gaze, justly merit the contempt of which they are the subjects; and are amply punished by the grovelling dulness which condemns them to perpetual obscurity.'

Consistent enough with this, however at variance with the proper sobriety and faith of a Christian minister and tutor, are the puerility and heathenism of the apostrophe which immediately follows, and closes the paper.

Accept then, much-injured shade! accept the humble offering which I present thee, from the contemplation of thy splendid talents and transcendent abilities!-Why have the admirers of genius delayed to soothe thy perturbed ghost by a tablet sacred to the recollection of thy excellencies?-How dear would be the consecrated spot to every mind susceptible of the pleasures of poesy!-To thy reputation it is acknowledged that the storied urn or animated bust.' is unnecessary, because that shall endure as long as veneration for genius shall constitute an amiable quality inseparable from superior minds; but a tablet inscribed with thy name might be made the means of transmitting a lesson to posterity, and save some future Chatterton from despair.' p. 157.

If there were any use in wondering, we might indulge that sentiment a long time at the deliberate republication of such folly as this, by a teacher, as the prefix to his name implies, and we are to presume, a sincere teacher, of the Christian religion.

Two papers are occupied with sketches biographical and moral of two persons in point of name fictitious; how far real persons are described under the character of Mrs. Donville and her son, we do not know. Supposing the description to be that of real persons, and a real course of action, (and there are some expressions which would seem to intimate as much,) it would be not less valuable than pleasing. It represents a mother left a widow in very early life, with a son and daughter, with hardly any friends, and with a humble pecuniary competency; so humble as to preclude all possibility or thought of obtaining a complete education for her children by the usual means. But she was resolved that their education should be liberal nevertheless, and that it should be substantially the same to both. She adopted decisively such a plan of life as should reduce her expenses within her income; entered immediately on a resolute system of study for the acquisition of that knowledge which she was determined her children should have the advantage of possessing; made a respectable proficiency in the learned languages, and in several of the sciences; and all the while prosecuted, with invincible and successful perseverance, the labour of leading on her pupils in the same tracks so recently explored for the first time by herself. Her own progress,

and that of her pupils, exceeded even her most sanguine expectations; and as she had herself so recently experienced the difficulties of acquisition, she was peculiarly qualified to remove them; for in this extraordinary course of education, it frequently occurred that the preceptress acquired the morning's lesson by an application protracted from the preceding evening till midnight.' If all this is a description of a matter of fact, we wish the author had explicitly said so, it is so singularly pleasing an exhibition of a most meritorious energy. The matured character and opinions of the man who was formed in this school, and whom the author speaks of as his friend, are displayed at considerable length, as an example of highly disciplined talent, moral worth, and philosophical religion. In politics, George Donville is represented as moderate, and totally independent of parties: but certainly he is much more under the influence of superstition, in his partiality for the British Constitution, than in any other of his opinions and preferences; for we are told that, To the Constitution he is ardently attached, from an attentive study of its excellencies, as well as an accurate knowledge of its defects.' This appears to go even beyond Burke's assumption of it as a merit in the English, that they love and hold fast their prejudices because they are prejudices.

One opinion on which Donville is represented as resting peculiar emphasis, and which in another place, the author avows to be also his own, would be difficult perhaps to be refuted from history; namely, that, speaking generally, no form of government, however apparently perfect in theory, will be good in practical operation, and that no alterations of a defective or corrupt one, though conceded to the utmost claim of the most zealous reformist, will render it good in effect-but just so far as the community governed is enlightened and virtuous. But what a grievous and opprobrious truth, if it be a truth, this is! What is it but saying, that what should, according to the right order of things, have been the best, has actually been the worst part of human society? That what ought to have led on to wisdom and goodness, with a zeal continually ready to go, in the opinion of the main body, a little too fast and too far in advance, should have been, on the contrary, generally a dead weight for it to drag behind, to describe it in the most moderate terms, but often a positive and obstinate counteracting force? It is indeed most melancholy to reflect what might have been done for mankind under the reverse of this state of things. It is melancholy even to reflect on those bright, short, rare instances, in which Providence has vouchsafed such a reverse to mankind; to go back in thought to the Alfreds, the Fourth

Henrys, the Regent Murrays, the Washingtons.-But there is something better to be done than to mourn and despond. If, it be true as a general rule, that nations will never be well governed till they shall deserve to be so, by possessing an intelligence and a moral respectability which shall enforce authoritatively their demand to be so, it should be an additional stimulus to the zeal and industry of all who are desirous, by means of extended education and whatever other expedients, of raising from its degradation the intellectual and moral state of mankind. And to this point George Donville is represented as exceedingly zealous to direct the projecting speculation and the energy of political reformers, that they may secure two grand advantages by one process.

In pursuance of this principle, that good government is a blessing which none but enlightened communities have any reason to expect, the Ponderer strongly insists, in a paper expressly on the subject, that the science of politics should be made an essential part of liberal education; meaning, he says, by political science, something very different from what can be learnt from newspapers, and the warfare of parties. The study, commencing with some elementary work, is to be prosecuted through the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Blackstone, and De Lolme.

