said he, however excellent in its distributions of wood, and water, and buildings, leaves not one tract in the memory; historical painting is perpetually false in a variety of ways, in the costume, the grouping, the portraits, and is nothing more than fabulous painting; but the real portrait is truth itself; and calls up so many collateral ideas as to fill an intelligent mind more than any other species. Marvelle justly reprehends the fastidious feelings of those ingenious men who have resisted the solicitations of the artist, to sit for their portraits. In them it is sometimes as much pride as it is vanity in those who are less difficult in this respect. Of Gray, Shenstone, Fielding and Akenside, we have no heads for which they sat; a circumstance regretted by their admirers, and by physiognomists. To an arranged collection of Portraits, we owe several interesting works. Granger's justly esteemed volumes originated in such a collection. Perrault' Eloges of the illustrious men of the seventeenth century,' were drawn up to accompany the engraved portraits of the most celebrated characters of the age, which a fervent lover of the fine arts and literature had had engraved as an elegant tribute to the fame of those great men. They are confined to his nation, as Granger's to ours. The parent of this race of books may perhaps be the Eulogiums of Paulus Jovius, which originated in a beautiful Cabinet, whose situation he has described with all its amenity. Paulus Jovius had a country house, in an insular situation of a most romantic aspect. It was built on the ruins of the villa of Pliny; and in his time the foundations were still to be traced. When the surrounding lake was calm, in its lucid bosom were still viewed sculptured marbles, the trunks of columns, and the fragments of those pyramids which had once adorned the residence of the friend of Trajan. Jovius was an enthusiast of literary leisure; an historian, with the imagination of a poet; a bishop nourished on the sweet fictions of pagan mythology. His pen colours like a pencil. He paints rapturously, his gardens bathed by the waters of the lake, the shade and freshness of his woods, his green hills, his sparkling fountains, the deep silence, and the calm of solitude. He describes a statue raised in his gardens to Nature; in his hall an Apollo presided with his lyre, and the Muses with their attributes; his library was guarded by Mercury, and an apartment devoted to the three Graces was embellished by Doric columns, and paintings of the most pleasing kind. Such was the interior! Without, the pure and transparent lake spread its broad mirror, rolled its voluminous windings, while the banks were richly covered with olives and laurels, and in the distance, towns, promontories, hills rising in an amphitheatre blushing with vines, and the elevations of the Alps covered with woods and pasturage, and sprinkled with herds and flocks. In the centre of this enchanting habitation stood the Cabinet, where Paulus Jovius had collected, at great cost, the Portraits of the celebrated men of the fourteenth and two succeeding centuries. The daily view of them animated his mind to compose their eulogiums. These are still curious; both for the facts they preserve, and the happy conciseness with which Jovius delineates a character. He had collected these portraits as others from a collection of natural history; and he pursued in their characters what others de in their experiments. One caution in collecting portraits must not be forgotten: it respects their authenticity. We have too many supposititious heads, and ideal personages. Conrade ab Uffenbach, who seems to have been the first collector who projected a methodical arrangement, condemned those portraits which were not genuine, as fit only for the amusements of children. The painter does not always give a correct likeness, or the engraver misses it in his copy. The faithful Vertue refused to engrave for Houbraken's set, because they did not authenticate their originals; and some of these are spurious. Busts are not so liable to these accidents. It is to be regretted that men of genius have not been careful to transmit their own portraits to their admirers; it forms a part of their character: a false delicacy has interfered. Erasmus did not like to have his own diminutive person sent down to posterity, but Holbein was always affectionately painting his friends; Bayle and others have refused; but Motesquieu once sat to Dacier after repeating denials, won over by the ingenious argument of the artist; Do you not think,' said Dacier, that there is as much pride in refusing my offer as in accept ing it?" DESTRUCTION OF BOOKS. The literary treasures of antiquity have suffered from the malice of men, as well as that of time. It is remarkable that conquerors, in the moment of victory, or in the unsparing devastations of their rage, have not been satisfied with destroying men, but have even carried their vengeance to books. Ancient history records how the Persians, from hatred of the religion of the Phoenicians and the Egyptians, destroyed their books, of which Eusebius notices they pos sessed a great number. A remarkable anecdote is recorded of the Grecian libraries; one at Gnidus was burnt by the sect of Hippocrates, because the Gnidians refused to follow the doctrines of their master. If the followers of Hippocrates formed the majority, was it not very unorthodox in the Gnidians to prefer taking physic their own way? The anecdote may be suspicious, but faction has often annihilated books. The Romans burnt the books of the Jews, of the Christians, and the philosophers; the Jews burnt the books of the Christians and the Pagans; and the