We

Stare super antiquas vias, is still a good maxim, let a conceited age say of it what it will; and it would be the maxim here, for such a reform would be only a recurrence to a primitive practice, which the revolution of years and of moneyvalues has rendered obsolete. In carrying, however, such a measure into effect, it would be for future consideration what should be the details-what should be the value, for instance, of the livings, which should subject them to the action of this additional impost-what the amount to which it should be proposed to raise the smaller benefices before it should cease altogether -whether, in levying the tax, some regard should not be had to the residence or non-residence of the incumbent, as is the case in the Gilbert act-whether a living mortgaged under that act for the building of a parsonage should not find favour in the eyes of the law, at least till the mortgage had expiredwhether the first-fruits should be levied at all, or at least upon residents; the year in which a man takes possession being usually the poorest of his life, and so esteemed in all college preferment, where a year of grace is allowed for this very reason. observe, indeed, that Dr. Burton confines his proposition to the tenths, and we think he is right;-whether some portion, as we have already hinted, less than a tenth might not suffice, or whether some graduated scale might not be adopted in reference to the value of the benefice, it being obvious that a living of a thousand a-year could afford to pay a hundred pounds better than one of half the sum to pay fifty; but these are all matters which this is not the season for discussing. At all events, the law, whatever it is, must not attach to present incumbents, (even a Lord King would hardly propose this,) but should come gradually into operation as a new generation succeeds them. When all the benefices throughout the country shall, by this means, have been raised to a sum competent to the respectable maintenance of a clergyman, then might the legislature, by degrees, throw more and more impediments in the way of pluralities till that great, but as matters now stand necessary, evil should at last cease. So would the dues of the church be more cheerfully rendered when they are paid to one who strows where he gathers,-tithes being, in such cases, seldom resisted, or (as far as our experience has gone) grudged ;-so would church preferment be more widely dispersed when it was no longer accumulated upon individuals, and many meritorious men, who live and die in the harness of a curacy, would come in for their portions ;-so would some unseemly expedients, to which recourse must now be had for the creation of a pluralist, be annihilated, and much obloquy on this score be removed from the establishment;-so, above all, would

every

every parish have its own proper spiritual guardian, poor indeed still in very many cases, but yet with less limited means of exercising charity and hospitality than the still poorer curate; and though in many instances it might happen that the parish would be no gainer by the exchange, (for curates are allowed by the country to be, in general, in these days no drones,) still it would be something to meet the reproach now so often cast upon the church, that one man feeds the sheep whilst another shears them—not to say that the rector would be no longer brought into invidious comparison, as at present, with his curate, in the eyes of his parishioners;-with his curate, who enjoys an unwholesome popularity, founded often, if the truth were known, rather upon the covetousness of the people than upon his own worth;-and the church at large would not be left to suffer by the notion thus naturally put into the heads of tithe-payers, that the services required of the minister may be done (for, in fact, they see them done in a manner) at far less cost perhaps than the amount of their tithes.

We have ventured upon these remarks chiefly with a view to ascertain the feeling of the clergy, conscious that the question is one of great difficulty and delicacy; persuaded that even the incumbents of our best livings are, for the most part, so burdened with parochial and other claims upon them, (for the clergy are generally of a rank to have poor relations,) that they can afford as ill as any men to have an additional tax laid upon their incomes; but, withal, utterly hopeless, from the temper of the times, (unless it should please God, by some scourge of his own, to create a stronger interest for religion in the hearts of the people,) utterly hopeless, we say, that the wants of the church, however crying, will be relieved by any other class than the ministers of the church themselves.

ART. IV. The Catechism of Health; or, Plain and Simple Rules for the Preservation of Health, and the Attainment of e Long Life. By A. B. Granville, M.D., F.R.S., F.A.S., F.S.S., M.R.I., &c., &c., &c. Fourth Edition, with Additions. London. 1832.

THIS is a severe, though covert, satire on the tribe of book

makers in general, and especially on the medical portion of that tribe. It has been remarked, (by J. Warton, we believe,) that the keenest ridicule of the abuses or absurdities of the medical art has proceeded from physicians; and the classical names of Garth, Arbuthnot, and Smollett verify the observation. The little work now before us is another proof of this disposition; and without venturing to place Dr. Granville in the literary scale, by the side of the three great authors we have just mentioned, we

must

must say that his work appears to us to be a more caustic exposure of the self-sufficiency, inanity, and impudence of a certain class of medical writers, than anything which we can remember in Smollett, Arbuthnot, or Garth.

It has been suspected, and we believe with justice, that these great men in their pleasantries upon others did not spare themselves; and some of the anecdotes and adventures with which they have amused the world are said to have happened to them individually. Such a superiority over personal vanity, as well as over professional prejudices, does honour to the mind that is capable of it; and although we cannot presume to say how far Dr. Granville may have derived from his own experience some of the very laughable traits with which his book is replete, we cannot be blind to the many instances in which he exposes with great pleasantry and effect the compliances which he has himself been obliged to make with the fashion of the day; for instance, the enunciation of his name on the title-page :

A. B. GRANVILLE, M.D., F.R.S., F.A.S., F.S.S., M.R.I.,

&c. ! &c.!! &c.!!!

is, to our taste, a very happy exposure of the vanity which some people, who have little other claim to be thought men of letters, derive from adding to their names a string of initials, some with, but many more, we believe, without a meaning. A semi-savant of the present day seems, like a Highland chief, to think it derogatory to appear in public without his tail on.* M.R.I. mean, we suppose, if they mean anything, Member of the Royal Institution -a kind of reading club to which, we believe, any one may become a subscriber, without even a ballot; and, when after Member of the Royal Institution, Dr. Granville adds, et cetera! et cetera!! et cetera!!! the climax is perfect, and the ridicule complete; and we venture to believe that we shall never again see' M.R.I., &c., &c., &c., in the train of any, however superficial, pretenders to literary distinction. M.R.I. are henceforth, and for ever, dead letters-thanks to the exemplary pleasantry of Dr. Granville.

