Already,' said she, you know, Montfort, that I received from my grandmother, the Lady Albina, all those prejudices which have been the means of Zagla tyrannizing over the minds of every de scendant of Raymond and Fatima.-Already you also know, that at the command of my father, I listened to the instructions of the learned Gioviana, who himself had acquired his knowledge from an Arabian versed in every secret of art and nature. With the knowledge he acquired, Gioviana also acquired a spirit of enquiry into the truth of religion, and found his faith not equal to the belief of every dogma of the monks, or to the pretended miracles wrought by senseless blocks and stones. Gioviana looking beyond, saw through the artifice, and beheld cunning, wicked, and ingenious men, making use of secrets known but to themselves, to terrify and mislead the ignorant and superstitious. I was an apt pupil, and Gioviana, as he unfolded his stores of wisdom, shook also my belief on many subjects I had been taught to reverence. I laughed at the infallibility of him who is called the Father of the Christian World, and laughed at his dispensations and absolutions; yet all this was concealed from the Count di Capeci. Ah! happier had I been, had I never been taught to stray in the paths of science; never been taught aught but what is usual for women of my rank to learn; still then should I have attended to the reproof and advice of my Confessor, nor dared, by striking out a path for myself, have laughed at restraint.

These principles of Gioviana became known, and he might as well have denied the existence of one Almighty and self-created being, as the saintship of weak mortals like ourselves, prayed to by the ignorance and superstition of the times, and might with the same impunity have denied that the God of nature existed, as to pry into its secrets, and form by the hand of wisdom, combinations so surprizing, that it was said he dealt in magic. Persecuted, he fled, and took shelter amidst the splendid ruins, where, ere I accompanied you, I had visited him; and where in the pursuit of his fayourite study, he met that death his enemies would have made him so unjustly suffer. It was necessary I should speak of Gioviana that I might account to you for a kind of knowledge which would appear to you supernatural, and which I should at the time have noticed, had I not feared, by so doing, to lower myself in you opinion. Ah! even now I do it, and you deem me a vile heretic and infidel to the holy church. Alas! I wish I had still deemed her infallible, and supported that a certain dress, and attending to prayers that touch not the heart, is the way to heaven. I have with daring hand opened the book of life, and I know guilt must be punished, though clothed in scarlet, or in the coarse garb of a monk; but let me proceed:

At the court of the King of Sicily, I first beheld you, Montfort, and was struck with your noble mien; but it was another circumstance which so powerfully interested me. I attended the

queen and some ladies of the court to see you contend with a fa. mous wrestler; then it was, Montfort, I beheld on your arm the sacred symbol of our faith; my heart at once acknowledged the Western stranger, and conceived a passion that can end but with my life, and which death alone can overpower.

"You left the court,-my faithful Lorenzo assisted me in following you. I saw you taken a prisoner to the Castle of my fa thers, and knowing each secret outlet, I easily found means to enter and conceal myself in it; whilst Lorenzo offered his services to Raymond, which were accepted. Ah! need I relate the various methods I took in the Castle di Capeci to gain your love. Alas! as I recal that period I feel deeply humiliated; I degraded myself in your eyes, nor thought whilst sacrificing every thing to the pas sion which governed me, I could be acting on false conclusions, and that I might be guilty. Yet, Montfort, knowing as you now know, that I then fondly imagined I was your destined bride, and that if I succeeded in gaining your affections, every sentiment of love, pride, and ambition would be gratified, can you wonder at my actions? or that when goaded by despair if not succeeding, I gave way to the agony I felt, till again roused to exertion. When we quitted the castle by ways wholly unknown to its new masters, I was the happy means of preserving your life by my presence of mind, impressing the ignorant soldiers with an idea, what was but a natural appearance, though very rarely seen, was a host of men coming to our relief.

