pable of containing all the navies of the world; and both Cook and Flinders crossed Moreton Bay,-nay, the latter anchored in it, without the smallest suspicion of so fine a river as the Brisbane discharging its waters into it, concealed, as it is, by an island, which stretches in front of the debouchure. We conceive ourselves, therefore, borne out in supposing that many more extensive harbours and fine rivers yet remain undiscovered on the great continent of New Holland; and hope that, besides entertaining our readers, Mr. Cunningham's work may have the effect of stimulating attention to this subject in the proper quarters.

We cannot conclude without observing, that Mr. Peter Cunningham is stated to be a brother of Allan Cunningham, well known as the author of some very pleasing ballads in the Scottish dialect-and of two or three romances, in which, whatever else may be wanting, there is a considerable display of genius and inventive power:—the appearance of two such men, in one humble cottage-bred family, is a circumstance of which their country has reason to be proud.

ART. II. Lucian of Samosata, from the Greek: with the Comments and Illustrations of Wieland and others. By William Tooke, F. R. S., Member of the Imperial Academy, and of the Free Economic Society of St. Petersburgh. London. 2 vols. 4to. pp. 1580.

WE

E have, in our language, several old versions of select portions of Lucian; of which the best is that published in 1664 by the learned Joseph Mayne:-and four translations professedly complete-namely, that of Spence (1684), which is every way worthless; that of Moyle, Shear, and Blount (1711), an unequal and inaccurate work, to which Dryden prefixed a hasty and inaccurate preface; that of Dr. Franklin (1780), on the whole an excellent performance; and last, the result of Mr. Tooke's exertions.

His title-page sets out with a mis-statement: the book has no claim to be called 'Lucian of Samosata, from the Greek,' It is demonstrable from any one of Mr. Tooke's pages, that he never attempted to render a line of Lucian's own language-that his only original was the German version of Wieland. There is another error. The reader naturally supposes that Mr. Tooke has examined for himself the various editions of his author, and embodied whatever he found valuable in other men's comments as well as Wieland's. But Mr. Tooke has done nothing like

this. The work, moreover, has been very hastily executed, or the writer's acquaintance with the German language is inaccurate; it is certain, from whatever cause, that they who really wish to have the help of Wieland in their Lucianic studies, must not rely in perfect security on Mr. Tooke's version.

We have great doubts whether any bookseller would find it profitable to bring out another edition of Dr. Franklin's Lucian-or indeed any complete, or nearly complete, version of that author's works.* It is absolutely impossible to strike out his filth, and yet present him in anything like an intelligible form. Scholars will never study him but in his own tongue, and selections are all that the mere English reader can have the right, or, probably, the wish to be acquainted with. Whoever undertakes to edit any such selections will do well to consult Wieland at every step of his work; but we must, at the same time, warn him to compare the ingenious German throughout with Dodwell and Reitze, and, above all, not to put hasty confidence in any statements concerning the personal history of the satirist which shall be found at variance with these authorities. Wieland's lively essay on the life and writings of his author is far more pleasant reading than the preface to the Bipont edition; but it is there, and there only, that the scanty materials of Lucian's biography have been considered and arranged with any thing like an approach to due caution and accuracy.

The performance to which we have alluded is, however, far indeed from being what we should, at this time of day, see prefixed to the works of such an author as Lucian. In fact, no writer of equal rank has derived so little benefit from that enlarged and liberal species of critical illustration which has been applied, within the last fifty years, to the great monuments of ancient literature; and the circumstance is the more to be wondered at, because, as we have ere now had occasion to remark, he is, of all the ancients, the author whose tone, style and spirit have been most successfully caught and imitated among the moderns. In truth, Lucian may be considered as the great connecting link between the old literature and the new; and what else, indeed, should be looked for in the most admired and popular author of the age of the Antonines -that age of perfect political tranquillity, in which the whole inhabitants of the civilized world found themselves, for the first time, fellow-citizens; in which the intercourse of Syria and Gaul resembled that of two counties in the same modern kingdom; when Roman law and Greek philosophy, and, we may add, Egyptian

* Franklin has left two or three of Lucian's tracts untouched, on the score of indecency; had that argument been intended to bear any weight with him he should have omitted many more. He has also judiciously avoided some of the spurious pieces.

VOL. XXXVII, NO. LXXIII.

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superstition,

superstition, were cultivated with equal zeal, and exerted co-ordinate authority, from the Euphrates to the Thames; and when, amidst this wonderful blending and interfusion of nations and arts, opinions and prejudices, a religion, destined ere long to revolutionize the whole frame and structure of society, was rapidly spreading its influence, without apparently attracting much more notice from the great, the wise, or the witty of the earth, all in their spheres its unconscious coadjutors, than would in our own time be commanded by the development of another variety of methodism in England, or the establishment of some new body of missionary miracle-mongers in France?

Lucian was the Voltaire of this extraordinary period: but he exerted higher powers upon a yet wider scene, and, however unconsciously, to infinitely more important purposes than Voltaire's. The bitterness of wrath which his satire excited, may be measured by the profound silence in which contemporary authors pass over the name of so remarkable a person. Had his own works perished, we should scarcely have known that such a man ever existed. Suidas would have told us that an impious sophist of this name had lived in the times of Trajan and afterwards;' practised as an advocate at Antioch; written ferocious diatribes against the Christian faith, and been torn to pieces by dogs as a fit punishment of his blasphemies, and foretaste of the eternal pains; and another still obscurer drudge would have added that 'he originally embraced Christianity, and, after renouncing his creed, used to say he owed nothing to his connexion with that sect, but the corruption of his name from Lucius to Lucianus ;' and who would have troubled himself to ask in what proportions truth and falsehood were mingled in these meagre notices?

