a

to a musical key. This note seems to express complacency and rivalry among the males: they use also quick call and an horrible scream; and can snore and hiss when they mean to menace. Ravens, befides their loud cloak, can exert a deep and folemn note that makes the woods to echo; the amorous found of a crow is strange and ridiculous; rooks, in the breeding season, attempt sometimes in the gaiety of their hearts to fing, but with no great success; the parrot-kind have many modulations of voice, as appears by their aptitude to learn human sounds; doves coo in an amorous and mournful manner, and are emblems of despairing lovers; the woodpecker sets up a fort of loud and hearty laugh; the fern-owl, or goat-fucker, from the dusk till daybreak, serenades his mate with the clattering of castanets. All the tune ful pafferes express their complacency by sweet modulations, and a variety of melody. The swallow, as has been observed in a former letter, by a shrill alarm bespeaks the attention of the other hirundines, and bids them be aware that the hawk is at hand. Aquatic and gregarious birds, especially the nocturnal, that shift their quarters in the dark, are very noify and loquacious; as cranes, wild geese, wild ducks, and the like: their perpetual clamour prevents them from difperfing and lofing their compani

ons.

In so extensive a fubject, sketches and outlines are as much as can be expected; for it would be endless to inftance in all the infinite variety of the feathered nation. We shalltherefore confine the remainder of this letter to the few domeftic fowls of our yards, which are most known, and Therefore beft understood. And first the peacock, with his gorgeous train, demands our attention; but, like most of the gaudy birds, his notes are graTing and shocking to the ear the yelFing of cats, and the braying of an

afs, are not more disgustful. The voice of the gooseis trumpet-like, and clanking; and once saved the capitol at Rome, as grave historians affert; the hiss also of the gander is formidable and full of menace, and "protective of his young." Among ducks the sexual diftinction of voice is remarkable; for, while the quack of the female is loud and fonorous, the voice of the drake is inward and harsh, and feeble, and scarce discernible. The cock turkey struts and gobbles to his mistress in a most uncouth manner; he hath also a pert and petulant note when he attacks his adversary. When a hen turkey leads forth her young brood she keeps a watchful eye; and if a bird of prey appear, though ever so high in the air, the careful mother announces the enemy with a little inward moan, and watches him with a steady and attentive look; but, if he approach, her note becomes earneft and alarming, and her outcries are redoubled.

No inhabitants of a yard seem pof sessed of such a variety of expreffion and so copious a language as common poultry. Take a chicken of four or five days old, and hold it up to a window where there are flies, and it will immediately seize its prey, with little twitterings of complacency; but if you tender it a wasp or a bee, at once its note becomes harsh, and expressive of disapprobation and a sense of danger. When a pullet is ready to lay the intimates the event by a a joyous and eafy foft note. Of all the occurrences of their life that of laying seems to be the most important; for no fooner has a hen disburdened herself, than the rushes forth with a clamorous kind of joy, which the cock and the rest of his mistresses immediately adopt. The tumult is not confined to the family concerned, but catches from yard to yard, and spreads to every homestead within, hearing, till at last the whole village, is in an uproar. As soon as a hen hecomes

becomes a mother her new relation demands a new language; the then runs clocking and screaming about, and seems agitated as if possessed. The father of the flock has also a confiderable vocabulary; if he finds food, he calls a favourite concubine to partake; and if a bird of prey pafses over, with a warning voice he bids his family beware. The gallant chanticleer has, at command, his amorous phrases and his terms of defiance, But the found by which he is best known is his crowing; by this he has been diftinguished in all ages as the countryman's clock or larum, as the watchman that proclaims the divisions of the night. Thus the poet elegantly styles him:

the crefted cock, whose clarion

"The filent hours."

A neighbouring gentleman one Summer had loft most of his chickens

by a sparrow-hawk, that came gliding down between a faggot pile and the end of his house to the place where the coops stood. The owner, inwardly vexed to see his flock thus diminishing, hung a setting net adroitly between the pile and the house, into which the caitif dashed, and was entangled. Resentment suggested the law of retaliation; he therefore clipped the hawk's wings, cut off his talons, and, fixing a cork on his bill, threw him down among the brood - hens. Imagination cannot paint the scene that ensued; the expressions that fear, rage, and revenge, inspired, were new, or at least such as had been unnoticed before: the exasperated matrons upbraided, they execrated, they insulted, they triumphed. In a word, they never desisted from buffetting their adversary till they had torn him in a hundred pie

ces.