At the ruins where the sage Gioviana lost his life, and mine was almost miraculously preserved, I was parted from you, but followed, and, in the habit of a pilgrim, heard you abjure all connection with me at the Monastery of La Trinita. Yet I again followed, assuming a fresh disguise,and once more was so happy as to save your lite from the banditti. I reached the cottage of Paulo before you; the gentle Marie was laving her fine limbs in a limpid stream; I beheld on her arm the mark imprinted by the mother of every descendant of Raymond and Fatima; convinced I was not then the sole heiress of Terra Nuova, I was sunk in despair. You had renounced me, and life no longer desirable, I determined upon terminating it; you already know it was preserved. You may ask, Montfort, why here I defended not myself from the charge of magic; alas! I was convinced you would not credit my assertions; perhaps even now you do not, for it would require more time in explaining what you have seen me perform, than I now have leisure for; and these secrets of nature unfolded to me by Gioviana, was done under an oath of secrecy, to keep them sacred from all but the initiated.'

ART. 30.-The master Passion, or the History of Frederick Beaumont. 4 Vols. Millar, Albemarle street.

THE fair lady, who is the author of the Master Passion, in her

address to the reader says, And if the secret tribunal, whose judicial sentence sways the taste of readers, and pales the cheeks of writers-but a sudden dizziness comes over me,' &c. We will as far as in our power endeavour to dispel the alarm, that caused this very unpleasant sensation of dizziness by our candour in giving as clear an account of the Master Passion or history of Frederick Beaumont, as we are able to collect from a careful perusal of the work.

Mrs. Villars, the young widow of an officer who fell in battle in India, is an amiable and of course handsome personage, who resides in Wales and devotes her time to the education of her only child, an infant girl. In this task she is assisted by the rector of the parish, a Mr. Melcombe, who is the younger son of a noble family. This very worthy divine has under his charge a youth, whose father is amassing wealth in the East Indies.. This young gentleman, the Frederick Beaumont of the piece, is said, at the commencement of the tale, to be about thirteen years of age, and Miss Helena, Mrs. Villars's daughter about ten. The master and miss read together and play together, till it is time for the young gentleman to take his departure to Eton school, and from thence to Oxford. The vacations in each seminary were spent with Mr. Melcombe, and of Course during every visit the young people appear to each other more and more improved and delightful. An ardent and sincere attachment is formed long before they are sensible of it or know what it means further than the friendship of brother and sister. The young gentleman in one of their morning walks soon convinces Helena, that he will not only be a brother, but wishes to be her lover and finally her husband. This not proving unacceptable to Helena, the respective parents are applied to for their consent to the union. Frederick's father gives his consent only on the condition that the lady repairs to India as soon as she is married to bis son. This could not be accomplished with comfort to all par ties; Frederick is therefore desired by his father to go to Vienna to settle some business for him. Here he meets with various (but very hacknied, and common place) incidents; and returns at last after being sometime confined in a cave inhabited by banditti with his health broken from the hardships and sufferings which he has undergone. During this absence, Helena through her activity, benevolence, and presence of mind rescues his father from a watery grave: the ship in which the elder Mr. Beaumont is a passenger from India being shipwrecked off Hastings. All ends very happily at last by the union of Frederick with the beautiful and no less amiable Helena, These are the heads of the tale. Those who are fond of this kind of desultory reading, may perhaps be kept awake by the perusal; there is nothing to vitiate or disgust, though we cannot say that there is any thing that will very powerfully interest or delight. A young girl may be instructed by contemplating the frankness of Helena, her good sense, her cheerfulness,

and above all that's admirable, her confidence in her mother, Some of the characters are not badly drawn, and. the story of Rose Woodland is prettily told. We could have wished that the author had not made a petty display of learning which can be of no good to her young readers, nor of any avail to herself; but carries with it an air of self-conceited pedantry which every woman of good sense would wish to avoid. The faults of this piece are various; but there is no defect in the morality. There are more incidents (although trivial) than enough for che novel; and more than the limited genius of the writer was able to wind up with proper and interesting effect. Hence the narrative is intricate and confused. Her power of wit is small, and what little she has is spoiled by affectation: nor can we commend her attempts at the pathetic and sublime. One of her most absurd endeavours to be fine, is an effort to make the reader thrill with sympathy and admiration by the description of a lady's suderings during a fit of the tooth-ach, and of the fortitude which she displayed during the process of extraction which a neighbouring blacksmith is called in to perform. Where the author intended to be very moving she becomes highly Judicrous; and our risible muscles shake where she meant that our eyes should weep.

