of divorce might, indifferently, be written and signed in Greek and Hebrew. During the siege of Jerusalem, for the first time, some opposition was made to the use of the Greek language, when, at the same time, brides were forbidden to wear a nuptial crown, and fathers were prohibited from teaching their children Greek t. This circumstance will enable us readily to understand why Josephus, when he was sent by Titus to address his besieged countrymen, spoke to them εβραίζων (in the Hebrew dialect), and τῇ πατρίῳ γλωσση | (in his native tongue): it was not in order that he might be better heard, but that he might make himself known to them as their fellow countryman and brother. "5. The Greek language was spread through various classes of the Jewish nation, by usage and the intercourse of life. The common people, with a few exceptions perhaps, generally understood it, though always most attached to their own tongue. There were at Jerusalem religious communities, entirely composed of Jews, who spoke Greek; and of these Jews, as well as of Greek proselytes, the Christian church at Jerusalem seems in the first instance to have been formed. "An examination of the Acts of the Apostles will easily prove these assertions. Thus, in Acts xxi. 40, and xxii. 2, when Paul, after a tumult, addressed the populace, and when they perceived that he spoke in Hebrew, they kept the more silence.' They, therefore, expected to have been accosted in another language, which they would have understood, though they heard him much better in Hebrew, which language they preferred. In Acts vi. 9, and ix. 29, we see that there were, at Jerusalem, whole synagogues of Hellenist Jews, under the name of Alexandrians, Cyrenians, &c. And in Acts vi. 1, we find that these very Hellenists formed a considerable portion of the church in that city. "It is objected, that in the history of the siege of Jerusalem, we read §, that Titus granted a truce to the factious Jews, just before he commenced the last assault, and advanced towards them, accompanied by an interpreter: but Josephus clearly means, that the son of Vespasian, being confident of victory, from a sense of dignity, spoke first, in his own maternal language. The interpreter, therefore, was not intended to translate Greek words into Hebrew, but to render into Hebrew or Greek the discourse which Titus pronounced in Latin. "It has also been urged as a strong objection to our thesis, that Jesus spoke Hebrew; as we may see in Mark v. 41, and vii. 34; and in Matt. xxvii. 46, and Mark xv. 34. But to this it may be replied, that on this occasion the evangelists have noticed and transcribed these expressions in the original tongue, precisely because Jesus did not habitually speak Hebrew. However, admitting it to be more probable that he did speak in Hebrew to the Jewish people, who delighted to be addressed in their native tongue; we will ask, in what language * Misch. Tract. Gitin. c. xix. n. 8. + Mischn. in Jotah. c. ix. n. 14. [but Greek] did he address the multitudes, when they were composed of a mixture of persons, of different countries and nations? For instance, proselytes and heathens? Gadarenes (Matt. viii. 28. 34; Mark v. 1; Luke viii. 26). The inhabitants of the borders of Tyre and Sidon (Mark vii. 24)? The Syrophoenician woman, yum inanis? The inhabitants of the Decapolis ? &c. P. 242. We had noticed several other able discussions on difficult points of sacred criticism, particularly one relative to some disputed parts of the four Gospels, and another on the apocryphal books of the New Testament; but we have not room to translate them; and they would suffer by abridgement. Biblical students, especially those who are not acquainted with the German language, are greatly indebted to M. Cellérier, for his French translation and analysis of Professor Hug's introduction; which may indeed be considered as a necessary supplement and companion to the Bishop of Peterborough's translation of Michaelis. Dello Stato Fisico del Suolo di Roma; Memoria per servire d'illustrazione alla Carta Geognostica di questa Citta. Di G. BROCCHI. Con due tavole in rame. pp. 282. Roma. Ir the old Empress of the "Seven Hills" were permitted to utter a voice, we fully believe that she would with Gray's priestess say, "Leave, leave me to repose." Unquestionably no sovereign city, since the invention of laying stone upon stone, has undergone so many molestations and plunderings by all kinds of spoilers, heathen and Christian, First, in the days of her full majesty, when she " sat a queen," came Constantine, and robbed her palaces of all that his imperial hands could carry away, to leave it on the banks of the Bosphorus in deposit for Turks to come. Then rushed down the iron men of the North, breathing war, rapine, and Sclavonic, to make sport of her gods and goddesses, stable their polar commissariat in her temples, and boil their mangel wurzel over camp-fires of her poetry, eloquence, and philosophy. Then came the endless, voiceless, pale-faced multitude of monkery, to deface what the Siberians had spared, turn her marbles into quick lime and convent walls, and swamp the land. Then came the Italian barons, all silk and steel, gay and gallant, but treacherous and bloody as becomes war; and, above all other forms of slaughter, civil war; battling from house to house, till their French and German Seconds warmed themselves into Principals, and devastated on a more heroic scale; alternately turning her monuments into fortresses, and battering them down with catapults and cannon. Then came the generation of Virtuosi, a race of born plunderers, who let nothing escape that