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hend little improvement is to be looked for in the existing generation. We have heard nothing recently of the result of the experiment made by Governor Macquarie, of educating the children of these people, but we believe it has failed; and the prevailing opinion among the settlers is, that they are a race of men utterly incapable of being civilized. Not so, however, thinks Mr. Dawson, the intelligent agent of the Australian Agricultural Company :—' I have heard them,' says he, 'called the most degraded of all God's creation, and that their nature will not admit of civilization; and this is, unfortunately, the language of nine out of ten people in the colony. They are, in fact, in the first stage of society, and are, in my opinion, just as susceptible of advancement by degrees as savages in the same state in other countries. I should be sorry to think that God created a race of human beings unsusceptible, in their very nature, of light or improvement. Having stamped upon them the image of his own likeness, for what end did he design them, if they are perpetually condemned to the level of brutes?'

Under this favourable impression, Mr. Dawson had assembled about a hundred of the natives at Port Stephens; and at their hands, from the moment of his landing, he received the most valuable assistance: they collected bark and built huts for the whole establishment; they carried the luggage from the boats to these huts; in a few minutes,' says Mr. Dawson, they were seen carrying boxes, bags, and other things on their heads, under the directions of different families, to their respective huts!' He describes them as generally cheerful and good-humoured, though keenly sensible of injuries; strictly faithful in the performance of duties which they have undertaken, and remarkably honest, which was shewn by the punctual return of anything lent to them or entrusted to their care. But then, it must be stated, he cautiously kept them from the knowledge of spirituous liquors. Whether he will be able to preserve them in this happy state of ignorance, when many hundred families, and as many convicts, are added to the establishment, may very much be doubtedindeed, we should say it will be impossible; and then, in spite of every exertion and kind intention on their behalf, it is to be dreaded that the result will not be unlike what Mr. Cunningham speaks of in his descriptions of the town of Sydney.

Upwards of one hundred pages of the first volume of Mr. Cunningham's book are occupied in geographical and topographical details, with notices respecting the soils and productions; but in these details we find nothing that is new; and, in fact, much of the geographical part, for want of a chart, is in a great degree unintelligible.

unintelligible. This defect, which might so easily have been obviated, is a considerable drawback on the value of the volumes, and ought to be supplied in the event, which, we think probable enough, of another edition being called for.*

It is rather surprising, that, in the thirty-eighth year,' so little progress has been made in discovery, where so extensive a field of terra incognita surrounds the settlers. In fact, a very small portion of New Holland is as yet at all known. The Dutch and French have visited certain parts of the coast, and Dampier, Cook, Flinders, and King have more minutely examined the rest, so that we have most of the bays and prominent headlands laid down with sufficient accuracy; but beyond this, with the exception of Sydney and its dependencies, not a mile of the interior is known. Discoveries, it is true, are slowly and gradually making, particularly to the northward on the eastern coast, where some harbours of no mean dimensions, and rivers of considerable magnitude have recently been found, where none had been supposed to exist, the overlapping of headlands having concealed them from the coasting navigator. Many great rivers, we have no doubt, will yet be found to exist on the northern and north-eastern coasts-were it otherwise, this immense continent would present a physical constitution in its geographical phenomena, at variance with what occurs in all other countries. Nothing could be more unsatisfactory than Mr. Oxley's account of the supposed termination of the Macquarie river, behind the Blue Mountains, in an inland sea, or overflowed marsh; and we must confess our surprize, that no enterprising person should have been found to push discoveries in that direction into the interior. Persons in the employment of government obtain large grants of land on such easy terms, that they cannot be expected to undertake expeditions which would subject them to considerable personal hardship-but if so many hundreds or thousands of acres, on a graduated scale, according to the degree of longitude reached in proceeding westerly, were held forth as the reward of discovery, we cannot help thinking that candidates would be forthcoming, to embark in expeditions which might lead to important results.

To show how fallacious is what is called a survey by running along the coast, it may be mentioned, that Captain Cook, in passing the entrance of Port Jackson, calls it a creek in which boats might enter and find shelter,' never once suspecting that within that narrow entrance lay the tortuous harbour of Sydney, ca

Since writing the above, we perceive that a second edition is announced, accompa nied by a chart.

pable

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.

VE have, in our language, several old versions of select por

tions 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 indeceucy; 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. superstition,

D

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

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