has been found with the sweeping character of Sir George Lewis's criticisms in this work on the interpretation of hieroglyphics and the cuneiform inscriptions. It may be that his want of Oriental scholarship makes his observations on this subject of less value than his judgments on such matters in general, but we think that the difficulties stated in the sixth chapter respecting the interpretation of an unknown language written in an unknown character, and the fallacious analogy of such a process to that of deciphering, require yet to be answered fully and completely, if any such answer can be given. Sir George Lewis may have underrated the exact amount of what has been done, but his arguments are such as ought to make us, in all such cases, require the most stringent proof. The little jeu d'esprit published by him last year was intended to apply more particularly to the attempts to interpret the inscriptions in the old languages of Italy and Assyria, and it is excellent in its way. The thought of a serious work on this subject had long before crossed his mind. back as 1858 he said, in writing to a friend :

So far

'I am thinking of writing an essay to prove the recent German attempts to interpret the Eugubine tables and other Italian inscriptions in unknown tongues to be frivolous and vexatious.'

We have omitted to mention that English scholars owe to our lamented friend the translations of Müller's Dorians (executed jointly with Mr. H. Tufnell), and of the same writer's History of Greek Literature,' as well as of Boeckh's Public Economy of Athens.'

But Sir George Lewis's literary activity, and his influence on scholarship, history, and philosophy would be very imperfectly estimated by a reference to his larger works alone.

6

In the year 1831 or 1832, the periodical called The Philological Museum' was started at Cambridge by the present Bishop of St. David's, the late Archdeacon Hare, and others. Sir George Lewis was an early contributor. His first paper is, we believe, a short review of Goettling's edition of Aristotle's Politics. This was succeeded by an article on Babrius; then followed a notice of a blunder made by the Journal of Education in confounding the lot in Greek elections with the ballot; and a paper on English Diminutives. The second volume contains a review of Arnold on the Spartan .. Constitution; a discussion on English Preterites and Genitives; and some observations on Micali's History of the Ancient Nations of Italy'all by him. The circulation of the • Philological Museum' was a limited one, and it was given

up in 1833. In 1844, Sir George Lewis assisted in starting the Classical Museum,' to which he was a contributor for some time. Among his papers in this journal there was one on Xenophon's Hellenics, another on the English verb to thirl,' and a curious note on some remarks of Napoleon on the Siege of Troy. To the Law Magazine,' then so ably conducted by Mr. Hayward, he contributed largely, and some of his articles are of great and permanent value. Among them were several on Secondary Punishments, and more than one paper on the Penitentiary System; one at least on Presumptive Evidence, another on Capital Punishments, and one on the Trial of La Roncière. More recently he published in a separate form an Essay on the Extradition of Criminals, in which he discussed, with great legal acuteness, the conflicts of jurisdiction which have on several recent occasions assumed a high degree of public importance between civilised

states.

In the Edinburgh Review' he wrote frequently on subjects of modern history and politics, and these contributions were not interrupted by the labours of official life. A series of seven articles especially, on the political memoirs of the last and present centuries which have appeared within the last few years, forms a connected narrative of political changes from the time of the Rockingham Administration to the Reform Bill. We earnestly hope that these papers will appear as a separate work, and thus become more accessible to the general reader. But if the variety of his writings in the periodicals already mentioned is such as to astonish us and defy enumeration, the number of his contributions scattered through the volumes of Notes and Queries' is still more surprising. Taking only the second series of this publication, we find -articles from him on the following subjects-they are signed sometimes with his name, sometimes with his initials (G. C. L.), and sometimes only L.:- Niebuhr on the Legend of Tarpeia (vol. iii.). On this question we believe that he was, through a friend, corresponding with Dr. Pantaleone, of Rome, whilst he was actually engaged in the preparation of his budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer; The Tin Trade of Antiquity' (vol. v.); The Amber Trade of Antiquity' (vol. vi.); Tartessus' (vol. vii.); The Vulture in Italy, The Lion in Greece and Italy,'Ancient Names of the Cat' (vol. viii.) On the Bonasus, the Bison, and the Bubalus' (vol. ix.). Ír connexion with the subjects of these last papers, we may add that he was extremely anxious to promote the publication of a Dictionary of Greek and Roman Natural History, and had

communicated with his friend Dr. Wm. Smith on the matter. He wished to secure the proper completion of such a book, which does not in fact exist either in English or German, and which would be one of extreme value to the classical student. A very short time before his death he inserted in Notes and Queries' a most interesting paper on The Presidency of Deliberative As'semblies.' We do not mention the numerous pamphlets which he wrote on various occasions, though some of them were of great merit, and had much weight at the time of their appearance. In these productions of his laborious pen, and also in his Parliamentary Speeches, the style of Sir George Lewis was eminently characteristic of his powerful mind and unpretending character. With a true relish for the correct beauty of the highest order of composition, he disdained all rhetorical display, and held very lightly to those artifices of words which are apt to mislead the judgment though they please the imagination. His own chosen form of expression was full, clear, and strong;-seeking no ornament, and admitting of no variety of illustration beyond that which the matter in hand naturally suggested. A writer who adhered to these principles, and who sought to instruct rather than to please-to convey a thought rather than to shape a sentence-might be dry, and could not hope to be popular. But we doubt not that the contributions of Sir George Lewis to the political, historical, and philosophical literature of Europe, will outlive many of the performances of his more brilliant contemporaries.