T

HE ambassador

of the court of

of Morocco to Ferdinand IV, king of the Two Sicilies, discovered in a dusty corner of the library of the Benedictine monks, eight miles from Palermo, a valuable manuscript in the Western Moorish character, which contained the History of the Conquest of the Island by the Saracens in the year 827 to 1072. This manuscript was entrusted to the Abbé Vella, a man of learning, and a teacher of Arabic, who was judged capable of undertaking the talk, and conducting it to its termination in a proper manHis modefty, his learning, and his diligence pleased the ambassador so well, that he obtained from the library at Fez, a copy of the continuation of the history down to the conquest of the Normans, in which respect the Sicilian manuscript was deVOL, XI. No. 64. LI

fective. The first part was published in 1788 at Palermo, in folio, entitled, " Codex Diplomaticus Siciliæ fub Saracenorum imperio, ab anno 827 ad 1072, nunc primum ex MSS. Mauro occidentalibus defcriptus curo et studio Alphonsi Ayroldi, Archiep. Hernel. &c. Tom. I.' A French translation of this work, printed at Palernio, was expected to be publish ed about the end of last year; but it has not yet reached us.

The short preface of M. Ayroldi gives an account of the discovery. The MS. is well preserved in a beautiful cover, probably of cotton, with letters painted in red and gold. The character is not the Cufic-carmachian, and the dialect is very different from that of the eastern Arabs. The archbishop has also procured, after the most diligent search, a complete feries

of

of the Saracenico Sicilian coins, which were struck under the government of these Africans and of the first Normans, which support, in every respect, the authenticity of the MS. Indeed the different circumstances mentioned by historians relating to the Siculo-Saracenian conquerors, as well as the names of places still exifting, contribute to the support.

This valuable volume has not the common form of a history: it is a collection of the dispatches of the commanders to the Muleys of Kairvan, which are inserted in chronological order; and it is sometimes a little tiresome, from the frequent repetition of exaggerated compliments, used by these Africans. The facts are, however, related with great fimplicity and acuteness. The collection was made 162 years after the Saracens were eftablished in Sicily, by the grand mufti, Mustapha Benhani, by order of the first emir of the Island, Rebdalla-ebn-Muhammed ben Abi Alhafan. It begins with the first report, on the 8th of April 827, of the debarkation of the general Aadeikum. A fpecimen of this work was published by the Abbé Vella, which contains one year of the correfpondence, and it is illustrated with a fac simile of a page of the MS. and the first coin ftruck in Sicily, by the conqueror Aadelkum, with his own name.

When this effay appeared, M. de Guignes, a very able and competent judge, remarked, that the style of the MS. was very different from that of all the other Arabic authors, either orientals or Arabians; that it appeared to him unintelligible, not unlike the Maltese catechism, which is a very corrupt Arabic; that perhaps this language might have been the vernacular one of Sicily, during the Saracenian dynasty; that it appeared fingular to fee the muftis and chiefs of the nation write so incorrectly; and that he had never feen manufcripts dated by the year of Ma

homet, but only those of hegeira.' These objections were retailed and enlarged in a Letter to M. de Guignes, of the Royal Academy of Ina scriptions and Belles Lettres, on the supposed authenticity of the Codex Diplomaticus, by M. L. de Veillant, probably an affumed name.

To these observations it has been replied, that the style and the orthography of the preface are very different from the style and the correction of the letters contained in the manufcript. The mufti wrote the preface 162 years after the invasion of Sicily; and the style might then have been corrupted by the language employed by the inhabitants, and might resemble the Arabico - Maltese style, rather than the Arabic of a century and half before. That the mufti should not be able to write with elegance is a defect which may be imputed to many popes and Christian bishops of the fame period; and it is well known, by incontestible documents, that in treaties, contracts, and in coins, the African Arabs counted from the birth of the prophet, and not from his flight, or that the years of the prophet meant in these dates the years of his flight. The observations which M. de Veillant has added from himself, are of less importance than those which he has borrowed from M. de Guigues. The Saracen inscriptions, says be, published by the prince of Toremuzza, are in a very different style. Certainly: these are pure Arabic, chiefly collected from the Koran; in the time of the most polished age of Rome, the language of infcriptions was fometimes more pure than that of books. He concludes, that the letters were written by the Abbé Vella, in the Maltese jargon. He infinuates also, that the collection of coins of M. Ayroldi is suspicious, and observes, that the characters of the legends are not Cufic, as might be expected from the æra, but Nesqui; befides, he finds in them numerical cyphers, which were not used many centuries afterwards.

To each of these observations an able and diftinct reply is given in a pamphlet, entitled, An Opinion of the Letter of L. de Veillant, offered to the prince of Biscaris, published at Palermo, in which the character and the integrity of the Abbé Vella are ably supported. At last the controverfy was completely decided by two letters from Gerhard Tychsen, the one addressed to the Abbé Vella, and the other to the prince of Torremuzza. He added also an article figned with his own name, in all the literary journals in Germany, in defence of his friend, the translator of

the manufcript.

