of him by another, words" a fellow, sir, who claps a hump drew down upon the future biographer one on his back and a lump on his leg, and cries So little dis of those surly rebuffs of which he was after-I am Richard the Third.'” wards to have so many. "What do you crimination had he that he found "a fine think of Garrick?" said Johnson to Tom airy vivacity" in the Sir Harry Wildairs of Davies, who was by. "He has refused me a country player whom Garrick pronounced an order to the play for Miss Williams, be"as insufferably vulgar a ruffian as ever cause he knows the house will be full, and trod the boards." The opinion of such a that an order would be worth three shil- critic on Garrick's or any other person's lings." Garrick had given the lady a free acting is of course worthless. But when he benefit at his theatre a few years before, by comes to speak to us of the man and the which she had realized two hundred pounds. writer, we listen with respect. "Garrick's "Oh, Sir," broke in the fussy Scotchman, prologues and epilogues," he tells us, not dreaming how little Johnson meant by incomparable.""Dryden has written prothis sally, I cannot think Mr. Garrick logues superior to any that David Garrick would grudge such a trifle to you." has written; but David Garrick has written Sir," said Johnson, turning upon him with a stern more good prologues than Dryden has look, "I have known David Garrick longer this great master of the art of talking of done." Again, what was the opinion of than you have done; and I know no right Garrick's gifts in the same way?" Garrick's you have to talk to me on the subject." The incident was typical. All through gaiety of conversation has delicacy and elegance." "He is the first man in the world for sprightly conversation." And, in a conversation with Mrs. Siddons, reported by her Johnson did justice to Garrick as an actor, brother John Kemble-where, for once, saying that "a true conception of character, and natural expression of it, were his distinguished excellences" - he concluded with the remark, "But, after all, madam, I than when at the head of a table." And thought him less to be envied on the stage 66 66 Boswell's book Garrick's name provokes Johnson's sarcasm, if other people praise; or kindles his praise, if other people censure. Which of the two was genuine we very soon discover. Johnson never quite forgave his old pupil and friend for a success so much more rapid and, in a worldly sense, more brilliant than his own. The latent grudge found its way to the surface every now and then, in such sneers as "What! respect a player!" Feelings, pooh! Punch has no feelings." When he contrasted his own social position, and unattractive person and 66 66 are what the character of his conversation in mixed society was Johnson also tells us. "It was gay and grotesque. It was a dish The Life of David Garrick: from Original of all sorts, but all good things." We may Family Papers, and numerous Published and Un- set these details against his occasional splepublished Sources. By Percy Fitzgerald, M.A., netic allusions to his lively friend's buffoonF.S.A., Author of "The Life of Sterne," "The Dear Girl," &c. 2 vols. London: Tinsley Brothers. ing. When the "abridgment of all that |