of phrenology, so called, in which he appears to be a devout be. liever, and according to which no faculty, or rather organ, of the mind, can be improved by the exercise of any other. But is this theory of phrenology true? On the contrary, does not the very fact that the study of these languages does exercise and improve several of the faculties of the mind, if not all of them, go far to explode this fantastic theory itself, upon its own principle?

He contends, also, that a knowledge of Greek and Latin is by no means necessary, or even very important, to "a thorough understanding of English." He admits, indeed, "that no one can comprehend the etymology of a large portion of our language without an acquaintance with Greek and Latin as fully as with it." But then he contends that "to be acquainted with the etymology of words, and so to understand their meaning and uses, as to apply them with readiness and correctness, elegance and force, to all the requisite purposes of speech, are different and independent attributes of mind." (As if the study of the etymology of words did not necessarily involve the study of their meaning, or as if the process of translation at least did not inevitably do so; and, at the same time, naturally induce a habit of weighing them, and a faculty of appreciating their "force and elegance," which can hardly be acquired in any other manner.) But how is this? Did he not tell us, a little while ago, that there was but one faculty, or organ, of Language; and are we now to understand that there is one organ for the etymology and another "different and independent" one for the meaning of words? Really phrenology must be a very agreeable science.

But we have no time, or space, to state all our writer's views on this subject-much less to discuss them--and we must, therefore, satisfy ourselves with protesting against this part of his pamphlet, whilst we give him our cordial thanks for nearly all the rest.

TO OUR READERS.

We publish the following second letter from our correspondent "Oxoniensis," upon the subject of Huddesford's "Lines to My Wife," &c. with great pleasure; and shall subjoin a few remarks, which may be better understood after the letter is read. We must add here, however, in order that the letter itself (or a part of it,) may be better understood, that having found out (by the help of a literary friend,) the real name of our correspondent, we took the liberty to write to him eo nomine, (as he would say,) and this is his answer:

Charleston, S. C. May 10th, 1837.

Mr. White :-I have received four numbers of your "Literary Messenger," and am much obliged to you for sending them. If any future occasion of contributing to the work should present itself, I shall certainly embrace it; but it is seldom that I am induced to trouble other people with any remarks of my own. I supposed that, in this instance, at least, my incognito would have been secure; for, I do not believe that any body in Richmond knows my hand-writing, though I have formerly had some acquaintances there: at any rate, I shall, in future, preserve the same fictitious signature. At present, I shall content myself with sending you two or three quotations, illustrative of the connection between the Ivy and the Elm. They will show that, however grateful, and even necessary, the entwinement may be to the former, it is generally supposed to end in the death of the latter, and, of course, that the separation cannot be fatal to the tree, whatever may be the case with the parasitical creeper. The author of the additional stanza in your Magazine mistakes this point of Natural History; perhaps, not altogether without precedent. But, my chief objection to his lines arises from the pastry cook metaphor, of "rolling all their wishes into one ;" for which Mr. Huddesford would probably have been flogged, if his little poem had been a Winchester exercise, shown up to Dr. Warton. I omitted to mention, in my last, that these lines are selected by the Monthly Reviewer (February 1806), who introduces them, as a specimen of Mr. Huddesford's merit, in the following manner: "We turn to the following song; which, if our readers admire it as much as we do, they will thank us for transcribing." It is a little singular that the writer of the article should have been wholly ignorant of the very pretty lines of Lapraik, as quoted by Burns-and that, if Mr. Huddesford ever saw them,

"Chaplet." That one of these poets must have copied from the other, appears to be indisputable. I cannot avoid preferring the Scotch-where, by the by, the physiology of the Elm and Ivy is more correctly given.

I will conclude with three or four extracts confirmatory of the remark contained in my last communication.

Hedera, Ivy. Planta perpetuó virens, cum per se stare non possit (for which reason, I suppose, Bacchus, a notorious drun. kard, was crowned with Ivy,) arboribus et parietibus adeó arcté adhæret ut rumpat parietes et arbores necat." Facciolati, in Hedera. An evergreen, which adheres so closely to walls and trees, as to split the former and kill the latter.

