tree of knowledge was to be the opening of their understandings. The woman is induced to eat of the tree, and of course it is to be expected that the consequence mentioned before would immediately take place. But not so according to Mr. Bellamy's improvements. He translates the words which follow, nevertheless, the eyes of them both had been opened.' And he tells us, in his note, that their eyes (meaning their understandings) had been opened, long before, not that this was the effect of eating the forbidden fruit. So consistent would be make the Holy Scriptures! At ch. iii. 17., Mr. Bellamy translates, Cursed is the ground by thy transgression; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.' We have no objection to his substitution of the words by thy transgression,' for those of the received version, for thy sake,' except that here is a needless departure from the original text, ara signifying literally, for thy sake,' on thy account.' But we have much to remark on his explanation of this passage in his notes. He first tells us that the ground' here mentioned is the organized ground, Adam.' 'The organized ground called Adam was the ground that was cursed, and not the ground, which God had blessed with the principles of generation to produce every thing necessary for the use of His creatures.' Well then, we are to understand that the ground is not cursed, but Adam. Now for the words which follow, In sorrow shalt thou eat of it.' It manifestly refers to the ground,' which, as we have just been told, means Adam, and the sentence is addressed to Adam: therefore the clause runs, ' In sorrow shalt thou (Adam) eat of it (Adam) all the days of thy life.' We must really apologize to our readers for laying such prodigies of absurdity before them but we quote Mr. Bellamy fairly. In his note on the very next verse he says, "It is highly proper to observe here that a charge has been brought against this part of the sacred history, which is not true; viz. that God cursed Adam. But it is sufficiently evident that no such expression is found, even in the common version.' What are we now to think? Who in his senses ever understood the meaning of the passage to be that God cursed Adam, before Mr. Bellamy broached this opinion? And yet, in the very next note after he had delivered this opinion, he contradicts himself and affirms the direct contrary to what he had before advanced. It surely must be needless to extract any more of this writer's monstrous inconsistencies. We will however subjoin, 1st. An instance of his extreme carelessness, to use the mildest term. At Gen. iii. 23. he translates as when he had transgressed on the ground,' instead of the usual to till the ground.' We We say nothing of the form which he gives the clause, when 2dly. A proof of his not understanding the distinction between the plainest parts of speech in Hebrew. At Gen. vi. 16. -rendered in the received ver ופתח התבה בצדה תשים on the words sion and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof," he remarks that our translators have rendered own thereof. Now it so happens that own is the verb rendered shalt thou set,' and that it is suffixed to 72 which is rendered thereof.' The case is precisely the same as if a person were to find the Latin In the midst of all this blundering, his intolerable arrogance is not the least striking: expressions of this kind continually occurEvery intelligent reader will readily allow that, notwithstanding the concurring testimony of all these authorities, ancient and modern, the translations I have given are perfectly right, and sanctioned by the Hebrew.' (Reply, p. 29.)—Such self-sufficiency, resting on such grounds, we firmly believe to be without a parallel. We had almost forgotten to add any thing respecting Mr. Bel lamy's punctuation.* We content ourselves with repeating his words I have paid particular attention to the punctuation.' (Introd. p. xi.) and subjoining one or two further specimens of the fruits of his labours. 'Gen. iii. 15. Moreover I will put, enmity, between thee, and the woman; also between thy posterity, and her posterity: he shall bruise thy head; and thou shalt bruise his heel. Gen. iv. 10. Moreover he said, something thou hast done: the voice of the blood, of thy brother; crieth before me, from the ground.' We here dismiss, for the present, Mr. Bellamy, his New transla * Mr. Bellamy complains (Reply, p. 39.) that we misrepresented his punctuation in our last number. His complaint is perfectly unfounded: our printer put a full period at the end of each quotation that we made, which, we believe, is always done in such cases. tion, and his Reply.' Whether we shall return to them again, and how soon, will depend on the occasion which we see for laying before the public, more fully even than we have yet done, proofs of his utter incompetence to the task of a biblical translator. We pledge ourselves, at any time when it may be thought necessary, to produce ten, or twenty times as many instances of blunders and mistranslation equally gross and glaring. Mr. Bellamy speaks, we observe, (Reply, p. 47.) of 'testimonials of decided approbation' received from many of our learned clergy,' and of 'the warm approbation of the public;' but unfortunately he forgets to mention in what manner, and from what individuals this approbation has been received. He forgets equally to mention, what he knows, perhaps, a little better, how much decided reprobation of his work has been expressed, and from what quarters.As far as relates to ourselves, he may depend on one thing; which is, that, as long as we find him, or any one else, acting on a system which must tend to degrade the Holy Bible in public estimation, so long we shall feel it our duty to use our utmost exertions to maintain inviolate its sacred truths. ART. XII.—1. Abrégé des Mémoires ou Journal du Marquis de Dangeau, avec des Notes Historiques et Critiques, et un Abrégé de l'Histoire de la Régence. Par Mad. de Genlis. 4 vols. 8vo. Paris. 1817. 2. Essai sur l'Etablissement Monarchique de Louis XIV. précédé de Nouveaux Mémoires de Dangeau, avec des Notes Autographes curieuses et anecdotiques ajoutées à ces Mémoires par un Courtisan de la même Epoque. Par Edouard Pierre Lémontey. Paris. 