war.' A reference to Todd's Johnson' or Richardson's Dictionary would have shown him that the word existed long before the war which ended in 1815, of which we suppose him to speak. One word more, and we have done. We cannot allow our author to assume, as he does at page 394, the connexion between 'cheap' (in the sense of market) and 'shop.' He is quite right when he shows that 'chipping,' in such names as ChippingNorton, Chipping-Barnet, and others, implies simply that they were ancient market-towns; but 'shop' we hold to be a word of a totally different origin. The French 'échoppe' at the present day means a small booth or stall—a lean-to against a wall. The 'Dictionnaire de Trevoux' explains it as follows: 'Petite boutique adossée à un mur, et souvent en appentis, qui se bâtit en des lieux passans.-Taberna. C'est où se logent les marchands qui n'ont pas a débiter des choses de grande valeur. Dans les marchés, dans les parvis des cathédrales, il y a toujours quelques échoppes.' The word is originally German. 'Schoppen' or 'schuppen' is defined by Campe in his Dictionary as a light building, which often consists only of a covering or roof resting on four uprights, and open at the sides. 'Wagen-schuppen' is a waggon-tilt. The root of the word is 'schuppe,' a scale: 'schuppen panzer is a coat of scale-armour. The name originally applicable to a mere booth or stall was applied to all shops, and the word passed into English from the French with hardly a change of pronun ciation. We have freely criticised certain etymologies which we think Mr. Taylor has adopted hastily, and we have expressed our opinion frankly when we have differed from him; but we should be sorry if our readers were on that account to suppose that we questioned either the value of his conclusions or the general accuracy of his facts. On the contrary, we think the book a good one; full of useful and interesting information, put together with scholarship and with untiring industry. We hope to see it circulate widely, because it is calculated not only to impart to people in general much that is curious and entertaining, but because we feel sure that it will stimulate research, and tend to increase the collection of a number of facts by which future philologists and antiquarians may largely profit.* We regret that our limits do not permit us to give more than a passing notice of Dr. Prior's cognate work on the Popular Names of British Plants' (London, 1863), which though open, like Mr. Taylor's book, to occasional exception, is full of valuable information, and highly illustrative of ancient history and manners. Vol. 116.-No. 231. D ART. ART. II.-1. Gedichte von Ludwig Uhland. 47th Edition, with preface by Dr. Holland. Stuttgart (Cotta), 1863. 2. Ludwig Uhland. Gedenkblätter auf das Grab des Dichters. By Karl Mayer. Tübingen, 1862. 3. Ludwig Uhland, sein Leben und seine Dichtungen, &c. Von Friedrich Notter. Stuttgart (Metzler), 1863. 4. Kritische Gänge. Viertes Heft. Art. 5. Ludwig Uhland. THE Neue Folge. Von Dr. F. T. Vischer. 3. Stuttgart (Cotta), 1863. Vortrag, von Otto Jahn. Bonn, 1863. HE name of Ludwig Uhland is so well known, and his poems are so familiar to most readers, as to make an article devoted to himself and his writings appear at first sight almost a work of supererogation. Very few of the numberless English men and women who, within the present century, have entered upon the study of the German language, have failed to make acquaintance more or less intimate with his works, or to appreciate their excellency. And yet there can be little doubt that, in many of his admirers, parts of those works fail of awakening interest, not from the absence of intrinsic merit, but from the want of some key to their full and clear comprehension. His ballads of course can be understood at once; and hence it is that, in nine cases out of ten, we find that to enter on the subject of Uhland and his writings leads to the discussion of, or quotation from his ballad pieces; but how rarely do we meet with readers who have so fully entered into his other writings, and the life which they reflect, as to comprehend their allusions, to appreciate their force, and to sympathise with the feelings to which they owe their origin! The works cited at the head of this article (with the exception of the first) have all appeared since Uhland's death, in the end of 1862, are all but the last written by eminent authors, fellow Suabians with the poet, and all tend towards making us better acquainted with a man who personally has been an abstraction to multitudes to whom his writings are a pleasuregiving reality. Before using the material, biographical and critical, which these different publications afford, in setting forth a short sketch of Uhland's life in connexion with his works, we may say a few words in reference to their literary merits. The pamphlet (for it is no more) of Karl Mayer, though the shortest and least pretentious, is at the same time the most useful and succinct of the whole number, serving as it has done to the authors of the other works as a framework of facts, which they have filled up each according to his ability. Karl Mayer, himself known as one of the Suabian poets, from early youth to mature mature old age an intimate and valued friend of Uhland, has here given us almost such an account as we might imagine Uhland to have done, if any torture could have got him to speak or write even so many words about himself. It is a simple statement of the prominent facts in a life useful and consistent, written in a perfectly unaffected style; and without attempting to claim for its subject any undue importance, sets before us means of forming our own judgment upon the character and merits of a poet of whom it may be truly said, that he was less in his own eyes than in those of any of his countrymen. Notter's Life of Uhland is a more pretentious and a less pleasing work. It bears the appearance of candour, but (at least in one or two points) small show of friendship: its literary merits are small, its critical pretensions great; it is involved in diction, irregular in construction, and bears the marks of eager haste in execution. This latter defect the author himself admits in his preface, though it may be questioned whether readers generally will admit as freely the excuse he proffers, which in plain terms amounts to this: that, on Uhland's death, a biography being required-and required in haste-by a bookselling firm, he was unable to expend upon