II. 464.

"While I abroad,

Through all the coasts of dark destruction seek

Deliverance for us all."

Addison remarks, as a "little slip," the following passage:

IV. 323. " Adam, the goodliest man of men since born
His sons; the fairest of her daughters Eve."

Adam and Eve are here reckoned among their own descendants, of whom they are said to be the goodliest and the fairest. However, I would not call this a "slip." Milton was of no fault more free than of negligence. For every peculiarity he has his authority. Thus, in the quoted passage, he, no doubt, had in his mind a similiar construction found in the best Greek writers, e.g. in Thercydides. (Bell. Felop. I. 1. ἐλπίσας (τὸν πόλεμον) μέγαν τε ἔσεσθαι καὶ ἀξωλογώτατον τῶν προγεγενημένων. The same explanation applies to

II. 678. "God, and his Son except,

Created thing nought valued he nor shunned."

All the peculiarities of Milton's style, which I have touched upon, arise from his striving to elevate his style by adopting the more perfect grammatical structure of the classical languages, more especially of Latin. It is to these peculiarities, that I intend to confine myself in the present essay. If they are to be looked upon as blemishes or as ornaments, I leave others to judge. I am satisfied that they are not the result of inadvertency. In Milton this style had become a second nature. He could not write otherwise, even had he wished. It is an interesting question, in how far the habit of so-called literal translations from foreign languages tends to introduce foreign idioms into the mother tongue? A careful inquiry would show, that all modern European languages, and not only the Romance languages, owe a great portion of their grammatical structure to imitation, especially of Latin. I will not call this a wrong tendency, and, of course, I could not blame those men who first adopted a classical idiom, which afterwards became naturalised. But I have no hesitation in saying, that innovations of this kind, like political and social revolutions, are only legitimised by success. In so far, therefore, as a literary innovator has not succeeded in imprinting his peculiarity of diction on the national idiom, in so far does his failure deprive him of the meed of praise. The spirit of a language rejects what is uncongenial to it. An attempt to inoculate such heterogenous matter argues a fundamental error, a miscalculation of the powers and capacities of a language. The result is the effect of natural unerring laws. We must, therefore, abide by the decision, and whatever merit we attribute in other respects to Milton, for the vigour and loftiness of his diction, we cannot but say, that his tendency to

adopt classical idiom was very much in excess to the capability of the English language to receive them.

This opinion is corroborated by the thousands of lexicological classicism spread over the works of Milton. Many of these, it is true, have ceased to be strange. They have been assimilated in course of time to the rest of the English vocabulary; for this process is far easier in isolated words than in grammatical constructions. Yet a great number of expressions are still so far un-English that only a classical scholar is able to understand them. For the sake of illustration I will select a few.

66

No passage is better known than the beginning of book III., which contains the beautiful address to light; yet I am almost bold enough to say, that the expression in v. 7, " hearest thou," is not understood by one in a hundred of the general readers. No wonder; as the verb hear is used in the sense of the Latin audio, which means sometimes to be called. The expression

"Or hearest thou rather pure ethereal stream”—

is in fact an imitation of Horace's " Matutine Pater, seu Iane libentius audis."

Who but a classical scholar can understand

V. 19. "War he perceived, war in procinct."

What reader would not think of quarrels in the following passage

VIII. 53. And solve high dispute

With conjugal caresses."

Solicit is the Latin sollicitare in

VIII. 167. "Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid." Memory is the Latin memoria; i.e. time rememberedVII. 637. "And what before thy memory was done."

Compare farther

X. 1101. "With tears

Watering the ground, and with their sighs the air
Frequenting."

VII. 323. "And bush with frizzled hair (coma) implicit (implicita.")

A longer enumeration of such isolated verbal peculiarities would be tedious. To use our poet's own Latinised expression—

I. 507. "The rest were long to tell."

They stand in the same relation to his diction, in which the Greek mythology stands to his biblical fable; they are those dark spots in the moon's bright visage, "vapours, not yet into her substance turned;" and as, after the lapse of almost 200 years, they are still unassimilated,

R

we may safely pronounce, that they have no better chance of finally disappearing than those lunar shadows.

To compare, in conclusion, the two greatest English poets, I would say, that Shakspeare represents the romantic, Milton the classical school of poetry. The one is essentially national, native, popular,the other foreign, antique and learned. The one is like a Gothic structure, varied in plan and adorned with a thousand brilliant colours, and an endless variety of carvings of animated and inanimate beingsthe other, like a Greek temple, simple and grand in outline, but scientifically correct in proportions and ornaments. Milton studied and reproduced the ancients, Shakspeare studied and painted nature. To understand and enjoy Milton, it is necessary to have a knowledge of classical antiquity, but Shakspeare will live and flourish as long as man has an open eye and a warm heart for all that is beautiful and good or great in the spiritual and physical world.

NINTH MEETING.

ROYAL INSTITUTION.-February 20, 1854.

JOSEPH DICKINSON, M.D., F.L.S., &c., PRESIDENT, in the Chair.