Christians burnt the books of the Pagans and the Jews. The greater part of the books of Origen and other heretics were continually burnt by the orthodox party. Gibbon pathetically describes the empty library of Alexandria after the Christians had destroyed it. The valuable library of Alexandria was pillaged or destroyed; and near twenty years afterwards the appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator, whose mind was not totally darkened by religious prejudice. The compositions of ancient genius, so many of which have irretrievably perished, might surely have been excepted from the wreck of idolatry, for the amusement and instruction of succeeding ages and either the seal or avarice of the archbishop might have been satiated with the richest spoils which were the rewards of his victory.' The curious narrative of Nicetas Choniates of the ravages committed by the Christians of the thirteenth century in Constantinople, was fraudulently suppressed in the printed editions; it has been preserved by Dr Clarke. We cannot follow this painful history, step by step, of the pathetic Nicetas, without indignant feelings. Dr Clarke observes, that the Turks have committed fewer injuries to the works of art than the barbarous Christians of that age. The reading of the Jewish Talmud has been forbidden by various edicts, of the Emperor Justinian, of many of the French and Spanish kings, and numbers of popes. All the copies were ordered to be burnt; the intrepid perseve rance of the Jews themselves preserved that work from annihilation. In 1566 twelve thousand copies were thrown into the flames at Cremona. John Reuchlin interfered to stop this universal destruction of Talmuds; for which he became hated by the monks, and condemned by the Elec tor of Mentz, but appealing to Rome, the prosecution was stopped; and the traditions of the Jews were considered as not necessary to be destroyed. Conquerors at first destroy with the rashest zeal the na tional records of the conquered people; hence it is that the Irish deplore the irreparable losses of their most ancient national memorials, which their invaders have been too successful in annihilating. The same event occurred in the conquest of Mexico; and the interesting history of the New World must ever remain imperfect in consequence of the unfortunate success of the first missionaries; who too late became sensible of their error. Clavigero, the most authentic historian of Mexico, continually laments this affecting loss. Every thing in that country had been painted, and painters abounded there, as scribes in Eu rope. The first missionaries, suspicions that superstition was mixed with all their paintings, attacked the chief school of these artists, and collecting, in the market-place, a little mountain of these precious records, they set fire to it; and buried in the ashes the memory of many most interesting events. Afterwards sensible of their error, they tried to collect information from the mouths of the Indians; but the Indians were indignantly silent; when they attempt. ed to collect the remains of these painted histories, the patriotic Mexican usually buried in concealment the re maining records of his country. The story of the Caliph Omar proclaiming throughout the Kingdom, at the taking of Alexandria, that the Koran contained every thing which was useful to believe and to know, and he therefore, ordered all the books in the Alex andrian library to be distributed to the masters of the baths amounting to 4000, to be used in heating their stoves during a period of six months, modern paradox would attempt to deny. But the tale would not be singular even were it true: it perfectly suits the character of a bigot; a barbarian, and a blockhead. A similar event happened in Per$13. When Abdoolah, who in the third century of the Mohammedan era governed Khorasan, was presented at Nishapoor with a Ms, which was shown as a literary curiosity, he asked the title of it, and was told it was the tale of Wamick and Oozra; composed by the great poet, Noshirwan. On this Abdoolah observed, that those of his country and faith had nothing to do with any other book than the Koran; and that the composition of an idolator must be detestable! Not only he declined accepting it, but ordered it to be burnt in his presence; and further issued a proclamation commanding all Persian Mss, which should be found within the circle of his government to be burned! Much of the most ancient poetry of the Persians perished by this fanatical edict. Cardinal Ximenes seems to have retaliated a little on the Saracens; for at the taking of Granada he condemned to the flames five thousand Korans. The following anecdote respecting a Spanish missal, called St Isidore's, is not incurious; hard fighting saved it from destruction. In the Moorish wars, all these missals had been destroyed excepting those in the city of Toledo. There in six churches the Christians were allowed the free exercise of their religion. When the Moors were expelled several centuries afterwards from Toledo, Alphonsus the VI ordered the Roman missal to be used in those churches; but the people of Toledo insisted on having their own preferred, as being drawn up by the most ancient bishops, and revised by St Isidore. It had been used by a great number of saints, and having been preserved pure during Moorish umes, it seemed to them that Alphonsus was more tyranmical than the Turks. The contest between the Roman and the Toletan missals came to that height, that at length it was determined to decide their fate by single combat; the champion of the Toletan missal felled by one blow the knight of the Román missal. Alphonsus still considered this battle