A BAD CRAM BOOK.* WE naturally suppose the compiler of
a dictionary to be at least respectably acquainted with the language with which he deals. A vast amount of the sort of knowledge which goes to make up scholarship must pass in some sort through his brain, and if only a small part of it remain with him, he ought to be more than moderately well equipped. Now Dr. White has compiled a dic- tionary, large, and what is more to the purpose, good, as good, perhaps, as anything of the kind that we have. Moreover, he has had large experience of education, having been, we believe, "Master of the Latin School" in Christ's Hospital for many years. It was reasonable, therefore, that opening his edition of Livy XXIII. we should expect to find a thoroughly good class-book. Here, we thought, is an editor who knows what boys ought to be told, and is thoroughly well qualified to tell it to them. Well, not to mince matters, we have found that the book is about as bad as it could be ; that it tells its readers a number of things which, if they have any pretensions to be reading Livy, they ought not to be told; that it passes by points where any commen- tator that knew his business would certainly give a note, and that it contains blunders which are simply inconceivable in any one who has learnt, not to say taught, Latin grammar.
To begin with the blunders. In chapter 12, 'Emile°, in the Carthaginian Senate, after the victory at Cannm, tauntingly asks Hanno, the leader of the peace party, whether he did not repent of his opposition to the war, and Hanno replies, " Respondeam Himilconi non desisse pcenitere me belli." Here Dr. White's note is " Desisse for desivisse, perf. inf. of dean°. Supply me as the subject." Surely Dr. White must have taught many generations of boys that an impersonal verb cannot have a personal subject ; or does he not see that to say that me is the subject of desisse is to say that it is the subject of pcenitere, to which the sense of desisse is carried on ? In chapter 14, Livy details the measures to which, in their straits, the military authorities of ROOM had resort. Besides making a levy of slaves, and collecting auxiliaries from Gaul and Picenum, the Dictator, " ad ultimum prope desperata3 reipubliem auxilium, quum honesta utilibus cedunt, descendit, edixitque," to the effect that debtors and criminals who might choose to serve should have their freedom. Now, observe the note,—" descendit, i.e., in forum"! How in the world does our editor propose to construe ad ultimum auxilium, unless it be after the word which he thus appropriates to an imaginary ellipsis ? In chapter 7, among the conditions which Capua makes with Hannibal, is this :—" Ut sum leges, set magistrates, Capum essent." Has Dr. White never heard of the " est pro habeo " construction—as it used to be called in the pre-Primer times that he tells us that Caprice is the "genitive of place"? In chapter 19, on " minus dimidium ferrum famesque consumpait," we have the note, "minus is an adverb, and quam is to be sup- plied after it." The construction is not a very difficult or unusual one, but it certainly is not simplified by minus being turned into an adverb. But to show the general character of the notes— what they put in and what they leave out—we will examine one chapter (7) in some detail. We have had one specimen of it already, in "sum leges," &c. After the conditions have been enumerated, come the words " hmo pacts ;" Dr. White says, * The Twenty-third Book of Livy, with Explariatory and Grammatical Notes, and Vocabulary 4%f Proper Names. Edited by John T. White, D.D., Oxon. London: Longman. 1873. " supply runt, perf. ind. of paciscor." We should have thought that the perfect indicative of a deponent would be rather out of place here. A little further on, we have " negasset se Unreel." " Supply esse," says our commentator. Surely a boy reading Livy might do that for himself. We have note after note of the same kind, telling the scholar exactly what, if the notes are not to be mere noxious cram, he ought to find out for himself,—" Tu. mulitis, gen. of thing measured, dependent on quid." "Postern die, abl. of time ' when.' " . . . . " Faturum ; supply essc." " Ilanni- bale, dat. dependent on obviam." Meanwhile the commentator has passed over a passage which really does call for a note. We read that, to seal their bargain with Hannibal, "plebs repents ensues [i.e., the Roman citizens in the place] comprehensos velut custodies cause balneis includi juasit, ubi fervors atque asstu anima inter. clusa fosdum in modem exspirarent." Now a boy who has to be told to supply esse after futurism may possibly need to have the force of ubi exspirarent explained to him, as denoting the purpose of the plebs that the victims should be suffocated. If Dr. White did not carefully eschew all illustrations, he might have quoted the parallel of the Black Hole at Calcutta, noting that the historian
might in the latter case have used the indicative, as the act of Sirdj-ud-Daulah seems to have been an act of thoughtlessness, though of the most reckless kind. Further on, again, the passage where Hannibal gives up the idea of seizing the obnoxious Decius Magius, " Veritus deinde, ne quid inter vim timeliest atque ex concitatione animorum inconsulti certaminia °meter," might be profitably explained. Young gentlemen who cannot discover a single rule of syntax for themselves might possibly fail to observe the sequence of ideas. The violent proceeding of an
arrest (vis) might cause a disturbance (tumu/fus); from the dis- turbance would arise much excitement (concitatio aninwrum); and this, again, would end in an unintentional conflict (inconsultum cer- tamen). And again, in " trepidante tote civitate ad exeipiendum Pcenum visendumque," a maker of dictionaries might have noted the uncommon use of trepidare, without any accompanying notion
of alarm. But it is useless to weary the reader with instances.
We turn to the vocabulary of proper names. Such a vocabulary might be useful. We should prefer indeed that the learner should refer to his dictionaries of biography and geography, but these books of reference are not always at hand, and boys will not always use them when they are. Let us take one example of the information Dr. White gives us. We turn to Litana, the forest
where Postumius was destroyed with his army toward the close of the fatal year of Canna), expecting, of course, to find some description marking more or less exactly the locality. Instead of this, we get a vapid epitome of Livy's narrative :-
"Litana, ae. f. Litana, a forest in the territory of the Boil in Ciaalpine Gaul, where a Roman army, under the Consul, L. Postumius, was destroyed by the trees being thrown down upon it, through a well planned and well executed device of the Gauls."
From this any one who has read the chapter learns absolutely nothing, and any one who has not will find it worthless even as
cram. Postumius, by the way, was not consul, but consul- elect, and could never have heard of his dignity. " Quum ens res [i.e., the elections] maxims agerentur," says Livy, came the news of this fresh disaster. Dr. White, of course, fails to point out the forte of quum maxime. We are afraid that many of our young friends would be sadly apt to construe it with very great energy.'
The editor says that "this edition of Book XXIII. of Livy bas been prepared for the use of a large body of pupils differing in age
and in. mental powers." In fact it is one of the subjects set for the Cambridge Local Examinations of this year. We hope that the large body of pupils who may use this book will have its infor- mation supplemented by some far more correct and efficient- teaching, feeling quite sure, that if they dci not, the Cambridge examiners will mark their opinion of the sort of scholarship thus acquired in a very significant and disagreeable manner.
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