Several passages from different writers having been mentioned in your columns as likely to have suggested to our brilliant essayist and historian his celebrated graphic sketch of the New Zealander meditating over the ruins of London, I would beg leave to hint the probability that not one of those many passages were present to his mind or memory at the moment he wrote. The fact is that the picture is so true to nature, and has been so often sketched, and the associations and reflections arising from it so often felt and described, that I cannot for a moment admit the insinuation of a charge of plagiarism, or even unconscious adaptation of another's thoughts in one so abundantly stored with imagery of his own, that the very overflowings of his own wealth would enrich a generation of writers. It has however occurred to me that his classic mind might have remembered the picture of Marius amid the ruins of Carthage, or, more probably, the still more striking passage in the celebrated letter of Sulpicius to Cicero, on the death of his daughter Tullia, in which he describes himself, on his return from Asia, as sailing from Ægina towards Megara, and contemplating the surrounding countries:
"Behind me lay Ægina, before me Megara; on my right I saw Piræus, and on my left Corinth. These cities, once so flourishing and magnificent, now presented nothing to my view but a sad spectacle of desolation."
And he then proceeds with his melancholy reflections on so many perishing memorials of human glory and grandeur in so small a compass.
G. W. T.
Volney wrote thus:
"Qui sait si sur les rives de la Seine, de la Tamise ... dans le tourbillon de tant de jouissances ... un voyageur, comme moi, ne s'asseoira pas un jour sur de muettes ruines, et ne pleurera pas solitaire sur la cendre des peuples et la mémoire de leur grandeur?"—Les Ruines, chap. ii. p. 11.
Mackenzie Walcott, M.A.
Misapplication of Terms (Vol. ix., p. 44.).—I cannot pretend to set up my judgment against that of Mr. Squeers, who has in his favour the proverbial wisdom of the Schools. Riddle, however, who I believe is an authority, gives the word Lego no such meaning as "to hearken." If Plautus uses the word in that sense, as it is an uncommon one, the passage should have been quoted, or a reference given. The meaning of
the word appears to be "to collect, run over, see, read, choose." In justification of my criticism, and in reply to Mr. Squeers, I shall quote Horne Tooke's remark, in speaking of "τα δεοντα, or things which ought to be done;" Div. Purley, Pt. II. ch. viii. (vol. ii. pp. 499-501., edit. 1849):
"The first of these, Legend, which means That which ought to be read, is, from the early misapplication of the term by impostors, now used by us as if it meant, That which ought to be laughed at. And so it is explained in our Dictionaries."