rich; the ægis of the people, and the restraint of kings; the rule of the power which it moderates, and of the obedience which it sanctifies; the great charter of humanity, where eternal justice, not willing that even crime should be without hope and without protection, stipulates for mercy in favour of repentance; a doctrine as humble as it is profound, as simple as it is high and magnificent; a doctrine which subjugates the most powerful genius by its sublimity, and proportions itself by the clearness of Its light to the most feeble intellect-in fine an indestructible doctrine, which resists every thing, triumphs over every thingover violence and contempt, over sophisms and scaffolds, and powerful in its antiquity, its victorious evidences and its benefits, seems to reign over the human mind by right of birth, of conquest, and of love. Such is the religion, which some men have chosen to make the object of their indifference. What Bossuet, Pascal, Fénélon, Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, Euler believed after the most attentive examination, what was the continual subject of their meditations is not judged worthy of a moment's thought. In despising christianity without understanding it, they think to raise themselves above all the genius and virtue, which has appeared on the earth, during eighteen centuries, and absurdly proud of a careless disdain for the truth, whatever it be, they are inflated because they keep up a neutrality of ignorance between the doctrine which produced Vincent de Paul and that which produced Marat. 'Whether God exists or not, whether to this short life succeeds a life that is lasting, whether the only duty is to follow our wishes or whether we ought to regulate them by a fixed and divine law : we wish to know every thing, these things excepted. Men are agreed that every thing interests them except their eternal fate. They have not, say they, time to think of it; but they have abundance of leisure, when the question is about satisfying the most frivolous fantasy. They have time for business-time for pleasuresand they have not time to examine whether there be a heaven or a hell. They have time to instruct themselves in the most vain trifles of this world, where they only pass a day; and they have not time enough to assure themselves whether there exist another world, which they must, whether happy or miserable, inherit eternally. They have time to take care of a body, which is about to dissolve, and none to inform themselves, whether it incloses an immortal soul. They have time to go far to convince their eyes of the existence of a rare animal, a curious plant, and they have none to convince their reason of the existence of God. Incon. ceivable blindness! And who will not exclaim with Bossuet: "What! is the charm of sense so strong that we can foresee nothing ?" We have seen convicts laugh, dance upon the scaffold, but the death which they braved was inevitable, nothing could save them from it. In the invincible necessity of dying, they strove against nature, and found a sort of brutal consolation in astonishing the eyes of the people by the sight of a gaiety more frightful than the anguish of fear and the agony of despair. But that a man, uncertain whether his head is not about to fall in a few hours under the axe of the executioner, and certain of saving it, if he will only convince himself of the reality of the danger which menaces him, should remain in repose in this terrific doubt, and prefer before life, some moments of pleasure, or even of listlessness, which a shocking and disgraceful punishment is to terminate; this is what we have never seen, this is what we can never see. • Whatever contempt we affect for an existence, brief and bur dened with so many pains, we are not so easily detached from it; there is no apathy so profound, that the announcing of it, the idea alone of approaching death, does not awaken. What do I say? Every thing, which touches us, whether in our health or goods, or enjoyments or opinions or habits, startles, alarms, transports us out of ourselves, inspires us with an indefatigable activity-and we are indifferent about nothing but heaven, hell, eternity.' p. 277. "This life is the dream of a shadow," says Pindar. When we consider from a certain height the objects upon which the activity of the human mind usually exercises itself, we are astonished at the littleness of the circle in which it voluntarily incloses itself; and that so little is sufficient to amuse its curiosity and to deceive the infinite desire of knowledge, with which it is consumed. I know of nothing which marks more the misery of man than this surprising facility to content himself in some frivolous employments, with an immense capacity for truth. He loves it naturally, an invincible instinct induces him to seek it inces santly it is his end, his repose, his happiness, and there is nothing which can take the place of it. I do not speak either of the poor man absorbed in bodily labour, or of the rich man, agitated in the emptiness of pleasure; I speak of those who hold from heaven an independent condition with elevated sentiments. What do you think habitually fills up their thoughts? The Eternal Beingthe immutable laws, which he has established. Oh! no: they will wear out their life in combining words, in studying the relation of numbers the properties of matter-it needs no more to satisfy their powerful intellect. Why do you speak of God to that learned man, who fills the world with the noise of his name? How do you suppose that he will listen to you? Do you not see that at this moment, his mind is altogether occupied in the decom. position of a salt, hitherto rebellious to his analysis. Wait till he has made known to the universe a new acid: then perhaps you will be permitted to discourse with him about the infinite Being, who has created, as in sport, the universe and all that it contains. This other man composes a history, a poem, a play, a romance, on which he imagines his glory depends; do not disturb him he must make haste, for death approaches-and what inconsolable grief, if it arrive before he has put the last touch to his fame! It is true that he is ignorant of his own nature, of the place which he occupies in the order of beings, of his future destinies, of what he may hope, of what he ought to fear; he does not know whether there exists a God, a true religion, a heavena hell-but he has long since taken his side in these matters, he does not disquiet himself-he does not think of them. These things are not clear, says he; and immediately he acts as if it were clear that they were only dreams.' p. 290. E. ART. XXI.