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novel,' and I will hazard another opinion, that no woman ever liked Burke."

To which we also will subjoin another opinion, that we also hazard, that no woman ever thinks of reading Burke, always excepting Miss Harriet Martineau, and Lady Mary Sheppard.

In many instances Mr. Hazlitt expresses himself in language where the opinion he maintains is either exaggerated beyond the truth, or so loosely worded, as to require an explaining commentary. As when, p. 106, speaking of Bishop Butler's Sermons, he calls it a quite different work from the Analogy, and much more valuable; or as when at p. 176 he says, "In fact, a knowledge of the world only means a knowledge of our own interest; it is nothing but a species of selfishness." His statements are often founded on truth, but afterwards pushed beyond it, for the sake of a transient effect, as p. 215, “In France they damn Shakspere in the lump, by calling him a barbare, and we talk of Racine's verbiage with inexpressible contempt and self-complacency."

In his discourse on nick-names (p. 226) he says,

"A striking instance of the force of names standing by themselves is, in this respect, felt towards Michael Angelo in this country. We know nothing of him but his name. It is an abstraction of fame and greatness; our administration of him supports itself, and our ideas of his superiority seems self-evident, because it is attached to his name only."

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Now the errors in this passage appear to arise from Mr. Hazlitt never permitting himself to step out of the positive and unqualified, into that careful and comparative examination of his subject, by which truth is alone detected and information conveyed. If by this country, he means persons in this country conversant with art" (for such an interpretation is alone applicable to his argument), then to them; the Beaumonts and the Lawrences, the Hopes and the Holwell Carrs, besides all artists, the works of M. Angelo are familiar; for they have seen and studied them all in Italy: but if he confines his observation to those persons of taste in England, who have had no opportunity of foreign travel,

certainly their impressions of this great artist, and their acquaintance with his divine productions, must be far inferior; but as all of them have been engraved, and some in the finest style of that art, and as we have at least one or two of his acknowledged works in England, we cannot be said to know nothing of him but his namean abstraction of his greatness. On the subject of taste Mr. Hazlitt observes, When Mr. Wordsworth once said that he could read the description of Satan in Milton-Nor seem'd

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Less than Archangel ruined, and the

excess

Of glory obscured

till he felt a certain faintness come over his mind from a sense of beauty and grandeur, I saw no extravagance in this, but the utmost truth of feeling." When the same author, or his friend Mr. Southey, "says that the Excursion is better worth preserving than the Paradise Lost,-this appears to me a great piece of impertinence, or an unwarrantable stretch of friendship." Unwarrantable and impertinent indeed! but did Mr. Wordsworth or Mr. Southey ever so injudiciously speak of the poem of the Excursion. We are confident that no such words ever passed their lips, not even in a poetic dream; but that they owe their rise to some high praise given by the Laureate to the structure of the versification in the Excursion, which he described (so we have heard) as almost equal or only inferior to that of Milton. All beside is the unconscious production of Mr. Hazlitt's heightening faculties. To another modern poet of great fame he attributes sentiments which we cannot receive without some stronger proof than the mere assertion of the essayist.

"There were those who grudged to Lord Byron the name of a poet, because he was of noble birth; as he himself could not endure the praises bestowed on Wordsworth, whom he considered as a clown. He carried this weakness so far that he even seemed to regard it as a piece of presumption in Shakspeare to be preferred before him as a dramatic author; and contended that Milton's writing an epic poem and the answer to Salmasius was entirely owing to vanity."

That Lord Byron, with all his ec

centricities, should gravely assert such things, and believe what he asserted, we are not convinced; and if he threw out such will-o' the-wisp fancies in moods of passion, or amid floods of wine-they were not worth repeating. At p. 315 in his paper on Envy, Mr. Hazlitt makes an observation on the unwillingness of the mind to allow a variety of excellencies in the same person -perhaps just enough and warranted by experience. "We allow (he says) no one to be two things at a time;" but this plain and fair statement is not strong enough for him: and he then adds, "It quite unsettles our notion of personal identity."! "If we allow

man wit it is part of the bargain that he wants judgment of style, he wants matter." So that if a man writes a sensible work in an elegant style his personal identity is destroyed! These, we think, are instances in sufficient number to prove our point, though many others in the same volume might be added. If Mr. Hazlitt had had the resolution to discard his paradoxes,* his exaggerations, and his idle sophisms, his writings would have lost nothing of their immediate attraction, and gained much in permanent reputation. He was wasting his strength in these forced exertions, and we may address him in the language of La Fontaine :

C'est fort bien fait à toi ; recois cet ecu-ci; Tu fatigues assez pour gagner d'avantage.

Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy. By Thomas Keightley, 2nd. ed. 1838. "A Græco Sermone (says Quintilian), puerum incipere malo ;" and if a knowledge of the Greek language is advantageous to the orator, a thorough acquaintance with Mythology of Greece is absolutely necessary to the scholar. With this Mythology, history is intimately acquainted, and it forms the very life-blood and soul of poetry. We think this work of Mr. Keightley's will prove very advantageous to the young student and the advanced scholar; for it is written with great diligence, with more than common acquaintance with Greek literature, and with a knowledge of those works, in

*He begins one essay, "Footmen are no part or parcel of Christianity."

which critical learning and ingenuity have been employed in restoring what is corrupt, explaining what is obscure, and examining what is dubious in the remains of ancient literature and art. So little has been done by English scholars to illustrate the Mythology of the people and country, whose works they have studied and admired, except in the superficial work of Spence, and the fanciful one of Jacob Bryant, that we believe not a single English author or antiquary is quoted as an authority by Mr. Keightley, except Mr. P. Knight; while his work is almost founded on the very deep researches and ingenious reasonings of Lobeck, Buttman, Voss, Müller, and other profound and laborious scholars among the Germans,-—a happy, studious, and enlightened people, dwelling on the banks of the Elbe and of the Rhine, with whom learning, driven from our shores by the din of politics, the allurements of pleasure, the prospect of preferment, and the all-absorbing thirst of profit, has taken up her tranquil abode, and pores contentedly over her lexicons and grammars, in the sequestered cloisters of Leipsic and Heidelburg! Mr. Keightley has, in his introduction, given a very judicious and reasonable account of the source or origin of the Mythes; arranging them under the two heads of names and

things, and shewing how several and physical truths were enveloped under the garbs of Symbol, Mythe, and Allegory. Concerning the origin of Mythology, various systems have been advanced, which Mr. Keightley divides into three classes, 1. the Historic, 2. the Philosophic, and 3. the Theological. Of the first (the Historic,) according to which, all the Mythic persons were once real human beings, and the legends merely the actions of those persons poetically embellished, Bochart, and our Bryant were the maintainers; of late days, Larcher, Raoul-Rochette, and Böttiger, have supported this theory, 2. The Philosophic supposes Mythology to be merely the poetical envelope of some branch of

human science. Bacon's Treatise de

Sapientiâ Veterum is well known,

in which this view is taken. 3. The Theological. In this point of view, Mythology is to be considered as a debased and imperfect theology. This

is the system of Creüzer and others, whom, as Mr. Keightley informs us, Lobeck calls synchytic Mythologists, who think that the religion of all nations, old and new, were the same from the beginning, and deduce the most recent fables from the springs of the primogenial doctrine." On this subject we must quote an observation of our author-" of these three classes, the last alone is peculiar to modern times; the two former theories were familiar to the ancients. We must also observe that all are true to a certain extent. Some Mythes are historical, some physical, some moral, some theological; but no single one of these will suffice to account for the whole body of the Mythology of any people.' We have no room for much transcription, but we recommend the serious attention of the classical reader to Mr. Keightley's introduction, and especially to his rules for the interpretation of the Mythes, which we consider the safest and soundest that can be adopted. The account of the different deities is

