For the Monthly Magazine. LYCEUM OF ANCIENT LITERATURE.-No. XIX. OF MANILIUS. F this poet, who lay for so many centuries unknown, and concerning whom so many controversies have arisen, we are now to give some account. He was so strangely neglected by his contemporaries, that they furnish us with no memorials of him; and all that we can discover, is by inferences to be drawn from some passages in the poem itself. There is nothing certainly known of the country which gave birth to Manilius. It is supposed, however, that he was originally from some part of Asia; both froin the peculiar construction of his sentences, and from the particular science which he has celebrated, more familiar to the natives of the East, than to the Romans. From these two lines, Speratum Hannibalem nostris cecidisse cate some have endeavoured to prove, that age when genius and talents of every Particularly by Bentley and Pingré lian* propose him also to his orator, when he encourages him to read Macer and Lucretius, and affirms that a competent skill in astronomy was necessary to make him perfect in his profession? Why do the philologers never use his authority, when it might have been so pertinently cited by Aulus Gellius and Macrobius? Why do the grammarians and mythologists appear to be altogether unacquainted with his writings? These are queries which cannot now be answered; but they are of sufficient weight to make us hesitate in pronouncing him to be a native of Rome, at least, as one of the Manilii family. That he was originally from some part of Asia, in whatever place he received his education, may be surmised from his energetic and highly-coloured descriptions, and from a variety of expressions, which, however poetical, are extremely singular, and not to be found in the Roman writers of that age. As a proof that he was not a Roman of illustrious birth, there will be found considerable variations, in the old manuscript copies, with respect even to the Gemblacensist, by much the most ancient name of this obscure poct. The MS. and the best, has no name in the title page, appearing to have been written in the sanie hand which transcribed the rest of the poem; but the name of Manlius pocta may be seen evidently written by a which is the next in seniority, is thus inmore recent hand. The MS. of Leipsick, that of Vossius is entitled M. Mallii Anscribed: Arati philosophi Astronomicon; tiochi Pani Astronomicon; and the MS, Cassinensis has this inscription, C. Ma nilii poetæ illustris Astronomicon. It is ascertain the real name of the author, therefore impossible, from these MSS. to since the name in the Gemblours MS. is stated not to be written in the same hand which executed the rest of the poem; that of Leipsick is notoriously false; and among the more recent MSS. there are not to be found two which agree in the had seen these MSS. and collated all the orthography of the name. Bentley, who earlier editions of the poet, considers this as a point which cannot now be settled. This uncertainty may also equally refute the opinion of those, who think that the poet was the same Manilius the astrologer, mentioned by the elder Pliny:‡ and of others again, who supposed him to have been the same with Manlius the mathematician, also mentioned in Pliny*, who, by an order from Augustus, had placed a golden ball upon an obelisk, which formed a kind of zodiacal sun-dial, from its shadow marking the hours. The mathematician of Pliny appears to have had nothing in common with our poet; and if they had been the same person, it is not probable that the naturalist would have omitted so remarkable a circumstance. That it was not necessary that the poet, whoever he was, should have at the same time been an excellent ma thematician, may be inferred from the instance of Aratus, who also wrote a poem on Astronomy, though, according to Cieerot, he was ignorant of the first principles of the science; and Manilius himself sometimes betrays great want of skill in the subject which he selected for the exercise of his muse. That he was a poet, is sufficiently verified by the poem itself; that he was an astromer, may be doubted. He probably only collected into one mass whatever he had read in various Greek and Roman authors, and embellished it with the graces of poetry. We must not therefore be surprised if he sometimes contradicts himself. Dr. Bentley is of opinion, that whoever was the author, it was not published by him. It remained unknown till the reign of Constantine. Hence it is that Do one of the ancient grammarians have cited any of its verses; which would probably have been the case, had the poem been known to them, as we frequently see in their collections innumerable lines cited of authors, whose works are no longer extant. About the reign of Constantine, it appears to have fallen into the possession of Julius-Firmicus Maternus, who left a commentary, or rather a mere translation, in prose, of the poem, without acknowledging the source whence he derived all that he has evidently taken from Manilius. It then relapsed into darkness and oblivion, till it was discovered in the tenth century, but in a most wretched condition; from this copy, however, many transcriptions were made. There is, we admit, more of conjecture than of certainty in this statement; but it will perhaps appear probable upon reflection, and may serve to account for the silence of Ovid and Quinc Nat. Hist. xxxvi. 