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work in operating on the publications of his own day, it may perhaps be worth while to preserve just one copy of the book before us, in the spacious repository which the state should be recommended to erect, for preserving, till the appearance of this new and greater Gregory Thaumaturgus, single copies, accumulating through years or ages, of the successive books that shall be deemed to labour under an infirmity of meaning at present incurable. There will thus be a grand hospital of invalid books; and glorious will be the day, and vast the flood of light, when our great enchanter shall arrive to help them all into sense and new editions, and set them a-going in infinite swarms. Even this Midas' may then be considered as one of the most precious remains of a former literary world; and many a student, whose taste shall be polished, or whose genius kindled, by perusing it, may be grateful that all the copies were not surrendered to the service of candles, soap, and snuff. And the reviewers of those times, though of tempers probably far less benign, and of justice far more rigid, than we, may congratulate their nation on the re-appearance of a work which they can ascribe to nobody but Apollo himself; for as to Anthony Fisgrave, LL.D., they will believe, as we do, that it is a mere manufactured name.-If, on the other hand, it shall be deemed not at all reasonable seriously to expect, in any length of future time, such a phenomenon as fable has never presumed to feign, we are afraid the whole edition must go to the uses just now mentioned; though it is really a pity to see such a pretty offspring of the paper-mill and the letter-foundry consigned to so ungentle and inelegant a part of the great rary economy.

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Perhaps we deserve only to be laughed at, for having taken considerable pains to understand the meaning and object of this production, especially as we must acknowledge the labour has been nearly in vain: we question, indeed, whether the author had any meaning at all beyond a mere literary hoax. A certain degree of art appears to be used in keeping the composition from coming out into sense, when sometimes it seems on the point of doing so. It would be hardly possible, indeed, for pure honest absurdity to get through so many pages without telling what its joke is aiming at. A portion of dexterity, which, applied the same length of time to some honest task, might perhaps have given instruction or got money, is required in making up a thousand or two of sentences, on one leading subject, each of them sufficiently intelli gible in itself, and all joined together in an orderly manner into a composition so effectually confounded, that the writer cannot be cited as holding any one opinion on any one topic, The dexterity is employed to preserve an absolute confusion

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and contradiction of ideas, and not in advancing any class of opinions under a regular sham appearance of maintaining the contrary, as in Swift's Argument for abolishing Christianity,' or Burke's Viudication of Natural Society; nor in contriving a plausible train of mock-serious arguments in support of some merely fantastical proposition, just to shew what ingenuity can do, as in Dr. John Campbell's tract on the salutary effects of inhaling the breath of young wonen.

When any purpose is meant to be answered by a piece of grave ironical reasoning, there must be a consistency and uniform bearing in the series of arguments and illustrations; they must all be, to use a convenient vulgar phrase, right wrong. In the production before us, observations which are unmeaningly ironical are crossed and blended with such as are soberly and unmeaningly true. Nor is the incongruous farrago disposed into any remote resemblance of a regular alternation of remarks, adapted to maintain the two opposite sides of a question, and prolong an amusing argumentative indecision; the whole is a mere thicket of involved confusion. If any thing more, than the sport of making a number of curious people wind and toil through a literary brake to get at a choice fruit tree which they are told is to be found in the midst of it, and then laughing at their disappointment, was in the writer's view, we should perhaps have conjectured that he might intend to ridicule the pretensions and conceit of connoisseurs in the fine arts, and to rescue professors, and men of genius, from the arrogance of their judges. Something of this kind might seem intended in the mock proposal of a sovereign court of taste, to which every performance in the arts should be required to be submitted, and which should peremptorily and definitively pronounce on its merits, and with such authority as to preclude all further question, and all difference of opinions in the public. But in the various topics which are brought in as having some kind of connexion with the arguuient for this ludicrous institution, there is no management to bear out the joke, and make it tell to any purpose of either wit or sense. Just as much ridicule, and with just as little point or use, seems to be splashed, in the author's course through this puddle of whim and absurdity, on the men of real genius as on the pretended men of taste."

The latter half of the volume is put in the form of a fragment of very ancient history, relating the fabled musical contest between Pan and Apollo, of which Midas and his court were appointed the judges, which ancient fragment is made to descant on the contemporary reign of his majesty king George III. The Phrygian critical court and mouarch, the

ridiculous literary exhibitions made before them, the perform ances of the two gods, the decision on their respective merits, and the long speeches of Midas and Apollo, make a sort of exemplification and burlesque of such a court as the first part of the book had affected to propose, and with the same absence of any thing like systematic significance. The assembled connoisseurs are also made to expose themselves to scorn by a preference, which connoisseurs, whether really possessing refined taste, or only affecting it, are never likely to be caught in the mistake of avowing, of rude, rustic, and vulgar strains to the finished performances of combined art and genius. A professed connoisseur will be certain to take care not to fall too readily into the taste of the vulgar.

There is here and there a passage which we should be inclined to call well written, especially a controversy among a company of painters, each asserting the superlative merits of the particular painter that he has selected among the great masters for his model, and depreciating the idols and models of all the rest of the party.

Perhaps the following passage may be worth transcribing.

