Now there is nothing in the whole range of scholarship and philology that requires more tender handling than the Greek preposition, unless it be the prepositional adverb, which results from the combination of a preposition with an adjective. I would not be so bold as to assert that κατ' ὀλίγον does not mean "gradually, by little and little." I feel convinced that I have seen it so used before now; but I beg to submit that in the powerful passage quoted from Longinus it can only mean "presently, at once, with little" delay or interval. The purport of the passage seems to be this:—[The instances which I have cited] "exhibit rather a turbid diction, and a confused imagery, than a striking and forcible discourse. For, take them one by one, and hold them up to the light, and what first looked terrible shall presently take its true colour, and appear contemptible."
Longinus had quoted certain turgid and empty attempts at a very high rhetorical strain: he then in the passage before us condemns them for their confusion both of thought and phrase; and says, that they won't bear looking into for a minute (κατ' ὀλίγον).
If these remarks are correct, I fear they must damage the parallelism so industriously instituted by your correspondent; but if he will not be offended, I shall not regret it: for I confess to some feeling of jealousy in favour of modern forms of thought, and their claims to originality. The field of thought is finite, and great minds have tilled it before us; so that scarcely in its remotest corners shall you find a patch of virgin soil, or a bud till now unseen. But originality is not excluded for all that. He that culls a flower in the nineteenth century, and has an eye for its beauty, is as original an admirer as he who did the same on the day of creation. And he who with quick perceptions combines the thoughts which have arrested his attention, and with a lively and apt expression, fresh and free from conventional formalism, gives them out to another, that man may be called original. The opposite of originality is not repetition, but imitation. When, therefore, we would prove that a writer is not original, it is not enough to produce similar thoughts or phrases in older writers, unless our instances are so numerous as to afford an appearance of systematic copyism, or historical evidence of the fact of imitation be forthcoming from some external source.
J. E.
Oxford.
"Carmen perpetuum," &c. (Vol. v., p. 104.).
—The words in Ham's Bible are from the Metamorphoses of Ovid (I. 3.):
"Primâque ab origine mundi
Ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen."
This book has been called the Heathen Bible. It should be studied with the Greek translation of Tzetzes (Boisaunade's edition), to show the identity of the gods and heroes of Greece and Rome under their different names in the two languages. Ovid was by profession a learned priest; and it is probable that the subjects of his verse were the subjects of scenic representations in the mysteries, to which probably moral and natural or theological instruction was added, much after the manner of the Greek choruses. That these mysteries taught something worth the attention of a philosopher and moralist is manifest from the encomiums of Cicero: