At the sale of Mr. Hone's books, I purchased a bundle of religious pamphlets; among them was Cecil's Friendly Visit to the House of Mourning. From the pencillings in it, it appears to have afforded him much comfort in the various trials, mental and bodily, which it is well known clouded his latter days.

WILLIAM BARTON.

19. Winchester Place,
Southwark Bridge Road.

SHAKSPEARE'S "SMALL LATIN."—HIS USE OF "TRIPLE."
(Vol. iii., p. 497.)

In reference to the observations of A. E. B., I beg leave to say that, in speaking of Shakspeare as a man who had small Latin, I intended no irreverence to his genius. I am no worshipper of Shakspeare, or of any man; but I am willing to do full justice, and to pay all due veneration, to those powers which, with little aid from education, exalted their possessor to the heights of dramatic excellence.

As to the extent of Shakspeare's knowledge of Latin, I think that it was well estimated by Johnson, when he said that "Shakspeare had Latin enough to grammaticize his English." Had he possessed much more than was sufficient for this purpose, Ben Jonson would hardly have called his knowledge of the language small; for about the signification of small there can be no doubt, or about Ben's ability to determine whether it was small or not. But this consideration has nothing to do with the appreciation of Shakspeare's intellect: Shakspeare might know little of Latin and less of Greek, and yet be comparable to Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; as Burns, who may be said to have known no Latin, is comparable, in many passages, even to Horace. "The great instrument of the man of genius," says Thomas Moore, "is his own language," which some knowledge of another language may assist him to wield, but to the wielding of which the knowledge of another language is by no means necessary. The great dramatists of Greece were, in all probability, entirely ignorant of any language but their own; but such ignorance did not incapacitate them from using their own with effect, nor is to be regarded as being, in any way, any detraction from their merits. Shakspeare had but a limited acquaintance with Latin, but such limited acquaintance caused no debilitation of his mental powers, nor is to be mentioned at all to his disparagement. I desire, therefore, to be acquitted, both by A. E. B. and by all your other readers, of entertaining any disrespect for Shakspeare's high intellectual powers.

As to his usage of the word triple, that it is "fairly traced to Shakspeare's own reading" might not unreasonably be disputed. We may, however, concede, if A. E. B. wishes, that it was derived from his own reading, as no trace of its being borrowed is to be found. But I am not sure that if other writers had taken pains to establish this use of the word in our tongue, its establishment would have been much of a "convenient acquisition." Had any man who has three sisters, closely conjoined in bonds of amity, the privilege of calling any one of them a triple sister, I do not consider that he or his language would be much benefited. Ovid, I fear, employed triplex "improperly," as Warburton says that Shakspeare employed triple, when he spoke of the Fates spinning triplici pollice. I cannot find that any writer has imitated him. To call the Fates triplices deæ (Met. viii. 481.), or triplices sorores (Met. viii. 453.), was justifiable; but to term any one of them triplex dea, or to speak of her as spinning triplici fuso or triplici pollice, was apparently to go beyond what the Latin language warranted. A. E. B. rightly observes that triple must be explained as signifying "belonging to three conjoined;" but the use of it in such a sense is not to be supported either by custom or reason, whether in reference to the Latin language or to our own.

MR. SINGER, in his observations on "captious," has a very unlucky remark, which A. E. B. unluckily repeats—"We, no doubt, all know," says MR. SINGER, "by intuition as it were, what Shakspeare meant." If we all know Shakspeare's meaning by intuition, how is it that the "true worshippers of Shakspeare" dispute about his meaning?

J. S. W.

Stockwell, June 27. 1851.