as we generally find it to be the case; and secondly, you must beware lest these benefices, as they are called, should prove to be a mischief to you, as they do to most of those who obtain them. For, on due attention, you will find, that most men, whilst they seek for wealth and are eager after riches, are ignorant of good arts and have no regard for virtue, and that this wide spreading ambition for benefices has ruined the principles of many. For it is very difficult to become rich with a good conscience, since it is well known by what practices riches are often acquired; and it is an old proverb, that a wealthy man is either a rogue or the son of a rogue; and this superfluous accumulation of benefices will fall in ruins about us, and crush our souls if we do not give a just account of the utmost farthing. How far we are qualified to do this you yourself well know; for to restrain the vices which assail us in multitudes is a difficult matter, even for a man whose bodily appetites are chastened by cold and hunger; and much more so for an individual nursed in the plentifulness of luxury and delicacies. Therefore, my dear Richard, be diligently attentive, in order that as the weight of your temporal things increases, you may acquire strength of mind to sustain them, lest you should fall to rise no more. When a certain Prince desired that Divine honours should be decreed to him, one answered him, "Take care lest while you aim at Heaven you lose the earth." Reversing this admonition, I say to you, "Beware lest, whilst you covet earthly things, you lose Heaven.". This is not a long letter-but if you read it often and impress its contents on your memory, you will be sensible that it offers you sound advice, by which you may profit. Farewell.'

'I

It may be remarked that Poggio was entitled thus to admonish his friend, as he had himself lately given up a living in England -a small one indeed, but bestowed upon him by the Bishop of Winchester, as the precursor of a larger one-because he was unwilling to take upon himself the serious responsibility attached to the pastoral office. I am well aware,' says he in a letter to Niccolo Niccoli,' what a weighty matter it is to undertake the duties of a clergyman; and how great must be the anxiety of 'the holders of benefices, if they have any conscience. For since ' rewards are not given but to those who labour, as the Apostle 'says, whosoever does not labour, neither let him eat.

6

* ***

'I would willingly, then, resign that office which I have reluctantly accepted-not that I by any means hold religion lightly; but because I cannot be confident that I shall discharge my religious functions in such a manner as to give satisfaction to those who make a right estimate of their import'ance.'

*

The Latin style of Poggio is very unequal. In many of his letters, composed in the early part of his life, and in some of a

* Lib. I. Epist. xxii. of Tonelli's Collection.

later period, which were written in haste, we find barbarisms in phraseology; betraying in their author the habit of thinking in one language and writing in another. His moral dialogues however, and his longer and more elaborate epistles, many of which are in fact treatises, are more correct. He had adopted Cicero as his model in diction; and from the diligent perusal of the works of that ornament of philosophy, some of which he had copied with his own hand, he had derived a rich store of idiomatic forms of speech, great copiousness of expression, and an easy fluency of phraseology. The clauses of his sentences are in general perspicuously connected and nicely balanced; and his periods are well rounded. But there occur in all his writings instances of error in the minutia of the Latin dialect-especially in the confounding of pronouns personal and pronouns possessive; in the neglect and the misuse of the subjunctive mood; and in the violation of the harmony of tenses-which show that he had not sufficiently attended to the philosophy of grammar. He improved, however, in this respect as he advanced in age; and, with all the drawbacks we have mentioned, Poggio must be esteemed as a respectable Latinist, and as much superior in classical scholarship to his predecessors in that walk of literature, as he was himself inferior in correctness to Politian, and in grace to Bembo.

The Cavaliere Tonelli is not the first who conceived the idea of publishing a complete edition of Poggio's Epistles. It appears from his preface, that Laurentius Mehus had entered upon a similar undertaking, and had proceeded in it so far as to have put to press twenty-five letters of the first collection of the Riccardi MS.-but there stopped. We have already alluded to a similar intention on the part of Monsieur De Lan, which also proved abortive. These failures, the admirers of Poggio and the studious who are interested in the history of the revival of literature, will have the less reason to regret, as the task which was thus relinquished by two literary characters of the last century has been undertaken by so judicious a critic and so accomplished a scholar as the Cavaliere Tonelli, whose subsequent volumes will, we doubt not, be received with pleasure by the literati of Europe.

VOL. LXIV. NO. CXXIX.

F

ART. IV. An Examination of the Ancient Orthography of the Jews, and the Original State of the Text of the Hebrew Bible. Part the First, containing an Enquiry into the Origin of Alphabetic Writing; with which is incorporated an Essay on Egyptian Hieroglyps. By CHARLES WILLIAM Wall, D.D., Senior Fellow of Trinity College, and Professor of Hebrew in the University of Dublin. 8vo. London: 1835.

THIS Volume, the double title of which we have above transcribed,

Tis one of no ordinary pretensions. The author breathes de

fiance in his very motto: Пáτažov μèv, anovcov dè. In his Adver⚫tisement,' he announces himself as a discoverer. Having,' says he, in the course of writing this preliminary treatise, lit upon what I believe to be the true key to the deciphering of the · Rosetta hieroglyphs, I have been induced to hope that the pub⚫lication of so much of my work might excite some interest.'