Nor, indeed, can much be gathered as to his personal history from his own works, voluminous as these are, and composed moreover, in a great measure, of occasional pieces. The leading facts, about which there can be no dispute, are few in number; as that he was born in Samosata, then a town of some importance, and afterwards the seat of a bishop, but now a paltry village in the pashalick of Aleppo; that his parents were extremely poor, and would fain have had him apply himself to statuary in the workshop of a maternal uncle; that an early passion for literature induced him to leave the trade after a short trial; that he wandered for a time about Syria in very distressed circumstances; practised at the bar somewhere (Wieland supposes at Athens, but, whatever we may think of Suidas's authority, Antioch seems much more likely to have been the scene of such exertions); that being disgusted with the tricks of the courts-which, however, may

be

be his euphemismus for being dissatisfied with his own success in them, he in a few years quitted the bar for ever, and took up rhetoric as a profession; that he visited, in his capacity of sophist, several provinces of the Roman empire, among others, Gaul, and perhaps Spain; that, before he was forty years of age, he had realized a fortune, moderate indeed, but such as permitted him to withdraw from professional avocations, and devote himself entirely to literature; that he subsequently visited Italy, Greece, Macedon, and the various districts of his native Asia Minor—enjoying a high reputation, and mingling every where with the first society, Roman and provincial; that in advanced life he accepted an appointment of considerable importance in the service of the state; and that (in all probability at least) his official duties fixed his ultimate residence in Egypt. The piece, which shows that he might have been a great poet had he had a mind, shows also that he was much afflicted with the gout-whence, probably, a tradition that he died of that disease. It is quite impossible to fix the year of his birth; and all we know of the period of his death is, that it did not occur until after the reign of Commodus had begun.

By what prince he was promoted in his old age, there has been much controversy. Dodwell inclines to think that his appointment was bestowed by Avidius Cassius, the rebellious viceroy of Marcus Aurelius, in Syria, and of course lasted but for a few months. But the calm terms in which he himself speaks of his official occupations are scarcely to be reconciled with that hypothesis; and on the whole, Massieu seems to be successful in his defence of the old tradition, that Marcus Aurelius was his efficient patron. The chief objection to this was, that Lucian has composed two elaborate encomiums on the Grecian consort of his imperial patron, by name Panthea; that Marcus had no wife but the fair and frail Faustina; and that though, after her death, he took a Greek concubine to his bed, no such person could ever have been suffered, by a frugal philosopher like him, to live in the high splendour which Lucian ascribes to this Panthea but it is answered, that the concubine of Aurelius held the same sort of rank with a Madame Maintenon, or a modern German sovereign's ' wife of the left hand,' and must, especially in the eastern provinces, have appeared with many circumstances of imperial magnificence. As to the name Panthea, (the all-divine,) it seems to be too easily taken for granted on all sides, that this was a real one. To us it appears much more likely to be fictitious; and it is certain that Lucian was quite accustomed to panegyrise his patrons under such appellations,-witness the Roman consular Esculapius,

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Esculapius, to whom he indites a long and formal apology for having saluted him one morning in a manner not quite consistent with the established etiquette. But the whole of this dispute is frivolous we cannot imagine that Lucian was a man who would have scrupled about describing any empress or any imperial concubine in whose way he happened to be thrown, in whatever manner he thought most likely to gratify her fancy; nor is there any evidence whatever that the Panthea of his dialogues was either the wife or the mistress of the particular prince who gave him his appointment. The practised littérateur, who tells us that he had " one foot in Charon's boat,' ere he got his 'place under government,' and who was obviously so much delighted with the dignity when he did obtain it, had, we may fairly suppose, thrown away not a few oily paragraphs in his time.

We had almost forgotten another objection, which, indeed, the Abbé Massieu seems to have considered unworthy of a serious reply; namely, that the second Antonine was little likely to patronize such an habitual persecutor of the stoics of his day, as Lucian. The satirist himself was at pains enough to proclaim that one might laugh at a Zenothemis, and yet have all manner of respect for a Zeno. But who ever fancied that Marcus employed no men of letters in the administration of the empire, but those of his own sect?-or gravely doubted that so wise a prince might be willing to avail himself of talents like Lucian's, with whatever heterodoxy of speculative opinion he might find them combined? The patronage which literary men of all persuasions received during this reign, was among its most striking features; and there is, perhaps, none which has been more copiously illustrated in the writings of our author himself.

The argument of Wieland, who differs from both Dodwell and Massieu on this head, and thinks that the author owed his post to Commodus, is simply this: that Lucian describes himself as having one foot in Charon's boat at the time of his elevation, and could, according to Massieu's own chronology, have been no more than sixty years old when Aurelius died. Lucian's expression about his foot might possibly have some allusion to his gout; but who does not guess the real state of the case,-namely, that Wieland was on the wrong side of fifty when he found it so ridiculous in a gouty sexagenarian to talk of himself as old?

:

1

We have no doubt that much remains for a skilful editor of Lucian nothing like a chronological arrangement of his multifarious tracts has, as yet, been attempted-and surely some approximation, at least, to such an arrangement might be effected, were the style, structure and purpose of the various pieces care

fully