From many circumstances it would appear that, however they might affect to deny it, the arists themselves are convinced of their own littleness when compared with their predecessors; for though they continually depreciate the supposed unjust preference given to ancient works, they are ever the most forward to support it. Place one of these gentlemen in a professor's chair, to discourse on art, (a situation with which they sometimes compliment each other) and see what he uniformly resorts to. He scarcely deigns to touch on the first principles of his particular profession, cautiously avoids describing what is its nature and intention, with its means of operation, and thence deducing a regular system of practice.-No, he immediately launches back into its antiquity, and astonishes his auditors with his knowledge of high-sounding names, and with gorgeous panegyrics on the genius of past times; expatiates on the merits of Greeks and Italians; illustrating his opinions, and supporting his criticisms, by the mere description of celebrated examples, (many of which are perhaps only known to himself by description) and by rhapsodies that conse quently convey no information, and excite no sympathy; and in conclusion, that the excessive inconsistency of these profound teachers may be more apparent, their eulogiums on ancient genius are uniformly accompanied by reproaches, hurled with great vehemence against their contemporaries, for refusing to acknowledge the indubitable excellence of modern art'. pp. 72, 73.

As the reader, who is in quest of entertainment merely, will not be at all gratified by the labour of getting through the puzzle about the meaning and object of the book, and as he will not meet with enough smart insulated pieces of ingenuity or humour to amuse him on after he finds that no assignable object is to be pursued, he will never read to the

end; and if any one's hope and patience can be beguiled over so much ground in search of something graver than amusement, he will probably, at the end, find this the single instance in his life, in which he has read a whole volume without gaining three useful ideas. But indeed nobody but a reviewer will ever read through the production; and therefore we have a peculiar right to reprobate the perverse whim which has occasioned the waste of so much of our time; the writer might have been satisfied with the folly of wasting so much of his own, we might say the guilt, for we still think it within possibility that his faculties might have succeeded in something better than this piece of laborious absurdity.

Though he appears not unaccustomed to the pen, there are many gross faults in the construction of sentences, and even in common grammar. We must however acknowledge 9% one service to literature; our language confessedly labours under a most miserable scarcity of terms; it will be thankful therefore to the inventor of the words 'illucidation,' and 'stimulæ ;' even the old Romans are involved in the obligation. This brilliant coinage is, we think, the chief merit of the book.

Art. IX. Observations on various Passages of Scripture, placing them in a new Light, and ascertaining the Meaning of several, not determinable by the Methods commonly made use of by the learned. Originally compiled by the Rev. Thomas Harmer, from Relations incidentally mentioned in Books of Voyages and Travels into the East. Fourth Edition, with a new Arrangement, many important Additions. and innumerable Corrections, by Adam Clarke, LL. D. 4 vols. 8vo. pp. cxxii. 2100. Price 11. 16s, bds. Johnson, Baynes, &c. 1808. AMONG the various descriptions of evidence for the authen

ticity of Divine Revelation, which have successively expelled infidelity from its most considerable positions, and have at length confined its once active and audacious hostility. within a narrow circle, we are far from thinking lightly of that which was primarily brought into action by the venerable author of this work. His idea of employing the accounts of modern travellers in the East to illustrate the incidents and allusions that occur in Scripture, was one of those happy conceptions which are often the unexpected reward of diligent thought. The evidence of recent authors, in one department at least, is unexceptionable; so far, we mean, as it relates to physical phenomena. The products of the earth and their times of germination and maturity, the face of the country, the vicissitude of seasons, the distinctions of climate, and the appearances of the atmosphere and the sky, are with few exceptions the same in all

ages. When we learn, for example, from a modern report-
er, that grapes, figs, and pomegranates in the neighbour-
hood of Palestine are in season at one particular time, and
find that the expedition of the twelve Hebrew spies who re-
turned with specimens of each fruit is related to have taken
place about that period, we, have as fair a collateral proof that
the relation is genuine, as if we could ascertain the same fact
from some contemporary record. There is another depart-
ment, in which the evidence, though sufficiently satisfactory,
is not so undeniably conclusive. The habits and customs of
men are not in their nature invariable, like the physical phe-
nomena and before we admit the testimony of a modern au-
thor on existing customs, as explanatory of ancient writings,
we must assume that the customs are ancient too.
In many
instances, this assumption is plainly legitimate; as in the case
of those customs which originate in physical peculiarities,
and the reasons for which invariably continue to subsist. It is
also fair, in the case of those customs which originate in the
condition of society and of the human mind, where it can
be, shewn that such condition has not been materially altered.
And this proves to be the fact in nearly all the cases that
have been cited in illustration of Scripture. They are de-
rived principally from the Arabs, who spring from the same
stock as the Israelites, and who are notoriously the accurate
representatives of their remotest forefathers. In the neigh-
bouring countries also, where national independence and an-
cient manners have not been preserved equally inviolate,
those changes which affect the habits of a people have had
but a very limited operation. Commerce has not introduced
wealth, nor literature refinement; even the conquest of the
countries by a foreign tribe has had less effect, than such an
important event must necessarily produce in cases where the
invaders have greatly differed from the vanquished in the
nature of their religious faith, or their progress in civiliza-
tion. But setting aside the probability and the certainty that
popular customs have changed less in these Asiatic countries
than in almost any other region of the earth, we may con-
sider it as generally safe and fair to conclude, that a mo-
dern custom in any country, which affords a satisfactory ex-
planation of an allusion in ancient records referring to the
same country, did exist at the time of those records and is
substantially the custom to which they really alluded.
the same manner, a scientific theory is deemed sufficiently
established, when it gives a satisfactory and consistent solu-
tion of the phenomena to which it is applied.

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The benefits derived from this kind of evidence, to the cause of religion, are confessedly of secondary value. The proofs in favour of Divine Revelation were quite conclusive, and

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