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given with the correctness and extent of knowledge that might be expected from so accomplished a scholar; and it is interspersed with some curious critical observations on passages of the authors whose authority is cited. We really have no errors to detect, nor omissions to supply.* At p. 126, we should omit the note of Voss on the supposed melody of the swan, and of course discard the reasoning on which it is founded. We believe that the ancient poets looking on that bird as the very emblem of beauty in form, endeavoured to make that beauty perfect by adding to it, the charm of music and melody; and that they never considered how far the truth of nature

did or did not support them; which
they forsook, (as may be seen strongly
in the statuary group of the Laocoon,)
whenever the perfection of their art
called for the application of different
and more appropriate rules. At p.
521, Mr. Keightley's says,
"Janus
was usually represented with two
faces, whence he was named Bifrons
and Biceps. It is said that at the
taking of Falerii, a statue of Janus
was found with four faces; and at
Rome there was a temple of Janus
Quadrifrons, which was square, with
a door and three windows on each
side." On this subject, we will take
the liberty of observing that Musurus,
the Archbishop of Malvasia, in the
Morea, (and for some time a stipendiary
corrector of the Aldine Press,) in his
verses prefixed to the Aldine Plato,-
describes the god Janus as Trifrons:
Λασκαρέων γενεῆς ἐρικυδέος ἄκρον
αὤτον

Καὶ τριπροσωποφανοῦς, δυνομ ̓ ἔκοντα

Θεοῦ.

Dr. Butler (the present Bishop of
Lichfield), who has inserted this
Poem in his Opuscula, 1797, has no note
on the passage.† P. 314, on the subject
of the immortality of Achilles, Mr.
Keightley has given us the account of
Apollodorus, but he has said nothing
of his supposed Invulnerability :-we
therefore venture to transcribe a few
lines, from some notes we wrote on
this subject many years ago; when
we wandered more at leisure,
"Aonias
inter sylvas," than we can now do.

"Statius in Achilleide, i. 270, fingit Thetidem ita loquentem :

-"Si progenitum Stygis amne severo
Armavi, (totumque utinam) "----
et vs. 134:

* In his Dissertation on Bacchus, Mr. K. might have profited by the Recherches sur la nature du Culte de Bacchus en Greece, &c. Par J. F. Gail. 1821, 8vo.

+ Foster supposes that Janus might be called трiπроσwπо¶аνôvs, as indicating past, present, and future time. Heinsius says he has seen statues of Janus, which were three-headed, tricipites. In the Cassandra of Lycophron, 680, Mercury is called rpiképaλos. A statue of Jupiter with three eyes was in the Temple of Minerva at Argos, see Pausanias, lib. ii, c. 24, and Chandler's Travels in Greece, p. 229, 4to. There is a Janus Trifrons in Hadr. Aug. nummis ex Ære mediocri, v. D. Choul. p. 20. Hardouin ad Plin. N. H. Lib. xxxiii, vol. ix, p. 59; but it must be remarked, that on coins and medals, Janus must be represented as Trifrons, whether he was meant to be Quadrifrons or not. Perhaps this may have led to the expression of Musurus, which, however, Aldus does not appear to have objected to. See Martial, ed. Delph. Amst. 1701, p. 397, where is a coin of Hadrian with a three-headed Janus. Therefore even the Janus Quadrifrons was, in the language of Orpheus, тpiσσoκápηvos ideiv, V. Argon. 974.

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"Invulnerabilem telis fuisse Achillem nec Homerus nec poetæ veteres Græci agnoscunt; at contra, I., 167, vul. neratur, et 568, Agenor ait de Achille, Καὶ γὰρ θὴν τούτω πρωτὸς χρως ὀξει χαλκώ,

et Ovid. Metam. xii. 170, ubi, inter epulas, superato Cygno, Achilles cæterique Achivi admiranter corporis duritiam, quod toties hasta a corpore ejus esset repulsa

"visum mirabile cuntis,

Quod juvenis corpus nullo penetrabile telo Invictumque ad vulnera erat; ferrumque tenebat

Hoc ipsum acides; hoc mirabantur Achivi Cum sic Nestor ait, Vestro fuit unicus æo Contentor ferri, nulloque ferabilis ictu Cygnus, at ipse olim patientem vulnera mille Corpore non læso, Perhœbum Cenea vidi."

