MISCELLANIES.

THE LIFE OF HEYNE.*

[1828.]

THE labours and merits of Heyne being better known, and more justly appreciated in England, than those of almost any other German, whether scholar, poet, or philosopher, we cannot but believe that some notice of his life may be acceptable to most readers. Accordingly, we here mean to give a short abstract of this Volume, a miniature copy of the biographical portrait;' but must first say a few words on the portrait itself, and the limner by whom it was drawn.

Professor Heeren is a man of learning, and known far out of his own Hanoverian circle, indeed, more or less to all students of history, by his researches on Ancient Commerce, a voluminous account of which from his hand enjoys considerable reputation. He is evidently a man of sense and natural talent, as well as learning; and his gifts seem to lie round him in quiet arrangement, and very much at his own command.

*FOREIGN REVIEW, No. 4.-Christian Gottlob Heyne, biographisch dargestellt von Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren. (Christian Gottlob Heyne, biographically pourtrayed by Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren.) Göttingen.

Nevertheless, we cannot admire him as a writer; we do not even reckon that such endowments as he has are adequately represented in his books. His style both of diction and thought is thin, cold, formal, without force or character, and painfully reminds us of college lectures. He can work rapidly, but with no freedom, and, as it were, only in one attitude, and at one sort of labour. Not that we particularly blame Professor Heeren for this, but that we think he might have been something better : these fellows in buckram,' very numerous in certain walks of literature, are an unfortunate, rather than a guilty class of men; they have fallen, perhaps unwillingly, into the plan of writing by pattern, and can now do no other; for, in their minds, the beautiful comes at last to be simply synonymous with the neat. Every sentence bears a family-likeness to its precursor; most probably it has a set number of clauses (three is a favourite number, as in Gibbon, for the muses delight in odds '); has also a given rhythm, a known and foreseen music, simple but limited enough, like that of illbred fingers drumming on a table. And then it is strange how soon the outward rhythm carries the inward along with it; and the thought moves with the same stinted, hamstrung rub-a-dub as the words. In a state of perfection, this species of writing comes to resemble powerloom weaving: it is not the mind that is at work, but some scholastic machinery which the mind has of old constructed, and is from afar observing. Shot follows shot from the unwearied shuttle; and so the web is woven, ultimately and properly, indeed, by the wit of man, yet immediately and in the meanwhile by the mere aid of time and steam.

But our Professor's mode of speculation is little less intensely academic than his mode of writing. We fear he is something of what the Germans call a Kleinstädter; mentally as well as bodily, a dweller in a little town.' He speaks at great length, and with undue fondness, of the Georgia Augusta;' which, after all, is but the University of Göttingen, an earthly, and no celestial institution: it is nearly in vain that he tries to contemplate Heyne as a European personage, or even as a German one; beyond the precincts of the Georgia Augusta, his view seems to grow feeble, and soon die away into vague inanity; so we have not Heyne the man and scholar, but Heyne the Göttingen Professor. But neither is this habit of mind any strange or crying sin, or at all peculiar to Göttingen; as, indeed, most parishes in England can produce more than one example to show. And yet it is pitiful, when an establishment for universal science, which ought to be a watchtower where a man might see all the kingdoms of the world, converts itself into a workshop, whence he sees nothing but his toolbox and bench, and the world, in broken glimpses, through one patched and highly discoloured pane!

Sometimes, indeed, our worthy friend rises into a region of the moral sublime, in which it is difficult for a foreigner to follow him. Thus he says, on one occasion, speaking of Heyne: Immortal are his merits in regard to the catalogues'— of the Göttingen library. And, to cite no other instance except the last and best one, we are informed, that when Heyne died, 'the guardian 'angels of the Georgia Augusta waited, in that higher ' world, to meet him with blessings.' By Day and Night!