dication appears to have been a sacrifice of-nothing. It is clear that he was still considered as the head of his party, and that he resigned no more than a mere title, with the fatigue of the ordinary business of the State, while he continued to act as Sovereign whenever he thought proper to exert his power. This appears from a speech which Sallust ascribes to M. Æmilius Lepidus, who was Consul the year after Sylla's abdication. It is supposed to be spoken during his Consulship; and in it he continually inveighs against Sylla as the actual tyrant of the Republic, without the least allusion to any resignation which he had made of his authority. And another speech, preserved among the Fragments of Sallust, and ascribed to Macer Licinius, Tribune of the people, a few years afterwards, speaks of Sylla's tyranny as only ending with his life. When Sylla was dead, who had laid this bondage upon us, you thought,' says Macer to the people, that the evil was at an end. But a worse tyrant arose in Catullus.' It appears, then, that Sylla, while relieving himself from the labours of Government, retained at least a large portion of his former power, and that, having completed his work, he devolved the care of maintaining it upon the other members of his party, while he himself retired to enjoy the pursuits to which he was most strongly addicted. 6 "Then it was, when the glare of the conqueror and the legis. lator were no longer thrown around him, that he sank into the mere selfish voluptuary, pampering his senses and his mind with the excitements of licentiousness and of elegant literature, His principal companions, according to Plutarch, were actors and performers of various kinds, some of whom indeed, such as the famous Q. Roscius, were of unblemished reputation, but others were of the vilest class of those wretches who ministered to every appetite of their patrons, of those men of prostituted talents, who above all others are most deserving of contempt and abhorrence. The intervals which were not passed in such society, Sylla employed in the composition of his own Memoirs; a work in which he took great interest, and in which he brought down his history to within a few days of his death. It was about a year after he resigned the Dictatorship, that he was attacked by the disorder which proved fatal to him; and which is said to have been one of the most loathsome that afflict humanity. We have in truth no very authentic accounts of his sickness; but it was the belief of the Romans in the time of Pliny*, that he who had shed such torrents of blood was visited by an awful retribution of suffering; that vermin bred incessantly in his body, and that thus he was in time destroyed. The Senate ordered that his funeral should be cele brated in the Campus Martius † ; and by his own desire his body was burnt, contrary to the general pratice of his family t, who Pliny, Histor. Natural. lib. xi. c. 33. lib. xxvi. c. 13. lib. vii. c. 43. + Livy, Epitome, lib. xc. Cicero, de Legibus, lib. ii. c. 22. VOL. XX. SEPT. 1823. Y were accustomed to commit their dead to the ground. But as he had ordered the grave of Marius to be opened, and his remains to be scattered abroad, he possibly departed from the custom of his ancestors to prevent any similar insults from being hereafter offered to himself. The members of his party, who owed their present greatness to him, testified their gratitude to their departed leader by lavishing every kind of magnificence on his funeral. The soldiers who had served under him crowded to Puteoli *, where he had died, and escorted the body in arms to Rome. All the ministers of the Gods, all the magistrates of the Commonwealth, in their ensigns of office, all the Senate, the Equestrian order, and an immense multitude of the people, walked in the procession; and the ladies of the Nobility vied with each other in offering perfumes to throw upon the funeral pile +. Such was the end of Sylla, in the sixtieth year of his age, six hundred and seventy-six years after the building of Rome, and seventy-eight before the Christian æra." P. 159. The fourth and last division of this Encyclopædia contains in alphabetical order, all such subjects as cannot with convenience be classified under any of the preceding general heads. Its distinguishing feature is the new English Dictionary, a Herculean labor, which appears to be continued with the same exercise of sound judgment and indefatigable research which marked its commencement. Admirable as was the work of Johnson, and almost surpassing the powers of a single individual in its construction, his Etymological deficiency has always been a subject of regret. The compiler of the present Lexicon has amply remedied this want. Every source, in every language, is ransacked for derivations; and the illustrations with which each separate meaning is afterwards supported, are not taken at random, but in Chronological order, commencing with the earliest writings which our language afforded, while in its very cradle. This Dictionary far excels all others in any tongue, which have hitherto been put together; and, we should think the work in which it appears well worth obtaining even for the possession of this alone. Our readers will give us credit for the absence of any mawkish and overstrained delicacy. We are fully aware of the impossibility of vesting every