to be questioned touching the matter of the divorce, he breaks into this exclamation:

"Forsoothe it is a world to consider the desirous will of wilfull princes, when they be set and earnestly bent to have their wills fulfilled, wherein no reasonable persuasions will suffice; and how little they regard the dangerous sequell that may ensue, as well to themselves as to their subjects. And above all things, there is nothing that maketh them more wilfull than carnall love and sensuall affection of voluptuous desire, and pleasures of their bodies, as was in this case; wherein nothing could be of greater experience than to see what inventions were furnished, what lawes were enacted, what costly edifications of noble and auncient monasteries were overthrowne, what diversity of opinions then rose, what executions were then committed, how many noble clerkes and good men were then for the same put to deathe, and what alteration of good, auncient, and holesome lawes, customes, and charitable foundations were tourned from reliefe of the poore, to utter destruction and desolation, almost to the subversion of this noble realme. It is sure too much pitty to heare or understand the things that have since that time chaunced and happened to this region. The profe thereof hath taught us all Englishmen the experience too lamentable of all good men to be considered. If eyes be not blind men may see, if eares be not stopped they may heare, and if pitty be not exiled the inwarde man may lament the sequell of this pernicious and inordinate love. Although it lasted but a while, the plague thereof is not yet ceased, which our Lorde quenche and take his indignation from us! qui peccavimus cum patribus nostris, et injuste egimus !"

This passage could scarcely have been penned by a person who was well affected to the Reformation, as Sir William Cavendish unquestionably was; who, as we have observed, held an office which arose out of it, and had been one of the Commissioners for visiting and taking the surrenders of divers religious houses.

The present author, in accounting for the great number of manuscripts existing of this disputed work, and for the great length of time which transpired between the period of its being written and that of its being published, observes that 'scarcely any work of this magnitude, composed after the invention of printing, has been so often transcribed. There is a copy in the cathedral library at York which once belonged to Archbishop Matthew; another very valuable one in the library of the College of Arms, presented to that learned society by Henry Duke of Norfolk; another in Mr. Douce's collection; another in the public library at Cambridge; another in the Bodleian. There are two in Mr. Heber's library; two at Lambeth; two in the British Museum. The reason of this multiplication of copies by the laborious process of transcription seems to have been this: the work was composed in the days of Queen Mary by a zealous Catholic, but not committed to the press in her short reign. It contained a very favour

able representation of the conduct of a man who was held in but little esteem in the days of her successor, and whom it was then almost traitorous to praise. The conduct of several persons was reflected on who were flourishing themselves, or in their immediate posterity, in

the

the court of Queen Elizabeth: and it contained also the freest censures of the Reformation, and very strong remarks upon the conduct and character of Anne Boleyn, the Cardinal's great enemy. It is probable that no printer could be found who had so little fear of the Star-Chamber before his eyes as to venture the publication of a work so obnoxious: while such was the gratification which all persons of taste and reading would find in it, from its fidelity, its curious minuteness, its lively details, and above all, from that unaffected air of sweet natural eloquence in which it is composed, that many among them must have been desirous of possessing it. Can we wonder then that so many copies should have been taken between the time when it was written and the year 1641, when it was first sent to the press; or that one of these copies should have found its way into the library of Henry Pierrepoint Marquis of Dorchester, who was an author, and a man of some taste and learning?”

We have been sitting down to a grateful repast, and we rise from it reluctantly. At parting, may we take the liberty of requesting that the accomplished author would favour the public with an edition of the work in question, with notes?

POLITICS.

Art. 30. The Christian Conqueror, or Moscow burnt, and Paris saved. 8vo. Is. 6d. Longman and Co. 1814.

A merited compliment to the Emperor Alexander, for his generosity and forbearance in the brilliant hour of victory. The writer calls himself a Country Gentleman: but, from the title which he has given to his hero, and from his liberal quotations from Scripture, we should suspect him to be a clergyman. To the Grand Duchess of Olden berg, the Emperor of Russia's sister, (lately in London,) this tract is dedicated, and she must be pleased with the following sentence as applied to her brother: The Christian Conqueror of the present day has introduced into the world a new character, which philosophers have delighted to contemplate in the abstract, but have despaired of seeing realized in fact.