as merely the effect of the heavy arm of the doughty Toletan, and ordered a fast to be proclaimed, and a great fire to be prepared, into which, after his majesty and the people had joined in prayer for heavenly assistance in this ordeal,both the rivals (not the men, but the missals) were thrown into the flames-again St Isidore's missal triumphed, and this iron book was then allowed to be orthodox by Alphonsus, and the good people of Toledo were allowed to say their prayers as they had long been used to do. However, the copies of this missal at length became very scarce; for now when no one opposed the reading of St Isidore's missal, none cared to use it. Cardinal Ximenes found it so difficult to obtain a copy, that he printed a large impression, and built a chapel, consecrated to St. Isidore, that this service might be daily chanted as it had been by the ancient Christians. The works of the ancients were frequently destroyed at the instigation of the monks. They appear sometimes to have mutilated them, for passages have not come down to us, which once evidently existed; and occasionally their interp 'ations and other forgeries formed a destruction in a new shape, by additions to the originals. They were indefatigable in erasing the best works of the most eminent Greek and Latin authors, in order to transcribe their ridiculous lives of saints on the obliterated vellum. One of the books of Livy is in the Vatican most painfully defaced by some pious father for the purpose of writing on it some missal or psalter, and there have been recently others discovered in the same state. Inflamed with the blindest zeal against every thing pagan, Pope Gregory VII ordered that the library of the Palantine Apollo, a treasury of literature formed by successive emperors, should be committed to the flames! He issued this order under the notion of confining the attention of the clergy to the holy scriptures! From that time all ancient learning which was not sanctioned by the authority of the church, has been emphatically distinguished as profane-in opposition to sacred. This pope is said to have burnt the works of Varro, the learned Roman, that St Austin should escape from the charge of plagiarism, being deeply indebted to Varro for much of his great work the City of God.' The jesuits,sent by the Emperor Ferdinand to proscribe Lutheranism from Bohemia, converted that flourishing kingdom comparatively into a desert, from which it never ecovered convinced that an enlightened people could never be long subservient to a tyrant, they struck one fatal blow at the national literature: every book they condemned was destroyed, even those of antiquity: the annals of the nation were forbidden to be read, and writers were not permitted even to compose on subjects of Bohemian literature. The mother tongue was held out as a mark of vulgar obscurity, and domiciliary visits were made for the purpose of inspecting books and the libraries of the Bohemians. With their books and their language they lost their national character and their independence. The destruction of libraries in the reign of Henry VIII, at the dissolution of the monasteries is wept over by John Bale; those who purchased the religious houses took the libraries as part of the booty, with which they scoured: their furniture, or sold the books as waste paper, or sent them abroad in ship-loads to foreign bookbinders. The fear of destruction induced many to hide manuscripts under ground, and in old walls. At the Reformation popular rage exhausted itself on illuminated books, or Mss that had red letters in the title-page; any work which was decorated was sure to be thrown into the flames as a superstitious one. Red letters and embellished figures were such marks of being papistical and diabolical. We still find such volumes mutilated of the gilt letters and ele gant flourishes, but the greater number were annihilated. Many have been found under ground, being forgotten: what escaped the flames were obliterated by the damp: such is the deplorable fate of books during a persecution! The puritans burnt every thing they found which bore the vestige of popish origin. We have on record many curious accounts of their pious depredations,of their maiming images and erasing pictures. The heroic expeditions of one Dowsing are journalised by himself; a fanatical Quixotte, to whose intrepid arm many of our noseless saints sculptured on our cathedrals owe their misfortunes. The following are some details from the diary of this redoubtable Goth, during his rage for reformation. His entries are expressed with a laconic conciseness, and it would seem with a little dry humour. At Sunbury, we brake down ten mighty great angels in glass. At Barham, brake down the twelve apostles in the chancel, and six supersti tious pictures more there; and eight in the church, one a lamb with a cross (†) on the back; and digged down the steps and took up four superstitious inscriptions in brass,' &c. 'Lady Bruce's house, the chaple, a picture of God the Father, of the Trinity, of Christ, of the Holy Ghost, and the cloven tongues, which we gave orders to take down, and the lady promised to do it.' At another place they brake six hundred superstitious pictures, eight Holy Ghosts, and three of the Son.' And in this manner he and his deputies scoured one hundred and fifty parishes! It has been humourously conjectured, that from this ruth-. less devastator originated the phrase to give a Dowsing. Bishop Hall saved the windows of his chaple at Norwich from destruction, by taking out the heads of the figures, and this accounts for the many faces in church windows which we see supplied in white glass. Fot In the various civil wars in our country, numerous li braries have suffered both in ss and printed books. 