reverence towards antiquity," and we feel that its productions have a vigour, a freshness, and a power, which seem to symbolize with the original fertility of the material world. We listen to the sacred oracles of superior wisdom which appear intuitive. From the monuments of the different arts which survive for us to admire or to imitate, we presume that the inventors of them had sounded all the depths of scientific inquiry, had ascertained the existence and examined the truth of the remotest principles, had conducted their investigations by the most delicate and perfect analogies, had combined them by the most original views; and thus successfully perfected their almost divine creations, to the excellence of which all late efforts have failed to reach. It is for these reasons that we do not reckon the ancients to be "the children," but the venerable and revered preceptors of mankind, the masters and lords of the realm of thought. By denying them the title of ancients, neither Bacon nor Pascal could refuse their claim to the highest excellence and perfection to which the genius of man has ever attained. The rest is merely a verbal ambiguity not worth disputing, seeing that the feeling itself is founded not on blind authority, but on reasonable conviction. "We must not," says M. Aurelius," adopt the opinion of our fathers, like children, only because they were held by our fathers."* At p. 178, Lord Brougham calls Mr. Fox "the most accomplished debater that ever appeared." Now this word, we presume, was not chosen by the writer without his conviction that it expressed with peculiar propriety the character, and perhaps the measure, of Mr. Fox's eloquence. It was the very word which Burke had previously used on the same subject. He mentioned" Mr. Fox as one who, by slow degrees, had become the most brilliant and accomplished debater he had ever seen.' On this Dr. Samuel Parr observes," He spoke not, and he must have been conscious of not speaking, the whole truth.... He must have known that the epithets most brilliant and accomplished,' did not make the term ' debater' co-extensive with the aggregate of Mr. Fox's merits as a public speaker. He must have known that a Dunning, a Thurlow, and a North might, with consummate propriety, have been described as accomplished and most powerful debaters. He must have known that he had himself seen in Mr. Sheridan and Mr. Pitt debaters more brilliant, if not more accomplished, than Mr. Fox according to the obvious and established signification of the words, he must have known that by the slightest touch of his wand, the debater, in the twinkling of an eye, might have been transformed into an orator," &c.t But we must now draw to a conclusion, not however, before we have animadverted on the exceedingly bad taste of a passage in the life of Lord Liverpool, on which the writer employs his satire against the Catos and Columellas, the country squires and rural magistrates, the class of the 'Pannosus vacuis ædilis Ulubris," who, he says, considered Mr. Canning's poetical allusions as insults, and in whose mouth he places the following speech: "Well, well, but it was out of place,- -we have nothing to do with King Priam here, or with a heathen god such as Æolus: these kind of folks are very well in Pope's Homer and Dryden's Virgil; but, as I said 66 * See M. Aur. Anton. de Seips. lib. iv. c. 52. † See Philopatris Varvicensis, p. 260. The Doctor exhausts his vials of wrath on Mr. Burke's head, through more than twenty pages of learned vituperation, for this expression; and even then the Garagantua of grammarians leaves the field of slaughter growling and unappeased. to Sir Robert, who sat next me, 'What have I or you to do with them matters?' I like a good plain man of business, like young Mr. Jenkinson; a man of the pen and the desk. Let me tell you Mr. Canning speaks too much by half. Time is short,-there are only twenty-four hours in the day, you know." This effusion approaches too near the "dicacitas scurrilis et scenica" to be received with satisfaction, and the writer should have recollected, "Male etiam dicitur quod in plures convenit." There are a few expressions, and but few, in the language, that we should wish to alter among these would be (vol. i. p. 30) "When the conversation rolled upon lost works," for "turned." P. 51. "The Duke of Grafton.... any one thing rather than the character painted by Junius." P. 102. "The secret had not been discovered of posting second-rate men ;" and at p. 23, Lord Brougham has taken from poetry the word "gratulate," without much benefit from the transplantation. MR. URBAN, HERNE'S OAK, WINDSOR LITTLE PARK. SOME observations by Mr. Jesse having occurred in your number for January 1839, on the identity of Herne's Oak, in contradiction to a statement of the Quarterly Review; and these having been commented upon by the editor of the "Pictorial Shakspere," I beg to present you with an accurate portrait of the tree so denominated, and of its accompaniments, as they appeared in 1822. Since my sketch was painted, this venerable tree has been protected from the wanton injury of curiosity-mongers by a fence; but many of its larger branches have "toppled " to its base, and it is now completely "bald with dry antiquity." The low ground "hard by," which is "the pit" of Sir Parson Evans and his fairies, has been almost filled up with rubbish from the old castle, and would have been altogether effaced but for that feeling against the unnecessary destruction of any local illustration of olden times which your Repertory has so long inculcated and so arduously cherished. " certain tree, ycleped Herne's Oak, which had been recently