bis Dictionary was announced to the public in a pamphlet addressed to that nobleman. In the hope of a dedication, after neglect and abandonment, his lord thought fit to write some papers in The World' of a complimentary character. The manly spirit displayed in the letters of Dr. Johnson on that concession are well known and they contributed more, perhaps, to the mortification of the arrogant peer, than any other circumstance in his ceremonious and courtly history.

The doctor, we believe, never in his writings avowed any attachment to the University of Oxford, where he was maintained by Mr. Corbet as a companion to his son. He was entered a commoner at Pembroke when nineteen years of age, but was careless of his character and conduct, whether in regard to discipline or study; and after the departure of his young friend, he was reduced to a condition of great poverty. Yet his mind was not depressed by his circumstances, and he translated Pope's Messiah into Latin hexameters, if not with classic correctness, in a style of extraordinary vigour. His pursuit was general knowledge, and finding it not to be attained in the confined studies of academical establishments, he left Oxford without taking a degree; so that it was not until the lapse of nearly half a century that he obtained the diploma of doctor of laws from the University, and by the interest of lord North, not gratuitously or voluntarily conferred.* Yet he was desirous of this distinction, and had then published the whole of those works that raised him to the pinnacle of literary fame, the Lives of the Poets excepted, with which he concluded his labours as an author.

At Oxford he seems to have shut himself up with Mr. Coulson, senior fellow of University College; a man resembling the doctor in appearance, and who is the person designated in the Rambler under the name of 'Gelidus the Philosopher.' The ladies;' our traveller says, 'wandered about the University.' The only conversation he mentions is with Dr. Vansittart, the uncle of the present chancellor of the exchequer, who communicated to him the particulars of some disorder with which he was afflicted. He now concludes, Afterwards we were at Burke's (Beaconfield,) where we heard of the dissolution of the parliament. We went home.'

No conclusion can be fairly drawn as to the declining strength of the doctor's mind from this short fragment; indeed, at the time of penning these notes he was in the full vigour of his understanding, although sixty-five years of age. He had received his pension in 1762, and published his edition of Shakspeare in 1765; but it was not until 1770, four years prior to this journey, that he interfered ostensibly in any political controversy; and then he wrote 'False Alarm,' when the constitution was by some supposed

* Johnson had before obtained the same rank from the Dublin University, which he declined to assume.

to have received a violent shock from the resolutions of the house of commons in the case of John Wilkes. The next year appeared Falkland's Island,' to show the folly of going to war on account of the conduct of Spain; and in the same year of the Journey to Wales (1774,) he published The Patriot,' on the eve of the general election, of which, as we have seen, he first obtained information at Mr. Burke's, at Beaconfield. ‹ Taxation no Tyranny,' which came out in 1775, was directed against the American congress; and it was from the utility of such publications to the ministry, and the respect the highest officer in it entertained for an accomplished scholar, that he acquired the degree from Oxford, to which we have already adverted.

To the Diary is subjoined, in the aphoristic method, 'Opinions and Observations, by Dr. Johnson;' and these, equally on account of the authority from which they are derived, the peculiar felicity with which they are stated, and the intrinsic merit they possess, we cannot persuade ourselves to omit.

"1. Life, to be worthy of a rational being, must be always in progression; we must always purpose to do more and better than in time past. "2. Of real evils the number is great; of possible evils there is no end.

"3. The desire of fame not regulated, is as dangerous to virtue as that of money.

4. Flashy, light, and loud conversation, is often a cloak for cunning; as shewy life, and a gay outside, spread now and then a thin covering over avarice and poverty.

"5. There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful; power is nothing but as it is felt; and the delight of superiority is proportionate to the resistance overcome.

"6. Old times have bequeathed us a precept, to be merry and wise; but who has been able to observe it? Prudence soon comes to spoil our mirth.