'I dare maintain,' says Fuller, that the wars betwixt York and Lancaster, which lasted sixty years, were not so destructive as our modern wars in six years.' He alludes to the parliamentary feuds in the reign of Charles I. during the former their differences agreed in the same re ligion, impressing them with reverence to all sacred muni ments; whilst our civil wars, founded in faction and variety of pretended religions, exposed all naked church records a prey to armed violence; a sad vacuum, which will be sensible in our English historie.' The scarcity of books concerning the catholics in this country is owing to two circumstances; the destruction of catholic books and documents by the pursuivants in the reign of Charles I, and the destruction of them by the catholics themselves, from the dread of the heavy penalties in which their mere possession involved their owners. When it was proposed to the Great Gustavus of Sweden to destroy the palace of the Dukes of Bavaria, that hero nobly refused, observing, 'Let us not copy the example of our unlettered ancestors, who by waging war against every production of genius, have rendered tho name of Goth universally proverbial of the rudest state of barbarity.' Even the civilization of the eighteenth century could not preserve from the savage and destructive fury of a disor derly mob, in the most polished city of Europe, the valuable Mss of the great Earl Mansfield, which were madly consigned to the flames during the riots of 1780. In the year 1599, the hall of the stationers underwent as great a purgation as was carried on in Don Quixote's library. Warton gives a list of the best writers who were ordered for immediate conflagration by the prelates Whitgift and Bancroft, urged by the puritanic and calvinistic factions. Like thieves and outlaws, they were ordered to be taken wheresoever they may be found. It was also decreed that no satires or epigrams should be printed for the future. No plays were to be printed without the inspection and permission of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London; nor any English historyes, Í suppose novels and romances, without the sanction of the privy council. Any pieces of this nature, unlicensed, or now at large and wandering abroad, were to be diligently sought, recalled, and delivered over to the ecclesiastical arm at London-house.' At a later period, and by an opposite party, among other extravagant notions made in the parliament, one was to destroy all the records in the tower, and to settle the nation on a new foundation. The very same principle was attempted to be acted on in the French revolution by the true sans-culottes.' With us Sir Matthew Hale showed the weakness of the proposal, and while he drew on his side all sober persons, stopped even the mouths of the frantic people themselves.' To descend to the losses incurred by individuals, whose name ought to have served as an amulet to charm away the demons of literary destruction. One of the most interesting is the fate of Aristotle's library; he who by a Greek term was first saluted as a collector of books! his works have come down to us accidentally, but not without irreparable injuries, and with no slight suspicion respecting their authenticity. The story is told by Strabo in his thirteenth book. The books of Aristotle came from his scholar Theophrastus to Neleus, whose posterity, an illiterate race, kept them locked up without using them, buried in the earth! One Apellion, a curious collector, purchased them, but finding the Mss injured by age and moisture, conjecturally supplied their deficiencies. It is impossible to know how far Apellion has corrupted and obscured the text. But the mischief did not end here; when Sylla at the taking of Athens brought them to Rome, he consigned them to the care of one Tyrannio, a grammarian, who employed scribes to copy them; he suffered them to pass through his hands without corrections, and took great freedoms with them; the words of Strabo are strong. Ibique, Tyrannionem grammaticum iis vsum atque (ut fama est) intercidisse, aut invertisse.' He gives it indeed as a report; but the fact seems confirmed by the state in which we find these works; Averroes declared that he read Aristotle forty times over before he succeeded in perfectly understanding him; he pretends he did at the one and fortieth time! And to prove this has published five folios of commentary. 6 We have lost much valuable literature by the illiterate or malignant descendants of learned and ingenious persons. Many of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters have been destroyed, I am informed, by her mother, who did not approve that she should disgrace her family by adding to it literary honours; and a few of her best letters, recently published, were found buried in an old family chest. It would have mortified her ladyship's mother, to have heard that her daughter was the Sevigné of Britain. At the death of the learned Peiresc, a chamber in his house filled with letters from the most eminent scholars of the age was discovered: the learned in Europe had addressed Peiresc in their difficulties, who was hence called The Avocat general' of the republic of letters. Such was the disposition of his niece, that although repeatedly entreated to permit them to be published, she preferred to regale herself occasionally with burning these learned epistles to save the expense of fire-wood! The Mss of Leonardo da Vinci have equally suffered from his relatives. When a curious collector discovered some, he generously brought them to a descendant of the great painter, who coldly