some cases where criticism has been defeated by the popular instinct in favour of brevity or convenience no great harm has been done. On the whole, however, Mr. Hall's theory is far better than his practice. He allows that new words have been scrutinised much more jealously during the last seventy years than they were ever scrutinised before, and insists on the importance of subjecting our continuous verbal acquisitions to definite critical tests. The two chapters on Modern English' (V. and VI.) in which he discusses this question, appear to us the most valuable in the volume, and in justice to Mr. Hall we quote the following passages :—

'Of new words we may enumerate, at least, five distinct sources. Those words which may be called inspired are due, almost wholly, to the common people; others are elaborated by the learned; others are imposed by conquest, as the Norman element of the English, and the Semitic element of the Indian vernaculars; others, all the world over, are imported by commerce; and others, still, are introduced from abroad by fashion, or are borrowed thence for their usefulness. It is with the two first classes and the last that we are concerned practically. Inspired neoterisms, as springing from the needs of the illiterate, often respond to a general need, and are easily enfranchised. Besides being, mostly, monosyllables, they are easy of remembrance; and-where not abbreviations-being formed on the most obvious analogies, they are rarely exceptionable as illegitimate formations. However less immediately valuable for popular use, the coinages of scholars, in proportion as they supply recognised wants, likewise make good their value eventually, by obtaining the rights of citizenship. Intercourse with foreign countries and their inhabitants contributes further to augment our lingual wealth. And thus our exchequer is constantly increasing; and, at the same time, its contents are constantly liable to mutations. Once it was not so; but, now-a-days, we may accept, as an indubitable argument of a nation's healthy activity, both intellectual and material, the fact of the expansiveness and mobility of its language.'

What between the activity of modern life and the productiveness of modern reflection, new words ofler themselves for trial, in peculiar abundance, and it behoves us to try them. But what are the considerations by which we are to be governed, in determining to harbour, or to discard, them?

The principal, obviously, are prompted by observation of the fate of words in the vicissitudes which English has heretofore undergone. Of philosophical purifications effected except by instinct, our language has as few to show as any other. It may, however, be safely predicted, that, in the future, unless our successors lapse into barbarism, unphilosophical depravations of our language will be comparatively rare. Even now, ignorance and chance, which have availed so largely to load our tongue with anomalies, are no longer, as regards it, other than an insignificant source of mutation. From mere impulse of expedience,

we shall go on, as we have always gone on, supplying blanks, curing ambiguities, and removing excrescences; but, in time to come, in distinction from the past, our innovations, whatever they may be, will, in the main, be controlled by analogy. We shall continue to change our language, and, very generally, for the better; and the motives for changing it will be the same, in character, with those which have operated towards rendering it what it is. Whatever is new, or whatever, though old, has an inadequate verbal representative, demands, and at last obtains, its appropriate expression. There are, besides, neoterisms occasioned by alteration in the import of words alreadyexisting.'

'Many are the words which, though nine persons out of every ten use them, are positive blemishes to our tongue. Old or new, if not ineradicably established, or if not exchangeable for others that comport with analogy and are just as intelligible and euphonious, we should give them the go-by. To learn what to avoid, a heedful study of the best writers is, though not all in all, indispensable, and will continue to be so, pending the appearance of lexicographers much in advance of those who have hitherto volunteered to enlighten us. As to choice of words, new or old, while, among writers of the first class, none are wild neoterists, there are conservatives of every degree of conservatism. Of these, some set their faces, regardless of expedience, against everything in the least novel; but others, more wisely, conform, in their phraseology, to the temper of the times. Popularity, however, or even celebrity, is no guaranty of skill in neoterising, with reference to need, analogicalness, or harmony. From the best writers we may, with proper care, gather ideas of the multiform considerations which control the right selection of expressions more or less familiar to us. Words and meanings actually new to us stand, as regards their elegibility, on an independent basis. Those which are eligible must, without reservation, supply desiderata; and, while doing so, they must fulfil the conditions which it is reasonable to impose on desiderata. We live in days when our language is the subject of daily and daring innovations. Revolutionism is in all things, indeed, the spirit of our age; and this chapter will not have been written in vain, if it shall but serve as a contribution, however meagre, towards teaching the art, in the domain of speech, of revolutionising after precedent.'

This is the aim of Mr. Hall's Modern English,' and the illustrations of his main thesis scattered through the volume are full of interest and instruction. We cannot help feeling, indeed, that with his command of intelligent critical principles, and his almost unrivalled collection of materials for their illustration, he might render still more effective service to English scholarship. To this end it is however essential that he should revise the literary form of his expositions, and remove as far as possible the blemishes which tend to repel intelligent readers from his pages, and prevent them from studying his facts and reasonings with the attention they so well deserve.

ART. VI.-1. The Proportions of the Human Figure, according to a new Canon; for practical use: with a critical Notice of the Canon of Polycletus, and of the principal Ancient and Modern Systems. By WILLIAM STORY. London: 1866.

2. The Natural Principles of Beauty, as developed in the Human Figure. By D. R. HAY. London: 1852. 3. The Proportions of the Human Figure, according to the ancient Greek Canon of Vitruvius. Also a Canon of the Proportions of the Human Figure, founded upon a Diagram invented by JOHN GIBSON, Esq., R.A. With description, practical application, and illustrative outlines. By JOSEPH BONOMI. Second Edition. London: 1857.

