But, if printing had been early practised, the great number of editions and copies, and their extensive circulation throughout all civilized countries, would have gone very far towards preventing the entire destruction of the whole number of editions printed of any very popular work. It is not unreasonable to suppose that some few printed copies of each, or of many, would have escaped; and that for one ancient vellum manuscript, which has come down to our hands, it is probable there would have been hundreds, or even thousands, of ancient printed volumes, the original manuscripts of which have been destroyed. The Similar reflections arise with respect to the multiplying of impressions, when the art of engraving on wood and plates of metal was first practised, or had made some progress in Babylon and Egypt. In those times, when an inscription or figured design was cut on the wooden block, or plate of metal, the advantage of instruction or pleasure, which it was intended to convey, was confined to the single engraved representation; and that was destroyed when the block or plate perished. engraved surface was not employed to pro-create (if the term be applicable) its own likeness by a conjunction with the papyrus, or any other substance. From the admirable tooling of their public edifices, statues, and gold work, we may fairly conclude the Egyptians would have brought calcography to a high degree of perfection, and have employed it to multiply transcripts of all their most renowned works of art and local varieties; their domestic utensils, furniture, mechanical tools, and machinery. Many of their tombs are ornamented with paintings of these representations. The Greeks, also, would no doubt have multiplied with the graver and printing press, copies of their most celebrated paintings, statues, and views of their noblest public buildings. We have now the names of Polygnotus, Zeuxis, Parhasius, Apelles, and a few more of their renowned painters; but their names only. Of all their works, so applauded by the writers of antiquity, not a vestige remains. Even of the Grecian sculpture, it is too true, we have comparatively only a very few specimens, and, of those, still fewer unmutilated. For one that has escaped the hand of time and iconoclastic fury, many thousands have been destroyed. In another view, what a vast diffusion of literature, science, general knowledge, and civilization would have been produced by the printing and circulation of books and engraved prints in Egypt, Babylon, and the other great nations of Asia, in remote antiquity. Knowledge, and all the powers of the mind, are progressive, and the greater the sum of their acquisitions, the greater their speed and influence. The intellectual legacy of those primitive people, like money acquiring interest upon interest, would have been increasing and multiplying itself from father to son, and year to year, during these four thousand years. Each generation would have inherited a prodigious mental treasure, and might be likened to a rich heir, whose paternal wealth enables him to leave his less fortunate neighbours behind, and to undertake and accomplish great things, which, wanting the means, he would never have thought of or attempted. In this view, is it at all unreasonable to calculate that the wonderful advances, improvements, and discoveries, made by the noble emulation of the moderns, would have been, in a number of instances, anticipated, and, perhaps, more than twice doubled, or trebled, centuries ago; or that the present race of mankind having all, or the greater part, of the admirable thoughts and productions of antiquity, as lessons and models to profit by and improve upon, would have been advanced four or five hundred years beyond the distinguished elevation to which they have so nobly fought their way? A flood of light and glory would have been poured upon the ancient world, which, although partially overcast by occasional storms, would have broke out again like the sun from a dark cloud, and have continued to shine with undiminished lustre to the end of time. The moderns being, as we may say, deprived, by the want of printing, in antiquity, of their lawful inheritance, had, at the time of the revival of learning in Italy, on the rapid conquests of the Turks, and, more particularly, the capture of Constantinople by those barbarous infidels, to begin on a dilapidated and scanty fund, the impoverished remains of their birth-right; but with a genius worthy the proudest era of Greece or Rome, they have wrought, and are daily working, wonders, in every department of literature, science, and the arts. The length of this communication obliges me to omit my observations on the first known use of printing in Germany, about the commencement of