forts and luxuries of life are all reviewed; and no one can rise from a perusal of the chapters which treat on the social state of the people of Britain under the Romans without being either instructed or gathering some useful suggestion for further thought or research. The fertility of Britain is often alluded to by ancient writers; and one of the panegyrists, Eumenius we believe, deplores the loss to the imperial treasury during the separation of the province from the Roman Empire by the rebellion of Carausius, of a country so rich in corn and cattle. Mr. Wright remarks,

We know very little of the state of agriculture in this island under the Romans, though, as it was celebrated for its fertility, it was probably extensively and highly cultivated. When Cæsar visited the island, he remarked chiefly the large herds of cattle, which are the principal wealth of uncivilised peoples, but under the Romans it appears to have been celebrated for the production of corn. The Emperor Julian, in one of his orations, states that when he commanded in Gaul, about the year 360, agriculture had been so entirely interrupted in the countries bordering on the Rhine, by the ravages of war, that the population was in danger of perishing by famine. In this emergency, Julian caused six hundred corn-ships to be built on the Rhine, with timber from the forest of the Ardennes, and these made several voyages to the coast of Britain, and, returning up the Rhine laden with British corn, distributed it among the towns and fortresses on that river, and he thus obtained a sufficient supply to prevent the threatened calamity. Gibbon has

supposed that each of Julian's corn-ships carried at least seventy tons, which I am told is a very low estimate. But taking this, and reckoning wheat at sixty pounds a bushel, the six hundred vessels would have carried at each voyage a hundred and ninety-six thousand quarters, which would not be a very large export. But as we are ignorant of the number of voyages they made, and the estimate of tonnage is perhaps too small, we are justified in supposing that the export was large enough to prove that the country was very extensively, and perhaps, for the age, very well cultivated. In many parts of Britain we find distinct marks of former cultivation on land which is now common, and has certainly lain fallow for ages, and it is not impossible that it may have been the work of the Roman ploughshare. A curious legend has been told in some parts to explain these appearances of ancient cultivation: it is pretended that when, in the time of King John, the country lay under an interdict, the Pope's ban fell expressly on all cultivated land, and that the superstitious peasantry, imagining that the lands which were not cultivated when the bull was written were excepted from its effects, left their cultivated lands, and ploughed the wastes and commons as long as the interdict lasted. The suggestion made above is at least as probable an explanation as the legend. Mr. Bruce observed similar traces of cultivation on the waste lands in Northumberland, and he is probably right in attributing them to the Romans. "A little to the south of Borcovicus," he says, "and stretching westward, the ground has been thrown up in long terraced lines, a mode of cultivation much practised in Italy and the East. Similar terraces, more feebly developed, appear at Bradley; I have seen them very

distinctly marked on the banks of the Rede-water, at Old Carlisle, and in other places." It is probable that Julian's corn-ships came for their cargoes to the Tyne or the Humber. To judge by the accompanying cut, the plough used in Roman Britain was rather of a primitive construction. It represents a Roman bronze, said to have been found at Pierse

bridge, in Yorkshire, and now in the collection of Lord Londesborough. The figure of the ploughman gives us probably a correct picture of the costume of the Romano-British peasant. Fruit-trees were also cultivated with care, and the Romans are said to have introduced, among others, the cherry. We may probably add the vine.

མ་ང་་་་ང་

In surveying the fictile vessels made in various parts of Britain, of which many examples are presented, we cannot but be struck with their general beauty of form and ornament, and the absence of anything positively inelegant, a quality which is altogether wanting in similar works of the afterages, and not always to be found in those of the present day. It is doubtful where the glass vessels we meet with in our museums were manufactured. There is no reason why some of them may not have been made in Britain; and the discovery made by Dr. Guest, mentioned by Mr. Wright, deserves further investigation.

The portions of the volume devoted to the military affairs of Britain under the Romans, and to the mythology that prevailed in the province, shew how a wide field of curious research has been but partially explored even by those who have undertaken to write the history of our country. Taking the numerous religious monuments, for instance, which belong to the Roman period, into consideration, under one point of view only, that of the evidence or non-evidence which they afford on the important question of the period at which Christianity was introduced into Britain, we shall perhaps be surprised to find in them no trace whatever of the new faith which in Germany and in France was fast superseding the

Mr.

The third division of the volume will be read with especial interest. Wright does not confine his researches to the antiquities of the Saxon period, although he presents them under a very interesting aspect, with many novel additions. But, by the judicious insertion of historical incidents not generally known, and by drawing attention to political, ecclesiastical, and municipal institutions at later times when history is purified from fable, he continues in a great measure to fill the dreary void which in most of our popular histories of England exists between the Roman and the Saxon periods. Roman civilisation in Britain did not expire when the legions were withdrawn, and its effects were much greater than has been supposed upon the Saxon population.