7. The advice that is wanted is commonly unwelcome, and that which is not wanted is evidently impertinent.

"8. It is very rarely that an author is hurt by his critics. The blaze of reputation cannot be blown out, but it often dies in the socket; a very few names may be considered as perpetual lamps that shine unconsumed.

"9. There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow; but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved, nor will by me at least be thought worthy of esteem.

"10. In the world there is much tenderness where there is no mis

fortune; and much courage where there is no danger.

"11. He that has less than enough for himself, has nothing to spare, and as every man feels only his own necessities, he is apt to think those of others less pressing, and to accuse them of withholding what in truth they cannot give. He that has his foot firm upon dry ground may pluck another out of the water; but of those that are all afloat, none has any care but for himself.

"12. Attention and respect give pleasure, however late or however useless. But they are not useless when they are late; it is reasonable to rejoice, as the day declines, to find that it has been spent with the approbation of mankind.

1

"13. Cool reciprocations of esteem are the great comforts of life; hyperbolical praise only corrupts the tongue of the one, and the ear of the other.

"14. The fortuitous friendships of inclination or vanity, are at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

15. A sudden blaze of kindness may, by a single blast of coldness, be extinguished. Esteem of great powers or amiable qualities newly discovered, may embroider a day or a week; but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life. A friend may be often found and lost; but an old friend never can be found, and nature has provided that he cannot easily be lost.

"16. Incommunicative taciturnity neither imparts nor invites friendship, but reposes on a stubborn sufficiency self-centred, and neglects the interchange of that social officiousness by which we are habitually endeared to one another. To be without friendship, is to be without one of the first comforts of our present state. To have no assistance from other minds in resolving doubts, in appeasing scruples, in balancing deliberations, is a very wretched destitution.

17. Faith in some proportion to fear." (p. 150-156.

CRITICISM.-Reflections on the Authorized Version of the Holy Scriptures, intended to show its defects, and the necessity of attempting to improve it, with a specimen of such an attempt. By B. Boothroyd, 4to. pp. 58. 1816.-From the Critical Review.

{The account of the early English version of the Bible, contained in this article, is rather superficial. In his remarks on the Psalter, the author does injustice to the church of England. The Psalter is translated from the Septuagint, and not from the Hebrew Bible, as he asserts.-Ed.]

It is probably well known to the generality of our readers, that we are indebted for the first printed edition of any part of the scriptures in the English language, to William Tyndal. This distinguished person embraced the doctrine of the reformation, and having thus rendered himself obnoxious to the Romish hierarchy, he was compelled to leave England, his native country, and seek an asylum in foreign lands. For some time he travelled in Germany, where he became personally acquainted with Luther. He afterwards removed into the Netherlands, and fixed his residence at Antwerp. Justly supposing that the circulation of the scriptures in the vernacular language would be efficacious as a means to oppose the superstitions of his countrymen, and of directing their attention to the truth, he projected a translation of the New Testament, and having obtained the assistance of John Fryth, who had been educated at Cambridge, he completed this important work, which was published at Antwerp about three years after the first edition of Luther's German version, in 1523.

The effects produced by this translation of the scriptures into the English language may be estimated by the conduct of its adversaries, the popish clergy, whose authority was not then broken in this country. They alleged that it was not possible to translate the scriptures into English; they asserted that it was not law. ful for the laity to possess them in their mother tongue; that it

