Pieces of a broken-down critic Author:Charles Astor Bristed Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: His consort clasp'd. For them the sacred earth, Spontaneous, herbage from her bosom pour'd. With new-born flow'rets; lotus, dewy moist, And ruddy saffro... more »n, purple hyacinth, Thickly bestrew'd and soft, a fragrant bed, Which, swelling, raised them high above the ground. There they delighted lay, conceal'd within A beauteous golden cloud, which glittering dews Around them shed. Whe had some more passages marked to extract, but by this time the reader must be ready to unite with us in the question. Why did Munford transiate fie Iliad, and why did his friends publish his transiation? There are three men living who could translate Homer well, Elton, Tennyson and Aytoun; but the first is too old, the second too lazy, and the third too busy. PHONICS AND PHONETICS. Literary World, January 1848. Camslock's Phonetic Reader. Philadelphia: E. II. Butler and Co. 1847. Comstock's Phonetic Speaker. Do. Do. Cornstalk's Phonetic Magazine. Philadelphia: A. Comstock. 1847. DR. COMSTOCK, or, as he spells himself phonetically, and doubtless prefers to be spelled, Dr. Komstok, proposes simply to alter and remodel the entire orthography of our language; and as a necessary means of carrying out this somewhat comprehensive and radical reform, he announces a perfect alphabet. A perfect alphabet! When it is considered that perfection is predicable of few sublunary works, and that all existing alphabets are allowed to have some imperfections in the way of deficiency, redundancy, or incongruity of some sort, the announcement is not a little startling, and savors of something very like arrogance. But "to us much meditating" (as Brougham saith afterCicero), another interpretation has occurred which renders the assertion less wonderful and more admi...« less