"In hoc loco, Achilles (ipse penetrabilis telo) miratus est Cygnum non potuisse vulnerari. Usque ad Augusti tempora, puto veterum fabulam incorruptam mansisse, et Statium primum fuisse poetam, qui historiam antiquam de Achille corrumpere, et novam mythologiam inducere tentasset. Illum sequitur poeta aliquis in Anthologia Latinâ, verbis apertioribus recentiorem fabulam explicans, Ep. xc. vol. i. p. 78, ed. Burman :

"Cauta quidem genitrix, noceant ne vulnera

nato

Confirmat Stygio fonte puerperium ;

Sed quia fas nulli est humanam vincere sortem,

In membris tincti dant sibi fata locum."

Adde Ep. xci.

"Pande manum, genitrix, toties tingatur Achilles,

Tu facies natum mortis habere locum."

"Hunc versum Achilleidos citat Servius ad Æneid. vi. 57; add. Muncker. ad. Hygin. fab. cvii. et Fulgentii Mythol. lib. 3. vii. p. 120, "Denique natum Achillem velut hominem perfectum, mater in aquas intinguit Stygias; id est, duram contra Solum ei talum omnes labores munit.

non tinguit." Ita Lactantius Arg. fab. vii. lib. xii. Met. "Talumque, quod fuit in corpore ejus mortale, percussit, et interemit, Cæneum invulnerabiliem fuisse ait Heraclitus de Incredibilibus, ed. Teucher, p. 8. De Cygno, vel Neptuni vel Martis filio, invulnerabili, sed ab

Hercule interempto, v. notam Gronovii ad Senecæ Herc. Fur. 486, et notas editoris ad Dict. Cretensem, lib. ii. c. 12, 59. In Ovidii Metam. xii. 95, Cygnus his verbis de seipso ita gloriatus est :

-"removebitur omne Tegminis officium, tamen indestructus abibo." et. 99:

"Tela manu torsit-rursus

corpus

sine vulnere

Sincerumque fuit, nec tertia cuspis apertum Et se præbentem valuit distingere Cycnum."

"Talum etiam non fuisse telo penetrabilem nisi per venam sub collo surgentem, fingit Apoll. Rhod. iv. 1644. De Messapo, (v. Virg. Æn. vii. 691.) bellatore invulnerabili:

"At Mesapus,equum domitor, Neptunia proles, Quem neque fas igni cuiquam, nec sternere ferro."

v. Nonni Dionys. xvi. 158; et de Diomede invulnerabili, xxvi, 35. Denique Lycophron in Cassandra Poem. vs. 459, ait Ajacem esse invulnerabilem :

χαλκῳ τορητὸν ουκ ἔτευξεν ἐν μαχή. Adde Philostrat. Heroic. p. 172, ed. Boissonade, sed de hac re consule Exoλ. ad Hom. II. V. et notam Mycilli ad Ovid. Met. xiii. 267.

"At nihil impendit per tot Telamonius annos Sanguinis in socios, et habet sine vulnere corpus."

"Ajax erat toto corpore invulnerabilis, præterquam latere, ita vs. 390.

"Dixit, et in pectus, dum denique vulnera passum

Quâ potuit ferro, letalem condidit ensem."

"In poemate Virgilio adscripto, quod appellatur CIRIS, fabula recondita, ait Heynius, seu verius, fabula recentioris ingenii invenitur est, Minoem, Regem Cretæ, vulnerari nequisse, v. 270.

"Cui Parcæ tribuêre nec ullo vulnere lædi. Adde Statii Theb. ix. 730, de Parthenoрхо.