observed, that he had a great deal more in the garret, which had lain there for many years, if the rats had not destroyed them! Nothing which this great artist wrote but showed an inventive genius. Menage observes on a friend having had his library destroyed by fire, in which several valuable mas had perished, that such a loss is one of the greatest misfortunes that can happen to a man of letters. This gentleman after wards consoled himself with composing a little treatise D Bibliotheca incendio. I must have been sufficiently curious. Even in the present day, men of letters are subject to similar misfortunes; for though the fire-offices will insure books, they will not allow authors to value their own manuscripts! A fire in the Cottonian library shrivelled and destroyed many Anglo-Saxon Mss, a loss now irreparable. The antiquary is doomed to spell hard and hardly at the baked fragments that crumble in his hand. Meninsky's famous Persian dictionary met with a sad fate. Its excessive rarity is owing to the siege of Vienna by the Turks; a bomb fell on the solitary author's house, and consumed the principal part of his indefatigable labours. There are few sets of this high-priced work which do not bear evident proofs of the bomb; while many parts are stained with the water sent to quench the flames. The sufferings of an author for the loss of his manuscripts is nowhere more strongly described than in the case of Anthony Urceus, one of the most unfortunate scholars of the fifteenth century. The loss of his papers seems immediately to have been followed by madness. At Forh, he had an apartment in the palace, and had prepared an important work for publication. His room was dark, and he generally wrote by lamp-light. Having gone out, he left the lamp burning; the papers soon kindled, and his library was reduced to ashes. As soon as he heard the news, he ran furiously to the palace, and knocking his head violently against the door, uttered this blasphemous language; Jesus Christ, what great crime have I done! who of those who believed in you have I ever treated so cruelly? Hear what I am saying, for I am in earnest, and am resolved if by chance I should be so weak as to address myself to you at the point of death, don't hear me, for I will not be with you, but prefer hell and its eternity of torments.' To which, by the by, he gave little credit. Those who heard these ravings tried to console him, but they could not. He quitted the town, and lived franticly, wandering about the woods! Ben Jonson's Execration on Vulcan was composed on a like occasion; the fruits of twenty years' study were consumed in one short hour; our literature suffered, for among some works of imagination there were many philosophical collections, a commentary on the poetics, a complete critical grammar, a life of Henry V, his journey into Scotland with all his adventures in that poetical pilgrimage, and a poem on the ladies of Great Britain. What a catalogue of losses! Castelvetro, the Italian commentator on Aristotle, having heard that his house was on fire, ran through the streets exclaiming to the people, alla Poetica! alla Poetica! To the Poetic! To the Poetic! He was then writing his commentary on the Poetic of Aristotle. Several men of letters have been known to have risen from their death-bed, to destroy their Mss. So solicitous have they been not to venture their posthumous reputation in the hands of undiscerning friends. Marmontel relates a pleasing anecdote of Colardeau, the elegant versifier of Pone's epistle of Eloisa to Abelard. This writer had not yet destroyed what he had written of a translation of Tasso. At the approach of death, he recollected this unfinished labour; he knew that his friends would not have courage to annihilate one of his works; this was reserved for him. Dying, he raised himself, and as if animated by an honourable action, he dragged himself along, and, with trembling hands, seized his papers, and consumed them in one sacrifice. I recollect another instance of a man of letters, of our own country, who acted the same part. He had passed his life in constant study, and it was observed that he had written several folio vols., which his modest fears would not permit him to expose to the eye even of his critical friends. He promised to leave his labours to posterity; and he seemed sometimes, with a glow on his countenance, to exult that they would not be unworthy of their acceptance. At his death his sensibility took the alarm; he had the folios brought to his bed; no one could open them, for they were closely locked. At the sight of his favourite and mysterious labours, he paused; he seemed disturbed in his mind, while he felt at every moment his strength decaying; suddenly he raised his feeble hands by an effort of firm resolve, burnt his papers, and smiled as the greedy Vulcan licked up every page. The task exhausted his remaining strength, and he soon afterwards expired. The late Mrs Inchbald had written her life in several volumes; on her death-bed, from a mo Live perhaps of too much delicacy to admit of any argu-| meat, she requested a friend to cut them into pieces before her eyes not having sufficient strength herself to perform this funeral office. These are instances of what may be called the heroism of authors. The republic of letters has suffered irreparable losses by shipwrecks. Guarino Veronese, one of those learned Italians who travelled through Greece for the recovery of mss, had his perseverance repiad by the acquisition of many valuable works. On his return to Italy he was shipwrecked, and unfortunately for himself and the world, says Mr Roscoe, he lost his treasures! So pungent was bis grief on this