You will find in Beloe's Aulus Gellius, the exquisitely elegant prologue, spoken by Laberius, a Roman Knight, who was induced, by the irresistible persuasion of Julius Cæsar, to exhibit himself on the Stage, and that, too, at a very advanced age. The lines end thus (Beloe's Aul. Gel. Vol. II, p. 133): "Ut hedera serpens vires arboreas necat, Ita me vetustas, amplexu annorum, enecat: Sepulcri similis, nihil nisi nomen retineo."

"The creeping Ivy clasps and kills the tree," &c.-or, in Rollin's admirable French version: De même que le lierre, embrassant un arbre, l'epurse insensiblement et le tue, ainsi la veeillesse, par les années dont ella me charge, me laisse sans force et sans vie, &c.—Cours. d'Etudes, I, 294. Again:

"See, Elfrida,

Ah see! how round yon branching Elm the Ivy
Clasps its green folds, and poisons what supports it."
Mason's Elfrida.

And Shakspeare:

"Thou art an Elm, my husband, I, a vine,
Whose weakness, married to thy stronger state,
Makes me with thy strength to communicate.
If ought possess thee, from me, it is dross,
Usurping Ivy, briar, or idle moss;
Who, all for want of pruning, with intrusion
Infect thy sap, and live on thy confusion."

Com. of Errors, 2, 2.

"Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms-
So doth the woodbine the sweet honey-suckle,
Gently entwist-the female Ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the Elm."
Mid-Summer's N. Dreams, 4, 1.

Shakspeare does not, in this last passage, state the consequences of this entwistment; but he does not say that the Elm would be killed by separation. Milton is equally silent on that point: "Led the vine

To wed her Elm: She, spous'd, about him twines Her marriageable arms."-Paradise Lost, v, 215. Nobody doubts that this is pleasant enough to the "female Ivy"-but, in how many instances, would the tree be glad to be relieved!

The heroine of the following anecdote seems to have carried matters a little too far:

"Longinus affirms that a lady in Cologne, in that situation where a lady's longings must be gratified, took such a fancy to taste the flesh of her husband, that she assassinated him, and, after eating as much as she could, while he was fresh, salted the rest,”—Albion, April 29th, 1837.

By the by, what has Cologne (eo nomine) to do with Longinus? I regret that these extracts should cost you double postage, and can only hope that you may think them worth the money. If not, you have your self, only, to blame; for, I had no thought of adding any thing to my first communication.

Allow me to conclude with a hope that you (or somebody else), may, some day, succeed in discovering the author of "Junius' Letters," as you have done in translating my incognito. Ishall, nevertheless, adhere to my signature of

OXONIENSIS.

In mitigation of damages, and to fill up my paper, I send you a conjectural reading of a passage in Macbeth--Act V, Scene the last.

When the approach of his foes is announced, in such force as to render resistance hopeless, the thought of suicide suggests itself, and is thus repelled:

"Why should I play the Roman fool, and die
On mine own sword? while I see lives,
The gashes do better upon them."

In the first place, no lives were, then, in sight; and if there had been, he must have been dreadfully alarmed to talk nonsense. Shakspeare undoubtedly wrote:

"While i foe lives."

The mistake, by the copyist, of the dotted figure for the dotted letter, and off for s, occasioned the vile blunder. As to the plural relative pronoun "them," it means those foes, "while one of them is left me." There is scarcely a page of Shakspeare that does not exhibit such inaccuracies as this.

If ever I should, like poor Laberius, be compelled to exhibit myself upon any stage, in the character of Macbeth, I shall not hesitate to speak the passage (meo periculo, as Dr. Bentley says,) as it is here amended.

I proposed this conjectural alteration, some time since, through a friend, to Mrs. Kemble Butler; but I don't know that she ever received it. If Mrs. Siddons, whom I knew intimately, had been alive, I should have submitted it to her. Whatever might have been her opinion, I am sure that it would have given her pleasure, if she could have acquiesced in mine.