The letter to M. Vella expresses his coincidence in the interpretation of the legends of some coins given by the profeffor of Palermo: aliquantum, says he, ab elegantia abest, simplicitate et facilitate tamen se commendat. He advises his friend alfo not to correct the orthography, for minutias caftigare, operæ non pretium eft. He finishes his letter by congratulating the Abbé ' on the discovery of an Arabic version of the seventeen books of Livy, which are wanting in the original, a version which, we are told, will be translated into Latin by the profeffor, when he has finished the present work.

N the year 1784, when our church had indeed a less number of Bishops than usual, but still such as was fufficient for the time to answer the great end of the office, an unexpected affair of a quite foreign nature was providentially thrown in her way, which contributed to raise her in fome measure out of that obscurity into which a run a of distress had plunged her, and procured her a particular degree of respect and notice, from a quarter where she had not been favoured with much of either for some time before. The American war, which, from inward and artfully-fomented murmurings, had at laft broke out into open revolt, and had been carried on for some years with various success between Britain alone, and her rebellious colonies, supported by France, Spain, and Holland, had, in spring 1783, terminated in a peace, by which Britain gave up her sovereignty over these colonies, and fully acknowledged and ratified

the independence which they had already affumed to themselves, under the new title of The Thirteen United States of America." This concession of neceffary policy diffolved the established connection which had hitherto subsisted between the Epifcopal people in America and the Bishop of London, who had always been, by appointment and practice, the proper Ordinary of the Epifcopal Church there, but could no longer now be fubmitted to by them in that character. And as the United States had found it for their interest to grant an universal liberty of conscience to all professions, without preference to any by way of eftablishment, the Epifcopal clergy, thus left to themselves, and deftitute of any Superior, began to look about how to get this fundamental defect removed, and have their now orphan church duly organized, in such a form as they believed essential to her being, and might find consistent with the civil. civil constitution of their new go

verument.

In this important undertaking, the clergy in the province of Connecticut, who had long been a numerous body, took the lead; and having, afrer mature deliberation, pitched upon Dr Samuel Seabury, one of the miffionaries from the Society for Propagating Chriftian Knowledge, as a clergyman, in their unanimous judgment, every way qualified for the Epifcopal function, and who had been one of the fuffering loyalists during the late war, they sent him over to their old mother church of England, with proper attestations of his character and qualifications, and earnestly fupplicating the Prelates of that flourishing church to take pity upon their desolate state, and give them a Bishop in the perfon of this worthy brother, to be a fpiritual father to them for governing them in the mean time, and for the great work of continuing a regular ministry to posterity in time to come. Upon the Doctor's arrival in England, and presenting his credentials, the English Prelates received him very graciously, but required time to confider in what way the object of his journey might be best accomplished. The business was new, and out of the usual line of their procedure hitherto, in the performance of this diftinguishing part of their high office. They saw the expediency of the measure proposed, but wished to have some preliminaries adjusted, and brought as near as poffible to their own stated forms, without which, they were at a loss how to act confiftently with that regard which they owed to the standing practice of their church, and the ftri& connection subsifting in England between the civil and ecclefiaftical constitution.

In this ftate of fufpence, which necessarily lasted many months, the candidate began to weary of so long a delay, and fuch a continuing uncer

tainty, as the former was not con venient for his own fituation, nor the latter suitable to the expectations of his employers: therefore, having known before that there was a continued succession of Bishops in Scotland, and finding, where he then was, no objection to the validity of their Epifcopal powers, whatever there might be to the propriety of their political scruples, he contrived to have it enquired at second hand, what profpect there might be of speedy fuccess in an application to that quarter, if fuch application should be formally made. When this was intimated, in fuch a general manner, to the Scotch Bishops, they knew, not well at first what to think of it, as being entirely unacquainted with the character of the person proposed, and not certain whether there might not be fome danger in their giving any countenance to such an unexpected application. But when the propofal was more pointedly and pressingly repeated, and assurance given them, by authority which they could rely on, that Dr Seabury was a clergyman of unblemished reputation and eminent parts, with a full representation at the same time how matters stood concerning him in England, they at last agreed to comply with the application, and contribute what was in their power towards advancing the good work so urgently recommended to their affistance. Upon the welcome notification of this consent, Dr Seabury came to Scotland, and, on the 14th of November 1784, being Sunday, was publicly confecrated at Aberdeen, by Bishop Kilgour, now Primus, Bishop Petrie, and Bishop Skinner.

This charitable act of spiritual function, by which the Epifcopal Church of Scotland has the honour of first introducing a refident Protestant Epifcopacy into America, was varioufiy talked of when it came to be generally known. Some gave it