4. The Law of Increase, and the Structure of Man. By F. P. LIHARZIK, Ph. D. Vienna: 1862.

THE

HE broad field of human history, stretching back from the present era to the earliest dawn of dimly-preserved tradition, and ranging over the hemispheres of both the old and the new world, is irradiated from certain bright spots, or centres of light, on which the attention of the student unavoidably fixes. Some of these phosphorescent nuclei illuminate the course of the religious, or of the ethical, progress of mankind. A great prophet, or a great legislator, sprang forth from the darkness of his age, and left his name hewed, in deep-graven letters, on the face of our planet. In physical science, a continuous and still-broadening pencil of light may be traced to the age of Galileo. Sparks and streaks in its brightening path recall the names of Dalton, of Cavendish, of Faraday. In that branch of human study which is conversant with the secrets of mechanical and chemical law, the men of the present day occupy one of those luminous oases, the fullest lustre of which is yet, we may hope, to be developed in the future.

If we regard the æsthetic history of mankind, the brightest spot is more remote. The acme of the excellence attained by the physical beauty, if not by the intellectual dignity, of the race, is not to be found in the nineteenth century, or in the existing centres of civilisation. When we regard, in poetry, one expression of the æsthetic faculties, we instinctively revert to the music of Homer, rolling with the very sweep and cadence of the Ionian Sea. For a mental analysis which is not, like modern attempts, almost exclusively subjective, and which has therefore tacitly guided the activity of human thought for more than 2,000

years, no subsequent work can compare with the writings of Aristotle. In his doctrine, and in the immortal musings of the Sage of Academus, the study and culture of the health, vigour, and beauty of the human body formed an essential part of education, second to no portion of the course of study, or of the duty of a citizen. Wise institutions combined with the influence of climate and condition, and (may we not believe?) with the fresh and lusty youth of the race; and the result was such an ennobling of the human form as no other period of history, or region of earth, is known to have witnessed. For it is not on the testimony of poets or of historians that we rely; but on the faithful reflections of actual or of ideal beauty, that the chisels of Phidias and his scholars and successors have stereotyped on the marbles of Pentelicus and of Paros. Some of these unapproached masterpieces, clothed in their very decay with a grace that is immortal, are in our National Museum; where, compared with the productions of modern art, they look as though they had come from another and a nobler planet. The brightest illumination apparent in a review of the æsthetic branch of human history, is thus found to exist at a period remote from our own. It is circumscribed in its extent; and its extreme brilliancy is limited, comparatively speaking, to a very brief period of time.

The progress of Greek art was as rapid, as its excellence was unrivalled. In no other department of human skill, has the length of the period of decadence been so much greater than that occupied by the progress towards maturity. In the Glyptothek at Munich, is one of the most ancient pieces of Grecian sculpture known to be extant. It is a statue of Apollo, which was found at Tegea, near Corinth, and it is attributed to the middle of the sixth century B.C. It bears a strong resemblance to an Egyptian statue. The metopes from Selinus, which are supposed to be of about the same date, present the Egyptian characteristic of the delineation of the chest in full, and of the legs in profile. In the Lycian room in the British Museum is the headless seated figure of Chares, 'ruler of Teichioessa,' from the Sacred Way of Branchida in Caria, which was dedicated to Apollo, and is erroneously described in the catalogue as a statue of that deity. artist of this early portrait has failed to liberate this work from the massive block; and the sculptural mastery over the material is very far inferior to that attained by the Egyptian sculptors of the time of the eighteenth dynasty, a thousand years earlier than the work in question. Yet

The

within 130 years from the date ascribed to this statue of Chares, the Temple of Jupiter at Olympia, and that of Juno at Argos, were adorned by the masterpieces of Phidias and of Polycletus, and the Canon of Proportion had attained its perfect symmetry. The unformed buds, full of promise, but swathed within their protective envelope, that were formed in the sixth pre-Christian century, had opened into the finest blossom in the fifth; and although the manipulation of the sculptor may have continued to improve, that grandeur of treatment, which may be compared to the perfume of the flower, gradually faded, on the introduction of the more passional and naturalistic phases of sculpture.

In an endeavour to analyse that ideal of human beauty, which was at the same time the aim of Grecian culture, and the inspiration of Grecian art, two snares have to be cautiously avoided. The first is the danger, which has proved fatal to many writers, of becoming so dazzled and oppressed, by a grandeur far exceeding the artistic tone of the present day, as to sink into a feeble and helpless admiration, or to degenerate into rhapsody and commonplace. The other is, lest the attempt to anatomise Art should be made in language altogether technical, and should thus become didactic, dry, and unreadable. This latter risk is illustrated very strikingly by modern English works on natural history, especially on botany. The discoveries inaugurated by Linnæus have enriched the natural sciences with so much definite knowledge, of which the picturesque writers, Buffon and his school, were uninformed, that English writers have limited their observations to technical details alone; and thus we have works on botany which fail to mention the colours of flowers, or the pictorial effect on the landscape of different types of vegetation.

Of the several elements which combine to produce the one noble result of the unapproached grandeur of Greek sculpture, there are some that are within the province of critical analysis, above which others may be thought to soar. Of the effect produced on the mind by the sculpture of Phidias, it is not more easy to determine the actual source, than it is to characterise the secret charm of Homer. But it is fully within our competence to dissect the actual proportions, and to define the laws of symmetry, which have been followed by the master sculptors of Greece. The great point of contest between the old and the new philosophy of animal physiology—or rather between a philosophy that has never yet been reduced to system, and a hurried and impatient inference from few and unarranged facts-may be said to be the significance of external form. Into