LITERARY NOTICES. 



679 



cited by the author, the linguistic source of 

 each word is stated, and it thus appears 

 that in Ethelbert's time out of 100 words 

 not 07cr six were other than pure Anglo- 

 Saxon. Compare with this the constitution 

 of English. Dr. Weisse finds that out of 

 100 words in the Bible 78 are Anglo-Sax- 

 on ; in Samuel Johnson, 51. But of this 

 side of the work we have written enough. 



Dr. Weisse was an utter stranger to 

 English up to his thirtieth year, and his 

 estimate of the value of our language at 

 that time was in direct ratio to his igno- 

 rance of it. Convinced of its inferiority to 

 certain other languages, he commenced the 

 researches of which this volume is the re- 

 sult, for the purpose of demonstrating that 

 inferiority. His studies satisfied him that 

 English " contains the cream and essence of 

 its predecessors and contemporaries ; that 

 its grammar is simpler, and that its records 

 and literature are more consecutive and 

 complete, than those of any other tongue." 

 He is not content to class English with the 

 best languages of the globe ; it surpasses 

 them all : it is the best, the most flexible, 

 the one language of all that have ever ex- 

 isted which is most suitable to become a 

 universal language. But there exist some 

 slight hindrances which Dr. Weisse labors 

 to remove, and the principal one is that we 

 do not " write as we pronounce or pi'onounce 

 as we write." If our " orthography " were 

 reformed and a few syntactical anomalies 

 corrected, nothing could prevent the Eng- 

 lish from becoming universal. Already it 

 is spoken by some 90,000,000 people, and 

 English-speaking nations are the masters of 

 a far larger area of the inhabited globe than 

 are the nations using any other tongue. 



The author does not confine himself 

 very scrupulously to the programme indi- 

 cated in his title, but is ever digressing to 

 the right hand and to the left. His busi- 

 ness is with the English language as it has 

 been and as it is, but for page after page 

 the reader might suppose that he was pe- 

 rusing a dogmatic treatise de omnibus rebus. 

 Dr. Weisse himself is not unconscious of 

 the irrelevancy of much that he has writ- 

 ten, but he excuses it on the ground that 

 his digressions serve to amuse the reader 

 and make the perusal of the work a plea- 

 sure instead of an irksome task. For our 



part, when we wish to learn the truth about 

 the supposititious visit of St. Paul to Brit- 

 ain, the history of Pelagius, or other top- 

 ics, we prefer to get our information from 

 the histories which deal with those sub- 

 jects. Though not uninteresting, these di- 

 gressions are a blemish, and should be 

 omitted if the work reaches a second edi- 

 tion. The volume is a valuable contribu- 

 tion to the history of the English language, 

 and we bespeak for it the earnest attention 

 of our readers. 



A Treatise on the Law of Property in 

 Intellectual Productions in Great 

 Britain and the United States. Em- 

 bracing Copyright in Works of Litera- 

 ture and Art, and Playright in Dra- 

 matic and Musical Compositions. By 

 Eaton S. Drone. Boston : Little, Brown 

 & Co. 1879. Bvo, pp. 774. Price, §6. 



The popular interest which the subject 

 of the rights and wrongs of authors has 

 recently awakened in England, France, and 

 the United States, and the uncertainty and 

 confusion into which the law of copyright 

 has been allowed to drift, make a satisfac- 

 tory treatise on this subject as welcome to 

 men of letters as to the legal profession. 

 The book before us is beyond comparison 

 the most thorough and critical work on lit- 

 erary property yet published in England or 

 this country, and, though an American pub- 

 lication, it is as complete an exposition of 

 the English as of our own law. Our read- 

 ers will remember that in his evidence be- 

 fore the English Copyright Commission, 

 which we reprinted in the December " Month- 

 ly," Professor Huxley maintained that there 

 was no distinction in principle between liter- 

 ary property and any other kind of property. 

 Herbert Spencer and Professor Tyndall, who 

 also testified before the Commission, were 

 evidently of the same opinion. In a prelimi- 

 nary essay on " The Origin and Nature of 

 Literary Property," Mr. Drone has gone to 

 the bottom of this subject, and by an elab- 

 orate examination of all the principles, au- 

 thorities, and arguments which bear on it, 

 shows that literary property has the same 

 genei-al attributes and is governed by the 

 same general principles that obtain in the 

 case of all property. Hence the right of an 

 author to his intellectual productions is no 

 more a monopoly subject to the whims of the 



