liarities of his own opinions, that they may square with those established beforehand by writers in all respects different from himself, and if he were to reflect a little, he would be surprised to find that he had, in order to preserve an apparent consistency with his ill-associated co-adjutors, made by far too great a sacrifice of the very life and spirit of his own faith. It is thus that a sceptical or infidel journal goes on progressively in error. All the contributors are expected to write up to a certain mark, and no farther, there is a silent compact entered into between the conductors and the occasional contributors, certain subjects must either be avoided altogether, or treated in a philosophical manner, and thus have we seen clergymen, the pride and boast of the church, and the fearless and triumphant defenders of Revelation, absolutely banded together, without any apparent sense of guilt or degradation, with men whose opinions they, nevertheless, on all other occasions, condemn with a severe and a righteous indignation.

But while the staunchest friends of this Journal either give up its religion altogether, or confess that it is liable to many unanswerable and fatal objections, perhaps they are willing to let it stand or fall by the character of its Politics. And if sheer talent and acuteness be all that political discussions require, those in the Edinburgh Review may often be pronounced excellent. During war-times, when the whole soul of Britain was passionately turned to the fluctuating drama acted on the Continent of Europe, the loud and vehement voices of the Edinburgh Reviewers were often listened to with a feverish and dreamy perturbation. Great events succeeded each other so rapidly, and often so unexpectedly, that unfulfilled prophecies were soon forgotten, and the credit of the seer was but little impaired by the failure of his predictions. Those who had been deceived once and again, could not withdraw their faith, even strong suspicions of imposture; while fresh crowds continued to be driven on by the impulse of a thousand passions, to consult the Oracle, into the falsity of whose responses they had no leisure to inquire, and which they believed to be divine, because of the number of its worshippers. Then too, as of old, VOL. IV.

on

the responses delivered from the shrine, were capable of a twofold explanation; nor were there wanting adherents bold enough to deny, when events seemed to shame the Oracle, that any such responses had ever been delivered,-or, if that were impossible, to affirm that events which had contradicted them in word and in spirit, had given them ample and decided confirmation. The fugitive and ephemeral nature of their work was the cause of preserving their reputation. Who recollected-who cared whether the Edinburgh Reviewers were in the right or the wrong-had been false or true prophets,—when kingdoms were overrun and thrones subverted, and rumour travelled on all the winds of Heaven, "with fear of change perplexing monarchs ?" Whatever their prophecies were, more dread and more magnificent realities passed in procession before our eyes,and it was no time to heed the changes, the follies, the falsities of a periodical journal, when Mutability seemed the ruling power on earth, and all ancient institutions were being fast trampled into the dust. It would seem that those political wizards were well aware of the nature and essence of the peculiar power which they possessed. They saw that the craving desires of excited spirits demanded direful predictions-that fear was as eager to be fed as hope-and that nothing was so dear to the imaginations of many as visions of shame and of ruin.

It is grievous to think of great talents thus employed in the service of despotism, and against the glory of our country. The energies of those deluded men might have found high and noble employment in sustaining the spirit of the nation during times of darkness and jeopardy. The voice of their counsel had not in that case, as now, been suffered to sleep neglected, or recalled to mind only with contempt and indignation; and they might now have been honoured by their countrymen as patriots, and as sages, instead of being at the best, with difficulty forgiven as men betrayed by partyspirit into an abandonment of the most sacred interests of Britain.

These troubled and changeful days are gone by, and men are beginning to have leisure to reflect upon them and all their pageants. They endeav

2 G

our to review the causes of events, as well as the events themselves; and it is not going too far to assert, that the unanimous conviction of the people of Britain is, that had the counsels of that party, of which the Edinburgh Review was the organ, prevailed, Europe had at this hour been prostrate, chained, and benighted.

It is not because its prophecies have been so often falsified, that the political credit of the Edinburgh Review is irretrievably ruined. It is the spirit in which these prophecies were delivered, that causes "the deep damnation" of the prophets. Grant that many of the successes which crowned the measures of the Ministry were such as no foresight could anticipate, -grant that their blunders were all felicitous, and that fortune or fate gave at last a glorious issue to a system often marked by ominous imbecility, make all these large deductions, aye, and larger still, from the merits of Ministers, and after that, set them, with all their admitted misdeeds, and all their doubtful wisdom, by the sides of the Whig Party and the Edinburgh Reviewers, and then ask the people of England, which men they consider best entitled to their respect and gratitude? The Opposition did not cry out with the lofty voice of true prophetic warning. It was not with them,

"Though dark and despairing my sight I

may seal,

Yet man cannot cover what God would reveal."