the 15th century, prior to the claims of Guttenbergh, in Mentz, and Costar, in Holland, to the invention of that art. I must hasten to a conclusion. When we recollect the ancient bricks with Chaldean characters, supposed to have been impressed upon them by the hand, with moveable blocks, of which (bricks) Trinity College, Cambridge, is in possession of some rare specimens, computed to be about 4000 years old; when we also bear in mind that inscriptions and figures were engraved on blocks of wood, stone, and plates of metal, in Egypt and Asia, upwards of 3000 years ago;-that signets and stamps for impressing coin were in use, at the same period;-that those arts became diffused, and have continued in full practice, in all civilized nations ever since; that the Chinese and Japanese possessed the art of multiplying impressions from wooden blocks, and applied that art to the printing of books 1400 years ago; we may well feel amazement and sorrow, that the art of multiplying impressions, or prints, from engraved plates of metal, and that of printing books, lay so many ages undiscovered in Europe, to the incalculable loss of mankind. March, 1835. SONNET. NIGHT hath its world of dreams,-but not alone Open to him, whose devious feet have known E. S. LIONEL LACKLAND, Τα εις εαυτον ; OR THINGS CONCERNING MYSELF. SOAR THE FIRST. BLESS, for ever bless the errant vagabondising spirit of the age, we are no longer imprisoned within the limits of our domestic circle, no longer do we gaze upon the roaming pedlar, and the dismembered Trim, with the anticipation of their fearful adventures and "hair-breadth scapes,"-no longer do we collect under the old sycamore of the village hostelry on a fine summer's eve, crowding round the old pedlar, who looks upon his innocent hearers, his eyes half closed, and the corner of his mouth curled up, with a sort of disdainful compassion, while now and then a light flickering smile plays over his brown phiz, as he turns out some abominable lie, which none but English credulity could swallow :-no longer do ye exist, sweet Auburns of our land, with your children as happy as ignorance could make them; out of the chaos of error and falsehood, light has sprung forth, and no one is now so happy as to believe in the "anthropophagi," and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. The bearded pilgrim no longer wends his solitary way through far-off lands, journeying with scrip and staff, to bow before the tomb of the holy city, nor the knight "in complete steel," tempting the dangers of the wilderness, for the love of his Dulcinea; these venerables have degenerated into the fashionable tourist: the fiery charger is exchanged for the chariot and the horsemen, and an "escort for the mountains," or else the more humble guise of a sorry hack and a Mackintosh cloak, with a pencil to sketch all the picturesque, and a head as large as a knight's helmet, and almost as empty, to contain the history and tradition of every people, and every land. Your Arab is nothing to the European for wandering; it matters not where, from Cashmere to the top of Caucasus, and from Caucasus to the north pole, the farther the better. I often wonder why our curiosity does not oftener lead us to follow the course of Empedocles, and take a ride through the buffeting waves of space. Now in the land of bon mots and deep speculations, of light wines and lighter hearts, now over "flood and fell" to the dazzling regions of misery and maccaroni, of the glancing gondola and her hundred mysteries, of poignards and pickpockets, of Madonnas and miasmata;-then on with lightning speed to the land of poverty, popery, and pride, where the spirit of Cervantes usurps the throne of chivalry and romance, which lie entombed at his feet, where stalk the haughty hidalgo and the mumbling priest, the fan and the fair one, the mystical mantilla, the dark eye, and the lightning-glance, the bullfight, the gay Matadore and the Bolero;-on, on, in spite of rough roads, dark ravines, and hanging precipices, to the land where Barons are plentiful as blackberries-Germany and the Rhine, the Hartz mountains and their unseen nimrods, the penelopean web of indefinable philosophies, Goethe and German ideality, sour Crout, sour Hock, the Meershaum true; Roncesvalles and Ehrenbreitstein adieu, and away through the lands of dikes and dams, and so farewell to the wise imperturbable little Stadtholder, Dutch phlegm, and commercial prosperity. Oh, sympathy! sympathy!