would make them all heretics, and that rebellion against the civil government would be the consequence of every man's reading the word of God for himself. And so excessive was their hatred, that they committed Tyndal's books to the flames, and soon after procured the death of this great man. The malice and cruelty of these popish persecutors against the cause which Tyndal had so nobly and so well supported, were vain. They could not extinguish the light which he had kindled. Other competent men came forward, to put a finishing hand to Tyndal's undertaking. Tyndal had resolved on translating the whole Bible, and in the execution of his design had proceeded to the end of Nehemiah. Miles Coverdale and John Rogers had been coadjutors with him, and these two persons proceeded separately with the work till it was completed Coverdale published an edition of the whole Bible, at Zurich, in 1535, which was the first printed Bible in the English language, and is known by the name of its editor. Rogers also completed the translation which Tyndal had begun, and an edition of 1500 copies was printed in 1537, at Hamburgh, by Grafton and Whitechurch. This was called Matthews's Bible; a feigned name being affixed to the title-page instead of Tyndal's, from the apprehension that, as he had been put to death as a heretic, his name might prejudice the public against the work. The subsequent English Bibles-the "Great Bible," in 1539--" Cranmer's Bible,” in 1540—the “Geneva Bible,” in 1557—the “ Bishop's Bible," in 1568, and the present public version, first printed in 1611, were only so many several revisions of Tyndal's Bible. King James's translators were expressly ordered to follow the Bishop's Bible, which they were to alter as little as the original necessarily demanded; and they were to use the translations of Tyndal, Matthews, Coverdale, Whitechurch, and the Geneva, when they came closer to the original than the Bishop's Bible. To represent the present public version as an entirely new translation, is to state what is contrary to the historical fact. It is only a revised impression of a former version, and therefore, instead of supplying reasons against a new translation, or a new revision, it is actually a precedent in favour of the latter.

Between the years 1535, the date of the original publication of the English Bible, and 1611, the date of the last revision, an interval of seventy-four years elapsed, in the course of which the public version of the scriptures had been revised at least five times. Since 1611, when the present common version was first put into circulation, a period of no fewer than two hundred and five years has elapsed, during the whole of which, to the present moment, no revision of the English common Bible has been attempted.

To what cause is this to be attributed? Were our ancestors more solicitous to possess a correct translation of the divine word than their descendants? Or was the revision ordered by James I.

so accurately executed, as to attain at once the standard of perfection; and thus to supersede all farther attempts at amendment? The affirmative of the first question might justly cover us with shame; and to assign the perfection of the common version as a reason for not revising or translating the sacred scriptures de novo, would be absolute folly. Had the present version, at the time when it was first circulated, been an exact representation of the Hebrew and Greek originals, which it certainly was not, there would still be reasons for a revision of it, which no objections could invalidate. But, as in addition to circumstances on which those reasons are grounded, there are others which regard the fidelity of the version itself, we are furnished with unanswerable reasons for maintaining the necessity of a revision of the English Bible, which would seem to be a more satisfactory proceeding than an entirely new translation.

It is a well known and undeniable fact, that the learned men who made the revision in 1611, were not supplied with materials so ample and efficient for amending the translation as those which are now in our power. Learning has not been slumbering for the last two hundred years. Light sprung up during that long period, and it penetrated and has dissipated the darkness which obscured those of earlier times. Advances have been made in philology and criticism. The "publication of Polyglots, of the Samaritan Pentateuch, of ancient and modern versions, of lexicons, concordances, critical dissertations and sermons; books of eastern travels; disquisitions on the geography, customs, and natural history of the east; accurate tables of chronology, coins, weights, and measures," have contributed essentially toward the improvement and elucidation of the Bible. What powerful aid has been afforded for the better understanding of the Hebrew and Greek originals, by the labours of Walton, Castell, Mill, Wetstein, Griesbach, Michaelis, Bochart, Lightfoot, Grotius, Poole, and many other illustrious writers! It must be evident, therefore, to all intelligent and unprejudiced men, that the early part of the seventeenth century was in all respects less favourable than the present time, for the publication of a correct edition of the English Bible.

Strongly rooted prejudices exist, there is too much reason to fear, in the minds of many, against an amendment of the public version. The very circumstance of there having been no revision of the common translation for upwards of two centuries, has contributed in no inconsiderable degree to cherish and augment those prejudices. Had the public version been repeatedly and recently revised, had every new impression contained corrections and improvements of preceding impressions, and the alterations which the growing advantages of succeeding years might have required, been regularly made, the public attention would have been so repeatedly fixed upon the subject, that no alarm would have