These facts are enough to show the unfairness of Mr. Reiley's covert attack on Harvard, even supposing all his strictures on Mr. Allen's Latin were correct. But Mr. R. apparently has yet to learn, what every experienced Latin teacher does learn, that it is very unsafe to say that anything is bad Latin. He certainly has detected some serious mistakes, - one, over which he gets specially exultant, in the conjugation of a verb, - one so very bad that a candid reviewer would have recognized it at once, to use Macaulay's expression on a similar occasion, as a blunder that the greatest scholar might make in haste, and that the veriest school-boy might detect at his leisure. But all the time, while piloting Mr. Allen with great skill, as he thinks, into Charybdis, he has not noticed Scylla picking off some of his choicest recruits. Or, to speak in a way he cannot fail to understand, he has himself made various blunders, quite enough to relieve Mr. Allen, or any other experienced teacher and scholar, from caring a whit for what he says. Our space will only allow us to mention two. Mr. Allen has translated "standing on one foot" by stantem uno in pede, whereon Mr. Reiley pours out several vials of most superior wrath, and all to show that stantem altero pede is the only proper way; that alter and not unus is "one of two," and that the preposition is inadmissible. Now it happens that what is wanted here is not alter, "one as opposed to the other," but unus, "one without the other; one and not two." But the only proper answer, the all sufficient answer, is to refer to Horace (Satires, I. 4, 10): Versus dictabat stans pede in uno, where the editions and dictionaries speak of it as a proverbial expression. Not that stans pede altero might not be used in some cases. If Mr. Reiley were to call on Mr. Allen, we think the result might be thus described: Alanus, stans pede altero, altero Reileium foras extrusit. There is also the brilliant remark that "compulit (instead of coegit) never occurs with an object infinitive in good Latin." E. g. Ovid (Fasti, III. 860): Compulerunt regem jussa nefanda pati.
We shall not be suspected of any wish to palliate any real blunder made by Mr. Allen or by any one else. But when editors of respectable magazines admit into them articles of which the chief aim appears to be a slur at Harvard College, they should see that the task is properly done, - for their own credit. Harvard's will take care of itself.
W. E.
*J. W. Schermerhorn & Co., 14 Bond Street, New York.
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