And so on for ever and ever and a day before! And from this and similar diagrams our philosopher adds in large capitals, 'Permit me, therefore, to repeat, as having been proved, these two propositions: All organic nature moves in a circle. 'Creation is a violent irruption into the circle of nature.' Mr. G. may repeat' this as long as he likes, or can catch ears to listen, but to talk of its having been proved' that creation was rude enough to make a violent irruption' into nature's quiet circle, whose circumference wished creation a mighty long way off, is just so much misconception on Mr. G.'s part, arising out of that fully developed self-esteem which is so prominent a characteristic of the religious party with which he is identified. Still there are men of science, and believers in revelation also, who want to know what are all these fossils we find in the earth; who ask, as Livingstone asked of the quarryman, However did these shells come into these rocks?' and are not satisfied with the Turk-like philosophy' that replies, "When God made the rocks he made the shells in them.' Besides which, there are not only shells' in the rocks; are there not great huge creatures, ichthyosauri, and pleisiosauri, and enaliosauri (great lizards, dear friends; saurians they are called by the learned, nearly as big as a church), and the megatherium and deinotherium, and lots of other theriods (great beasts, four-footed mammals, that could eat up a forest for dinner, and take a plantation afterwards for dessert); and frogs as big as a dining-table, and oysters, one of which would have been a meal for a large family, and fish (if Hugh Miller is to be believed) most singularly made and weaponprovided, and heaps of other things, we have them here close by us in our cabinet,too numerous to mention;' we say, are there not all these things, and who made them, and what were they made for? We have been accustomed to regard them as the real creatures whom God made in far distant periods of this earth's history, who had their term of life, fulfilled their functions, until in due course they were superseded by other orders of beings. We find we were mistaken. These creatures never lived at all. Those marvellous eyes of the trilobite never saw the refreshing light. Those saucer-like sockets of the ichthyosaurus never gazed out of the lazy river for an incautious pterodactyle. Those coprolites are not fossil undigested food. This beautiful terebratula never had life; and this marvellously ornamented ammonite never floated on a tropic sea with its companion nautilus. All these were unreal developments, whose apparent results' we witness. "The actual commencing point of the world's history was subsequent to the occurrence of such things in the perfect ideal whole, and hence these phenomena would appear precisely as if the facts themselves had been diachronic instead of prochronic, as was really the case.' (P. 353). It has given great pain to write this article; personally it has been an affliction to speak so severely of the author of Omphalos,' who has long been our guide, philosopher, and friend, in many departments of natural history; but on public grounds we have felt compelled to say what we think of the pretentiousness and absurdity of the stupid theory of Creation now submitted to the judgment of the nineteenth century. If ever words without wisdom were written they are in this book; and although Mr. Gosse intends it not, his 'Omplialos' is the most recent phase of that melancholy mood of mind which overlooks a living personal God, as the true King and Lord of all things and all beings, because He is their Creator and Preserver, and which finding itself surrounded by the great difficulties with which the idea of Creation must ever be associated in our feeble minds, resorts to a theory purely arbitrary and perfectly absurd, and accounts for all the grandeur in the colossal remains of pre-Adamite ages, and all the glory of the present modern condition of our planet, by telling us that Creation is a violent irruption into a circle.' Mr. Gosse is a good naturalist but a poor philosopher, and this is one of his many bookswe trust it will long continue to be the only one-which wise men will laugh at, sceptics rejoice in, and Christians deplore. W. G. B. Of John Milton's History of England. Of the few books in our library of libraries, the select few of what we are afraid would be considered a rather miscellaneous assortment,' there is one known at a glance by its old brown sheep-skin cover and red leather title. It bears the following on its first page: The HISTORY of BRITAIN, That Part especially now called ENGLAND, From the first Traditional Beginning, Continu'd to the NORMAN CONQUEST. Collected out of the Antientest and Best Authours thereof by JOHN MILTON. The Second Edition. London, Printed by J. M. for Mark Pardoe and are to be sold at the Black Raven over against Bedford House, in the Strand. 