Art. 31. An Historical View of the Domestic Economy of Great Britain and Ireland, from the earliest to the present Times; with a comparative Estimate of their efficient Strength, arising from their Populosity and Agriculture, their Manufactures and Trade, in every Age. A new Edition, corrected, enlarged, and continued to 1812. By George Chalmers, F.R.S. 8vo. pp. 496. 138. Boards. Longman and Co. 1813.

In this edition, Mr. Chalmers brings his useful and valuable work down to the present time. We mentioned it on its first appearance, in our lxviiith Vol., O. S., p. 51. As usual, he triumphs over his opponents in statistics; and he rather broadly insinuates that the errors of some of them are wilful, and maintained with a view to injure their country and embarrass its government. Of his own accurate statements, on the contrary, the motives are most worthy; in publishing them, he had it not in contemplation to secure the favour of men in power, by assisting their designs of increasing the burthens of the

people:

people but, in what he has done, he has been actuated solely by the love of truth and the desire of rendering justice to his subject.

MINERALOGY.

8vo.

Art. 32. Elements of Crystallography, after the Method of Haüy; with, or without, Series of Geometrical Models, both solid and dissected, exhibiting the Forms of Crystals, their Geometrical Structure, Dissections, and general Laws, according to which the immense Variety of actually existing Crystals are produced. By Frederick Accum, Operative Chemist, Lecturer on Practical Chemistry, on Mineralogy, and on Chemistry applied to the Arts and Manufactures; Member of the Royal Irish Academy, Fellow of the Linnean Society, &c. With Copper-plates. pp. 454. 16s. Boards. Longman and Co. 1813. As every man of science, who is desirous of becoming acquainted with the curious and recondite laws of mineral crystallization, will naturally resort to the original writings of Romé de Lisle and of the Abbé Haüy, the present elementary treatise, which is illustrated by a great variety of diagrams, and by the more tangible expedient of wooden models, is chiefly calculated to accommodate those students who are little conversant in the French language, or in the principles of geometry. A detailed analysis of its contents would scarcely be intelligible without the figures; would require much more room than we can spare; and would, at best, exhibit only the sketch of a system which is now generally understood by professed mineralogists, and the merits and defects of which we have, in the course of various articles, endeavoured to appreciate.

Mr. Accum's original design is well conceived, and the execution of it will furnish considerable facilities to the apprehensions of the English tyro in mineralogy: but a somewhat more methodical arrangement of his materials, a reduction of the size of his type, the suppression of one set of voluminous contents, the retrenchment of a few irrelevant sections, and, above all, a due degree of respect to accurate printing and to the first principles of English grammar, would have enabled us to report the result of his labours in terms of more unqualified approbation. For a work which has the slightest pretensions to science, the list of acknowleged errata is sufficiently numerous but various slips and inaccuracies remain to be corrected. We find, for example, parallix for parallax, noxius for nonius, enduced for endued, is a polygon for in, arrangement are, an extreme mechanical divisions and suspensions, solutions which yields, the principal angle are, the three first sections which there present itself, with several incomplete sentences, &c. &c. Gahn, the Swede, is styled a German philosopher; and the theory of crystallization is said to have been created by Haüy, as if Linné, Bergmann, and Romé de Lisle had never meditated on the subject. Again, the non-crystallization of basalt ought not to be gratuitously assumed, especially in a publication destined to state the leading facts and first principles of a science. The varieties and irregularities exhibited by columnar basalt are by no means irreconcileable to the crystalliz.ng process;

which, from various disturbing causes, or from the nature and proportions of the composing ingredients, is liable to deviations from the strictness of form. Such deviations, in prismatic basalt, scarcely detract from the general aspect of its regularity, which some of the most ingenious observers of nature have not hesitated to ascribe to crystallization, properly so called. Nay, they have even applied the term basalt, or the expression basaltic crystals, to mineral substances of which the forms are usually prismatical. Thus, Linné, Cronstedt, Wallerius, De Born, and Kirwan, include under basalt all the varieties of schorl, cross-stone, tourmaline, &c., which nobody presumes to exclude from the list of crystals; though few of them occur with configurations as neat and decided as those of basaltic columns. Romé de Lisle himself, yielding to the influence of evidence, had comprehended the latter in his essay on crystallography: but, perceiving that their anomalies occasionally infringed on the geometrical precision of his system, he had afterward recourse to a sort of intermediate mode of aggregation, removed both from confused mixture and from chemical crystallization: so that, according to his theory, the prismatic forms of basalt, their plane faces, and sharp angles, (prolonged, sometimes without apparent defect, to the height of fifty feet,) thousands of columns, of equal dimensions, and of which by far the majority present the same number of faces, are merely the effect of irregular shrinking. As the polygonal forms, however, which the portions of fused metals assume in cooling, are also induced by shrinking, (that is to say, by a more or less regular approximation of their particles,) and as this operation of nature is, without challenge, denominated crystallization, the doctrine involves a distinction of terms without a difference. Several observations of Dolomieu and Ferber lead to similar conclusions: but we cannot here prosecute the argument at greater length.