Lord Macaulay, in those beautiful lines written after his defeat at Edinburgh, in 1847, represents the Muse or Fairy Queen, who presides over the destinies of literary men, as addressing her infant protegé in the following words:-

"There are, who while to vulgar eyes they seem

Of all my bounties largely to partake,

Of me, as of some rival's handmaid, deem,

And court me for gain's, pow'r's, fashion's sake:

'To such, though deep their lore, though wide their fame,
Shall my great mysteries be all unknown:

But thou, through good and evil, praise and blame,
Wilt thou not love me for myself alone?'

If there ever was a man who loved her for herself alone,' that man was Sir George Lewis: his pursuit of literature was free from the smallest taint of low or sordid motives, but he did not on account of his love of letters abandon the paths of politics, nor did that ruling passion impair his influence in Parliament or the Cabinet. His official position and his share in

public affairs were not lowered or diminished by his literary labours on the contrary, men of all parties who look forward to the future, now think that they foresee the time when a single man of tried ability, sound judgment, perfect uprightness, and immense resources of knowledge, round whom floating and wavering politicians might safely group themselves, will be sorely missed in the councils of England. It is unfortunately useless to speculate on the fruits which the country might have reaped from that peculiar union of solid learning and honesty with so many brilliant and kindly qualities, which we have with a sorrowful heart attempted imperfectly to sketch.

ART. VI.-1. Les Marines de la France et de l'Angleterre. Par M. XAVIER RAYMOND. Paris: 1863.

2. Iron-clad sea-going Shield Ships. A Lecture delivered on the 25th March, 1863, at the Royal United Service Institution, by CAPTAIN COWPER PHIPPS COLES, R.N. London.

TH

HE prosperity, and perhaps we might add the safety, of this country has been recently threatened by two events widely different in their nature, but to some extent suggesting the same train of thought, and bringing to view the same national characteristics. We have seen our staple manufacture suddenly paralysed, and those wooden walls which we have trusted in for centuries rendered useless. There are many Englishmen, and still more foreigners, who may have thought that our commercial prosperity, to say the least, and with it much of our internal peace and order, depended on so great a branch of our national industry as the cotton manufacture. It was still more a national tradition, and the general belief of foreigners, that to our wooden walls' we owed our security at home, and our consideration abroad. And if these two great sources of national strength were separately of importance, few persons would have doubted that the simultaneous loss of both would have been a most serious calamity.

Yet, since 1860 we have seen that industry which brought us so much wealth almost swept away, and our vast and costly array of war-ships superseded. To add to the importance of this latter fact, the superiority at sea which we had possessed with our wooden walls was for a time at least transferred to the rival who had invented walls of iron. The genius of a French naval architect had given to his country a temporary grasp of the trident which we considered our inheritance.

We have all witnessed these things, and their results up to the present time are well known. We have had local distress but no commercial ruin, no bankruptcy, no disaffection or sedition, no extra taxes, no panic in the funds. The cotton crisis is probably at its worst, and has shown that we are one people, and not the two nations' of a political novelist. The collapse, to use a popular expression, of our wooden navy has been in its way more complete than that of the cotton manufacture; but even the fact of our inferiority to France in the only ships which can now enter the line of battle has caused no alarm at home, nor speculation upon the possibility of invasion abroad. The extinction of our wooden fleet (for it amounts to that) did not cause a fractional decline of the funds, and our hopes of success with untried weapons are almost as great as if we had already conquered with them.

This contrast between what is and what might have been expected by the most sagacious, is certainly a strange phenomenon. It would be very interesting to examine the causes of so great a discrepancy; but we do not propose to dwell upon the cotton crisis here, further than to observe certain points which it has in common with the naval crisis.

It is a common fallacy to mistake some results of our commercial greatness or of our naval strength for the cause. Thus our cotton manufacture has been assigned as the cause of that prodigious activity which embraces the whole globe. If it had been so, of course our whole commercial system would now be under an eclipse, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer would have presented us with a very different budget: but the fact is, that the cotton manufacture was only one of the outlets which our productive industry made for itself; and if that outlet be permanently stopped, the same energies which first made it, will make others. It is the same with our naval strength, of which our late navy was a developement and very powerful expression, but by no means the cause. The sources of our naval as well as commercial strength lie deep in the genius and character of the people, and are, as we may hope, more indestructible than a particular industry or a particular weapon of war.

That national habit of self-help and popular co-operation which distinguishes England from her continental neighbour proved of great value in the cotton crisis. Private charity, organised and directed by capable persons, sufficed to meet the first difficulties; and while its immediate effect was to alleviate the distress, it also tended to promote concord at home, and to raise our character abroad. We may trace the good effects of this same national characteristic in a very different field of