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: "Nam mihi cum multa eximia, divinaque videntur Athenæ tuæ peperisse, atque in vitâ hominum attulisse, tum _nihil melius illis mysteriis_, quibus ex agresti immanique vitâ exculti ad humanitatem et mitigati sumus: initiaque ut appellantur, ita reverâ _principia vitæ_ cognovimus; neque solùm cum lætitiâ vivendi rationem accepimus, sed etiam cum _spe meliore moriendi_."--_De Leg._ lib. ii. c. 14.