pagated by generation,-a continual solicitation from the natural side of our being, which is always striving to raise itself from the depths to which it belongs, and to gain over man that dominion which it was never designed to exercise."

We forbear making any further extracts. We would have given an analysis of the entire argument had it not been nearly impracticable. There is no chapter, section or division of any sort. Perhaps the nature of the argument forbids any artificial bounds. We advise our readers, who are interested in works of this sort, to purchase the book, and read it for themselves. They will find it well worth a perusal, though they should not agree with all the positions of the author.

6.-Select Letters of Pliny the Younger, with Notes illustrative of the Manners, Customs, and Laws of the Ancient Romans. For the use of Schools. Boston: Perkins, Marvin & Co. 1835. pp. 143.

THE popularity of Pliny has been shown by the number of editions which the translation has passed through, both in England and in this country. In respect to the moral tone of his works, Pliny is in the first rank of Latin writers. Important information on a variety of subjects is also communicated. Illustrative notes occupy nearly sixty pages.

7.-Report of the Copy-Right Case of Wheaton versus Peters, decided in the Supreme Court of the United States, with an Appendix, containing the Acts of Congress relating to Copy-Right. New York: James Van Norden. 1834. pp. 176.

HENRY WHEATON, now employed in the diplomatic service of the United States in Prussia, is the author of twelve volumes of the reports of cases argued and adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States, and commonly known as Wheaton's Reports, which contain a connected and complete series of the decisions of the courts from 1816 to 1827. Previously to the printing of the first volume, Wheaton sold the copy-right of it to Matthew Carey, who afterwards conveyed it to the firm of Matthew Carey & Sons. Subsequently, Robert Donaldson and Wheaton became the proprietors of the copy-right of the vol

ume.

At the expiration of the term of fourteen years, the

exist appropriately in a κατ' ἰδίαν ουσίας περιγραφήν, but (at the most) it is only in reference to the human nature in which it dwells and on account of which it is called Son, that we can speak of person in respect to it; for God, in himself considered, is a simple unity, without distinction and without plurality.

The passages already quoted from Origen do not stand alone, but are intimately connected with many other like formulas of the same author. Origen could not comprehend how God could exist without continually creating; inasmuch as he would then have been destitute of the glory of dominion, up to a certain point; and must also have passed over from a state of previous inaction, to a state of activity in creating; which would be to suppose him mutable.* In like manner, he supposed, the Fa

Quemadmodum pater non potest esse quis si filius non sit, neque, dominus quis esse potest sine possessione, ita ne omnipotens quidem Deus dici potest, si non sint in quos exerceat potentatum: et ideo, ut omnipotens ostendatur Deus, omnia subsistere necesse est. Nam si quis est, qui velit saecula aliqua transiisse, cum nondum essent quae facta sunt, per hoc videbitur Deus profectum quendam accepisse, et ex inferioribus ad potiora venisse, si quidem melius esse non dubitatur, esse eum omnipotentem quam non esse. De Princip. I. 2. 10. ['As a father cannot be a father who has no son, nor any one be lord without some dominion; so God cannot be called omnipotent, unless those are in existence over whom his power may be exercised and consequently it is necessary that all things should have an existence, in order that God may be exhibited as omnipotent. If now there be any one, who supposes that some ages passed away before things were called into existence; his opinion will make out that God has made some advances, and come out of an inferior to a more perfect state; since it cannot be doubted, that it is better he should be omnipotent, than not to be so.'-That is, if I rightly understand this last sentence, it is much better to suppose that things have always existed, and so have evidence that God has always been omnipotent, than it is to deny their perpetual existence, and thus disrobe the divine Being of his attribute of omnipotence, without which he would no longer be God.

On the sentiment of this whole passage it is difficult to say, whether the weakness of the reasoning, or the extravagance of the mode of thinking, is the predominant quality. If the reasoning is true; then every event that happens, must have been happening from all eternity; or else it involves the supposition, that God has advanced from one state of being and acting to a different one, and is therefore mutable. The death of Jesus, then, must have been happening from all eternity; or else it never could happen. And so of every event which we are accustomed to call new or strange. Such is the logic.

The extravagance of the whole supposition; the egregious over

8.-Prometheus of Aeschylus.

In the last volume, just issued, of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature of Great Britain, is an essay by Mr. S. T. Coleridge, introductory to a series, in which he proposed to treat of the following topics. 1. The elucidation of the purpose of the Greek drama, and the relations in which it stood to the mysteries on the one hand, and to the State or sacerdotal religion on the other. 2. The connection of the Greek tragic poets with philosophy as the peculiar offspring of Greek genius. 3. The connection of the Homeric and cyclical poets with the popular religion of the Greeks; and lastly from all these, namely, the mysteries, the sacerdotal religion, their philosophy before and after Socrates, the stage, the Homeric poetry and the legendary belief of the people; and from the sources and productive causes in the derivation and confluence of the tribes that finally shaped themselves into a nation of Greeks, to give a juster and more distinct view of this singular people, and of the place which they occupied in the system of the world and of the great scheme of Divine Providence, than has hitherto been given, or than it appears possible to give by other process.

