ART. XIV.-On Theophrastus :-prefaced with some Remarks on the supposed Inferiority of the Ancients to the Moderns in the Arts of Ridicule.

WE have all heard a great deal of the wisdom of the ancients, and very little of their wit and humour. From the school-boy to the reverend doctor, all know something,-at least, all can say something, about the sublimity of Plato, the profundity of Aristotle, the dignity of Thucydides, and "the thunder" of Demosthenes; but these same learned personages know, or say, but little concerning the boundless ludicrous invention and pointed, though horse-play, raillery of Aristophanes, the acute and discriminating humour of Theophrastus, or the high-coloured bur.. lesque and sly and piercing irony of the various Lucian, These trifling writers have been comparatively contemned by the learned as beneath the consideration of their speculating gravity, and, I think, that by this rejection many of them have acted wisely and with a due regard to their own powers; for it requires a far greater share of talent and sagacity to investigate and appreciate the nice. and fugitive forms of the ancient wit and humour, than to swallow the profoundly shallow dogmas of philosophy delighting in stilts, or even than to comprehend the full sense of mutilated passages, and restore corrupted texts to their first purity. But whatever may have been the motive for this contemptuous neglect of the wits of ancient days, the fact is certain, and there cannot be adduced a more glaring instance of it, than the circumstance that there exist six editions of the dark and perplexed Lycophron for two of the elegant, discerning, and entertaining Theophrastus. The consequence of all this has been, that those readers who know nothing of the ancients except by French and English translators and commentators, will allow, indeed, that the ancients were sensible sort of people, but then, for wit, humour, and all the powers of gay and ludicrous entertainment,

VOL. I. NO. II.

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The obscurity of Lycophron has been defended on the ground that his poem consists of prophetical effusions: but the defence seems a lame one. It is the nature of a prophecy to be obscure, and it was the business of a prophet not to be over-explicit: but the object of a poet is to please, and pleasure will never be communicated by dark hints lost in the labyrinths of perplexed phraseology. I will not deny that there are some fine passages in the Cassandra, but ont of upwards of 1400 lines, there are not 50 which have any pretensions to brilliancy, and these are the more observable from the surrounding obscurity, like a flash of lightning in the darkness of a starJess night.

how infinitely behind the facetious moderns, who, to wisdom not inferior, superadd all the pleasing and delightful arts of ridicule and laughter. Nay, so far has this idea been carried, that men of real taste and considerable learning, Addison and Dr. Warton, instead of dissipating, have encouraged the error, the first by a grave expression of wonder at the supposed fact, and the second by examining, confirming, and explaining the grounds of the fact so wondered at by the first. All this is very curious: Addison may, indeed, be excused, as his observation seems to have been thrown out incidentally, and without much deliberation; but, as Dr. Johnson said on another occasion, "I wonder Joe Warton should be such a fool," as to coolly and systematically defend such a loose assertion. It did, indeed, require either defence or exposure: but who could expect a defence from a scholar so versed in the ancient classics, and so fully able to estimate their nicest turns of thought and expression, as Dr. Warton. Could Voltaire or Bolingbroke have done more. It would have been well if Dr. Warton and others had been content to say, that there are more productions of wit and humour among the moderns than are extant from Greece or Rome. This is true, for the works of Diphilus, Philemon, and Menander, have unfortunately, except a few fragments, all perished: but it would have been inconsistent with the good-sense of Dr. Warton to have urged this as a proof of their inferiority; he goes further, therefore, and denies the capability of true humour among the ancients. This was high ground for a man to take who knew that the Athenians were the acutest and most observing people of whom history speaks, and that the licentious nature of their government admitted all those varieties of character arising from caprice and self-importance which the staunchest advocates for modern humour could attribute to the English themselves. Aware of this, he must assign another cause for this superiority of the moderns, and what is it? The improved state of conversation. I shall not stop here to draw a comparison between the most po lished eras of Greek and Roman conversation, and the condition of the best society of modern times: I will allow, for the sake of the argument, that Pericles, and Alcibiades, and Plato, &c. among the Grecks,--Mecenas, and Horace, and Tibullus, &c. among the Romans,---were not such fine gentlemen as our own countrymen Mr. Pitt, Mr. Sheridan, or that pink of courtesy, the much-bepraised Mr. Windham :* * I will acknowledge, and with delight,

* The good, and great, and chivalrous qualities of Mr. Windham, of which we heard so little in his life-time, have since his death burst upon the

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delight, the infinite advantages which we enjoy above the an cients, in that softened, subdued, and amiable tone, which the presence of females gives to modern society. But granting this, I cannot grant the conclusion drawn from it; for it must be notorious to any one who is at all acquainted with English litera. ture, that our wittiest writers, with the exception of Addison, are by no means the most polished,—that Butler, Swift, Con. greve, Fielding, and Smollet, bear no marks of this boasted im provement of modern conversation,-but, on the contrary, aré too profligate, indecent, and ill-mannered, to be read without expurgation in any decorous society, even out of the presence of ladies. But, says Dr. Warton, "the arts of civility, and the decencies of conversation, as they unite men more closely, and bring them more frequently together, multiply opportunities of observing those incongruities and absurdities of behaviour on which ridicule is founded." From the premises here laid down, I should have deduced a directly opposite inference: for it appears to me almost a truism, that in proportion as men mix to. gether and adopt, for mutual convenience and gratification, a pó. lished style of conduct, their oddities and incongruities will be all smoothed and levelled by collision; and, that by adjusting them. selves to a certain standard, they will all manifest that uniformity for which gregarious animals are always remarkable. If it were necessary to adduce any proof or illustration in support of so obvious a proposition, I might instance a passage in the lately. published letters of that acute observer Madame du Deffand. Speaking of the difference of French and English character, she says, "The English * are strange beings: one should never pre tend to understand them: they are like nothing one has seen: Ee 2

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world with the dazzling effulgence of a meteor. The newspaper-editors, overwhelmed with the number and importance of panegyrical topics, absolutely sunk beneath the weight of the subject. Nay, the Edinburgh Reviewers, the most generous of enemies, have felt themselves so confounded and wonder-stricken at his immense talents and “beautiful accomplishments," that eloquent as they are on most subjects, the powers of language here fail them, and they labour and flounce about, without much success, in search of words grand and comprehensive enough to embrace and express his stupendous abilities and attainments. How candid death makes some people!