-1. Gaii Institutionum Commentarii IV. e codice rescripto bibliothecæ capitularis Veronensis, auspiciis Regio Scientiarum Academicæ Borussicæ nunc primum editi. Accedit Fragmentum veteris jurisconsulti de jure fisci, ex aliis ejusdem bibliothecæ membranis transcriptum. Berolini. 1820. 8vo. pp. 348. 2. Ulphile partium ineditarum in Ambrosianis palimpsestis ab Angelo Majo repertarum specimen, conjunctis curis ejusdem Maji, et Caroli Octavii Castillionæi editum. Mediolan. 1819. 4to. pp. 60. THESE two works seem to us among the greatest literary curiosities of the day. Though they have of course no other connexion, we mention them together for the similarity of fortunes which they have experienced. Of the first of them, the Institutions of Gaius, we do not remember to have seen a notice in any English or American journal. The discovery of the work, of which the second is a specimen, has been mentioned in the British journals, and also in our own, but we have seen no notice of the publication itself. The length of time for which the learned of Europe had been engaged in the study of antiquity, and the diligence with which the libraries of manuscripts had been explored, had very nearly exhausted all hope of discovering any more remains of the ancient literature. Delusive hopes were occa sionally thrown out of recovering some of the Latin and Greek classics from the Arabian translations, supposed to have been made of them under the Caliphs; and Erpenius gives us the assurance of a respectable traveller, that the decades of Livy were in existence in the library of the emperor of Morocco at Fez. These same precious decades were also reported to be in the Sultan's library at Constantinople; and we have lately observed a revival of similar fairy tales. The discovery of an ancient library at Herculaneum, of seventeen or eighteen hundreds of manuscripts, known to be nearly eighteen centuries old, and the invention of a method of unrolling and decyphering them, gave a new impulse to the curiosity of the learned, and excited new hopes of the discovery of some of the lost treasures of ancient literature. We have in preparation an account of the efforts, which have been made in unrolling the Herculanean manuscripts, from the earliest attempts down to the late unsuccessful project of Dr. Sickler, to which such liberal patronage was extended by the British government, and the experiments of Sir Humphrey Davy, of which the result is not yet ascertained. In general, it is well known that all the hopes founded on the Herculanean rolls have been most vexatiously disappointed; that nothing of great interest has been discovered; and that what has been discovered has been so much mutilated in the process of unrolling as to be rendered nearly worthless. A new hope was excited a few years since by the discoveries of the Abbé Maio, in the Ambrosian library at Milan, and this hope has as yet received all reasonable fulfilment. Such of our readers as take an interest in this subject are acquainted in general with his discovery of several lost works of antiquity; among them, the letters of Fronto, some fragments of Cicero, and an epitome of the Roman antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, of which the portion that represents the lost books has been printed. These discoveries, it is well known, have been made in what are called codices rescripti, or now more frequently by the Greek name palimpsesti. It was an obvious resort, in the scarcity and dearness of parchment, to take an old manuscript, and efface the writing from it, in order to make way for a new work which was valued higher. The taste of the age would of course decide what works should be erased and what substituted as more valuable; and it is easy to conceive that, in the middle ages, Cicero and Euripides would stand but an indifferent chance when weighed in the scales with the epistles of a church father, or the acts of an ecumenical council. Nay there are many cases already discovered, in which the scriptures themselves have been effaced to make way for homilies and legends. In fact, one of the oldest manuscripts of the scriptures had long been known as a re-written one. It is that, which is described by Wetstein in his preface to his New Testament, as number C.* It contains externally some of the Greek works of Ephrem the Syrian, to make room for which valuable compositions, as was first discovered by Dr. Peter Allix, the scriptures of the Old and New Testament were effaced. The discovery of this manuscript does not appear to have excited the attention which it deserved, nor do we hear much again of codices rescripti, till the discoveries of Mr. Maio at Milan again called the public attention to them. That celebrated scholar found that many of the manuscripts in the Ambrosian library at Milan were thus re-writter, some of them even a second time; and that the ancient ink had penetrated so deeply, that by the application of chemical agents it could be drawn out and rendered legible. We have already alluded to the additions which he has made to ancient literature by the works thus discovered; and the two works which stand at the head of this article, of which one, however, alone was found by Mr. Maio, will, we think, prove more interesting and valuable, than any thing in this way which has yet been found. The first of them, the Institutions of Gaius, or Caius as he is commonly called, is a treatise on the civil law of the Antejustinianean age. This work, in its original form, bad shared the fate of most of the two thousand works on the preceding jurisprudence, from which the Pandects were com piled, and was lost. An epitome of it, however, was in existence, prepared by order of Alaric II, king of the Visigoths, by Anianus his referendary, and constituting, with other similar epitomes of the elder codes, and of some treatises of Ulpian and Paulus, a corpus juris for the Visigoths. This compilation had survived the chances of time, and, under the name of Corpus Juris Alaricianum, was familiar to • Prolegomena, p. 27. New Series, No. 6. 50 |