ART. 31.--Bath Characters; or Sketches from Life. By Peter Paul Pallet. Second Edition, with many Additions. Amongst which are a Poetical Pump Room Conversation. A new Preface, and an Appendix,containing a Defence of the Work, and a Castigation of its Persecutors. 8vo. 5s. Wilkie and Robinson. 1808.

THE novel of the Winter in London,' which obtained some little notoriety two years ago, from professing to give a representa tion of characters who were actually playing a conspicuous part on the great theatre of the metropolis, has given birth to several other publications of a similar nature. It was soon followed by a Winter in Bath,' and a 'Winter in Dublin.' The present publication has just come into our hands, and we have since observed Charac ters at Brighton' advertised in the public papers. Of these works, none of which we have as yet seen have adequately performed their assumed task. They have for the most part seized upon one or two peculiarities of one or two personages of eminence, and have filled the rest of their pages either with professed fiction, or what is much less tolerable, with perversion, exaggeration and falsehood. The present, however, seems to us the best of the set. Not that Mr. Peter Paul Pallet is possessed' of any genuine humour, that we can discover, more than the rest of his fraternity. But most of the facts to which he alludes, are, we doubt not, correct, and he has contrived so to characterise the individuals who are the objects of his satire, that no person acquainted with Bath can fail to recognize them. But the characters of Bath are not, we think, of sufficient importance to interest the British public. They

do not, like some of our high-bred London fashionables, attain to the dignity of absurdity. Mrs. C. (designated here by the syno❤ nime of Mrs. Vehicle) may give very large parties in the crescent, and win a great many rubbers at guinea whist, without the public's caring for her, any more than for the irritable lady, who runs pins into the latter parts of such other ladies as encroach upon her seat at the concert room. The obsequiousness of an orthodox Bath divine, who admits no tradesmen, livery-servants, or poor people to his chapel, that the company may be perfectly select, and the drunken jokes of another Bath parson, do indeed deserve to be held up to the contempt and indignation of the world, in as much as they tend to injure the interests of religion and morality, in the eyes of the undiscriminating; but the perplexities of a Bath master of the ceremonies, the absurdities of a Bath singer, and the tricks of a Bath apothecary, together with other localities peculiar to that once fashionable but now declining place of resort, as they have failed to elicit any humour from the author who has undertaken to satirize them, so will they fail to excite in an indifferent reader a smile either of amusement or of ridicule.

MATHEMATICS.

ART. 32.-Remarks on a supposed Error in the Elements of Euclid, By the Rev. William Lax, A. M. F. R. S. Lowndes Professor of Astronomy and Geometry, in the University of Cambridges 830. Lunn. Cambridge, Deighton. 1807.

M. LE SAGE states, in a communication which he made to the academy of sciences in 1756, that he had discovered an error in the 21st prob. of the 11th book of Euclid, which asserts "that every solid angle is contained by plain angles, which together are less than four right angles." But if re-entering angles are admitted (that is to say, if the pyramid be so constructed, that its base conof the tains an angle greater than two right angles, or more same kind,) the proposition is so far from true, that a solid angle may be constructed, which shall exceed four right angles by any given number of degrees. But Mr. Lax contends that the definitions given by the venerable Grecian of a solid angle exclude re-entering angles. There are two definitions given by Euclid. The first is, the inclination of more than two lines meeting to, gether, and which are not in the same plain, towards all the rest. This condition, says Mr. Lax, is not fulfilled in a pyramid formed with re-entering angles. The second definition, a solid angle is that which is made by the meeting of more than two plane angles, which are not in the same plane, in one point,' certainly does not expressly exclude a pyramid with re-entering angles. But Mr. Lax observes, and we think with justice, that it is virtually excluded, as much as plane figures are in the first book presumed to have each of their angles less than two right angles; or