cut down and manufactured into snuff-boxes, &c. as well as the pretensions of another tree still existing, more lately, and perhaps more truly, called Herne's Oak, though Gilpin thought it was too young to be entitled to such honour. Since the appointment of Mr. Jesse to the surveyorship of the royal parks and palaces, this gentleman has ex officio, and, no doubt, con amore, become acquainted with each sire of Windsor forest; but he may not have had such ample opportunity for investigating the matter through the testimony of old inhabitants of the town as Mr. Knight has had. "Non nostrum tantas componere lites;" for, notwithstanding all the arguments of either party, "adhuc sub judice lis est." Their difference, however, seems to be less as to the site, than as to the identity, of our subject. But, familiar as we are with this site, it would be difficult to make ourselves intelligible without a groundplan of the castle-ditch, the pit, and all those trees, both formerly, and yet, standing near them. During the next summer we will carefully review the locality, and impart to you any new opinion we may form about it, aided by that of " every old woman in Windsor" from whom we can gain authentic intelligence. In the mean time, having no better evidence than tradition whercon to found our present judgment, although we confess that Mr. Knight's information has somewhat modified it, we must maintain with Mr. Jesse that the isolated position (as shewn in our plate) of this ancient oak in William the Third's avenue of elms, strongly indicates some reason for thus admitting it into their company and protection; and this reason was, probably, the honour it had acquired, 150 years ago, from the reputation of as long a previous period, of being the identical Herne's Oak of our immortal Bard: "provided always" that Shakespeare's local portraitures were not such picturesque compositions, got up of detached bits, merely for poetical effect, as those of too many pseudo-historical novelists and romancers of the present day. Trusting that in the course of his "Disquisitions on the scenes of Shakespeare" the Rev. Mr. Hunter, the most acutely learned of our whole host of Shakespearian commentators, will more ably elucidate this subject, I am, yours, &c. PLANTAGENET. HERNE'S OAK. WHEREFORE doth young Imagination boast Recall green Windsor's glades-the voice that spoke Shoot forth, ye leaves, where bees in summer dwell; When on the turf were tiny footsteps seen, B-h-ll, Feb. 24. J. M. MR. URBAN, IN the Quarterly Review for December 1839, the last published, there are some remarks on Mr. Tytler's "England under the Reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, with the contemporary History of Europe, illustrated in a series of original letters never before printed, with historical Introductions and biographical and critical Notes." In observing that Mr. Tytler had met with some obstruction, officially, in continu. ing similar illustrations, lest the documents made public by him should interfere with the volumes of State Papers from time to time issued under the authority of the Royal Commission, the writer makes the following statement, "To bring before the reader the gigantic undertaking of Government, it need only be mentioned that, although these Commissioners have already published five or six volumes, each containing about nine hundred pages, in illustration of the reign of Henry VIII. not more than one fourth or at most one third of the papers relating to that one reign have been hitherto printed by them; that the papers of a later period increase so enormously in numerical extent, that fifty volumes at least would be required to embrace, on their plan, the annals of Elizabeth; and that the materials for history swell out in such an enormous ratio throughout all succeeding reigns that it is impossible to say where the labour of publication would end."..... "Although the price of the volumes has of late been lowered to a guinea, we apprehend that we are not far from the mark in asserting that a complete set on the scale originally projected would still cost some hundred pounds sterling, and, let them cost what they might, the work cannot certainly be meant for the present age; it is obviously meant for posterity, and for a very remote posterity too. No living man must hope to see the State Papers even of Elizabeth's reign The work has no sale, nor was a sale ever to be expected from it. It is, as far as it goes, well and carefully done. We have no fault to find in its execution; but it is not a book to be read-it is a book to be referred to," &c.* The Reviewer then goes on to deprecate any obstruction Mr. Tytler may have met with,-lauds his mo Quarterly Review, No. cxxix. p. 75. dernising the spelling of the ancient letters, his criticism,-biographical sketches, and protracted disquisitions on historical points, "unbroken occasionally throughout the space of twenty pages;" in short, the exhibition of that sort of literary sauce which a practised and intelligent writer can always employ to render the driest and toughest morsels of original and obsolete writings palatable to the modern taste. While there is some truth, there is also much that may be disputed in the assertions of the Quarterly Review. It is a fact honourable to our national character, and demonstrative of the respect in which we hold our public institutions, that from the beginning of the 18th century, when the Fœdera of Rymer was compiled, down to the present day, attention has been paid from time to time to our public records, and to all authentic documents illustrating our history. I do not say that some jobbing has not