ART. I. — 1. A View of the general Tenor of the New Testament regarding the Nature and Dignity of Jesus Christ; including a Collection of the various Pas- sages in the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles, which relate to that Subject. By JOANNA 2. Religious Prejudice overcome, by a careful Examina- ART. IV. Unitarianism vindicated against the Charge of ART. V. A Liturgy for the Use of the Church at King's Chapel in Boston; collected principally from the Exposé Historique des Discussions élevées en- tre la Compagnie des Pasteurs de Genève, et M. Gaus- sen, l'un de ses Membres ; &c. Historical Account of the Discussions between the Company of the Pastors of Geneva, and M. Gaussen, one of its Members, on occasion of a Point of Eccle- siastical Discipline: Addressed by the Company to ART. VII. Lectures on Witchcraft, comprising a History of the Delusion in Salem in 1692. By CHARLES W. UPHAM, Junior Pastor of the First Church in Salem. 243 ART. VIII. - Travels in Malta and Sicily, with Sketches of Gibraltar, in 1827. By ANDREW BIGELOW, Author ART. IX. Thoughts on Man, his Nature, Productions, and Discoveries. Interspersed with some Particu- lars respecting the Author. By WILLIAM GODWIN. 263 ART. X.-Remains of the Rev. EDMUND D. GRIFFIN, compiled by FRANCIS GRIFFIN; with a Biographical Memoir of the Deceased, by the Rev. JOHN M'VICK- ART. II. — 1. Traditions of Palestine. Edited by HARRIET 2. The Times of the Saviour. By HARRIET MARTI- ART. V. - The Light of Nature Pursued. By ABRAHAM TUCKER, Esq. From the Second London Edition, revised and corrected. Together with some Account of the Life of the Author, by Sir H. P. ST. JOHN Henry Pestalozzi, and his Plan of Education; being an Account of his Life and Writings, with copi- ous Extracts from his Works, and extensive Details illustrative of the Practical Parts of his Method. By ART. VIII. Inaugural Discourse, delivered before the University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, September ART. IX. -The Life of John Locke, with Extracts from his Correspondence, Journals, and Common-Place SEPTEMBER, 1831. ART. I. The Library of the Old English Prose Writers. Vol. I. Containing The Holy and Profane States, by THOMAS FULLER; with some Account of the Author and his Writings. 16mo. Cambridge. Hilliard & Brown. 1831. IT has been the fate of old books, like most other old things, to be the subjects of unreasonable extremes of opinion. The judgments passed on times long since gone by appear, for the most part, to have leaned strongly either to indiscriminate and weak admiration, or to flippant contempt without examination. On the one hand, antiquity has been exalted at the expense of truth and justice. Many will allow nothing to be good, unless it be old; no modes of thinking to be sound, but such as have the sanction of more than one century at least; and no virtues to be of very high desert, but those which have been practised by the men of other days. Even truth, it has been thought, is to be decided by the authority of dates; and those, who cannot plead for their opinions the defence of times grown grey with age, have been told that their cause is not worthy to be heard. On the other hand, partly from disgust at these absurdities, partly from habits of hasty and superficial thinking, some have resorted to the opposite extreme. Considering antiquity as synonymous with error and weakness, they are disposed utterly to disparage the characters and the doings of the fathers. They look back upon their records VOL. XI. N. S. VOL. VI. NO. I. 1 as the memorials of a generation, which we have left far behind in the career of excellence. Something like the condescension of pity is mingled with every view of their moral and intellectual qualities; their faults are exaggerated, or placed in strong lights; their virtues are depreciated, or overlooked; their views on all great subjects are described in the mass as encumbered with the narrowness and imperfection of their age; and their customs are mentioned only to excite the smile of self-complacent superiority, as if all that differs from present habits must of course be irrational or ludicrous. Thus, by ever running wide of the mark of impartiality, we neutralize or render useless whatever degree of justness our opinions may chance to possess. To find a similar want of fairness and sobriety in estimating the literature of different periods, we need not take up the comparison between the times of classic antiquity and the present day. It may be seen in the treatment, which the productions of the fathers of English literature have received at the hands of their successors. If their station be computed according to the large scale of the world's ages, they are moderns. But they are in some sense ancients to us; for so rapidly do the generations of men pass away, and with them their tastes and forms of mental developement, that even two or three hundred years constitute what may be called antiquity, and give us occasion to speak of modes of writing and of thought extremely diverse from our own. That excessive admiration of the old writers, as such, which is sometimes carried to a degree of superstition scarcely inferior to the respect paid by the pagans to their deified heroes, is almost wholly confined to England. The black-letter mania is a passion, which, in its highest and most amusing forms at least, may be said to be quite unknown in this country. Even if we had the means of stimulating and gratifying it,—as we have not,— yet such are the character and circumstances of our community, that it would be long before such men as Ritson, Sir Egerton Brydges, and Dibdin would be produced among us, long before we should have that class of fantastic devotees to time-hallowed paper and print, who will talk with all the fondness of true lovers of 'the good old books descended to us, whose backs and sides our careful grandsires buffed, and bossed, and boarded against the teeth of time, or more devouring ignorance, and whose leaves they guarded with brass, |