156 Specimens of Latin Comedy The Captives, of Plautus. [FEB. 



now have some opportunity of judging. But it can be no inconsiderable 

 acquisition to the English litterateur to rescue from the obscurity of an 

 antiquated dialect of a dead language, the comedies of one, whose purity 

 of diction and elegance of composition induced Varro to say,* that " if 

 ever the Muses were to speak in Latin, they would use the language of 

 Plautus." It was no disgrace to Plautus, that, while he was dazzling 

 his countrymen by the coruscations of his wit, and instructing as well 

 as amusing them by the productions of his pen it was no disgrace to 

 him, we say, that he had to labour in a mill, in order to save himself from 

 beggary ; for such was the case ; but if we occasionally meet with an 

 equivocal expression in his writings, or a metaphorical allusion incon- 

 sistent with the modern rules of decency, we cannot be surprised. The 

 faults of Plautus were not the faults of the man, but those of his circum- 

 stances and his age. Livius Andronicus, his predecessor, was a slave 

 before he was a poet ; and Terentius, his successor, bent his neck to the 

 yoke before he figured on the stage. But Plautus was at the same 

 time a miller and a comedian ; as, in after times, the far-famed Cin- 

 cinnatus was at once husbandman and dictator. And as, in the one 

 instance, Rome disdained not to furnish her theatre from the mill, 

 so, in the other, she disdained not to take her legislator from the 

 plough. 



_ 



CALAMITIES OF CARVING. 



I9W 



" Ah, who can tell how hard it is to carve .'" 



I HATE carving hate it in all its branches, moods, and tenses- 

 abhor it in all its figures, forms, and varieties. What is carving, in 

 fact, but a spurious kind of surgery, which we are called upon to exer- 

 cise, without the advantage of a common apprenticeship ? Far from 

 crying, like other children, for a knife and fork, my early years were 

 marked by a decided aversion to those weapons ; and when my uncle, 

 who brought me up, first put them into my hands, and abstracted my 

 spoon, I regarded it as the loss of a sceptre ; nay, its consequences 

 amounted almost to a prohibition of food, and I felt something of the 

 horror of anticipated starvation. Long, indeed, I endured the mortifi- 

 cation of seeing dinner come and go without the ability to secure a 

 tolerable meal ; for my uncle was a martinet in all matters of the table, 

 and his whim was, that the plates of the youngsters should be removed 

 as soon as the knives and forks of the elder branches had ceased to ply. 

 My cousins got through their work adroitly : they had the advantage 

 of early initiation in the mystery ; moreover, they had a natural liking 

 for the instruments which were my abhorrence. With a quick sense 

 of shame, much natural timidity, and an appetite of no ordinary cast, 

 many a meal passed with ineffectual struggles to assuage that hunger 

 which is the unfailing attendant of a sound constitution, and regular 

 bodily exercise. On one occasion, the effort to satisfy myself had nearly 

 cost me my life. Spurred to despair, I attempted to dispatch the slice 

 assigned as my allowance, without the preparatory process of cutting. 



* Quintil. I nst. Oral. x. 1. c. 