"Oh! les Anglois, les Anglois sont bien étrangés: on ne doit jamais pretendre à les connoitre: ils ne ressemblent en rien a tout ce qu'on a vu : chaque individu est un original, il n'y en a pas deux du même modele: nous sommes poritivement tout le contraire: chez nous tous ceux du même état se ressemblent: qui voit un courtisan, les voit tous, un magistrat, tous les gens de robe, ainsi que tous les autres, tous est faux chez nous, preten. sions," &c.

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every individual is an original, there are not two of the same stamp among them: we are directly the reverse: with us, all of the same condition bear a resemblance to each other: he who sees one courtier, sees them all,-one magistrate, all the gentle. men of the long robe: so with respect to all the rest, all is false among us, all is pretension." It is to be recollected, that the French lady is here speaking of a state of society which was far more polite than any contemporary class of fashionables then in England, and where, therefore, according to the position of Dr. Warton, there should have been a proportionably greater variety of characters. From all this it would appear, that if the statement be true,—that the ancients were inferior to the moderns in the arts of ridicule, at least, no good reason has been assigned for the circumstance; for if, as some have thought, liberty be the nurse of humours and incongruities of conduct, in no place did character ever luxuriate into such variety and wildness of ramification as at Athens; and, on the other hand, Dr. Warton's supposed cause appears to be utterly without foundation. What then is the true state of the case? I apprehend, that if all the humourous works of antiquity had reached us in an entire form, we should have but little reason to boast our superiority on this head. For allowing all that could be required to distance of time and difference of customs and manners,-whose power in destroying the transitory nature of wit we may estimate by con sidering that the brilliant allusions of Shakspeare and Jonson have many of them become obsolete,-yet, from what remains of the comic writers of Greece, * we find so much acute and strik. ing observation of those great features of human conduct over which neither time nor place have influence, so much facetious remark, and such shrewd and satirical appreciation of the motives of men's manners, together with such nice and piercing discrimination of the apparently similar shades of character,—as make us not only deeply feel regret at what we have lost, but ought also to make us pause and consider whether the ancients are not our masters in wit as well as in every thing else. Men of taste, and among them the late Mr. Fox, have been heard to lament the loss of Menander as the severest blow which time hath given to ancient learning, and there are some who would not think the redemption of this great comic writer from oblivion too dearly purchased even with the works of Henry Fielding. I confess I

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In speaking of the comic writers of antiquity, I confine myself chiefly to Greece, because there is scarcely any thing (except the Satires of Horace) in the Latin tongue which can be considered as exclusively Roman. The plays o: Plautus and Terence are translations, even to the extent of retain. ing the Greek scenes and names of persons, as well as the story.

do not carry my admiration of his imputed excellences to such an extent, as to barter a certain for a contingent good, yet such confidence do I place in the discernment of ancient critics, that, with the exception of Sheridan, I would venture to give all the plays that have been written within the last fifty years for one half of Menander. But not intending at present to institute a comparison between Aristophanes and Mr. Dibdin, or Menander and Mr. Reynolds, I shall proceed to introduce to the reader's notice an author, on whom alone I would be content to stake the claims of the ancients to the highest praise of wit. Theophrastus, * of whom I am speaking, after having studied philosophy under Plato and Aristotle, after delivering lectures of wisdom and knowledge to two thousand disciples in the Lyceum,-after acquiring the applause of his discerning fellow-citizens, and the friendship of philosophers and princes, but above all, after having, as he himself expresses it in his preface, conversed with all the varieties of human nature, and surveyed them with accuracy,-sat down, at the advanced age of ninety-nine, to give to the world the results of his observation and experience. The remarks of such a man may easily be expected to be important and interesting, nor will the reader's expectations be disappointed. He catches, with the success of a veteran sportsman, all the pecu. liarities of human manners, and defines and describes them with a nicety of distinction worthy of the disciple of Aristotle. To this he adds what the Stagirite had not, a shrewdness and force of humour which would bear comparison with the best parts of Swift and Fielding. Yet this accurate and witty describer of men and manners is not only unknown to the generality of English readers, but many even of pretended scholars have never perused a page of his entertaining volume. I have before mentioned the paucity of editions of his original text, and I am not aware that there is one respectable translation of him, though there are two (lately) of Lycophron.-The French have treated him better. La Bruyere, who may be considered as one of their best writers, has given a very elegant translation of the Characters of Theophrastus; and has justly appreciated and eulogized the talents of his original. Among other remarks equally sensible and lively he says, "The men whose manners Theophrastus

has described were Athenians and we are Frenchmen: and if we add to the difference of place and climate the long interval of time, and consider that this book was written in the last year of the

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*This name, which was given him for his brilliancy of thought and ele gance of expression, signifies “divine speaker,"