issued from the head of the goddess of wisdom, did it even come into the world as perfect and full grown as she did herself.' p. 69.

By the way, we must here deny the universality of Mr. Gamble's preference of what is old. The good old sober constitution of the English language is not within the compass of his affections. He is on this ground a furious and practical revolutionist, and if his example were to be unpunished and become infectious, there would be a frightful anarchy in the provinces of grammar and rhetoric. In grateful return for his benevolent willingness to consign us and other handicraftsmen to a political despotism, we wish him, and all such as he, to be put under the most rigorous despotism of criticism. He has had more liberty than heknows how to make a good use of.' He has taken up the most mischievous form of the doctrine of literary liberty and equality. He is clearly unfit for the exercise of the elective franchise, or any other function of a free citizen in the community of paragraph makers. With a remarkable perversity of fancy and whim, his democratic turbulence and refractoriness, as a subject of the state of letters, are combined with a violent passion for gaudy magnificence. It is the fancy of a man who cannot satisfy himself he is a freeman unless he may blazon the royal arms on his carriage or his cart, and harness eight cream-coloured horses. We will give two or three slight samples of his painting, gilding, and livery.

About the same time was reared in France that fatal Columna Bellica, from which was thrown the burning spear, which has caused such conflagration on earth. The spirit of Ulster innovation became sublimated, and blazed with borrowed violence. The sober Presbyterian drew infection from the boiling cauldron of French atheism, and while the livid fire gleamed on his visage, he could hardly be distinguished from the blood-stained demons, who, with shouts and yells, in uncouth and unseemly garb, were dancing round him.' In relating an instance of the influence of love, he finds occasion to generalize in the following strain:

• A man can dissemble to the object he loves; or rather, he is in her presence a different being, on whom her likings and dislikings, her feelings and affections, are impressed-and he may be said, without much exaggeration, to be endued with a new and etherial existence, floating in the cerulean dew of her creation.' p. 141.

Adverting to the early history of a now very old friend, a Presbyterian minister, he describes a disputation that was held by formal appointment, between that gentleman and a Catholic priest, just fresh and hot from Salamanca.

The first point was the often enough disputed doctrine of transubstantiation. This is a vast Sorbonian bog in which whole armies of controversialists have sunk. It is, of all the tenets of the Romish

church the most incomprehensible-which was precisely the reason why the young Salamanca pedant chose it. The more unmalleable it was, the more credit he thought he would have in hammering it into the hard head of his Presbyterian antagonist.' p. 255.

Again:

A people who are accustomed to the gratifications of the imagination, are rarely politicians, and as rarely sots or gluttons. How calm and unruffled, even unto this day, would, probably, have flowed the stream of Italian government, had it not been disturbed by the French Revolution, which, like a ponderous mill stone fallen into a lake, extended its circles to the remotest parts. And what a people were the Italians-so gentle, so sober, so animated, so intelligent, so affectionate. Is that wonderful? when the finest paintings, the most exquisite statues, when heavenly music and sacred incense, and spectacle, and show, and procession, daily seen and hearkened to, turned their natures to corresponding harmony, and caused their souls to float in a kind of celestial dewiness, which raised them far above the dark and murky shadows, which sordid care, and barbarous ignorance, and paltry rivalship, and mad-brained politics, throw on the characters of men.' p. 297.

The merit of the fine composition, though that is not small, is infinitely surpassed by that of the truth and sense, of this matchless piece of raving, which asserts, in the face of the history of the civilized word, and of the biography of artists and men of taste, the incompatibility of vice and a high cultivation of the fine arts; and, with a felicity that never can be equalled, cites modern Italy, the very sink of morals and reason, as the proof and illustration! It is perfectly worthy of the judgement and the style of such a writer to run wild in rhapsody on the charms and glories of popery; and the following sentences may complete the display of eloquence and intellectual sanity.

'How delightful too is the Catholic religion-solemn in music, fragrant in incense, splendid in decoration, graceful in ornament; the beads, the scapular and cross,-it may be said, like the Pagan religion of old, to deify life, and to reflect only in its fair bosom the beneficent author of creation; while the gloomy spirit of Calvinism. like a stern enchantress, waves her wand over the bright landscape of the imagination, and gives in its stead the dark cavern of a ferocious tyrant. p. 31.

'I see little reason why it (the ascendency of Protestantism in India) should be desirable. There is nothing in the Catholic religion more than any other, to make worse men, worse subjects, or worse members of the community; it addresses the heart as well as the head, it pleases the fancy, it captivates the imagination, it throws a ray of glory round the skeleton head of theology. It is no upstart, it is an ancient religion; it has all the grandeur and venerable aspect, though it has some of the weaknesses of age,' &c. &c, &c.

And then he goes forward in loud eulogy of the Catholic

clergy and gentry; who, if they have but even a small portion of that noble and lofty and magnanimous spirit which he ascribes to them, will spurn and nauseate a pretended tribute to their religion from a man who is prepared, in other company, to laugh at that and all other forms of religion.

It has often been imputed to religious, alias methodistical censors of books, that not being able, in any other effectual way, to vent against an author who thinks too freely for them, the malignity of which they are supposed to be always full to overflowing, they resort to an easy common-place of mischief, and call him an infidel. This charge will not be made in the present instance. The light, and sometimes sneering or burlesque manner in which religious topics are alluded to, and facts and phrases of Scripture cited, in the more lively parts of the book; the sceptical cast of the philosophic reflections (as we suppose we are to call them) in the graver parts; and the repeated affectation of considering the various modes of religion, excepting Calvinism, as all nearly equal, hardly left it necessary, for deciding the reader's estimate, that the author should have thrown in such a sentence as this: The grave is the isthmus which unites eternity to time-when once our eyes are closed in it, we do not know whether we shall ever wake again, or if we do, in what state we shall wake.' p. 375.