-thou dost make sad work of our free will, inside and outside 'tis all one; we sympathize with the trim of a coat as quickly as with the emotions of the heart, with the odour of a bonne-bouche as involuntarily as with the sweetest music-first the sympathies of the heart, secondly of the five senses, and by itself the sympathy of travelling. But with all the beautiful pictures of far-off lands, and however fascinating the memory of them may be to us, yet is there no region on earth which possesses so much variety, such sweet interchange of hill and vale, rude rocks, and smiling plains, or that can offer the worn wanderer so much of the comfort and real happiness of existence as our own green island. In the thousand and one tales which are wedded to old England, no spot is associated with deeper and more varied traditions than Cornwall. To wander over her rocky steeps, to listen to the hoarse booming of her seas, rolling over the breakers, and dashing through the slimy cavern-to behold the rude monuments of our ancient priesthood, the Cromlahs, the baths, the dawn's-men, the amphitheatres, caves, castles, charms, and superstitions innumerable, which breathe a spirit of the past, and awaken a thousand pleasing emotions. Cornwall was the last refuge of the Druids, and from the number of gigantic monuments which even now exist, the persecuted sect must have remained long in the possession of that country. The song of the minstrel-bard is no longer heard, but the last tones of his broken harp have been re-echoed through the ages of departing time, and seem even now, as we gaze upon the altars of their worship, to awaken the spirit, as sweet music stealing into it from unknown quarters. Here sprang forth the famous King Arthur, the fair Ysonde, and the brave Sir Tristrem. That first impressions are the most lasting, is enunciated every day, and by every body, and yet, like many other passive truisms, with no other reference than to the individual subject which suggested it. That first impressions are the most lasting, has been a thousand times edicted, and yet how few consider this truth, either in a metaphysical, philosophical, or physiological point of view. Our philosophic poet at once perceived the electrical sympathy of the opposite poles of our existence, "second childishness and mere oblivion." He beheld life as in the form of a circle, the two ends joining at the same point of fatuity and weakness, "Sans eyes, teeth, taste, sans every thing." To youth the reminiscences of childhood are seldom pleasing, if ever remembered; there is too much activity in the present to seek amusement in the past; up to the age of forty, youth and manhood merge so imperceptibly into each succeeding year, that there is scarcely any real change in the feelings and affections, save that those affections are differently applied: the ardent lover becomes the impetuous soldier-the impetuous soldier the fanatical priest; at forty, we blush for the follies of youth, at fifty we excuse them, at sixty we laugh at them, at seventy we scorn the wisdom of mankind, and behold existence as a dream; sick of the contentions of life, we revert with infantine pleasure to the dawning hours of our being; we dream of our early feelings, hopes, and emotions, and prattle of childhood with the fondness of garrulous age. Though not an old man, I already begin to doze over these "first impressions," and in looking through a life of strange adventure and startling events, I fall back upon the merry days of boyhood with all the prejudices of age-days upon which I dwell with a sort of evergreen freshness of interest, which I hope will increase with my years. It was in the Ides of March, in the year of our Lord 1784, on a cold, tempestuous, miserable night, when I first piped my whistle, a fine, plump, blustering bantling as ever smelt the cold of a March wind; my good old grandame, peace to her shade, is my authority for this egotistical predicate. But that I fear me much the habitation of my childhood has departed, though not like the palace of Aladin, I would give a hint to some Bond-street seeker of the picturesque to journey to the old rocks upon which the tenement was founded, supposing the old house in existence locum tenens, and supposing such a lover of the beautiful existed, let me advise him to go directly a circuitous route through South Wales, until he arrive at that filthiest of towns 'ycleped Swansea, with its long expansive beautiful beach,—and this for the sake of a trip across the green fishing pond. Once aboard the tight little brig, with the blue Peter flying on her foretop, as signal for sea, then heave away, and the capstan flies round, as the men coil in the dripping cable, until the anchor hangs under the bow; paddling through the smooth dirty water in the harbour for a quarter of an hour, the huge lazy mainsails flapping against the masts, with not a cap full of wind in their bellies, the little vessel lying like a dead hulk on the water; ready the fore-royals, bawls the captain, and instantly the white |