August 4. 1832
Dobrizhoffer
I hardly know any thing more amusing than the honest German Jesuitry of Dobrizhoffer. His chapter on the dialects is most valuable. He is surprised that there is no form for the infinitive, but that they say,—I wish, (go, or eat, or drink, &c.) interposing a letter by way of copula,—forgetting his own German and the English, which are, in truth, the same. The confident belief entertained by the Abipones of immortality, in connection with the utter absence in their minds of the idea of a God, is very remarkable. If Warburton were right, which he is not, the Mosaic scheme would be the exact converse. My dear daughter’s translation of this book[2] is, in my judgment, unsurpassed for pure mother English by any thing I have read for a long time.
Notes
“He was a man of rarest qualities,
Who to this barbarous region had confined
A spirit with the learned and the wise
Worthy to take its place, and from mankind
Receive their homage, to the immortal mind
Paid in its just inheritance of fame.
But he to humbler thoughts his heart inclined:
From Gratz amid the Styrian hills he came,
And Dobrizhofter was the good man’s honour’d name.
“It was his evil fortune to behold
The labours of his painful life destroyed;
His flock which he had brought within the fold
Dispers’d; the work of ages render’d void,
And all of good that Paraguay enjoy’d
By blind and suicidal power o’erthrown.
So he the years of his old age employ’d,
A faithful chronicler, in handing down
Names which he lov’d, and things well worthy to be known.
“And thus when exiled from the dear-loved scene,
In proud Vienna he beguiled the pain
Of sad remembrance: and the empress-queen,
That great Teresa, she did not disdain
In gracious mood sometimes to entertain
Discourse with him both pleasurable and sage;
And sure a willing ear she well might deign
To one whose tales may equally engage
The wondering mind of youth, the thoughtful heart of age.
“But of his native speech, because well-nigh
Disuse in him forgetfulness had wrought,
In Latin he composed his history;
A garrulous, but a lively tale, and fraught
With matter of delight, and food for thought.
And if he could in Merlin’s glass have seen
By whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught,
The old man would have felt as pleased, I ween,
As when he won the ear of that great empress-queen.
“Little he deem’d, when with his Indian band
He through the wilds set forth upon his way,
A poet then unborn, and in a land
Which had proscribed his order, should one day
Take up from thence his moralizing lay,
And, shape a song that, with no fiction drest,
Should to his worth its grateful tribute pay,
And sinking deep in many an English breast,
Foster that faith divine that keeps the heart at rest.”
Southey’s Tale of Paraguay, canto iii. st. 16.
2
“An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, From the
Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer, eighteen Years a Missionary in that
Country.”—Vol. ii. p. 176.