They were not melancholy seers cursed with the second-sight of the ruin of their country; but they were, it is impossible to deny it, an angry, irritated, unpatriotic, despot-loving band of disappointed partizans, alike destitute of wisdom and of magnanimity.

The consequence has been, that the Opposition Party never stood so low as at present in the confidence of the people. The people look back to long years of hardship and privation, during which they supported, not without some natural discontent, a prodigious weight of taxation; but they feel an honourable pride in having submitted, on the whole, with a manly cheerfulness to those sacrifices which could alone have enabled the government of their country to carry through that system of polity which has ulti

mately proved the salvation of Europe. True, that they might have thought the Whigs their best kind friends, when everlastingly preaching to them about the needless miseries of taxation, and the folly and madness of a hopeless war against the omnipotence of Buonaparte. But such exhibitions of friendship were not deserving of a very lasting gratitude. Ordinary men are not greatly to be blamed, though they make success the measure of wisdom. It would require a greater power of reflection than we can fairly expect in them, to enable them to perceive how those who have been always in the wrong, may very probably be wiser than those who have been almost always in the right. When they once see that the party whom they esteemed, have been less wise than they imagined, it is a very short and a very easy step to suspect, that they may likewise have been less honest. The "Party," therefore, are exceedingly unpopular, and now that all the first men, Whitbread, Ponsonby, Horner (the most honourable and the ablest man of them all), and Romilly are no more, there are no illustrious names to throw a splendour over a decaying cause, or to mitigate the contempt felt towards a discomfited party, by associations connected with the character of its most eminent chieftains.

It has been said, and perhaps truly, that the English nation is too fond of war. Certain it is, that nothing is so odious in their eyes as a dastardly administration. Now, the present Ministry shewed that they could depend upon the heroic spirit of England, and that they saw at last no security for other nations which was not to be purchased by the generous blood of the free. The last ten years will be important indeed to the character of ages yet unborn. They have been crowded with victories, and "a world of bright remembrances" will be added to the imaginations of our unconquerable youth. But the Opposition was evidently a dastardly Opposition. All their counsels were conceived in the cold shivering fits of fear; and they forgot that they 66 were sprung of earth's first blood," when they so over-rated the power of despotism in Buonaparte, and so undervalued the power of freedom in the British people. Paying taxes and receiving wounds

are no pleasant pastimes, especially the former; but the very lowest classes in such a country as ours, where selfrespect may safely be said to be a national feeling, would prefer a load of taxation to a load of dishonour, and, ignorant as they too often are, they can discover the necessity of the one, but never would submit to confess that there could have been any necessity for the other. These are feelings that with the lofty equalize the low," and make the peasant as true a patriot as the noblest in the land.

The policy enjoined by the Opposition, during our long contest for existence, was indeed far unlike that pursued by the great English statesmen of the elder times of England's glory. In dark and perilous days, they counselled resistance unto the death; submission was a thought that had no existence; and there was no difficulty-no danger-no suffering, that was not to be surmounted, faced, and endured, rather than that the bright name of England should be dimmed, or one inch shorn from her just dominion. But if we turn to the recorded counsels and prophecies of our modern Whigs, we shall hear of nothing but of disaster-of armies overthrown-and principalities laid prostrate as if

"Broken were fair England's spear,
And shattered were her shield."

There is, we know, a small assortment of foolish persons who attribute all the glorious issues of the war, partly to chance, and partly to the blunders of England and her allies. The attempt to apply to politics the theory of the fortuitous concussion of atoms, has not been very successful; and even they who hold it are startled by certain indications of intelligence and design. But neither, on the other hand, do the friends of the Ministry claim for them the whole merit of such wondrous success. Inconsistencies, vacillations, and even some more

fatal errors, may, during the long contest which they carried on, be justly laid to their charge. But this is certain, that, placed among difficulties and dangers greater than perhaps any Ministry ever had to encounter, called upon to act under exigencies not only formidable beyond all former experience, but so wholly new, that there were no precedents by which they might be guided, and no maxims by which they might be swayed-they yet carried along with them the confidence of the whole nation-exhibited a calm, steady, and collected confidence in themselves and boldly turned a deaf or an indifferent ear to the systematic and unwearied vituperations of those who, with no greater talents than themselves, had far less wisdom, and who, with louder professions of love for the country, were most assuredly not inspired by so pure a patriotism.