The SECRETARY read a "Report of the Delegates from the four Learned Societies of Liverpool, which publish Transactions, on the subject of Union," when the President appointed Saturday, the 4th March next, at half-past Seven p.m., to take the subject into consideration.

The Rev. WILLIAM BANISTER, and Mr. GEORGE MELLY, were ballotted for, and duly elected Ordinary Members.

Mr. F. P. MARRAT exhibited specimens of Minerals, viz.: Arsenical Sulphuret of Cobalt, from Tunaberg, Sweden, and Sulphate of Lead, from Seven Churches, Wicklow.

The Rev. DR. HUME made some observations respecting the history and probable use of a number of flint hammer heads and axes, which were exhibited to the Society. He also mentioned the fact that Mr.

Mayer had offered to purchase the valuable Faussett Museum of Saxon Antiquities which had been offered to the Trustees of the British Museum for £680, but which they refused to purchase.

Mr. WILLIAM FERGUSON, F.L.S., F.G.S., &c., read a Paper

ON THE RAISED BEACHES OF THE FRITH OF CLYDE ; WITH NOTICES OF THE DISCOVERY OF NUMEROUS ANCIENT CANOES IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF GLASGOW.

THE more recent of the geological changes, which the surface of our earth has undergone, are not the least puzzling. There are evidences of changes and counter-changes, oscillations of the surface, elevation, depression, and elevation again, which are wondrously perplexing, and complicate the study of recent geology to a very great degree. Whether this arises from the greater number of the observed facts relating to this period, as compared with the older eras, or whether it is, that these recent periods have been subjected to a greater variety of disturbing influences than the others, it would be hard to determine. It is at any rate true, that much greater unanimity prevails among geological writers in their theories of the earlier deposits, their reconstructions of the aspects the earth presented during their continuance, and the circumstances under which their inhabitants existed and perished, than does with respect to almost all that comes within the range of the post tertiary division of the science. The veil has been lifted, with some apparent degree of truth, from off the various systems, which, one after another, have each been once "the present." We recognize a Silurian period, characterized by a profusion of zoophytes, shells, and cuttle fishes, with the latter of which probably the trilobite disputed preeminence, the whole system presenting us with but very meagre evidence of vertebrated inhabitants. The labours of Hugh Miller have restored the forms and habits of the families of mail-clad fishes which predominate in the old red sand-stone period; and the carboniferous system has once more, in imagination, waved its forests of palms and gigantic tree ferns and towering reeds before our delighted gaze. The lands and seas of the various groups which succeed have been re-peopled, and their terrible reptiles and mammoth quadrupeds have been pourtrayed. And all this has been done with a striking degree of unanimity, going far to vouch for the truthfulness of the conclusions arrived at. But the period of the drift, and the boulders, and the sea beaches, is still, in the extremest sense of the term, "Debateable land," and from

this very cause is not the least interesting portion of geologic science. In the remarks which I have now the honour to submit to the Society, I do not propose to enter into any theoretical discussion, but merely to attempt a brief account of several appearances which the Frith of Clyde presents, and the analogues of which may be met with on this and every other coast.

In doing so, I cannot claim originality. Much of what I shall lay before you I have myself observed, but the subject has already been largely written on by such men as Mr. Smith, of Jordan-hill, Mr. Charles MacLaren, Mr. Robert Chambers, and many more. I am induced to make this communication, less perhaps by the hope that the local details of a district so far removed as the estuary of the Clyde is from that of the Mersey, will be interesting to you, as by a desire that the class of facts with which I shall have to deal should be brought under your notice, that your attention may thereby be directed as opportunity may offer to the observation and recording of the similar appearances which this neighbourhood also abundantly presents.

My attention was more particularly directed to this branch of geology by a circumstance, an account of which I had the honour of giving at the time to the Philosophical Society of Glasgow. Those acquainted with the topographical features of Glasgow, will remember that the town is built on a series of ridges of some eminence, running parallel, or nearly so, to the River Clyde, and that a slight hollow betwixt two of these, namely, Blytheswood Hill and the commencement of Garnet Hill, is occupied by Sauchiehall-street. In digging a drain in this street, in the summer of 1850, the workmen, after going down about four feet, came to a bed of pure peat, one foot thick, and below that they dug four feet through beds of sand, containing shells of the common species, "Trochus Ziziphanus." In prosecuting my inquiries, I soon found that the occurrence of shells at heights above the level of the sea, from 40 to 360 feet, was not at all uncommon in the valley of the Clyde.

Of a relative change in the level of the sea and land, denoted by this ancient beach in the heart of Glasgow, we have no want of corroborative proofs. Some of these I shall proceed to describe.

Commencing with the Island of Arran, we find there undeniable evidence of this alteration of level. The road from Brodick to Corrie, and so on round the north end of the Island, occupies a flat and level, but not broad, space of ground, a little elevated above the level of the sea, and backed by a series of cliffs of considerable height, and the vertical faces of which are water-worn and hollowed out into caves. The