Throughout the whole book, his constant aim is to strike; whatever he 'lits upon,' he disputes;-and he seems to think that the only certain way of discovering something is to begin by questioning every thing. In this amiable and philosophic spirit, he assails Bishop Warburton without mercy; accuses Dr Young, and the author of the articles on Hieroglyphics which appeared in this Journal, of 'forgery;' defends Athanasius Kircher against the charge of indulging in fanciful and imaginary interpretation; and denounces the late M. Champollion as a writer who endeavoured to sap the foundation of religious belief, by attacking • the historic truth of the Bible.' Dr Wall indeed seems to write in as great a heat as if he had been discussing the theory of impersonal verbs, and had gotten the worst in the argument;-the language which he habitually employs is more nearly akin to the emphatic malediction of the exasperated grammarian than the sober phraseology of the philosopher. He appears to view every thing through the distorting medium of passionate excitement; nor can he discuss a difference of opinion on subjects, where there is still but too much room for conjecture, without casting the most unwarrantable imputations. He has no talent for commendation, however much it may be deserved. His forte consists in seeking, or in making, occasions of censure. He dogmatizes with a confidence which bears an immense disproportion to his knowledge of the subject which he undertakes to treat of; and in accusing others of ignorance, he is oftentimes pre-eminently successful in exposing his own.

In as fas as regards ourselves, Dr Wall has, we believe, been singularly unfortunate. He accuses us, along with Dr Young, of attributing to Bishop Warburton an observation which he boldly declares is nowhere to be found in the works of that learned prelate; yet a few pages after, he himself quotes from the Divine Legation the very passage upon which our statement was founded; and, in another place, he refers to it for the purpose of urging a charge of inconsistency against the Bishop of Gloucester. This may no doubt appear somewhat extraordinary; but the proof is at hand, to obviate all scepticism. Dr Wall's charge against us is contained in the following passage, which, to prevent cavil, we cite at length:

The second of his (Warburton's) objections deserves attention, because it not only affords his own direct testimony againts his having discovered the phonetic use of hieroglyphs made by the ancient Egyptians [which no one ever attributed to him!], but also shows that he considered the very idea of such a use of them absurd, to such a degree, that when the discovery was suggested to him by the words of Clemens, he absolutely perverted the meaning of those words, in order to get rid of the suggestion. And yet several of the popular works of the present day teem with his praises on account of this very discovery [not one of them ever imagined that Warburton had made such a discovery!], and dilate upon the profound judgment and admirable sagacity which he displayed in making it. Indeed, the authors of these works would have us believe, that his penetration reached not only to what is now actually known upon the subject, but a great deal farther; and that he discerned the hieroglyphic texts of the Egyptians to be wholly phonetic [this is not true!], so as to constitute a written language, which is more than any one else has been since able to prove. To show to what an extent these writers impose upon themselves and on the public, I subjoin an extract from one of their works, which, I believe, is generally conducted with ability, and stands high among the periodical publications. In the article of the Edinburgh Review to which I have already referred, and which has been extensively read on the Continent, as well as here, the Reviewer gives us the following information :

"But the cabalistical reveries of Kircher failed to impose on the strong sense and powerful intellect of Bishop Warburton. In his celebrated work, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, that learned prelate has discussed with consummate scholarship, the different ancient texts relative to the Egyptian modes of writing; distinguished theoretically the several sorts of characters employed; and made the important observation, now completely verified, that the hieroglyphics, or sacred characters, were not so denominated, as being exclusively appropriated to sacred subjects, but that they constituted a real written language, applicable to the purposes of history and common life, as well as to those of religion and mythology. He was undoubtedly mistaken in concluding that each of the three sorts of characters mentioned by Clemens, formed a distinct and separate system of writing; but as he confined himself exclusively to such general inferences as the ancient authorities seemed to warrant, without attempting to verify his deductions by a direct application to the

Egyptian monuments then existing in Europe, his error in this respect is venial, and calculated, in no degree, to lessen our admiration of the sagacity which led him to divine a truth so far beyond the reach of an ordinary mind. Had Warburton's profound remark been prosecuted to its consequences, the quæstio vexata of the Egyptian hieroglyphics would probably have been resolved half a century earlier."-P. 107. And a little farther on : "A very cursory inspection of the pillar of Rosetta was sufficient to establish as incontrovertible, Bishop Warburton's profound observation, already noticed, that the hieroglyphics constituted a real written language.-P. 111.

The same error, committed in such direct opposition to the real state of the case [], may be found in still later publications, though the matter is perhaps not so forcibly or so fully insisted upon as in the above extract. The mistatement* seems to have been transmitted from one popular writer to another, just as a forged bank-note sometimes passes current through a number of hands without detection. But although I have exposed the forgery, I have not the least wish to hang the Reviewer: the probability is, that he took the note from some one else, and that his fault consisted only in vouching for its goodness without sufficient examination, and in promoting the circulation of bad paper by some additions to its embellish ment.'-Pp. 73, 74, 75.

The certainty is, that the Reviewer did nothing of the kind here imputed to him; and that if any one is to be hanged for forgery,' it must be Dr Wall himself. The Reviewer 'took the note from' Bishop Warburton, who, in the Divine Legation, expressly says, in concluding and elaborate statement,— The Egyptians therefore employed, as we say, the proper hierogly'phics to record, openly and plainly not secretly or mystically], their laws, policies, public morals, and history; and, in a word, ALL KINDS OF CIVIL MATTERS:' That is, they employed the hieroglyphics as a written language, applicable to the purposes of history and common life, as well as to those of religion and my'thology.'

But if the Egyptians employed the sacred characters in the manner Bishop Warburton describes, and as the Reviewer less specifically and comprehensively states, on his authority,— how could they possibly do so, except as 'a real written language? e? If these characters, thus employed, did not constitute

*The same mistatement` (as Dr Wall is pleased to term it) will be found in Dr Young's Account of some recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphical Literature and Egyptian Antiquities, pp. 5 and 6. London, 1823, in Svo. Accuracy not being amongst the number of the learned professor's literary virtues, he is, as usual, completely ignorant of the history of the alleged mistatement,' which, in the passage abore quoted, he professes to expose.