It was the soul of him "who, being dead yet speaketh," that inspired and supported the Ministry during all the struggle. On his deathbed Pitt exclaimed "Oh my country!" for at that hour it seemed that her sun was setting. But a great man cannot know the power of his own genius, else he would have foreseen the future triumphs of his country to be achieved by the imperishable spirit of his counsels. His successors are all indeed inferior to him, but they are at least in themselves equal to the best of their opponents, and far superior in the strength of a loftier faith. The Vessel of the State was at one time seen drifting to leeward-and breakers were on the shore-but her masts were not cut by the board-nor her sails lowerednor her flag struck-nor her guns thrown over board-nor her helm abandoned-nor her officers dismayednor her crew in despair; and we hail her with pride and exultation once more,

"That danger's troubled night is past,
And the star of Peace returned."

234

[Nov.

IN our last 'Number we noticed the unfortunate interference of the custom-house officers in this quarter with collections of Natural History. We find by the following observations in a very valuable periodical journal, published in London, that other collections have experienced similar treatment. "An instance of this excessive zeal in the public service took place lately under our own observation, and we are sorry to add, was attended with the usual bad consequences. A few bottles of water, taken from the ocean at great depths, and in different latitudes, as well as from icebergs in different circumstances and situations, were sent, carefully sealed, by an officer high in rank in the Isabella, and addressed to a distinguished philosopher in this country, for the purpose of analysis and experiment. The mere direction to a scientific character, coupled with the knowledge that the package had come from the discovery squadron, ought to have superseded all searching at the custom-house; but so far from this indulgence being granted, the box containing the bottles (and there were only three or four of them) was broken into, and the corks drawn. We are aware that a thousand tricks are practised by experienced smugglers; but that a man of science should have thought of smuggling three bottles of intoxicating spirits from the arctic ocean, and had them carried, too, several thousand miles, carefully packed up along with valuable articles for a museum, amounts to a degree of suspicious vigilance which we know not well how to praise."British Review.

Captain Scoresby on the temperature of Greenland. The cold in the Polar regions is sometimes considerably exaggerated. Mr Scoresby in the course of last summer ascended a mountain in Spitzbergen, which he estimated at the height of 3000 feet. "The temperature of the air," he writes,

66

was 37° on the top at midnight, the thermometer laid under the shade of the brow of the mountain among some stones. At the foot the temperature was 44° and 46°. Hence the line of perpetual congelation in the polar regions lies much higher than is usually estimated.". "The summer in Britain," he continues, “having been unusually warm, it may be interesting to compare it with that of Spitzbergen. The temperature of the month of July in the present year, in latitude 77 north, was nearly one degree below the mean temperature of the same month, as determined from seven years' observation made under the same parallel.

Hence, whatever causes may have produced the favourable change in our summer, the same appear not to have operated in the remote regions of the Pole."

"I have brought my meteorological observations to what I mean to be a close, and which may be stated thus: April, 370 observations give the mean temp. when reduced to lat. 70°-14°. May, 956 observations in 12 years give mean temperature in lat. 77° 17'-22° 8'. June, 831 observations in 10 years give mean temperature in lat. 78° 15′-31° 3'. July, 548 observations in 7 years give mean temperature in lat. 77° 18'-37° 3'." -British Review.

Belzoni's Researches in Egypt.-On my return to Cairo, I again went to visit the celebrated pyramids of Ghiza; and on viewing that of Cephrenes, I could not help reflecting how many travellers of different nations, who had visited this spot, contented themselves with looking at the outside of this pyramid, and went away without inquiring whether any, and what chambers cxist within it; satisfied, perhaps, with the report of the Egyptian priests, "that the pyramid of Cheops only contained chambers in its interior." I then began to consider about the possibility of opening this pyramid. The attempt was perhaps presumptuous; and the risk of undertaking such an immense work without success deterred me in some degree from the enterprize. I am not certain whether love for antiquity, an ardent curiosity, or ambition, spurred me on most, in spite of every obstacle, but I determined at length to commence the operation. I soon discovered the same indications which had led to the developement of the six tombs of the kings in Thebes, and which induced me to begin the operation on the north side. It is true, the situations of the tombs at Thebes, their form and epochs, are so very different from those of the pyramids, that many points of observation made with regard to the former, could not apply to the latter; yet I perceived enough to urge me to the enterprize. I accordingly set out from Cairo on the 6th of February 1818, under pretence of going in quest of some antiquities at a village not far off, in order that I might not be disturbed in my work by the people of Cairo. I then repaired to the Kaiya Bey, and asked permission to work at the pyramid of Ghiza in search of antiquities. He made no objection, but said that he wished to know if there was any ground about the pyramid fit for tillage; I informed him that it was all

stones, and at a considerable distance from any tilled ground. He nevertheless persisted in inquiring of the Caschief of the province, if there was any good ground near the pyramids; and, after receiving the necessary information, granted my request.