his work sufficient time to make it what, with less urgency, he might have done, and done well, if we may judge from many of his other meritorious writings, both biographical and poetical. The preface states, that in the end of December, 1862, without in the least expecting or seeking such an office, he was solicited to undertake the work, which appeared in the following April. So, from commission to publication of a Life of Uhland, filling 450 octavo pages (more or less intended to be the Life of Uhland), we find less than four months' time employed; and are then called upon to accept, as an excuse for crudity, confusion, and verbosity, the fact that the work has been a race against time (and other possible biographies), and are forced to content ourselves with waiting for a worthy Life of one of Germany's greatest men till the present book has worked its slight purpose of meeting the pressing exigencies of an early market. În one respect, however, Notter has achieved an unexpected success, namely, in doing what his preface tells us he was determined not to do. He says: "I have been desirous of setting forth, to the best of my ability, a life-like picture of the departed —not of merely supplying a chronicle of facts for some future biographer to use.' And yet this unintentional service to the future constitutes the chief merit of his book, which, prematurely born, and probably destined to a premature decease, yet contains 'stuff' in a good as well as a bad sense, and is specially valuable as furnishing us with several poems by Uhland, which have not hitherto been printed with his works. The third work on our list is an essay from the pen of Professor Friedrich Theodor Vischer, of Zurich, whose name, if unknown to many of our readers, is certainly not so from any lack of merit. The article on Ludwig Uhland is contained in the fourth number of his 'Kritische Gänge;' and, should our warm recommendation of the essay induce any of our readers to make a closer acquaintance with its author's style, we feel sure that we shall have established some little claim to their thanks. Finally, Professor Jahn's Lecture, graphic and well written, is enriched by several valuable supplements of unpublished pieces, correspondence, speeches, &c., and a useful list of the dates at which Uhland's various poems appeared. Johann Ludwig Uhland was born at Tübingen, on the 26th of April, 1787. It is needless that we should follow the example of some of his biographers, in threading his pedigree back a century or two through a line of ancestors whose only claim to our attention at all is the fact that their descendant Ludwig became a great literary name. It profits us little to know that his progenitor in the fifth generation, a carpenter by trade, was, with his wife, stigmatised in the parish register as 'Impii contemtores Verbi et Sacramenti' (which, however, as Notter suggests, may mean no more than that they were decided sectarians); nor need we care to hear that his great-grandfather married the daughter of a button-maker; but there are one or two points in the pedigree which may awaken a little interest. The son of the impious one, referred to above, made himself famous at the siege of Belgrade, in 1688, by slaying in single combat a Turkish pasha. We may presume that such proceedings being in his ordinary line of business, his fame and reward would not have been peculiar had there been nothing extraordinary in this manner of disposing of his adversary. No doubt the family legend of this Turk-smiter inspired his descendant's ballad Schwäbische Kunde,' in which, as many of our readers will remember, a Suabian, pursued and assaulted by a mounted Turk, first mows off the horse's fore-feet, and then, beginning to handle his sword in earnest,' Another Another interesting point in the history of Uhland's family is that in all human probability his grandmother, then the young bride of Joseph Uhland, curate at Marburg, and member of a family afterwards poetically distinguished, the Stäudlins, was on terms of close intimacy with the young mother of Friedrich Schiller at the time of that great poet's birth. We find also indications of, at all events metrical, if not poetical, tendencies in different members of the Uhland family before the appearance of the subject of this notice; but probably his fame has been the only cause of these versicles of occasion having ever been routed out of their quiet restingplaces in the old desks where hands of the dead have laid them long ago, and where they have lain in their worn foldings as such memorials lie, the ink growing yellow and the paper brown, while the object that inspired, and the love that could interpret their utterances, have alike grown old, and faint and feeble, and passed quietly away. Uhland himself, as a child, seems to have been much as other children, and as a boy much as other boys, save that, in the earlier stage he showed a strong taste for the strange and romantic, and a love of the terrific (as applied, however, to others rather than to himself); and that, when his time came to be sent to school, he really did distinguish himself, not only by unusual talent, but also by unusual industry. He was certainly fortunate in a schoolmaster; as with ourselves, Latin versification was a prominent branch of study; but Kauffmann, the then rector of the Tübingen Gymnasium, was one who loved, as far as possible, to draw out and develop talent, and from time to time permitted his pupils to treat the subjects he set them in any language and in any style they might choose to select. These productions were afterwards read aloud in school, and it is easy to imagine how valuable such exercises must have been to our author, as, indeed, they must be to any lads who have a mind to think, and a taste to awaken; in fact, we may refer much of the easy flow and free swing of Uhland's later versification not only to the frequent practice of his schoolboy days, but to the constant and useful corrections which his style and diction must have received from a careful and conscientious teacher. Would that among ourselves there were more such educators! We should find more men able to write a decently-worded letter, or to read a page of poetry aloud. With wider cultivation of taste we should have greater enjoyment of talent, and find ideas themselves become more abundant in proportion as men found facility in their utterance. And this might be without divorcing education from Latin verse-making. Uhland |