occasion that, according to the relation of one of his countrymen, his hair became suddenly white. About the year 1700, Hudde, an opulent burgomaster of Middleburgh, animated solely by literary curiosity, devoted himself and his fortune. He went to China to instruct himself in the language, and in whatever was remarkable in this singular people. He acquired the skill of a mandarine in that difficult language; nor did the form of his Dutch face undeceive the physiognomists of China. He succeeded to the dignity of a mandarine; he travelled through the provinces under this character, and returned to Europe with a collection of observations, the cherished labour of thirty years; and all these were sunk in the bottomless sea! The great Pinellian library after the death of its illustrious possessor, filled three vessels to be conveyed to Naples. Pursued by corsairs, one of the vessels was taken; but the pirates finding nothing on board but books, they threw them all into the sea; such was the fate of a great portion of this famous library. National libraries have often perished at sea, from the circumstance of conquerors transporting them into their own kingdoms. SOME NOTICES OF LOST WORKS. Although it is the opinion of some critics that our literary losses do not amount to the extent which others imagine, they are however much greater than they allow. Our severest losses are felt in the historical province, and particularly in the earliest records, which might not have been the least interesting to philosophical curiosity. Romans; these works were enriched with portraits. When we consider that these writers lived familiarly with the finest geniuses of their times, and were opulent, hospita ble, and lovers of the fine arts, their biography and their portraits are felt as an irreparable loss to literature. I suspect likewise we have had great losses of which we are not always aware; for in that curious letter in which the younger Pliny describes in so interesting a manner the sublime industry, for it seems sublime by its greatness, of his uncle (Book III, Letter V, of Melmouth's translation) it appears that his Natural History, that vast register of the wisdom and folly of the ancients, was not his most extraordinary labour. Among his other works we find a history in twenty books, which has entirely perished. Wo discover also the works of writers, which by the accounts of them, appear to have equalled in genius those which have descended to us. I refer the curious reader to such a poet whom Pliny, in Book I, Letter XVI, has feelingly described. He tells us that his works are never out of my hands; and whether I sit down to write any thing my. self, or to revise what I have already wrote, or am in a disposition to amuse myself, I constantly take up this agree able author; and as often as I do so, he is still new.' Ho had before compared this poet to Catullus; and in a critic of so fine a taste as Pliny, to have cherished so constant an intercourse with the writings of this author, indicates high powers. Instances of this kind frequently occur. The losses which the poetical world has sustained are sufficiently known by those who are conversant with the few invaluable fragments of Menander, who would have interested us much more than Homer: for he was evident ly the domestic poet, and the lyre he touched was formed of the strings of the human heart. He was the painter of manners, and the historian of the passions. The opinion of Quintilian is confirmed by the golden fragments preserved for the English reader in the elegant versions of Cumberland. Even of Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who each wrote about one hundred dramas, seven only have been preserved, and nineteen of Euripides. Of the one hundred and thirty comedies of Plautus, we only inherit twenty imperfect ones. I believe that a philosopher would consent to lose any poet to regain an historian; nor is this unjust, for some future poet may rise to supply the vacant place of a lost poet, but it is not so with the historian. Fancy may be supplied; but Truth once lost, in the annals of mankind, The history of Phoenicia by Sanchoniathan, supposed to be a contemporary with Solomon is only known to us by a few valuable fragments preserved by Eusebius. The same ill fortune attends Manetho's history of Egypt, and Berosus's history of Chaldea. The researches of the philosopher are therefore limited: and it cannot be doubt-leaves a chasm never to be filled! ed that the histories of these most ancient nations, however veiled in fables, or clouded by remoteness, would have presented to the philosopher singular objects of contemplation. Of the history of Polybius, which once contained forty books, we have now only five; of the historical library of Diodorus Siculus, fifteen books only remain out of forty; and half the Roman antiquities of Dionysius Halicarnas sensis has perished. Of the eighty books of the history of Dion Cassius, twenty-five only remain. The present opening books of Ammianus Marcellinus is entitled the fourteenth. Livy's history consisted of one hundred and forty books, and we only possess thirty-five of that pleasing historian. What a treasure has been lost in the thirty books of Tacitus; little more than four remain. Murphy elegantly observes, that the reign of Titus, the delight of human kind, is totally lost, and Domitian has escaped the vengeance of the historian's pen.' Yet Tacitus in fragments is still the colossal torso of history. It is curious to observe that Velleius Paterculus, of whom a fragment only has reached us, we owe to a single copy: no other having ever been discovered, and which occasions the text of this historian