10. De Nat. Deor. 2. 41. Præf. in Manil. tilian upon the work of Manilius*. It is certain that the poem was not left by its author in a state fit for publication. It is evidently imperfect and unfinished, though to what extent it was his inten tion to enlarge.it, or what other subjects connected with the science in its then limited sphere, he meant to introduce, it is now not easy to conjecture. The po et (lib. i. v. 112) hopes for a long and peaceful old age, that he may have time. to put the finishing to his work. He hints at a variety of topics, which we do not find are afterwards illustrated. He promises to speak of the properties of planets; of their different aspects; of their connection with the Decania and Dodecatemoria of the signs, and the twelve celestial houses; of the power of the constellations at their setting; of all which, nothing is to be found in any remaining part of the poem. There is almost as much uncertainty respecting the time when Manilius is supposed to have existed; though, in this respect, there are many circumstances to be collected from the poem, which induce us to adopt the common opinion, that he wrote under Augustus. By Gevartius, he is placed so low as the reign of Theodosius; and he considers him as the same Manlius Theodorus the consul,, to whom Claudian has addressed one of his panegyrics. But the arguments which Gevartius adduces in support of this hypothesis, are by no means convincing. From the mere similarity of name, no sufficient elucidation can possibly be drawn; nor is it enough to as sert, that the name of Manilius does not occur in any of the ancient writers, to infer that he could not have existed in the classic æra of Rome. Manilius has that in common with many other authors, of whose antiquity no doubt has been entertained. Q. Curtius, the historian of Alexander, lay so long unknown, that not the slightest mention is made of him by any writer of Greece or Rome; nor was he discovered till about the tenth centu ry from the birth of our Saviour. The writings of Velleius Paterculus are so lit tle noticed by his contemporaries, and by later authors, that, had it not been for the accidental discovery of a MS. in some part of Germany, miserably torn and defaced, the very name of that elegant historian would have been lost to Yet there are few, however slender us. * Vide Fingré Introd, aux Astronomiques de Man. To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine. Ο SIR, NE of the correspondents in your last month's Number, suggests a plan for handing down to posterity the way in which the languages of Europe are at present pronounced, by means of recording, in the orthography of the respective alphabets, the sounds of the inferior animals;" which," he says, "have been, are, and will be the same, in all time coming." He adduces instances to shew that in the days of Theocritus and of, Plautus the sheep cried ba,a, and the cuckoo tu,tu. "These," he says, "serve to point out that the inferior animals cried two thousand years ago exactly as they do at present, and also serve to shew how the ancients sounded certain of the letters in their alphabet." Now I humbly conceive it to be impossible for any examples of this kind to prove both these points: they can prove only one; and I apprehend we express the cuckoo's note by a different orthography (the name of the bird) at present. The idea however is wonderfully ingenious and profound, and I shall be proud to contribute my trifling assistance in the furtherance of it. How greatly such an object is wanted, is well known to scholars. Mr. Godwin says in his Enquirer, that the most learned man now living does not understand the Latin tongue so well as a Roman milkmaid did; nor, with respect to its pronunciation, so well as the cows that she milked. The following are the particulars which, after some research, and on consulting the best authorities, I have been able to collect in this view. To your correspondent's expression of the cuckoo's note, I must (as I mentioned before) except. Shakspeare records it otherwise, in a song: The cuckoo then on every tree Two notes perhaps thought to be ascertained with nearly equal precision, are those of the cock and the dog. Both these I shall produce from the same poet, in the song of Ferdinand and Ariel, in the first act of the Tempest: Hark, hark; bough-waugh: the watch-dogs bark, I confess, however, I have seen the for- Bow-wow-wow-wow.