1818. Svo. pp. 484. MEMOIRS may, we think, be called the most instructive of the amusing and the most amusing of the instructive departments of literature: they combine individual characters and feelings with public transactions-dignifying the levity of private anecdotes, and enlivening the gravity of historical events. The whole of the seventeenth century is rich in memoirs; it was then a kind of fashion to keep a journal, and it was, we think, a happy fashion for posterity--we should else know but little of what passed during that interesting period. We have not received from our immediate ancestors much of this species of information, and we apprehend our posterity will be still less indebted to us. The incentives to memoir-writing are greatly diminished by the number of newspapers which have of late inundated Europe: the regularity with which they relate all public events, and the minute and often indelicate accuracy with which they record the lighter topics of curiosity, leave too little unsaid to repay the diligence of a private journalist; and the curious, instead of writing the memoirs of their own time, now content themselves with filing and preserving the Morning Post. It is true that these diurnal records are always hasty, often inaccurate; and that they therefore supply very ill, or rather not at all, the place of authentic and wellfounded memoirs; but they nevertheless anticipate so much of what the private collector of anecdotes would have to relate, that he is discouraged from the task altogether. Nor can we believe that the publicity which state-papers now so generally, and sometimes so strangely, receive, tends as much as would at first sight appearto supersede the assistance of authentic memoirs; because it has a natural tendency to indispose statesmen from placing on record all the real grounds of their proceedings :-they are obliged to consider not so much what is forcible in expression, cogent in argument, or accurate in fact, as what is fit to be published; and accordingly diplomatic papers have been growing, for the last thirty years, drier and drier. We see that the greatest affairs of our own day are transacted in personal conferences; and of the motives of many of the most important events it is to be feared that no recorded explanation will survive: (we hold for nothing the unofficial and intentionally-meagre protocols of conferences.) Nor can we hope that the private papers of ministers of state, occupied as they are with public duties, will furnish many instances of historical memoirs ; and, however paradoxical it may seem, we see some reason to apprehend that this writing, printing, and publishing age of ours' will leave behind it as few materials for political history, and fewer for the history of manners than any of its predecessors since the revival of learning. The Memoirs of the Marquis of Dangeau, which have led us to these observations, are curious, and certainly include a great deal of valuable information; although we are not disposed to rate them so highly in this point of view as either of the editors. Before we begin our examination of them, we shall lay before the reader some account of their author, which Madame de Genlis has done too scantily, and M. Lémontey not at all. Pierre de Courcillon, Marquis of Dangeau, was born in 1638, and was about a year younger than Louis XIV.; his family was protestant, but he himself early in life became a Roman Catholic: he served, as all French gentlemen then did, in the army, and served with distinction. In 1665 he was made Colonel of the king's own regiment, which, however, he, some years after, resigned, to attach himself to the personal service of his master: he was employed by him in several negociations, one in England for the second marriage of James James Duke of York with Mary of Modena; he was governor of the province of Touraine; first Menin' to the first Dauphin; Chevalier d'Honneur to two dauphines successively, Counsellor of State, a Knight of the St. Esprit, and Grand Master of the Order of St. Lazare. He had,' says Fontenelle, a very agreeable countenance, and a large share of natural talents, even to the writing very agreeable verses.'—He succeeded Scuderi as a member of the French Academy, but is better known to the literary world as the patron of Boileau, who addressed to him the celebrated satire on Nobility. The sour and inaccurate St. Simon sneers a little at Daugeau's family; but, if its honours were not well vouched from other sources, it would be sufficient to substantiate them, that a writer of the nice taste and admirable good sense of Boileau selected him from all the grandees of France, for the apostrophe with which his poem opens 'La noblesse, Dangeau, n'est pas une chimère Un homme issu d'un sang fécond en demi-dieux, St. Simon, who seems to have loved a calumny even better than a joke, and both far beyond truth, represents Dangeau as ridiculously vain and self-important. That Dangeau was vain and consequential in his manner we can easily believe. It was the fashion of the time. The example of the king infected and inflated all his courtiers, and M. de Montausier and one or two other originals are quoted with wonder in all the memoirs of the time, as exempt from this general bombast-exceptions so rare as to prove the general character of the court, and to render venial the airs of Dangeau. Dangeau's chief vanity, however, was of an inoffensive and amiable kind; he was vain of his wife and her family.-She was of the family of Lowenstein,* and was, by one of those German alliances called a left-handed marriage, nearly allied to the house of Bavaria, to which the Dauphine belonged, and on the strength of this affinity, Mademoiselle de Lowenstein signed herself, as Madame de Sévigné informs us, Sophie de Bavière. The dignity, however, of the Dauphine was mortally wounded by such pretension. Mademoiselle de Lowenstein was obliged to retract her claim and cancel her unlucky signature;† and on no other condition could Louis XIV. * The French always blunder in foreign names; Dangeau calls his wife before their marriage, Levcstein. St. Simon's orthography is more correct. + Madame de Caylus, a great friend of Dangeau's, says, that the Dauphine was convinced of her error, and that the signature was not altered; a mistake, probably wilful, which the Genevese editor corrects by explaining the mezzotermine by which the king appeased the contending parties, namely, that the signature Sophie de Bavière Lowenstein' was changed into Sophie Lowenstein de Bavière'! re |