"Stabat mater dolorosa Pertransivit gladius," etc. We have run over, hastily, some of the fields of Latin literature, for the purpose of illustrating our ideas. Each of them should be followed out, beginning from its first appearance to its termination. If this has been done in such a manner as to have the judgment of the scholar unbiassed, which indeed depends chiefly upon a judicious selection of the passages intended to set forth, in a few touches, the character of the author, then the scholar will have obtained a correct general view of the whole extent of Latin literature, and be enabled to continue his private studies to advantage; the shelves, as it were, being prepared whereupon to deposite his classical stores in a systematic order. By pursuing the plan sketched in the preceding pages, that will be accomplished, which we think instruction ought to accomplish. It ought to furnish the scholar with a thorough knowledge of the language, so as to enable him to read and write it correctly and easily; with a familiar acquaintance with its best works in the various departments; and with such a general knowledge of its literature as to know its extent; its riches and defects; its rise and its decline. To read all authors, or even the larger proportion, can never be the object of the school of instruction. Even if it were possible, it would be unreasonable. There are but few, whom their calling or inclination invites to enter on so extensive a course, and even to these the perusal of many authors will be a matter of curiosity rather than advantage. ART. IV.-Encyclopædia Americana: a Popular Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature, History, Politics, and Biography, brought down to the present times, including a copious Collection of Original Articles in American Biography, on the basis of the Seventh Edition of the German Conversations-Lexicon. Edited by FRANCIS LIEBER, assisted by E. WIGGLESWORTH. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey; 1829. Vol. I. pp. 616. CONSIDERING the variety of subjects the elder Pliny treats, in the work which has escaped the wreck of his other scientific and literary labours, his Natural History may be deemed the earliest attempt at an Encyclopædia; and so it has been termed by the justice of a more learned age. Astronomy, pure mathematics, natural philosophy, botany, mineralogy, various branches of the medical science, mechanical, as well as elegant arts, and agriculture such was the vast compass of his researches ; and he has shed a vivid light over each of these wide and yet barren departments, by the deep insight of his powerful and scrutinizing mind, and a happy talent of describing not only minutely, but forcibly and graphically, every object he examined or contemplated. The declamatory tone, and the occasional obscurities for which he has been censured by La Harpe, cannot essentially diminish the merits of a naturalist, who was contemporary with Vespasian; the less, as he bears, in the opinion of the same critic, a comparison with Buffon, with no other inferiority, in some of his descriptions, than that of refined taste. But Pliny's Natural History has, above all, the unparalleled merit of showing the progress Science and the Arts had made, down to the period at which he wrote, and certainly so far it deserves, at any rate, the title of an Encyclopædia. Alfarabius, one of the great lights of the Bagdad School, is said to have enriched the tenth century with an Encyclopædia, which, on account of a systematic subdivision of the various branches of knowledge, might be more justly compared to works of the same denomination, belonging to the literary history of the 16th and 17th centuries. Nothing, however, is known of this work, except the notice Casiri gives of it in his Bibliotheca Arabico-hispana Escurialensis. Alstedius, a professor of philosophy and protestant divine, established at Herborn and Weissemberg, and whose principal literary merit has been expressed by the anagram of his name, "Sedulitas," published in 1620, a work in which he laid the basis of one worthy to be styled an Encyclopædia, and this appeared ten years afterwards, in two folio volumes. Esteemed by his contemporaries, mentioned with respect by Leibnitz, it is the chief title by which Alstedius is remembered, and it is some reproach to the authors of a recent Encyclopædia, that his name should be omitted. Neither he nor Alfarabius is mentioned in the work under review. A century elapsed before a step was made towards the production of a work, exhibiting the whole circle of knowledge, in the form of a dictionary, although dictionaries of technical terms, and explanatory of particular sciences, had been long known. The Lexicon Technicum of Dr. Harris, the two first volumes of which were published in 1706, was the first advance towards a real Encyclopædia, inasmuch as it not only explained the terms of art, but the arts themselves. Still, the subjects of which it treats, belonging mostly to the mathematical and physical sciences, it was far from fulfilling its intended purpose. At length, in 1728, Mr. Chambers published his Cyclopædia, in two folio volumes, of which a fifth edition, now lying before us, was issued in 1761, with the motto: "Floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant It is the first work in which knowledge is subdivided in alphabetical order, exhibiting, at the same time, the connexion and dependencies of its various branches and subdivisions. "His view," he says, "was to consider the several matters, not only in themselves, but relatively, or as they respect each other; both to treat them as so many wholes, and as so many parts of some greater whole, their connexion with which to be pointed out by reference. So that by a course of references from generals to particulars, from premises to conclusions, from cause to effect, and vice versa, i. e., from more to less complex, and from less to more, a communication might be opened between the several parts of the work; and the several articles be, in some measure, replaced in their natural order of science, out of which the alphabetical order had removed them." Yet Chambers remained far from attaining his object, for the several ramifications are so much split, that one would seek in vain in his volumes for any thing like a substitute for separate treatises, or for more, under many heads, than short and unconnected elucidations, or mere definitions and incomplete explanations. On mathematical subjects, conclusions are given without demonstration or experimental details, and on the whole, Chambers principally excels his predecessors, by treating each science and art under a separate head, here in a general, and there in a more special point of view, connecting them by reciprocal references, real, or relating to things, or verbal and grammatical, according to a systematic division and subdivision of knowledge prefixed to the Cyclopædia. Mr. Chambers's dedication of his work to the king, begins. in the style of the time: "The Arts and Sciences humbly crave audience of your majesty.