to remain incurably corrupt. Taste and criticism have certainly incurred an irreparable loss in that Treatise on the causes of the Corruption of Eloquence, by Quintilian; which he has himself noticed with so much satisfaction in bis 'Institutes.' Petrarch declares, that in his youth he has seen the works of Varro, and the second Decade of Livy; but all his endeavours to recover them were fruitless. These are only some of the most known losses which have occurred in the republic of letters; but in reading contemporary writers we are perpetually discovering new and important ones. We have lost two precious works in ancient biography; Varro wrote the lives of seven hundred illustrious Romans, and Atticus, the friend of Cicero, composed another on the actions of the great men among the QUODLIBETS, OR SCHOLASTIC DISQUISITIONS. Menage observes that the scholastic questions were called Questiones Quodlibetica; and they were generally so ridiculous that we have retained the word Quodlibet in our vernacular language, to express any thing ridiculously subtile; something which comes at length to be distin guished into nothingness, "With all the rash dexterity of wit' The history of the scholastic philosophy might furnish a philosophical writer with an instructive theme; it would enter into the history of the human mind, and fill a niche in our literary annals; the works of the scholastics, with the debates of these Quodlibetarians, would at once show the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect, for though they often degenerated into incredible absurdi ties, those who have examined the works of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus have confessed their admiration of that Herculean texture of brain which they exhausted in demolishing their aerial fabrics. The following is a slight sketch of the school divinity. The Christian docrrines in the primitive ages of the gospel were adapted to the simple comprehension of the multitude; metaphysical subtilties were not even employed by the fathers, of whom several are eloquent. Even the Homilies explained by an obvious interpretation some scriptural point, or inferred by artless illustration some moral doctrine. When the Arabians became the only learned people, and their empire extended over the greatest part of the known world, they impressed their own genius on those nations with whom they were allied as friends, or reverenced as masters. The Arabian genius was fond of abstruse studies, it was highly metaphysical and mathematical, for the fine arts their religion did not admit them to cultivate; and it appears that the first knowledge which modern Europe obtained of Euclid and Aristotle was through the medium of Latin translations after Arabic versions. The Christians in the west received their first lessons from the Arabians in the east; and Aristotle, with his Arabic commentaries, was enthroned in the schools of Christendom. Then burst into birth from the dark cave of metaphysics a numerous and ugly spawn of monstrous sects; unnatural children of the same foul mother, who never met but to destroy each other. Religion became what is called the study of divinity; and they all attempted to reduce the worship of God into a system! the creed into a thesis! and every point relating to religion was debated through an endless chain of infinite questions, incomprehensible distinctions, with differences mediate and immediate, the concrete and the abstract, a perpetual civil war was carried on against common sense in all the Aristotelian severity. There existed a rage for Aristotle; and Melancthon complains that in sacred assemblies the ethics of Aristotle were read to the people instead of the gospel. Aristotle was placed ahead of St Paul; and St Thomas Aquinas in his works distinguishes him by the title of The Philosopher; inferring Zoubtless that no other man could possibly be a philosopher who disagreed with Aristotle. Of the blind rites paid to Aristotle, the anecdotes of the Nominalists and Realists are noticed in the article Literary Controversy' in this work. Had their subtile questions and perpetual wranglings only been addressed to the metaphysician in his closet, and had nothing but strokes of the pen occurred, the scholastic divinity would only have formed an episode in the calm narrative of literary history but it has claims to be registered in political annals, from the numerous persecutions and tragical events with which they too long puzzled their followers, and disturbed the repose of Europe. The Thomists, and the Scotists, the Occamites, and many others, soared into the regions of mysticism. Peter Lombard had laboriously compiled after the celebrated Abelard's Introduction to Divinity,' his four books of 'Sentences,' from the writings of the Fathers; and for this he is called The Master of Sentences.' These sentences, on which we have so many commentaries are a collection of passages from the Fathers, the real or apparent contradictions of whom he endeavours to reconcile. But his successors were not satisfied to be mere commentators on these 'Sentences,' which they now only made use of as a row of pegs to hang on their fine-spun metaphysical cobwebs. They at length collected all these quodlibetica questions into enormous volumes, under the terrifying forms, for those who have seen them, of Summaries of Livinity. They contrived by their chimerical speculations says their modern adversary Grimaldi, to question the plainest truths, to wrest the simple meaning of the Holy Scriptures, and give some appearance of truth to the most ridiculous and monstrous opinions. One of the subtile questions which agitated the world in the tenth century, relating