1678. A priori, a book nearly two hundred years old, and that a book by John Milton, must have had a history. What old Puritan, of whose original dust not a molecule now remains, first bought it? Who was he? What was he? Where did he live? Was he married? And, did he have children? These are vitally important questions in the real —that is, the subjective history of a book, because the book is a different book as these questions are differently answered. Thus, a married man's book is worth more than a single ditto; and a book owned by a man with a family worth a great deal more than the same book would be if the man had no such gods in his household. The same rule, in fact, holds good with regard to what may be called the Economy of Books, as with light-houses, and furniture. The sun increases in value, in real commercial value we mean, every day; and so does the house over our heads with every child that may be born in it. On this principle, then, we decide that our copy of Milton has been a valuable book. Its first possessor bore the plebeian name of John Thomas. Puritan John had evidently a very high esteem for the object of his purchase, and so used it, as we use family Bibles, for the purpose of recording therein the events most interesting to himself and household, presuming, no doubt, that the book would go down from generation to generation as a family heirloom. After informing us that this is 'his book,' and that the price is five shillings, 1685,' he proceeds to state, after the manner of the Hebrew Bible, by beginning at the last page, that John Thomas, junior, was borne y 21th day of March, in y year of our Lord God 1682-3,' and that James Thomas was borne ye 2nd day of July, in y year of our Lord 1684, about 10 in y morning. We regret to say that this is all that John Thomas communicates concerning himself and his family. We only know what we have stated, but we surmise that the old Puritan was also a man of some education and position in society. He writes not only as though he knew how to write, but as if he were quite conscious of the superiority of his caligraphy to the general handwriting of his age. But the Puritan had two sons, and into the eldest son's hands the book before us evidently fell at the time of his sire's decease. We decide, without a doubt, that John Thomas, junior, was educated for the 'long robe,' as Lord John Russell would say. The book contains two lines in his handwriting, which re-assert the facts and circumstances of his own and his brother's births. They are written in the fine legal hand of the seventeenth century, by one who had evidently enjoyed considerable practice in bonds, mortgages, and abstracts. Whether John Thomas, junior, followed his father's example, and entered into the bonds of matrimony, we cannot say, although perhaps some one of the writers in 'Notes and Queries' could probably inform us if we would inquire. The book, however, certainly passed out of the Thomas family, and became, sometime, we may suppose, in the reign of the third George, the property of Mr. Thomas Kettle,' about whom we feel no sort of interest whatever,-Thomas Kettle having had great difficulty, after making several base attempts, in writing his own name as owner of the volume. We judge that Thomas Kettle, his executors, administrators, and assigns, sold this precious volume by auction-it may have been to a bookseller, or possibly to the party whose name stands next on the cover-WILLIAM GODWIN, author of the Political Justice,' husband and father of Mary Wolstonecroft, and father-inlaw of Shelley. To this great possessor we are inclined to attribute a few notes in the margin of the pages and on the blank spaces, notes which indicate the hand of a well-read and competent literary man. But Godwin died, and on the 18th June, 1836, Mr. Sotheby, of Pall Mall, sold his library, and with it this volume. The book again passed into the hands of strangers, and six months ago was picked up by the present writer, and bought for the price of 'an old song?', If the reader be at all of an imaginative or sentimental turn of mind, he will, before he proceeds further with this notice, faithfully supply all the gaps in the above history. He will imagine John Thomas and his son as they appeared in the age of the Restoration; he will see Mr. Thomas Kettle trying to write his name; he will think of Godwin's thoughts, and wonder whether little Mary Wolstonecroft ever laughed at the worn-out volume. We, ourselves, are reluctantly compelled to forego these pleasures of the imagination, and pass at once to the substance of the book. We may, perhaps, safely assume that few of our readers have met with the work of which we intend in the following pages to give a brief account. Most of the biographers of Milton have dismissed it in brief words, and it is printed in only one or two of the numerous collected editions of the great author's prose works. Yet it is a book which contains some of the grandest thoughts of the greatest prosewriter of England. For purely historical purposes, however, it is almost valueless. No man perhaps ever wasted so