-The work I here presume to lay at your Majesty's feet, is an attempt towards a survey of the republic of learning, as it stands at the beginning of your Majesty's most auspicious reign. We have here somewhat of the boundary that circumscribes our present prospects, and separates the known from the unknown parts of the intelligible world.”—Mr. Chambers intended, as he states in the advertisement to the second edition, to publish rather a new work after an improved plan. It would take a good portion of one of our pages, to give the whole title of the work. But a bill was brought before Parliament, by which publishers of all improved editions would have been obliged to print the improvements separately; and although it failed in the house of Lords, the booksellers relinquished the projected publication. We transcribe from Mr. Napier's preface to the Supplement of the Encyclopædia Britannica, the following judicious and temperate strictures on the work of Chambers: "That something was done, by this plan, to point out the links among connected subjects, disjoined by the alphabet, and to make its fortuitous distribution subservient to continued inquiry, cannot be questioned: but the inconveniences and defects, occasioned by the dismemberment of the sciences, could not possibly be remedied by any chain of references, however complete. The sciences can only be studied with effect, by being viewed in their appropriate state of unity and coherency; and the term Encyclopædia cannot be applied, with propriety, to any work in which that method of treating them is not observed. Useful purposes may, no doubt, be served, by explaining the elements of a science, in the order of the alphabet: but it seems abundantly clear, that a work intended to include and to delineate the whole circle of knowledge, must fall greatly short of its professed object, if it fails to embody the truths of science, in a systematic form." The Cyclopædia was the fruit of Mr. Chambers's individual exertions, and in modern times, we remember no work which can be compared with it, for extent of learning, research and diligence, except Dr. Watts's Bibliotheca Britannica, the result of twenty years' labour. Five editions of it were published within eighteen years; and it will, notwithstanding its deficiencies, ever stand as a creditable memorial of a vigorous and comprehensive mind, as a proof of literary industry, of which the epoch when it was published presents but few examples, and as the foundation, or model, of those works which we shall presently have occasion to mention. At first, several dictionaries appeared, without any aim at a rivalship with Chambers's Cyclopædia, and destined only to supply the want of books of reference on mathematics and arts. Such were Barrow's Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, in one folio volume, printed in 1751, and Owen's new and complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, in four octavo volumes, published in 1754, which was the first work of the kind written by several contributors, and the Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, compiled under the direction of Rev. Henry Croker, Dr. Thomas Williams, and Mr. Samuel Clark. Mr. Chambers's work did not produce less effect on the continent of Europe. It was translated into Italian, and was still more honoured, by becoming the basis of the French Encyclopædia, of which the first volume appeared in 1751. A French translation of it had been prepared for publication by Mr. Mills, an Englishman, and a German of the name of Sellius. But upon the suggestion of the Abbé Gua de Malves, it was resolved to divide the manuscript among several literati, in order to elabo rate the respective articles on a more extensive scale, that they might be combined into an Encyclopædia, at once more original, more comprehensive, and more scientific, than the English model and groundwork. The abbé having disagreed with the bookseller, in the outset of this undertaking, d'Alembert and Diderot became its principal managers. These gentlemen entered upon their task, by disdaining to publish the translation of Chambers's volumes, which, notwithstanding the merits they acknowledged it to possess, they deemed too much a mere compilation, principally from French writers, to be of any real use to their countrymen. They owned, however, at the same time, that they had distributed the translation among their coadjutors, whose co-operation it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to procure, had they not provided them with such a frame. To correct and to extend the English Cyclopædia, especially in regard to science, was, however, but one and the most commendable motive of the undertaking of the two French academicians. They were animated by another impulse, which ultimately connected the execution of their enterprise with the great political conflicts of their country, and placed their names, in the opinion of not a few, among the authors of those terrible convulsions. "We shall principally endeavour," says d'Alembert in the Preface of the third volume, "to distinguish this dictionary by its philosophic spirit:" and in these few words he has revealed more, perhaps, than he meant to confess. The history of the politico-literary Encyclopédie, is so curious, that we need not hesitate to detain our readers, by giving a condensed view of the various facts, scattered in a variety of memoirs, letters, and literary histories, which go to show how a scientific work may be perverted from its original end. It has often been said, that words are as powerful as actions, or as Mirabeau expressed it, "words are things:" a truth less needful, perhaps, of historical evidence, than that a literary and scientific enterprise may, with much plausibility, be considered as having been instrumental in one of the greatest political revolutions of modern times. We hasten, however, to state, that we deem the suspicion unwarranted, that the Encyclopædists deliberately undertook to instigate the crimes and follies committed during the French revolution; or that, at the outset, they intended, as La Harpe asserts, to entrench themselves behind a bulwark of quartos, from which they could attack, in safety, the established authorities of church and state. It is plain enough, that an order of society, in which literary men had become a separate class, enjoying openly the privilege to assail, more or less directly, the existing institutions of their country, caressed and feared in the highest ranks of civil and ecclesiastical dignity, and by foreign sove |