oment the Colonel stood stupified; then, his face turning to a
cold, clayey white, he seized the black by the throat, and hurled him to
the floor. Planting his thick boot on the man's face, he seemed about to
dash out his brains with its ironed heel, when, at that instant, the
octoroon woman rushed, in her night-clothes, from his room, and with
desperate energy pushed him aside, exclaiming: 'What would you do?
remember WHO HE IS!'
The negro rose, and the Colonel, without a word, passed into his
apartment. What followed will be the subject of another chapter.
_PICAYUNE BUTLER._
'General Butler was a barber,'
So the Pelicans were raving;
Now you've got him in your harbor,
Tell us how you like his shaving?
_LITERARY NOTICES._
LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. Delivered at the royal Institution
of Great Britain in April, May, and June, 1861. By MAX MULLER,
Fellow of All Souls College, etc. From the second London edition,
revised. New-York: Charles Scribner, Boston: A.K. Loring. 1862.
Within the memory of man one could in England or America be 'very well
educated,' as the word went, and yet remain grossly ignorant of the
simplest elements of the history of language. In those days Latin was
held by scholars to be derived from Greek--where the Greek came from
nobody knew or cared, though it was thought, from Hebrew. German was a
jargon, Provencal a '_patois_,' and Sanscrit an obsolete tongue, held in
reverence by Hindoo savages. The vast connections of language with
history were generally ignored. Hebrew was assumed, as a matter of
course, to have been the primeval language, and it was wicked to doubt
it. Then came Sir William Jones, Carey, Wilkins, Forster, Colebrooke,
and the other Anglo-Indian scholars, and the world learned what it ought
to have learned from the Jesuits, that there was in the East a very
ancient language--Sanscrit--'of wonderful structure, more perfect than
Greek, more copious than Latin, more exquisitely refined than either;
bearing to both a strong affinity,' and stranger still, containing a
vast amount of words almost identical with many in all European and many
Oriental tongues. This was an apocalypse of truth to many--but a source
of grief to the orthodox believers that Greek and Latin were either
aboriginal languages, or modifications of Hebrew. Hence the blind, and
in some cases untruthful warfare made on the Sanscrit discoveries, as in
the case of Dug
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