- From the dog, the transition to the cat is obvious. George Alexander Stevens, in one of his Readings, introduces an amorous dialogue between two cats, beginning with their addressing each other by name as follows: He. Moll-row, Moll-row. I'd rather be a kitten, and cry" mew. Theocritus, as your correspondent in forms us, lias preserved the cry of the sheep in his time: to which I add, that it is on printed record, without variation, among ourselves, in the farce of the Village Lawyer. Swift has taken some pains to catch the neighing of a horse, in his invention of houyhnhum; and (in the first chapters of his fourth Voyage) a shorter cry of that animal, in hhuun, hhuun. Job says of the war-horse (chap. xxxix. ver. 25), "He saith among the trumpets, ha, ha:" but I am not inclined to depend much on this, as I do not understand the ori ginal expression, to which I think our translators may perhaps have accommo dated an interjection of our own. It is desirable to have the Hebrew sound in this place faithfully represented, that we may know what it is the horse really did say. I have no written voucher for giving the bellowing of the core as something Jike moo. The cry of young pigs is on record in the lines which most of us have heard from our nurses: This pig went to market, &c. I shall not repeat the whole pocm, as I can attain the purpose with inore advantage by an old "quibble" of much simpli city, on sucking pigs, rescued froin oblivion in a periodical publication of last month: concerning the canary-bird's chirping. Pretty Dick, and sweet, sweet, are, as far as my most diligent observation has extended, its universal interpretations. The duck's note is generally called quack; but Pope, in his Imitation of Chaucer, writes it rather differently thus: Miss stared; and grey ducke crieth, quaake. I believe the hen's note is variously pronounced chuck,-cluck, and clock. Shakspeare gives us the owl's song in one of his own: When blood is nipt, and ways be foul, The jack-daw's note we have on the authority of Cowper, in an epigram on the speculations of that bird from a steeple: He sees that this great round-about And saysWhat says he?-Caw. The same note is given to the crow in the jest-books, by a traveller who heard that bird in Scotland. "Caw, caw, and be dd, if you stay in such a country as this when you have wings to fly away." The nightingale's song I remember seeing introduced in some juvenile verses, describing her to sit snug, And charm the ear with jug, jug, jug. There is a small bird called, from its note, pee-wit; and Mr. Ashe, in the first volume of his entertaining Travels lately published, mentions an American bird which, for a similar reason, is named whip-poor-Will. If I remember right from my schooldays, it is stated in one of the notes to the Delphin edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, that the frog's croak resembles the (French?) pronunciation of the Latin words sub sub aqua, aqua. But I beg leave to suggest to your correspondent, whether his plan would not adinit of being extended so as to include likewise the sounds afforded by inanimate objects. For this extension there are certainly ample materials; a few of which, at present occurring to my mind, I shall exhibit. One of the most prominent instances at this season of festivity (Whitsuntide) is that of church-bells; but this indeed is rather scanty, hardly exceeding ding dong, though Shakspeare carries it one. step further: Let us all ring Fancy's knell. I'll begin it: ding dong bell. As for the prophecy found in them by Whittington, and the contradictory admonitions by a widow in a singular story related (I think) in the Curiosities of Literature, I abandon them as not much to present purpose. the On speaking of a watch or a clock, it is unnecessary to add a single word of confirmation in assigning to them tick-tack. But a most invaluable record of this kind is preserved in Tristram Shandy, where the sounds of the strings of a violin, in putting them into tune (they were of course, at the time, out of tune), are thus accurately delineated: Ptr-r-r-ingtwing-twang-prut, trut, trut, prut -tr-a, e,i,o,u-twang-trut, prut-diddle diddle, diddle diddle, diddle diddle, dum: twaddle diddle, tweddle diddle, twiddle diddle, twoddle diddle, twuddle diddle: prut, trut-krish, krash, krush: diddle diddle, diddle diddle, diddle diddle, hum, dum, drum: trut prut, prut trut. There are two other expressions very well established