"Ambrosio tum spargit membra liquore, Spargit aquam, ne quo temeretur vulnere corpus [cet, Ante necem, cantusque sacros et consia misMurmura secretis quæ Cholcidas ipsa sub antris herbas." Nocte docet, monstratque feras quærentibus

"Hæc nova mythologiæ fabula pendere videtur de more antiquissimo Barbarorum flumine immergere recens natos; v. Virg. Æn. ix. 603, et notam Lacerda adde Aristot. Politic. vii. 17. Optime distinguit Gesnerus ad Claudianum, xxxvi. 181; inter quas appellat constantes illas fabulas, quæ velut fundum mythologiæ poeti

cæ constituunt, et mythos symbolicos physiologicosque Has fabulas respiciens, Statium & Poetas recentiores opinor, ut Heroem illum Maximum, donis coelestibus et honoribus augerent, et nobilitarent, ab aliis viris, quod in illis erat egregii et mirabilis, acervatim collegisse, atque omnia ita disposuisse, ut unius viri gloriam augerent, et spoliis optimorum ditarent, ita Fulgentius in loco citato, ait Achillem fuisse, Hominem Perfectum.'"'

At p. 345 we do not understand how the line of Milton, P. L. i. 720. "Belus or Serapis their Gods," proves that Milton read Greek by accent. He had authorities, however unequal, for long and short quantity, in "Serapis," and he selected what suited his purpose best; nor can we agree with Mr.Keightley, that "few lines are more harmonious, than the following one of Milton, read as he would accent it. 'And Tiresias and Phineus prophets old.'"'

It has a syllable too much—but if the second "and" were omitted, the metre would be set right to our judg

ment.

The Church of Rome in her Primitive Purity, compared with the Church of Rome at the present day, &c. By J. H. Hopkins, D.D., Bishop of Vermont. With an Introduction by Rev. H. Melvill, B. D.

WE are so convinced of the usefulness and importance of this work, of the convincing nature of its arguments, and of its triumphant refutation of the equally imperious and ill-founded claims of the Roman papistical Church, that we could wish to see it published in a cheaper and more commodious form, for general circulation-omitting entirely the Latin text of the passages quoted from the fathers. The work is written by Dr. Hopkins, Bishop of the Protestant Church of Vermont; and we are indebted to Mr. Melvill for the advantage of this, the first London edition, which has made it more accessible to English readers, and more generally known than it would otherwise have been. Mr. Melvill has also added a very eloquent and interesting Introduction, in which, after a judicious eulogy on the wellknown treatise of him, whom Dr. Parr called Βαρρόνον τὸν θαυμάστον, he gives very sufficient reasons, in opposition to a statement of Tillotton's, why GENT. MAG. VOL. XII.

another work on the same subject may be received with public advantage and approbation, and then he adds,

"There can be imagined nothing fairer than the course of his argument. You are present at a sort of judicial inquiryyou sit in a court of law, with the Church of Rome upon trial. Witnesses are successively called, but they are all such as the Church claims for her advocates; their testimony is sifted, as by a process of crossexamination; and we honestly think that not one leave the jury-box, without furnishing ground for a verdict, that the Church of Rome, at the present day, has grievously departed from the Church of Rome in her primitive purity."

He also observes,

"With singular industry the author has gathered from the authorities sanctioned by the Roman Canon Law whatever seem strongest, whether for or against the pretensions of the Roman Church and with singular skill he has so arrayed his evidence, and established its bearing, that one hardly knows how its force can be evaded. At the same time, by an universal felicity, his work may be called popular. It is quite adapted to the general reader, though it may be only fully appreciated by the laborious divine. The temper moreover which pervades the whole is beautiful. There is not a harsh or acrimonious expression-controversy never looked more amiable. The writer might almost be said to wound without giving pain; and for once at least we have a defence of the doctrines of Christianity, without even the appearance of violence to its spirit."

The objects of the work itself we consider to be most important indeed, as showing the real testimony of the Fathers, in their own words, fairly and fully stated, on one of the chief points in controversy between the Reformed Church and the Roman.

"This testimony (as Mr. Melvill most properly observes), is not to be thrown aside, as some in the present day would rashly recommend. The Church of England, in freeing herself from the corruptions of Rome, did not give up her adherence to Catholic tradition, and so set every man loose to interpret scripture for himself. The canon of 1571, enjoining that preachers should teach nothing but what is agreeable to the doctrine of the Old and New Testament, and what the Catholic fathers and ancient bishops had gathered out of that very doctrine. This sufficiently defines the mind of the Church; sufficiently shows that she never under

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