could be had by ravage or roguery; the merciless buyers and stealers of the bones and integuments of the mighty matron in her grave-the resurrection men of classic mortality, torsos and trophies, princely heads, and Venuses destitute of a nose. And now come the Geologists, the final, fatal visitation. The soil on which her relics have reposed, with whatever disturbed rest, is now to be shaken up: parricidal Italians, trap and gneis-puzzled Anglo-Saxons, and Teutonic men, hammer in hand, and uttering an unknown and barbarous tongue, are to descend into her sepulchre, and full of ferocity and Freyberg are to dig up her strata-lay bare her alluvia to the eye of vulgarity and day, and extravasate and exenterate Rome for ever. ROME! that Milton shows as the grand allurement of the Tempter, "The imperial city! With towers and temples proudly elevate We shall never see those things again; they will be rooted out by scientific foolery, by men, with spectacle on nose, and system and self-sufficiency in heart, analyzers of brickdust and developers of oyster-shells; the sons of Odin will yet encamp on the naked Aventine, and the ghost of Feldzeugmeister WERNER will sit in scorn and the malaria on what once was the Capitol. And what hope is there that another Rome will rise, even in diminished glory, among the nations? Germany will never build any thing better than a barrack, nor France than a theatre. England will for ever busy her restless hands in the fabrication of a prison or a penitentiary, a new conventicle or a new street. She is, after all, nothing but a younger Carthagea huge emporium of bustle and self-interest; of factious orators and sleek burghers; of docks, arsenals, and admirals; of machines and monopolists; of haughty soldiers, browned from campaigning through the world, and bold-faced mariners, lavish of their oaths, their lives, and their gold; of the pride of blood, and of mushroom ambition; of visages dyed to ebony under the torrid zone, and of the shivering and sallow physiognomies of Thule and the world of snow and ocean!-a great compound and concentration of all the evils of ships, colonies, and commerce. Such is the creation of trade; and such it will be when England is a fishing-bank or a salt-pan, and men rejoice in the ribbons and stars, intrigue for the places, and live by the Court Gazette of the empire of Australasia. We will assert on our knowledge of human nature, that in the Carthago vetus they never built any thing of stone but a dock or a dungeon: and on the same authority we will predict that the new Carthage will be barbarous, mouldering, and lateritian, while one brick can be agglutinated unto another; that white-wash and stucco were the grand architectural implements of the mother country, and that the daughter, with similar loveliness in her life, will subside into calx and sea-sand, with filial identity of decay. Yet, hating war, as all men in their senses do; not loving paganism, and looking on unmitigated human nature with alternate scorn and fear; we must own that those materials were once wrought up, like Virgil's thunderbolt, twisted together, of the simoom, the shower, the hail, and the "pursuing flame," into a phænomenon of matchless power, sublimity, and splendour. ROME, the city of war, of paganism, of human nature unchecked by Christianity, exhibited a picture living with such figures, and coloured with such colouring, as shall never meet the eye, till cities and architects are alike at rest. The richness and pomp of her public life; the return of armies from the East and the West, loaded with barbaric pearl and gold, triumphing up to the Capitol; the crowd of high functionaries, perpetually moving to and from their governments; the stateliness of the senatorial and public assemblies; the gorgeous pageantry of the national worship; the consular and imperial pomps; the influx of all nations, in their infinite variousness of habit, complexion, and language; and this whole current, this great gulph-stream of human life, rushing with continual roar and swell through those "streets of palaces and walks of state," that even in their fall are nobler than all the labours of posterity; the richest treasuries of magnificent and melancholy thought in the world;-all formed a combination which no time shall rival. The Spirits of GENIUS and FORTUNE shall never again sit upon so dazzling a throne! It is probably already well known to many of our readers, that the situation of Rome itself is in a great measure on a volcanic soil; and that parts of the adjacent country exhibit appearances of the same nature. With that, however, there are found all those peculiarities which we have already noticed as characteristic of Italy, together with a great extent of recent alluvial deposits. They are divided by Signor Brocchi into three formations; but all these soils are rendered more or less obscure and inaccessible within the bounds of the ancient city, by the immense quantity of ruins which time has accumulated above them. The rock of the Palatine mount, for example, is buried not less than forty feet under the ruins of the palace of the Cæsars. An ancient street has been discovered twenty-four feet below the present level, and another upwards of forty, between the Viminal and Quirinal mounts. This accumulation, or rise of soil, in the places of the larger towns of ancient date, is often so great that it is almost inconcievable how it should have been produced from the ruins of buildings. It is not long since, that in repairing Bow Church in Cheapside, there were found beneath its foundation, the remains of a small church of Saxon |