much power in collecting together such a heap of rubbish as is contained in the first two books of this volume. But it is rubbish containing many jewels, which we have found to have been worth searching for, and which we think are worth re-setting for the ornament of modern literature. We gather from Milton's correspondence, that he began his history immediately after writing his 'Observations on the Articles of Peace with Ireland. Soon after its commencement the author was interrupted in his work by receiving the appointment of Latin secretary to Cromwell's Council of State. The discharge of the duties of this office, the noble vindications of the English people, and the troubles of the Restoration, seem to have taken up his time for many years, for it was not until 1670, only four years before his death, that the first edition of this history was published. There can be no doubt, as Symmons states, that it was Milton's purpose, when he commenced his work, to bring the narrative down to his own times. One can hardly imagine otherwise what could have induced him to write such a history at all. Excepting in a few paragraphs it helps to do none of the work which Milton seems to have considered himself especially bound to do. It illustrates no principles of government, and confirms not a single great maxim of State policy. We shall see that it is made to bear on several of the finer laws of Justice, and the author does not seldom hesitate to turn his reflections round to his own times, and draw historical parallels by no means complimentary to the later generation, but as a history it is destitute of every quality which is now considered necessary to secure approbation or influence. If it was not written for mere amusement or relaxation, or for the poetical suggestions which it might furnish to his own mind, we can conceive of no adequate motive which the author could have had for undertaking such a laborious and comparatively profitless work. He himself, indeed, says, in writing of the pre-historic and fabulous periods of British history, that he tells the old fables, 'if for nothing else, but in favour of our English Poets and Rhetoricians, who by their art will know how to use them judiciously,' and so suggests that his history is intended for poets rather than for statesmen. If it was so, we may express a regret that the poets have used it so sparingly. Other historians have written for statesmen with such help from the imagination that one would suppose the poets only to have been readers of history. Milton was more just, and when he wrote for poets said so, and if he wrote to please his fancy rather than his judgment, can scarcely, considering his aim, be visited with censure. Fanciful and fabulous indeed are the tales of early British History which his industry has collected together. Not a statement of the most amusing of monkish historians does he omit to chronicle; but it is to be noted that, like the father of profane history, he by no means professes to believe all that he sets down. Beginning with the ficod, he first narrates how Britain is said to have been peopled two hundred years thereafter by a fourth or sixth son of Japheth named Samothis. Two pages are devoted to this race, and then Geoffrey of Monmouth's veritable history is taken up. Milton commences to draw from this historian at the birth of Brutus (whence 'Britain'), grandson to the Eneas of Homer and the Trojan war. It may be new to some of our readers, not given to the perusal of the monkish historians, to be informed that this isle is indebted to the goddess Diana for its name, its fame, its race of kings, and the promise of its power and glory. The story runs that the Trojans, under Brutus, having been undecided what to do or where to go, requested Brutus fo ask counsel of Diana. The goddess graciously replied as follows: 'Brutus, far to the West, in th' Ocean wide, And Kings be borne of thee, whose dredded might We next come upon Magog, one of the race of giants, to whom the goddess alludes, and after a few generations to King Lear-whose story the great dramatist has raised above the immortality of history itself. The first book ends with the reign of Cassibalannus, and the promise of facts upon the high authority of Julius Cæsar himself. Here the author wisely forsakes the guidance of the monkish historians, whom in leaving he dismisses with no very flattering compliment. 'Left,' he says, in an after part of the history, 'Left only to obscure and blockish Chronicles; whom Malmsbury, and Huntingdon, (for neither they than we had better Authors of those times) ambitious to adorn the History, make no scruple oft-times, I doubt, to interline with conjectures and surmises of thir own: them rather than imitate, I shall choose to represent the truth naked, though as lean as a plain journal. Yet William of Malmsbury must be acknowledg'd, both for stile and judgment, to be by far the best Writer of them all: but what labour is to be endur'd, turning over Volumes of Rubbish in the rest, |