The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3, June, 1851Various
History
The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3, June, 1851
Various
Art, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- History -- Periodicals
The last _Edinburgh Review_ has an article on COUSIN, in which a
general survey is taken of his life and of his works, of which he has
just completed the publication of a new edition. The _London Leader_
says that the critic ingeniously represents all Cousin's plagiarisms
as the consequences of the progressive and _assimilative_ intellect of
the eclectic chief; that it would be easy with the same facts to tell
a very different story; and correct the reviewer's "mistake," where he
talks of Cousin as the translator of Plato. Cousin's name is on the
title-page; but not one dialogue, the _Leader_ avers, did he
translate; it even doubts his ability to translate one. What he did
was to take old translations by De Grow and others, here and there
polishing the style; and the dialogues that were untranslated he gave
to certain clever young men in want of employment and glad of his
patronage. He touched up their style and wrote the Preface to each
Dialogue, for which the work bears his name! _This_ explains the
puzzling fact that the translator of Plato should so completely
misunderstand the purpose of the dialogue he is prefacing. Gigantic
indeed would be the labors of Cousin--if he performed them himself.
* * * * *
Walter Savage Landor is now seventy-six years of age. He writes no
more great works, but he is hardly less industrious than a
penny-a-liner in writing upon all sorts of subjects for the journals.
We find his communications almost every week in _The Examiner_, _The
News_, _The Leader_, _Leigh Hunt's Journal_, and other periodicals.
Sometimes he rises to his earlier eloquence, and we hear the voice
that was loudest and sweetest in the "Imaginary Conversations;" but
for the most part his newspaper pieces are feeble and splenetic,
unworthy of him. One of his latest composures has relation to Lord
Lyndhurst, by whose speech against the revolutionary aliens in England
had been excited the ire of the old poet. "In your paper of this day,
April 12," he writes to the editor of _The Examiner_, "I find repeated
an expression of Lord Lyndhurst's, which I am certain will be
offensive to many of your readers. General Klapka, a man illustrious
for his military knowledge, and for his application of it to the
defence of his country and her laws, is contemptuously called _one_
Klapka. The most obscure and the most despicable (and those only) are
thus designated. Surely to have been called by the acclamations of a
whole people to defend the most important of its fortresses is quite
as exalted a distinction as to be appointed a Lord Chamberlain or a
Lord Chancellor by the favor of one minister, and liable to be
dismissed the next morning by another. With all proper respect for the
cleverness of Lord Lyndhurst, I must entreat your assistance in
discovering one sentence he ever wrote, or spoke, denoting the man of
lofty genius or capacious mind. Memorable things he certainly has
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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