Several essays were contributed by correspondents; and it is with great excess of politeness, we think, that the Pouderer regrets receiving no further communications from one of them, who had sent him a paper against literary forgery, in which is to be found such wretched stuff as this; could this dangerous and pernicious doctrine but once be generally entertained, . . . . the chaster beauties of historic truth, now emanating from its motley garb, would again sink, encircled by the meretricious, though luxuriant ornaments of inventive fiction, and the lamp of science be eclipsed by the stronger glare of error and incertitude.' The page of Annius was referred to as sufficiently decisive, and his fanciful ebullitions were adopted as the acme of probity and truth.' Still plunges us deeper in the morasses of aberration, and leads us still further within the labyrinths and mazy paths of delusion.' This paper contains one sentence so constructed, (whether with deliberate intention or not, we do not know,) as to assent to the insinuation said to have been made, that Jesus Christ countenanced imposture.

The author is much more indebted to another correspondent, who has furnished, in separate papers, pleasing descriptions of Brockley-Coombe, a beautiful glen in Somersetshire, about

nine miles from Bristol, and the celebrated Dargle, with some other picturesque scenes, in the county of Wicklow.

There are several rather entertaining papers relating to matters of what may be termed modern antiquity, written, indeed, not as an exercise of antiquarian research, but as an indulgence of antiquarian taste. One of them, however, goes back to ancient Greece and Rome. The most remarkable thing about it is, that it appears to have been written by a polytheist; for the following sentence seems to be uttered simply in the writer's own person, and with perfect seriousness: In fact, an accomplished Roman was an object which the Gods would admire, and mortals must venerate.' It is not clear whether this essay is from the pen of the principal writer of the work.

Various points, of the philosophy of the human mind, education, and general morality, are cursorily touched. Genius is a favourite subject, both of formal consideration and of complacent and almost religious allusion. In regard to its nature, the author fully acquiesces in Johnson's definition or description ;

a mind of great general powers accidentally determined to some particular direction.' He appears much more confident than any man can shew good reason for being, in the notion, that genius and all other intellectual and moral distinctions, and indeed all mental superiority, are created by the operation of the circumstances in which the individuals have respectively been placed. That man is the creature of habit and association,' is declared to us again and again; but without any such explanation as to enable us even to understand clearly what the proposition means. But whether intelligible or obscure, true or false, it is right, at all events, in its application, when it is turned into an argument for wisdom and diligence in the office of education. Among the writers on education, he prefers Miss Hamilton to the Edgeworths, and, by a much greater degree, to Mrs. H. More, whose religious opinions he considers as nearly annihilating the value of her works. His own theological tenets are not very formally brought out, though not withheld with any disingenuous design: the intimations are quite clear, that he is among the most advanced proficients in the Socinian school. The obligations to Christianity are reduced to the smallest amount possible, and how small that is, may be seen in the paper on the Perfectibility of the human species, in which science appears as the chief operator of a predicted improvement of mankind so vast, as actually to leave no further improvement desirable; and also in a variety of passages, in which the safety and the felicity of the human creature, here and hereafter, are effected with all imaginable ease by a philosophical machinery. In

a curious essay on the advantages resulting from the appointment of Death, that solemn appointment is, with the most easy air of assurance, denied to be of the nature of punishment.

On the whole, we are disposed to think that these essays, with the exception of a few, and especially the account of Mrs. Donville, if it is not fictitious, should have been left to a perpetual slumber in the journal in which they first appeared.* In point of execution, they seem to betray great juvenility, though they manifest the germs of good sense and taste, which a long and patient cultivation may bring to a state capable of producing something much more worthy of public attention. As to the religious sentiments, however, we fear their maturest state will be only the ripeness of those apples, which travellers of former times professed to find on the shores of the Dead Sea.

Art. V. A general Introduction to the Study of the Hebrew Scriptures, with a Critical History of the Greek and Latin Versions, of the Samaritan Pentateuch, and of the Chaldee Paraphrases. By the Rev. George Hamilton, Rector of Killermogh. pp. 197. Dublin, Johnson; London, Ogles, Duncan, and Cochran, 1814. 7s. 6d.

IN assigning to different classes of writers their appropriate stations in the rank of literary precedency, the highest place seems justly due to the authors who have contributed to the general stock of knowledge, what is original; next to these may be placed those whose labours have been devoted to compilation, but who, by deep and unwearied research, have drawn their materials from the purest sources of information; the third place we think may justly be ceded to that class of authors who, without having added much that is new, have judiciously extracted from what has offered itself to their hands, and have arranged it in an improved form.

However inferior, in general estimation, the labours of this last class may be held, they are by no means to be disparaged. It not unfrequently happens, that where talent and habits of close investigation have eminently prevailed, there has existed a material failure in the mode of communicating the result of such investigation. Great merit, therefore, is due to that patient assiduity which has been exercised in gleaning the valuable information scattered through many an unwieldy volume, selecting the useful, compressing the diffuse, and presenting them to the world in a clear and luminous arrangement.

Among useful compilations, a respectable place may be allotted to the work that now engages our attention, of which the object is to present in a concise form, for the use of students, the author's observations, during a course of attentive reading, on various branches of sacred literature; viz. Biblical Criticism,