This ignorance nevertheless appears competent to be a foundation for pride. For in speaking of the very aged and venerable Presbyterian clergyman alluded to before, who is described as enjoying in his conscious approach toward the close of life, the calm confidence of a life to come, our author says, in a tone of kind condescension partaking of compassion, the tone of a man who must have the merit, forsooth, of being too good to wish to banish the fond fancies that console a weak mind, 'I have never heard him express a doubt on these subjects (the truth of revealed religion, and the immortality of the soul') and very cruel would be the man that suggested it to him!' This arrogant sort of kindness is the more silly and nauseous as this very clergyman is described as having been uniformly distinguished by an uncommonly sound understanding, and by a freedom and liberality of thinking and taste which had sometimes been greatly inconvenient to him in his connexion with a very rigid

sect.

Mr. Gamble has frequent occasion to revert to the rebellion and the United Irishmen; and it is done in much more tolerant language than might have been expected from so complete an enemy to political innovation. He affirms that the active energy of the conspiracy was in a great measure confined to the Catholics. So long, he says, as its employments were those deliberating, and planning, and writing, the Presbyterians bore

an ample and most animated share. But when the design was matured to the great crisis, they began to shrink; not for want of courage, but from the intervention of conscience and humanity, from a moral and religious horror of the crimes of civil war, combined with their long established partialities and prejudices. In consequence, the Catholic portion of the insurgents regarded themselves as basely betrayed by these Protestant cooperators in the schemes and councils which had led them into the war. And there is, it seems, a deep and extensive feeling of indignation and hatred, cherished by the discontented Catholics on this account. There is, therefore, in Mr. G.'s opinion, no possibility of any future political relation between the two parties. The Catholics could not trust, and the Presbyterians

will never seek to be trusted.

Among the remarkable facts attending the conspiracy, the author relates at great length one most extraordinary history. But we really cannot tell whether he means it to be all believed or not. He assumes most fully indeed the manner of a person relating what he knows or believes to be facts, only concealing names under initials; but he begins and ends without saying any thing precisely on the subject of the authentication of the story, while he might have been sensible that a more established name than he can suppose his to be, would have been requisite for such a narrative, if it was to be given without any of the formalities of evidence. Indeed he will expect every reader to challenge the authenticity of a history so full of romantic incidents of surprising changes of feeling, of tragical and overwhelming misery, and of retired circumstances and communications which it is impossible to conceive how the relator could know. It is an account of a young Protestant gentleman who entered the league of the United Irishmen, was implicated in the melancholy transactions of 1798, and became a prisoner, and a victim to the law. It includes two tender and ardent attachments, the former of which ended in a manner hardly less melancholy than the fatal catastrophe which resulted from and closed upon the latter. This interesting and ill-fated youth had for a time completely withdrawn himself from the dangerous political connexion, in consequence partly of having found on what pernicious moral principles it was prosecuting an object which in itself he deemed good, and partly of the solemn injunctions of his father when on his death bed. He devoted himself to retirement and rural employment, from which, though oppressed with languor and melancholy, he was little likely to have returned to the political fraternity and its schemes and enterprizes, had he not fallen, or rather been led by design, into the company and irresistible enchantments, as he found them, of a beautiful young woman, who was so enthusiastic a republican

and United Irish-woman, that though she became as much attached as he, she refused to marry him but on the condition of his first rejoining the formidable fraternity. He did so, at a moment very near the crisis of their designs, led a small division of the insurgents to battle, was wounded, and after a number of escapes, apprehended, condemned, and executed. His female friend attended him in his last melancholy hours, and accompanied him to the place of execution.

Art. III. A View of the Progress and present State of Animal Chemistry. By Iöns Jacob Berzelius, M. D. Professor of Medicine and Pharmacy, &c. &c. Translated from the Swedish, by Gustavus Brunnmark, D.D. Chaplain to the Swedish Legation at the Court of St. James's. 8vo. pp. 115. Price 5s. 6d. Hatchard, Johnson and Co. and Boosey. 1813.

THIS truly scientific memoir owes its origin to à regulation

of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Stockholm, which requires its President, who is elected for six months only, to read an essay on his retiring from that office, on some literary or scientific subject of his own choice. This circumstance has necessarily given to the essay before us a less laboured and formal character than is generally exhibited by productions of a similar class. Entering into no minute details of experiments, it makes us acquainted merely with their general results; and while it contains a very brief but candid account of what has been done by others, it gives us also the product of much original investigation, conducted by the Professor himself.

For this undertaking, indeed, the author seems to have been peculiarly qualified by the nature of his previous studies; having, in a work published a few years ago, gone pretty extensively into the experimental investigation of the chemistry of animal bodies, which is by far the most difficult department of the science. Nor is this all. His views are every where those of a philosopher, in the most enlarged and proper sense of the term,---of one who is sufficiently aware of the narrow boundaries within which the human mind is permitted to range, and who is too wise to attempt to supply by conjecture, what is denied to diligent and well directed inquiry. He shews very little respect towards the idle attempts made by Reil, Home, and others, to account for and explain the nature of secretion by the agency of galvanism; observing that there is no analogy between the effect of this agent upon either animal or unorganic bodies, and the function of secretion, and that by such an application of it we gain no information at all. The following observations appear to us strikingly just and philosophical.