any

The first essay is taken up in an attempt to answer the following questions: What proof is there of the fact of any connection between the Greek drama and either the mysteries or philosophy of the Greeks? Was it not the office of the tragic poet, under a disguise of the sacerdotal religion, mixed with the legendary or popular belief, to reveal as much of the mysteries interpreted by philosophy, as would counteract the demoralizing effects of the State religion, without compromising the tranquillity of the State itself, or weakening that paramount reverence, without which a republic, like those of ancient Greece could not exist? As a reply to these inquiries, and as a proof and instance, the Prometheus of Aeschylus is given, accompanied with an exposition of the intention of the poet, and the mythic import of the work. "The earliest Greeks," says Mr. Coleridge," took up the religious and lyrical poetry of the Hebrews; and the schools of the prophets were, however partially and imperfectly, represented by the mysteries derived through the corrupt channel of the Phoenicians. With these secret -schools of physiological theology, the mythical poets were

doubtless in connection; and it was these schools which prevented polytheism from producing all its natural sensualizing effects. The mysteries and the mythical hymns and paeans shaped themselves gradually into epic poetry and history on the one hand, and into the ethical tragedy and philosophy on the other. Under their protection, and that of a youthful liberty, secretly controlled by a species of internal theocracy, the sciences, and the sterner kinds of the fine arts, viz. architecture and statuary, grew up together, followed, indeed, by painting; but an austerely idealized painting, which did not degenerate into mere copies of the sense, till the process for which Greece existed had been completed."

1. The Greeks alone brought forth Philosophy in the proper sense of the term. In the primary sense, philosophy had for its aim and proper subject the za neoì dozav, de originibus rerum, as far as man proposes to discover the same in and by the pure reason alone. This was the offspring of Greece, elsewhere adopted only. The predisposition appears in their earliest poetry.

2. The first object, or subject-matter of Greek philosophizing, was in some measure philosophy itself. Great minds turned inward on the fact of the diversity between man and beast; a superiority of kind, in addition to that of degree; the latter, i. e. difference in degree, comprehending the more enlarged sphere and the manifold application of faculties common to man and animals; even this being, in a great measure, a transfusing from the former, namely, from the superiority in kind. In the Greek of Heraclitus, the senior and almost the contemporary of Aeschylus, we see already the dawn of approaching manhood. The substance is philosophy, the form only is poetry. The Prometheus is a philosopheme.

3. The generation of the vous, or pure reason in man. It was superadded or infused, a supra, to mark that it could not have grown out of the other faculties of man, his life, sense, understanding. The vous, or fire, was stolen, to mark its diversity, its difference in kind from the faculties which are common to man with the nobler animals. It was stolen from heaven, to mark its superiority in kind, as well as its essential diversity. It was a spark, to mark that it was not subject to any modifying reaction from that on which it immediately acts, that it suffers no change, and receives no accession from the inferior. It is

bestowed by a god, and by a god of the race before the dynasty of Jove, intended to mark the transcendency of the vous.

4. The Greeks agreed with the cosmogonies of the East in deriving all sensible forms from the Inextinguishable. Here, the peculiar, the philosophic genius of Greece began its throb. Here it individualized itself in contradistinction from the Hebrew archology, on one side, and from the Phoenician on the other. The Phoenician confounded the Indistinguishable with the Absolute. Their cosmogony was their theogony and vice versa. Hence followed their theurgie rites, magic, worship of the plastic forces, chemical and vital. The Hebrews imperatively assert an unbeginning, creative One, who neither became the world; nor is the world eternally; nor made the world out of himself by emanation or evolution; but who willed it, and it was. The Greek philosopheme, preserved for us in the Aeschylian Prometheus, stands midway between both, yet is distinct in kind from either. With the Hebrew, it assumes an indeterminate Elohim, antecedent to the matter of the world, supersensuous and divine. But on the other hand, it coincides with the Phoenician, in considering this antecedent ground of corporeal matter, not so properly the cause of the latter, as the occasion, and the still continuing substance. The corporeal was considered to be coessential with the antecedent of its corporeity. In the Hebrew scheme there is an immutable, unbeginning Creator, antecedent to night or chaos as the including germ of the light and darkness, the chaos itself, and the material world; in the Phoenician scheme there was a self-organizing chaos, and the omniform nature as the result; in the Greek, was the chaos, the heavens and the earth, and a sort of οἱ χρόνοι υπερχρόνιοι, which answers to the antecedent darkness of the Mosaic system, but to which was attributed a self-polarizing power, a natura deorum, to which a vague plurality adhered; or if any unity was imagined, it was not personal, not a unity of excellence, but simply an expression of the negative, that which was to pass, but which had not yet passed, into distinct form.

5. The ground-work of the Aeschylian mythus is laid in the definition of Idea and Law, as correlatives that mutually interpret each the other; an idea with the adequate power of realizing itself, being a law, and a law considered abstractedly from, or in the absence of, the power of manifesting itself in its appropriate product, being an idea. Whether this be the true phi