Having thus acquired permission, I be gan my labours on the 10th of February, at a point on the north side in a vertical section at right angles to that side of the base. I saw many reasons against my beginning there, but certain indications told me that there was an entrance at that spot. I employed sixty labouring men, and began to cut through the mass of stones and cement which had fallen from the upper part of the pyramid, but it was so hard joined together, that the men spoiled several of their hatchets in the operation; the stones which had fallen down along with the cement having formed themselves into one solid and almost impenetrable mass. I succeeded, however, in making an opening of fifteen feet wide, and continued working downwards in uncovering the face of the pyramid; the work took up several days, without the least prospect of meeting with any thing interesting. Meantime, began to fear that some of the Europeans residing at Cairo might pay a visit to the pyramids, which they do very often, and thus discover my retreat, and interrupt my proceedings.

On the 17th of the same month we had made a considerable advance downwards, when an Arab workman called out, making a great noise, and saying that he had found the entrance. He had discovered a hole in the pyramid into which he could just thrust his arm and a dejerid of six feet long. Towards the evening we discovered a larger aperture, about three feet square, which had been closed in irregularly, by a hewn stone; this stone I caused to be removed, and then came to an opening larger than the preceding, but filled up with loose stones and sand. This satisfied me that it was not the real but a forced passage, which I found to lead inwards and towards the south. The next day we succeeded in entering fifteen feet from the outside, when we reached a place where the sand and stones began to fall from above. I caused the rubbish to be taken out, but it still continued to fall in great quantities; at last, after some days labour, I discovered an upper forced entrance, communicating with the outside from above, and which had evidently been cut by some one who was in search of the true passage. Having cleared this passage I perceived another opening below, which apparently ran towards the centre of the pyramid. In a few hours I was able to enter this passage, and found it to be a continuation of the lower forced passage, which runs horizontally towards the centre of the pyramid, nearly all choked up with stones and sand. These obstructions I caused to be taken out; and at half way from the entrance I found

a descent, which also had been forced, and which ended at the distance of forty feet. I afterwards continued the work in the horizontal passage above, in hopes that it might lead to the centre; but I was disappointed, and at last was convinced that it ended there, and that to attempt to advance in that way would only incur the risk of sacrificing some of my workmen; as it was really astonishing to see how the stones hung suspended over their heads, resting, perhaps, by a single point. Indeed one of these stones did fall, and had nearly killed one of the men. I therefore retired from the forced passage, with great regret and disappointment.

Notwithstanding the discouragements I met with, I recommenced my researches on the following day, depending upon my indications. I directed the ground to be cleared, away to the eastward of the false entrance; the stones incrusted and bound together with cement, were equally hard as the former, and we had as many large stones to remove as before. By this time my retreat had been discovered, which occasioned me many interruptions from visitors, among others was the Abbé de Forbin.

On February 28, we discovered a block of granite in an inclined direction towards the centre of the pyramid, and I perceived that the inclination was the same as that of the passage of the first pyramid or that of Cheops; consequently I began to hope that I was near the true entrance. On the 1st of March we observed three large blocks of stone, one upon the other, all inclined towards the centre; these large stones we had to remove, as well as others much larger, as we advanced, which considerably retarded our approach to the desired spot. I perceived, however, that I was near the true entrance, and in fact, the next day, about noon, on the 2d of March, was the epoch at which the grand pyramid of Cephrenes was at last opened, after being closed up for so many centuries, that it remained an uncertainty whether any interior chambers did or did not exist. The passage I discovered was a square opening of four feet high and three and a half wide, formed by four blocks of granite; and continued slanting downward at the same inclination as that of the pyramid of Cheops, which is an angle of 26 deg. It runs to the length of 104 feet 5 inches, lined the whole way with granite. I had much to do to remove and draw up the stones, which filled the passage down to the portcullis or door of granite, which is fitted into a niche also made of granite. I found this door supported by small stones within 8 inches of the floor, and in consequence of the narrowness of the place, it took up the whole of that day, and part of the next, to raise it sufficiently to afford an entrance. This door is 1 foot 3 inches thick, and together with the work of the niche, occupies 6 feet 11 inches, where the gra