Upon another passage of Macbeth I will, at some future time, indulge my conjectural vein, if your insertion of this should encourage me to do so. 0.

We thank our correspondent for his communication, and may say that we pretty nearly agree with him in most of his thoughts. But what do we think of his quotations against the Ivy, whose cause we undertook to defend against his former attack?--Why we think that some of them sustain his point of physiology completely. But we certainly did not doubt that before. On the contrary, our readers may remember, we expressly admitted it; and our precise position was, that the plant, notwithstanding its secret fault of being a little too erigeante, was still a very proper and classical emblem of connubial affection and fidelity. This was our point of poetry, and the quotations evidently do not disturb it. Indeed the two last of them, from the highest authori ties of Parnassus, Shakspeare and Milton, expressly confirm it. Thus Shakspeare manifestly considers the "female Ivy" as, poetically at least, in the same category with the "woodbine," (against which our correspondent brings no charge of undue exaction,) and if he does not "state the consequences of this entwistment," (or rather "enringment,") it is only because, as we said, a poet satisfies himself with the superficial appearance of things, without inquiring too minutely into the physiology of them; leaving the simpler, or the satirist to do that, if he likes. And the extract from Milton is even still more to our purpose,

and indeed exactly in point.

We will only add, that we shall always be happy to hear from our correspondent, whenever he chooses to "indulge his con. jectural vein," or any other; and certainly shall not presume to "translate his incognito," any further than to express our hope, that he may long continue to gratify his literary taste, by roving among all the flowers of poesy-" modo apis Mantiniae," as Horace says-and favoring us, from time to time, with some small portions of their gathered sweets.

We add here, a pleasant note which our juvenile Messenger has begged leave to append to the letter of " Oxoniensis," by way of aiding his argument against the Ivy; in the following

words:

NOTE BY PRINTER'S DEVIL.

In addition to the illustrations of Oxoniensis, which are generally very happy, and evince a highly cultivated taste, as well as extensive reading,--I am tempted to give another, though not exactly applicable; and though unable to quote it in extenso, perhaps Oxoniensis, if he thinks it worth the trouble, may complete it.

When Lord Macartney was sent Ambassador from England to the Emperor of China, one object of his splendid embassy was a commercial treaty between the two countries. In this he was wholly unsuccessful, though treated with every honor that could be shown him by the Monarch of the greatest Empire that has ever existed-and ample returns were made for the rich presents that he carried from England. Among them, it was said, were some poetical productions of the aged Emperor Kien Long, who was admitted, by the best and most impartial critics of China, to be the first Poet of that or any age or country.-Before the return of the embassy, the Editor of one of the leading London newspapers, very naturally and laudably, undertook to gratify the public curiosity with anticipated translations of some of these productions. They were, of course, copied by at least one of our American Editors, and I remember to have met with them some years since in a file of old newspapers that hap pened to be preserved in a printing office where I then worked. I only recollect a few lines, or parts of lines, of a fable--“ The Oak and the Vine." I think they were nearly thus: "When tree to tree spoke,

Said the Vine to the Oak,

Let's together our branches intwine,
United we'll rise aloft to the skies,

Yes, Oak, you shall rise with the Vine."

I forget the rest of the fable, but it, of course, terminated in the Oak's declining the connection, as having no occasion for it.

Your readers may, perhaps, be very little pleased with your permitting one of your underlings to " start from his sphere;" and it certainly would not be allowable from any other motive jeu d'esprit, which, if not already lost in oblivion, is in danger than that of recovering, what I thought at least a very creditable of it, unless rescued by

YOUR MESSENGER.

TO "OXONIENSIS."

On reading his remarks respecting the Ivy and the Elm.
O blame not the Ivy, dear B-—,
If her fondness and frailty are such,
That she hangs on her favorite tree,
And hugs him a little too much.
'Tis her nature to do so--her fate-
Implanted by heaven above;
And if she e'er strangles her mate,
It is not from malice--but love.
So the generous Elm must forgive
Her fault for the sake of her charms;
And feel himself happy to live-

Or even to die--in her arms.