to dialects, was concerning universals, (as for example, man, horse, dog, &c,) signifying not this or that in particular, but all in general. They distinguished universals, or what we call abstract terms, by the genera and species rerum; and they never could decive whether these were substances—or names! That is whether the abstract idea we form of a horse was not really a being as much as the horse we ride! All this and some congenial points respecting the origin of our ideas, and what ideas were, and whether we really had an idea of a thing before we discovered the thing itself-in a word, what they call universals, and the essence of universals; of all this nonsense on which they at length proceeded to accusations of heresy, and for which many learned men were excommunicated, stoned, and what not, the whole was derived from the reveries of Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno, about the nature of ideas; than which subject to the present day no discussion ever degenerated into such insanity. A modern metaphysician infers that we have no ideas at all! Of these scholastic divines, the most illustrious was Saint Thomas Aquinas, styled the Angelical Doctor. Seventeen folio volumes not only testify his industry, but even his genius. He was a great man, busied all his life with making the charades of metaphysics. My learned friend Sharon Turner, has favoured me with a notice of his greatest work-his Sum of all Theology,' Summa totius Theologue, Paris, 1615. It is a metaphysicological treatise, or the most abstruse metaphysics of theology. It occupies above 1250 folio pages, of very small slose print in double columes. It may be worth noticing that to this work are appended 19 folio pages of double columns of errata, and about 200 of additional index! The whole is thrown into an Aristotelian form; the dif ficulties or questions are proposed first, and the answers are then appended. There are 168 articles on Love358 on Angels-200 on the Soul-85 on Demons-151 on the Intellect-134 on Law-3 on the Catamenia-237 on Sins-17 on Virginity, and others on a variety of topics. The scholastic tree is covered with prodigal foliage, hat is barren of fruit; and when the scholastics employed themselves in solving the deepest mysteries, their philoso phy became nothing more than an instrument in the hands of the Roman Pontiff. Aquinas has composed 358 articles on angels, of which a few of the heads have been culled for the reader. He treats of angels, their substance, orders, offices, natures, habits, &c,-as if he himself had been an old experienced angel! Angels were not before the world! Angels might have been before the world! Angels were created by God-They were created immediately by him-They were created in the Empyrean sky-They were created in grace-They were created in imperfect beatitude. After a severe chain of reasoning he shows that angels are incorporeal compared to us, but corporeal compared to God. An angel is composed of action and potentiality: the more superior he is, he has the less potentiality. They have not matter properly. Every angel differs from another angel in species. An angel is of the same species as a soul. Angels have not naturally a body united to them. They may assume bodies; but they do not want to assume bodies for themselves, but for us. The bodies asumed by angels are of thick air. The bodies they assume have not the natural virtues which they show, nor the operations of life but those which are common to inanimate things. An angel may be the same with a body. In the same body there are, the soul formerly giving being, and operating natural operations; and the angel operating supernatural operations. Angels administer and govern every corporeal creature. God, and angel, and the soul, are not contained in space, but contain it. Many angels cannot be in the same space. The motion of an angel in space is nothing else than different contacts of different successive places. The motion of an angel is a succession of his different operations. His motion may be continuous and discontinuous as he will. The continuous motion of an angel is necessary through every medium, but may be discontinuous without a me dium. The velocity of the motion of an angel is not according to the quantity of his strength, but according to his will. The motion of the illumination of an angel is three-fold, or circular, straight and oblique. In this account of the motion of an angel we are reminded of the beautiful description of Milton, who marks it by continuous motion, 'Smooth-sliding without step.' The reader desirous of being merry with Aquina's angels may find them in Martilus Scriblerus, in Ch. VII, who inquires if angels pass from one extreme to another without going through the middle? And if angels know things more clearly in a morning? How many angels can dance on the point of a very fine needle, without jostling one an other? All the questions are answered with a subtilty and nicety of distinction more difficult to comprehend and remember than many problems in Euclid; and perhaps a few of the best might still be selected for youth as curious exercises of the understanding. However, a great part of these pe culiar productions are loaded with the most trifling, irreve rend, and even scandalous discussions. Even Aquinas could gravely debate, Whether Christ was not an Hermaphrodite? Whether there are excrements in Paradise? Whether the pious at the resurrection will rise with their bowels? Others again debated-Whether the angel Ga briel appeared to the Virgin Mary in the shape of a serpent, of a dove, of a man, or of a woman? Did he seem to be young or old? In what dress was he? Was his garment |