Welsh Journals

Classics and Philology. 453 you been fortunate ? We have caught a pike. Have you caught him with a line ?" we should, in all three langu¬ ages, understand the fishing to have occurred on that same day. And, you will ask, does not the French equally lead us to think so ? Undoubtedly; as I have quoted it, it could suggest no other idea; but I have purposely omitted the key to my objection. The first of the above sentences actually stands, " Nous avons 6t6 a la peche j'eudi dernier." Try this in the other languages; and, in any of them, not only the words, " I have been a-fishing last Thursday" will be improper, but the idea itself is equally incorrect. That is, the French, when they have it in their power to say " Nous fumes a la peche jeudi dernier," and thus ex¬ press the Aorist idea by an Aorist tense, " I was a-fishing last Thursday," prefer a tense which can only represent that idea by a defiance of the universally received and philosophically true definition of that tense. I know not whether Clarke's explanation of tenses is original, but it was in his Homer (Iliad 1, Notes) that I first saw them classed rationally. Classical Experience. At a very early age, when rummaging amongst a heap of loose books, I met with a very strange-looking one, in an unknown tongue, and bound in a very coarse greenish-yellow buckram. The title page bore an escutcheon with a most ferocious looking animal, (which I afterwards learnt was Felis Leo,) and three fleur de lis. Below all this stood the venerable names of Pote and Williams. Full of laudable curiosity, which my dear parents ever rejoiced to gratify, I ran to my father to ask what it was. I found him in the old dining room ; I