It strikes us at the first glance (observes

Mr. Wright) that the few historical facts relating to the condition of our towns during the Saxon period, preserved by the older annalists, exhibit them in a state of importance and independence which they could hardly have reached had it not been

derived from municipal constitutions already existing when the Saxons settled in this country, and which is observed most distinctly in those places which are known to have occupied the sites of the more powerful Roman towns. All traditions (for our history of the first Saxon invasion is nothing more than tradition, and that very vague,) represent East Kent as having been occupied by the Saxons under a pacific arrangement, when they took Durovernum, or Canterbury, as their capital. Recent discoveries show that the Saxons not only continued to inter their dead on the site of the Roman burial-places around the ancient city, down to the time of their conversion, but that they afterwards erected Christian churches on the same spots; one of the strongest proofs we could have of the gradual change from Roman to Saxon in that city. We find Canterbury at an early period governed by a prefect, or reeve, who gives land to the monks; and in a later charter confirming his grant, dated in 805, there is a remarkable distinction between the villa or town and the civitas or corporate body, such as we might naturally expect in the transmission of the Roman principle to the Saxon people.

The city of Exeter affords a remarkable instance of the manner in which the Roman municipal institutions were preserved. In other towns the Romano-British population gradually disappeared; but we learn from William of Malmsbury that, down to the reign of Athelstan, Exeter was inhabited by English and Welsh, who lived on an equality of rights (æquo jure), which they could only have done by virtue of an original composition with the Saxon conquerors. It may be cited as a proof of the correctness of this view of the mode in which the Roman corporations outlived the shock of invasion, and thus became a chief instrument in the civilisation of subsequent ages, that even the Danes, in their predatory excursions, often entered into similar compositions with the Saxon towns, as with Canterbury, in 1009. It may be added, that there is no greater evidence of the independence and strength of the towns under the Saxons, than the circumstance that, while the king and his earls, with the forces of the counties, were not able to make a successful stand against the Danish invaders, it frequently happened that a town singly drove a powerful army

from its gates, and the townsmen sometimes issued forth and defeated the enemy in a pitched battle.

The more immediate inquiries of the archæologist will be assisted by the clear and ample manner in which the Saxon antiquities (for nearly all of which we are indebted to the graves,) are classified, and the latest discoveries noticed. The most recent acquisitions to our information on the customs and arts of the earlier Saxon times are the curious coloured glass goblets, so unlike the Roman vessels, and so much resembling Italian vitreous manufactures of the middle ages; earthen pitchers or jugs of a most homely and modern character, and ornaments or implements which are

ascertained to have been suspended from the girdles of females, not keys, as some had rather hastily conjectured.*

The illustrations of the volume are by Mr. Fairholt, and it is therefore almost superfluous to add that they are skilfully and faithfully executed.

p. 200.

THE Elector Ernest Augustus died in 1698. In his death, Leibnitz sustained the loss not only of a faithful and generous friend, but of an appreciating patron. The new Elector George Louis made no change in the external relations which Leibnitz occupied toward the Hanoverian Government, yet he felt for him no cordial sympathy or warm admiration, and he would have slighted, if he could have done so with any show of decency, the most illustrious man in his dominions. It was well for Leibnitz that, called to commune with so coarse and harsh a nature as Elector George, he was not tenderly sensitive, or disposed to brood with morbid phantasy on seeming disrespect, and that he was always prepared to assert and maintain his substantial claims, and to resist any interference with his unquestionable rights. He was aware also that the Elector had more need of him than he had of the Elector, and that there was not a court in Europe where he would not have been received with higher honours than those which surrounded him at Hanover. Still it is undoubted that, after the decease of Ernest Augustus, the position of Leibnitz became cold and isolated, though he had ever that in him which would have hindered the haughtiness or caprice of princes from treating him with serious or systematic neglect.

Leibnitz expended much time and effort at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the next on two of his favourite ideas: to unite the Protestant Churches of Germany, and then those of Europe, as the attempt at the union of the Catholic and Protestant Churches had so notably failed; and to establish an academy of sciences at Berlin, and others at Vienna and Dresden. His plan for more harmonious action among the Protestant Churches of Germany arose mainly from political considerations. The courts of Berlin and Hanover had become alienated from each other through some very small and childish jealousies. The Elector of Brandenburg, though possessed with the ambition of being a