The production of wood-stone, by the substitution of the particles of mineral for those of vegetable matter, is in like manner open to controversy; and, though honoured with the suffrage of the Abbé Hay, it appears to be pressed with very formidable difficulties. Thus, trunks of trees, from 20 to 40 feet in length, which are buried at a small depth from the surface, in sandy beds, are, from the bark to the very core, converted into siliceous matter; though the sand which is in immediate contact with them, on every side, in no degree participates of the converting influence. Now, we cannot easily conceive that the liquid, which held in solution the stony matter that is supposed to have assumed the place of the woody particles, should not have agglutinated, and converted into quartzose sand-stone the sand which immediately surrounds the petrified wood. With respect to the ligneous organization, which the advocates for substitution conceive to be destroyed, we may observe that not only the most minute fibres have perfectly preserved the form and situation which they manifest in the fresh state of the wood, but even all their appropriate shades of colouring. If, therefore, the stony had taken the place of the ligneous particles, the whole petrified mass would have been of an uniform colour; since the same stony matter would have successively filled all the vacancies occasioned by the retreat of

the

the ligneous particles. Besides, if we carefully examine the state of this description of petrified wood, we can perceive no symptom of previous decomposition. Some specimens exhibit not only the most entire organization, with the shades of each fibre, but worms which are themselves converted into agate; with their external surface whitish and opaque, and their interior characterized by waving zones, of different tints, which appear to represent their intestines. The annual circles of the wood, and the medullary prolongations from the centre to the circumference, are distinctly traceable; and it is partisularly worthy of remark that, in these and similar specimens, the only unsilicified parts are precisely those which had suffered decomposition. In the cabinet of M. Le Camus, are specimens of agatized wood, found at Naufle, near Grignon, which contain a multitude of the larvæ of insects, retaining their natural form. In others, the worms are observed to be moveable in their cavities, a circumstance irreconcileable with the infiltration of a quartzose fluid, which would have consolidated the mass. Saussure quotes a fossil crab, of which even the ova under the tail are petrified. These and other facts, which might be mentioned, would induce us to believe that the siliceous petrifaction in question is effected very rapidly, and seem to exclude all idea of decomposition and the tardy process of successive substitutions; because, from the moment in which soft bodies, like maggots or worms, are affected by putrefaction, their forms can no longer be preserved.

Still, after all the exceptions which even the rigour of criticism may make to the merits of the present performance, we may safely recommend it as an useful and popular introduction to the science of crystallography.-The models, to which the text refers, may be cured either directly from the author, or through the medium of the booksellers.

SINGLE SERMON.

Art. 33. On the Causes and Remedy of Schism. By L. Blakeney, A.M., Curate of Thorndon and Bedingfield, Suffolk. 4to. 28. Wilson. 1813.

The Bishop of Norwich, to whom this sermon is dedicated, must have been amused by Mr. Blakeney's curious mode of disappointing the critics, who, he concludes, will expect adulation in the address of a curate to a bishop. In the very act of disclaiming all flattery, he overwhelms the R.R. prelate with a dose of it that is sufficient to make a vain man sick, and then slyly hints at the difference between a cure and a benefice. In this way, he deceives the critic's foresight! If his reasoning in the sermon does not succeed better than his cunning in the dedication, he will not come off with very flying colours. We must tell Mr. B., in limine, that, for a Protestant clergyman, Schism is a very difficult corpse to bury; and that, unless by the attempt he can change a cure into a benefice, he had much better let it alo... : since, while he himself claims the right of protesting against the church of Rome, his brother-protestants will assert the same right of protesting against his church; and if he should lament to the Catholic

priest,