The next point of ridicule which the Doctor seizes, is another of the title-page frauds of the day. He designates his work as THE FOURTH EDITION,

WITH ADDITIONS.'

The reader, unless he has met with the literary cause celebre * Dr. Granville is really the Homo caudatus of Monboddo. If the reader has any curiosity to see the whole length of his tail, he will find it occupying half a page of the Quarterly Review,' vol. xxxix. p. 1. We are apprehensive that our observations on that occasion may have induced the Doctor to dock his tail as he has now done; we are sorry for it. In the former work, which affected to be serious, the étalage of insignificant titles was misplaced; but the present little book being, throughout, what we may call broad farce,' would have been all the better for such an absurd prologue: yet, after all, perhaps the ingenious detection of vanity veiled under three et ceteras is more effective than even the enumeration would have been,

of

of Leslie v. Blackwood, may not be aware, that when a book is so heavy as to afford little prospect of selling even one edition, it sometimes appears to run rapidly through second, third, and fourth editions, by the mere operation of stitching up the identical sheets of the first and only impression, with no other change or addition than a new title-page, bearing the words 'second,' 'third,' or 'fourth edition, as the case may be.

་

This trick Dr. Granville has fully elucidated. His fourth edition with additions' has No additions, and is NOT a fourth edition. We have before us the soi-disant 'third' and fourth' editions, and we find, first, as to additions, that there is not one page, one line, one word, one letter in the fourth edition, which is not in the third; and, secondly, we see that every sheet (always excepting the title-page) of 'edition the fourth' was printed from the same types and at the same time as the sheets which are designated as edition the third.' This is proved by various little circumstances obvious to those who are acquainted with the practice of printing; we need give the common reader but one, which is as good as a hundred :—in page vii. of the preface these words occur, who, from his official situation;' but, in the third edition, the letter f had, by accident, dropped out, and the line appears, who, rom his official situation;' now if there had been a reprint, this accident must have disappeared, and the word would have stood in its proper shape; but no,-in the fourth edition we have just the same " who, rom' that we had in the third. Our readers see at once, that an error of the press may be repeated in subsequent editions, but an accident never can; thus, if in the title-page Dr. Granville had been, instead of an F.A.S., designated as an A.S.S., that error might have been reprinted; but an accident,-a blot,-a letter inverted,-a letter dropped out, can only happen in one impression; and if there were an hundred editions, it would be a hundred millions to one that such an accident did not occur in the same place in any two editions; but when we add that there are a hundred of such accidents occurring in the same places in these two (so called) editions, it follows to an absolute certainty that there has been no reprint, and that in this point also the doctor's title-page is jocose.

But we almost doubt whether Dr. Granville has not pushed his satirical imitation of this mal-practice rather too far. We have shown that there was no fourth edition; but, still stranger to say, we suspect that there was not even a third, nor even a second. We are aware that satirists have a license to exaggerate, and that a parody, to make one laugh, is sometimes urged beyond the exact verge of truth; but we really doubt whether, in this instance, Dr. Granville has not pushed the pleasantry rather too far, and blunted a little the force of his ridicule, by using it too extra

vagantly.

vagantly. In his preface to the third edition,' in the true cant of those authors whom he holds up to public ridicule, he says, that within exactly one month after the publication of his first

edition

He is called upon to announce, in a second preface, the appearance of a third edition. However flattering to his feelings this simple FACT might be, as showing the degree of kindness with which his humble effort has been received by that public for whose sole benefit the Catechism was produced, the author would not have ventured to intrude himself anew on their notice were it not for certain additional remarks which the nature of the work and its reception seem to authorise. A few corrections and some additions have been made to the first and second parts of the work; these are intended either to render the language, already plain, still plainer, or to enforce, with greater effect, certain principles or doctrines laid down in the text.'Second Preface, p. 14.

Now, all this seems to us un peu fort, as, we think, it will appear to our readers, when we inform them that the first edition of the Catechism of Health contained three hundred and thirty-six pages, comprising the first and second parts, and a considerable portion of the third, of the work. The second edition we have never been able to discover; but if it ever existed, it was, no doubt, a mere re-issue with a new title-page of the original impression. The third edition, as it calls itself, contains a new title-page, an additional preface, and some pages added at the conclusion of part the third; but the whole of the first and second parts, which the Doctor assures the indulgent public have been corrected and enlarged, are exactly, verbatim, literatim, and down even to the typographical defects, the very SAME as they were in the first edition, and, as they finally appear in the fourth; so that, as far as regards the great body of the work, there appears to have been, up to this hour, but one single edition; and the alleged corrections and additions to the first and second parts are mere merry fictions. seems extravagant, even as satire, and we confess that we know no author to whom Dr. Granville's censure can fairly be applied; but if the doctor will, in another' edition, more clearly point out the culprit, he will, we fancy, look very foolish at the bar of the no longer indulgent public.

This

The next point of the literary charlatanerie which Dr. Granville exemplifies, and successfully ridicules, is the pretended rapidity-the kind of steam-engine velocity with which the gifted geniuses of the modern school achieve, what would have been to their ancestors works of long consideration and arduous labour. He tells us, in both his prefaces, that his original work was completed, within a fortnight from the day on which the idea was suggested to him,-three hundred and thirty-six closely printed

VOL, XLVII. NO. XCIV.

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