king, was yet angry that his near relation the Duke of Hanover should have been elevated to the dignity of elector. A restoration of loving and confiding intercourse between the two houses was strongly desired by the female members thereof. Over these ladies Leibnitz had great influence, and they had great influence over him. They thought that his skill and energy might be rendered powerfully instru mental for joining together once more links which had been broken not by strong hate, not by the violent concussion of any passionate excitement, but by the slow working of acerbities pitiful and ridiculous. The Elector of Hanover was a Lutheran, the Elector of Brandenburg belonged to the reformed church. What better means of leading the two rulers to a brotherly recognition of each other than a proposal for the alliance of the two churches under the common name of evangelical. The advantages of the alliance were exhibited by Leibnitz to the Electors, and to other persons of note and station, with all the force, learning, and ingenuity at his command. Perhaps the political objects which he had in view in his advocacy of this scheme he was to some extent successful in attaining; but church remained divided from church as before; the result simply that Leibnitz had added to the huge heap of his countless productions, that all the world was amused with the pleasant dream, and that bigot fought with bigot more fiercely than of old.

Nearly as barren were the persistent and zealous efforts of Leibnitz to promote the establishment of academies of the sciences at Dresden, Vienna, and Berlin. He was indeed invited to Berlin by the Elector of Brandenburg in connection with the proposed academy there, and the form of founding one was gone through, but it was not till many years after that the Berlin academy became an organized and vigorous fact. Leibnitz had the gratification to be appointed secretary on condition that he visited Berlin as often as his occupations at Hanover allowed.

This appointment was thought somewhat singular, as the academy as yet had no members; but Frederick the Great pleasantly remarked, when speaking of the circumstance, that Leibnitz was a society of sciences in himself. It was a leading and laudable feature of Leibnitz's design that the Academy should not confine itself to abstract speculations, but apply science in the most manifold and effectual fashions to the social circumstances of the people and the economical developments of the country. Some of the matters, however, which he intended to intrust to its care would have converted it into a despotism. For instance, he strenuously insisted that it should have a monopoly of the book-trade, that it should have the right to decide what manuscripts were worth publishing, and the liberty to devote the profits arising from the sale of books to literary and scientific purposes. Another of his projects was that the Academy should employ itself in the culture of silk. After incessant solicitation, the King of Prussia was at last induced to allow mulberry-trees to be planted in the gardens at Potsdam and elsewhere. But the part which the Academy had in this affair was confined to what Leibnitz himself did, he continuing to be in his single person the Academy. These experiments in raising silkworms bore no immediate fruits, but ripened through the struggles of half a century into some substantial consequence in the improvement of German manufactures.

A short time before the transformation of the Elector of Brandenburg into the King of Prussia, Leibnitz was present in Berlin at some gorgeous festivities given at the marriage of one of the Brandenburg princes. He confessed that he was a good deal out of his element in these gay scenes, which were followed by a grand masquerade got up in honour of the Elector's birthday. Leibnitz was to have figured as a masquer in the part of an astrologer; but some friend seeing that though he had tolerance enough for frivolities, he yet had no very abounding relish for taking an active or conspicuous share in them, kindly offered to be his substitute, so that Leibnitz had no harder duty than that of an amused spectator.

Court brilliancies and excitements could not long steal his attention from graver and more important things; and it was chiefly to aid the latter that he mingled in the former; for he thus gained the ear of men who would have shunned contact with him through any more solemn approach. Two subjects were now busy with him-an improvement in the science and practice of medicine-and the establishment of schools for the education of the people. At his demand an edict was issued, ordering all the physicians of Prussia to furnish an annual abstract of the remarkable cases occurring in the course of their professional duties, and the observations founded thereon. He wrote a report for the Leopold Society on the virtues of Ipecacuanha; he published an essay on the valuable results likely to flow from the study of comparative anatomy; and for botany he vigourously pleaded in a letter "De Methodo Botanica." While also promoting in all possible modes enlarged and effective agencies for popular instruction, he printed the "Projet de l'Education d'un Prince," intended immediately to apply to the King of Poland's son, but containing principles applicable to the mental and moral culture of all princes, and picturing at the same time the ideal of an accomplished ruler.

In the summer of 1700 Leibnitz went to Toeplitz to try the waters there as a cure for a severe cold which he had taken in the spring, From Toeplitz he went to Vienna professedly to be present at a conference on Church Union, but principally, as was supposed, for diplomatic purposes. A result growing out of his visit to Vienna was a manifesto written in French, which he published anonymously a year or two afterwards, setting forth, with a force of argument which has been much praised, the rights of Charles the Third to the Crown of Spain. It was not till near the end of 1700 that Leibnitz returned to Hanover.

Shortly after followed an event whereof he had long been the bold prophet and the skilful preacher, though under that veil of the anonymous to which, perhaps to increase his consciousness of power, he was so much attached-the coronation of the Elec