for musical sounds, but I as in the first of the following quotations am reluctantly obliged to give them up, they are appropriated to no particular instrument, and in the second are applied to instruments which they do not seein at all to suit: Some say that signior Bononcini, Sound the trumpet, beat the drum ; LITERARY MAGAZINE. The sound of a postilion's whip is also given by Tristram Shandy as crack, crack, crack. In Pope's Iliad, a spear or an arrow in the air may abundantly be seen to whiz. A bow-string, when pulled, is said to twang, on the same authority; which is also confirmed by a song of Garrick's: My heart would you hit, And it comes to my heart with a twang. The noise of a fly's wings in motion is given by Shakspeare: Poor harmless fly, That with his pretty buzzing melody, Came here to make us inerry, and thou hast kill'd him! The The same word, and humming, are applied to a bee. The noise of a large bird's wings in rising is well expressed by Pope (Windsor Forest) in the line, and this circumstance constitutes the very essence of the blunder—————— Hesperiosque amnes, Rhenum, Rhodanumque, PADUMQUE." The lines which Symphorus has over See, from the brake the whirring pheasant looked are, springs. The beat of a drum is pretty commonly agreed on. We have it in a military song in the Surrender of Calais: Nothing to eat, We have nothing to eat. It is also in another song: At pater obductos luctu miserabilis ægro Condiderat vultus, et, si modo credimus, นานท Isse diem sine sole ferunt; incendia lumen Prabebant, aliquisque malo fuit usus in illo. Added to this, the sudden descent of the son of Phoebus is compared with the motion of the meteor vulgarly termed a falling-star, and which mishes its jour ney generally in less than twenty-four hours. And our hearts beat the rub-a-dub feelings of Volvitur in præceps, longoque per aëra tractu joy. Nothing further occurs to me at present on this highly important subject, except that I believe the sound of a hunting-horn is represented by tantivy. Σ. To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine. SIR, HE Correspondent who subscribes Thimself Symphorus, in the 501st page of your last month's Magazine, imagines that he has fully acquitted Ovid upon the charge of inconsistency in his fable of Phaeton, whom he describes as having fallen into a river, at a time when there happened to be no river wherein to fall. Symphorus tells us, that by supposing the space of at least one day occupied by Phaeton's fall, the face of nature might then be in a considerable degree renewed:" and because Homer has chosen to make Vulcan a whole day tumbling into the island of Lemnos; ergo, "every seeming incongruity is thus removed from the text of Ovid." This, instead of a logical, or even a probable conclusion, is one of the most unhappy conjectures ever jumped at. Had the critic looked forward only a few lines into the text, he would have found the poet describing the face of nature so far from renewed," that the confla gration during Phaeton's descent is said to have supplied the loss of the sun, merely by the light it occasioned. Symphorus seems to have forgotten that Eridanus (or the Po) was expressly mentioned as scorched up, before Phaeton was said to be precipitated into it, Fertur: ut interdum de cœlo stella sereno, Quæ si non cecidit, potuit cecidisse videri. Your's, &c. Camden Town, May 16, 1808. SAMUEL WESLEY. To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine. IT SIR, T often happens that some of the limbs of fruit-trees, traired against a wall, are blighted, and die; while others remain in a healthy and flourishing state. This evil is, by gardeners, generally attributed to the effects of lightning. But if this were the case, would not the violent action of the electric fluid produce a laceration of the branch and stalk of the tree? No such effect is to be perceived. It therefore appears to me that we must seek some other cause for this evil, and I flatter myself that I have discovered the real one. A few years since, when Galvanism was first introduced to public notice, I constructed a pile, consisting of about one hundred plates of copper, and as many of zink, each about two inches square. Among other experiments, I applied it to the branch of a tender plant (a species of the ficoides). Having left it for about an hour, on my return I found the branch withered, and hanging close to the stalk. It immediately occurred to me that Galvanism might be the cause of the above-mentioned defect in wall fruit trees, occasioned by the oxidation of the nails, by which they are oftentimes fastened (for I conceive Galvanism to be produced, in a greater or less degree, by every metal passing into a state of ox dation). Recollecting that the limb of a cherry |