contaminated occasionally the progress of printing these muniments; in consequence of which, various instruments have been published at length which it would have been quite sufficient to describe in the abstract, and others have been published a second time which had already been printed; and thus at the expense of the public purse in transcripts, paper and print, many tons of waste paper have been made occasionally for the service of the butter-shops; but these are circumstances inseparable, perhaps, from any general national plan of historical illustration by records, and they by no means apply to the publications of the State Paper Office. The papers there preserved, which have been printed, of the time of Henry VIII. are of the most valuable kind as historical materials, and they will ever, as far as they have gone, form copious appendices to the annals of that period, available by the critical if not by the general reader. I readily at the same time admit that the continuing such plan of publication in detail, and hermetically sealing the State Paper Office in the meanwhile as a public depository, would be an intolerable evil to the generations who † Ibid. p. 76. must patiently await the result of the lingering operation-slow almost as the forming of islands in the ocean by the exuviæ of marine animalculæ. Yet while I say thus much, it by no means follows that it would be a right course to allow every literary man, either for a temporary purpose, or in illustration of his own peculiar views of historical passages, to select and garble and modernize original documents, which, while shut up in an inaccessible depository, would be obliged to wear any face or colour the writer and tran scriber, if such he could be called, might choose to put upon them. Í have no invidious motive in asserting, although I will pledge myself to the fact, that the publications which have of late attracted attention, and been lauded in reviews as illustrations of our history, because Messieurs the Reviewers had no means of testing their authenticity by comparison with the originals, are most deplorably incorrect in the mere mechanical transcription of documents; which, from being written in an antiquated courthand, the cursive character of the time, are difficult to be read. Some of the perversions of meaning by false readings have indeed been shewn to be perfectly ridiculous, and a long catalogue of gross errata might readily be formed. The commentator on Mr. Tytler's Historical Illustrations in the Edinburgh Review, observes that the author "has aimed at making his book popular by modernizing the orthography of its documents. With a view to his object, it was probably right to do so, but the prac tice is dangerous and objectionable. It destroys identity, takes away one evidence as to the education and character of the writer, fosters ignorance of the progressive changes in the orthography and pronunciation of our language, and increases the liability to errors in transcription and printing." The Reviewer then goes on to cite various errors of transcription, of which I select a few for "set me to flee," read " determyn to flee;" for "them who I served," read "them with whom I served;" for "justus adjutorius meus Dominus qui salvos facit rectos corde," read, "Justum adjutorium meum a Domino qui salvos facit rectos corde;" for "they came to view," read "they came to mass; for "I marvel that Tongres hath not the like," read “I marvel that Thames hath not the like ;” between the silver Thames and Tongres near Liege, there is little geographical connexion; for "continuance of men," read, "continence of men," &c. On Mr. Tytler's work, I shall only further remark, that his forte appears to be historic doubts, and his attempt to prove that Cecil Lord Burghley was a good conforming papist, has given rise indeed to an historic doubt, which, we presume the authority of all history, detailing the share that sensible, pious, indefatigable, and loyal statesman had in the glorious Reformation, will readily decide against Mr. Tytler. Burghley was no Romish devotee, and no Puritan; he was a sincere and most efficient member of the Reformed Catholic Church, as gradually restored on Apostolic principles in the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth.* To advert in the next place to the criticism on a subject, which, as I have said, very few even of the most * Mr. Tytler founds his assertion that Cecil was a Romanist upon a document discovered by that acute and excellent critic in the minutia of the history of the 16th century, the late Mr. Lemon, Deputy Keeper of State Papers; being a note book which contains a memorandum of the persons dwelling in the parish of Wimbledon in 1556, "who confessed and received the sacrament of the altar," at Easter in that year. The note was made by Cecil as lay impropriator of the living of Wimbledon. Among the communicants was Cecil, his lady, and his son Thomas Cecil. On this ground Mr. Tytler would have us jump to the conclusion, that Cecil and his family were Romanists; because, forsooth, they did not preclude themselves at that great christian festival from so much of the consecrated elements, as the canons of the Church of Rome would allow them to partake of, as laymen. Surely this was no ground for considering them to adhere strictly to all the anti-scriptural doctrines and traditions which had been engrafted on Christianity, by the priesthood in the dark ages. Mr. Tytler's next step should be to make Queen Elizabeth a papist, and he will find no want of evidence quite as conclusive as in the matter referring to Cecil. See Tytler's Edw. VI. and Mary, &c. vol. ii. p. 443. |