Octavo, sewed, price 2s. ON the LAW of LIBEL; with a detai ed Exposure of the SPECIAL JURY PACKING SYSTEM; and Strictures on the Self-styled Constitutional Association. "This Pamphlet contains the most complete exposure, in the smallest compass, which we have yet seen, of the Packing System. *** We recommend it strongly to the attentive perusal of every one who desires to know the extent of that boasted Liberty of the Press, which, we are taught to believe, is the birthright of Englishmen.”—Morning Chronicle, Jan. 1. In one vol. royal quarto, TWENTY ENGRAVINGS of Lions, Tigers, Panthers, and Leopards, by THOMAS LANDSEER, from Drawings by EDWIN LANDSEER and EDGAR SPILSBURY. These Drawings are some of them taken immediately from Nature, and the remainder from Rubens, Reydinger, Rembrandt, and Stubbs, corrected by a reference to the living animals. A Pictorial and Physiological ESSAY on the CARNÍVORA accompanies the Engravings. Prints Proofs £15 0 2 2 0 Tinted ditto £1 11 6 2 86 "This is a very delightful work for all who take an interest in perusing the great volume of Nature, and admire the beauty of her works. The engravings are executed with great spirit and neatness, from the paintings of foreign masters, and also from those of the English school, which takes so high a rank in this walk of art. Many are the most perfect delineations possible of the animals they are intended to represent."-New Monthly Magazine, March 1. "We know of no work of this kind that has been hitherto published, and are much surprised that it should have been left so long undone. Its execution, however, could not well have fallen into better hands; and we look upon this little work as a very valuable addition to the library of the naturalist and the lover of art."-Times, Sept. 11. "This is one of the most interesting publications that has recently appeared, connected with the Fine Arts, not only from its intrinsic merit, but from its novelty. It is as useful to the student as generally pleasing to the amateur."-Globe and Traveller. "The grand characteristic of these prints is, their justness and accuracy of form, character, and expression. Nature is stamped upon all-Nature in her delightful variety and most interesting aspects."-Morning Chronicle. A PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY. DIODORUS OF SICILY, AND HERODOTUS. WE will commence with Herodotus, as the most ancient. When Henry Stephens entitled his comic rhapsody "The Apology of Herodotus," we know that his design was not to justify the tales of this father of history; he only sports with us, and shows that the enormities of his own times were worse than those of the Egyptians and Persians. He made use of the liberty which the protestants assumed against those of the catholic, apostolic, and Roman churches. He sharply reproaches them with their debaucheries, their avarice, their crimes expiated by money, their indulgences publicly sold in the taverns, and the false relics manufactured by their own monks, calling them idolaters. He ventures to say, that if the Egyptians adored cats and onions, the catholics adore the bones of the dead. He dares to call them, in his preliminary discourses, theophages, and even theokeses.* We have fourteen editions of this book, for we relish general abuse, just as much as we resent that which we deem special and personal. Henry Stephens only made use of Herodotus to render us hateful and ridiculous; we have quite a contrary design. We pretend to show that the modern histories of our good authors since Guicciardini are, in * Eaters of God, and what is the necessary consequence of such a disposal of divinity. VOL. III. B general, as wise and true as those of Herodotus and Diodorus are foolish and fabulous. 1st. What does the father of history mean, by saying in the beginning of his work, "the Persian historians relate that the Phenicians were the authors of all the wars. From the Red Sea they entered ours," &c.? It would seem that the Phenicians having embarked at the isthmus of Suez, arrived at the straits of Babel-Mandel; coasted along Ethiopia, passed the line, doubled the Cape of Tempests, since called the Cape of Good Hope; returned between Africa and America; repassed the line, and entered from the ocean into the Mediterranean by the Pillars of Hercules, a voyage of more than four thousand of our long marine leagues, at a time when navigation was in its infancy. 2d. The first exploit of the Phenicians was to go towards Argos to carry off the daughter of king Inachus; after which the Greeks, in their turn, carried off Europa, the daughter of the king of Tyre. 3d. Immediately afterwards comes Candaules, king of Lydia, who, meeting with one of his guards named Gyges, said to him, "Thou must see my wife quite naked; it is absolutely essential." The queen, learning that she had been thus exposed, said to the soldier, "You shall either die, or assassinate my husband and reign with me." He chose the latter alternative, and the assassination was accomplished without difficulty. 4th. Then follows the history of Arion, carried on the back of a dolphin across the sea from the skirts of Calabria to Cape Matapan, an extraordinary voyage of about a hundred leagues. 5th. From tale to tale (and who dislikes tales?) we arrive at the infallible oracle of Delphos, which somehow foretold that Croesus would cook a quarter of lamb and a tortoise in a copper pan, and that he would be dethroned by a mullet. 6th. Among the inconceivable absurdities with which ancient history abounds, is there anything approaching the famine with which the Lydians were tormented for twenty-eight years? This people, whom Herodotus describes as being richer in gold than the Peruvians, instead of buying food from foreigners, found no better expedient than that of amusing themselves, every other day, with the ladies, without eating for eight-andtwenty successive years. 7th. Is there anything more marvellous than the history of Cyrus? His grandfather, the Mede Astyages, with a Greek name, dreamed that his daughter Mandane (another Greek name) inundated all Asia; at another time that she produced a vine, of which all Asia eat the grapes; and thereupon the good man Astyages ordered one Harpagon, another Greek, to murder his grandson Cyrus,-for what grandfather would not kill his posterity after dreams of this nature? 8th. Herodotus, no less a good naturalist than an exact historian, does not fail to tell us that near Babylon the earth produced three hundred ears of wheat for one. I know a small country which yields three for one. I should like to have been transported to Diarbek when the Turks were driven from it by Catherine II. It has fine corn also, but returns not three hundred ears for one. 9th. What has always seemed to me very decent and edifying in Herodotus, is the fine religious custom established in Babylon, of which we have already spoken -that of all the married women going to prostitute themselves in the temple of Mylitta, for money, to the first stranger who presented himself. We reckon two millions of inhabitants in this city;-the devotion must have been ardent. This law is very probable among the orientals, who have always shut up their women, and who, more than six ages before Herodotus, instituted eunuchs, to answer to them for the chastity of their wives. I must no longer proceed * Remark that Herodotus lived in the time of Xerxes, whilst Babylon was in its greatest splendour. The Greeks were ignorant of the Chaldean language, consequently some interpreter jested with him, or he jested at the Greeks. When the musicos of Amsterdam were in their greatest vogue, it would have been well |