matter connected with Science in nursery terms and young-lady-like language, and now and then, perhaps, there must always remain on these subjects some dicta which should be peculiarly addressed to the initiated only. Nevertheless it would be difficult to deny that scien+ Plutarch, in Syllä, c. 38, * Appian, c. 105, 106. tific works, in general, (and the observation unfortunately applies in particular to most Encyclopædias,) appear to delight in an unnecessary blazoning of technical impurities, and in soliciting attention to subjects which, if conveyed at all, should at least be conveyed obscurely. It is with infinite pleasure, therefore, that we have observed the extreme caution observed on this point in the pages before us. Without omitting any grand and leading truth of Science, no single offensive detail, nay, not a word which should be prevented from meeting such eyes as the Roman Satirist has taught us chiefly to reverence, is allowed to creep in under the guise of Philosophical investigation. Still more is it a subject of gratulation, that a work designed as a medium by which information may be conveyed to all readers of all classes in the most popular form, is fenced and guarded on every side by the principles of its conductors and contributors from the admission of crude and sceptical speculation. Here there is no hazard of drinking poison, while we imagine ourselves applying to the springs of knowledge; nor of finding bitterness and ashes at the bottom of the cup, whose edges have been purposely sweetened, that they may entice our lips. A work of this nature, has a claim to national patronage, and we have little doubt, although great bodies are proverbially slow in their progress, that the proprietors eventually will be amply rewarded for the national benefit which they have conferred. ART. VII. Lillian: a Fairy Tale. worth Praed. 8vo. pp. 30. By Winthrop MackKnight. 1823. THE Young Author of this agreeable jeu d'esprit has already distinguished himself at Eton and at Cambridge, by his classical compositions. In the little publication now before us, he has shewn that he can direct his poetical' talents with equal success to lighter subjects; and that he is just as well skilled in the manége of the Muses, whether the steed upon which they are pleased to mount him be Pegasus, or the Hippogryff. The occasion which gave birth to the tale before us, brings back to our memory some of the recollections of youth, and the glowing season of the gallantry of undergraduateship, in which, perhaps et nos aliquod -but we must not indulge in such retrospective dreams. The course is no longer open to us; and those who are treading it, for their day also, will best tell their own tale of its delights in their own language. The Poet himself, #poλoviče. asant "At a small party at Cambridge, some malicious belles endeavoured to confound their sonnetteering friends, by setting unintelligible and inexplicable objects for the exercise of their poetical talents. Among many others the Thesis was given out which is the motto of Lillian 'A Dragon's tail is flayed to warm A Headless Maiden's heart,' and the following Poem was an attempt to explain the riddle." Advertisement. Οπιθεν δὲ Δράκων-these three words must be enough for any imagination which had ever been kindled by the legends of romance; and Mr. Praed, we willingly grant, has accordingly made the most of them. "There was a Dragon in Arthur's time," who was as fierce as most animals of the same kind have shewn themselves to be, from those days to our own. "It was a pretty monster too, With a crimson head, and a body blue, And that, alas! he had ruined it, When on New-Year's-day, in a hungry fit, Swift and light were his steps on the ground, Arrow, and stone, and spear, As snow o'er Cynthia's window flits, On a fool's unshrinking ear." P. 2. And this Dragon it was who encountered the Headless Lady; a personification with which, till the appearance of this Poem, we had never met, save in the facetious emblem of the summum bonum of the fair sex, which is occasionally sketched by the pencil of a satirical sign painter. The father of this lady was a stout yeoman, who in a merry humour, one evening, wounded a Fairy, who was lying fast asleep under the disguise of a Dragon, and who, in conse quence of this hurt, imprecated the following curse upon her assaulter. "Thou hast an infant in thine home!- His child accordingly grew up a lovely ideot, and the unhappy father died heart-broken. As Lillian approached to womanhood, she increased in beauty, but not in sense, and thus obtained the name of the Headless Lady. One day, when the Dragon (the original Dragon, not the masquerading Fairy,) had dined, he met this young damsel, who sang him a song sufficiently silly to prove she was without her wits. The burden of it tickled him woundily, and he crouched at her feet, and twined his tail meekly, while she, after the manner of Europa, mounted on his back, and sailed away through the sky. Sir Eglamour was a brave knight, as the following spirited sketch informs us. "Sir Eglamour was one o' the best He never set his spear in rest, But a dozen went to the ground. His cheek was like his mother's; With his spur so bright, and his rein so tight, And his skilful sword, to wound or ward, And his spear so sure and steady; He bore him like a British knight, |