The

was, therefore, but little creditable to the acuteness of Norris, that he, a Protestant, should have adopted the Malebranchian hypothesis, without rejecting its Catholic incumbrance. honour of first promulgating an articulate scheme of absolute idealism was thus left to Berkeley and Collier; and though both are indebted to Malebranche for the principal arguments they adduce, each is also entitled to the credit of having applied them with an ingenuity peculiar to himself.

It is likewise to the credit of Collier's sagacity that he has noticed (and he is the only modern philosopher, we have found, to have anticipated our observation,) the incompatibility of the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist with the non-existence of matter. In the concluding chapter of his work, in which he speaks" of the use and consequences of the foregoing treatise," he enumerates as one "particular usefulness with respect to religion," the refutation it affords of "the real presence of Christ's

Locke, with whom the philosopher lived in the same family, and on the most intimate terms, for the last seven years of his life; and who, though he has never been consulted, affords often the most important information in regard to Locke's opinions. To this passage there is in the fourth edition of Coste's translation, a very curious note appended, of which the following is an abstract. "Here Mr Locke excites our curiosity without being inclined to satisfy it. Many persons having imagined that he had communicated to me this mode of explaining the creation of matter, requested, when my translation first appeared, that I would inform them what it was; but I was obliged to confess, that Mr Locke had not made even me a partner in the secret. At length, long after his death, Sir Isaac Newton, to whom I was accidentally speaking of this part of Mr Locke's book, discovered to me the whole mystery. He told me, smiling, that it was he himself who had imagined this manner of explaining the creation of matter, and that the thought had struck him, one day, when this question chanced to turn up in a conversation between himself, Mr Locke, and the late Earl of Pembroke. The following is the way in which he explained to them his thought :- We may be enabled' (he said) 'to form some rude conception of the creation of matter, if we suppose that God by his power had prevented the entrance of any thing into a certain portion of pure space, which is of its nature penetrable, eternal, necessary, infinite; for henceforward this portion of space would be endowed with impenetrability, one of the essential qualties of matter: and as pure space is absolutely uniform, we have only again to suppose that God communicated the same impenetrability to another portion of space, and we should then obtain in a certain sort the notion of the mobility of matter, another quality which is also very essential to it.' Thus, then, we are relieved of the embarrassment of endeavouring to discover what it was that Mr Locke had deemed it advisable to conceal from his readers: for the above is all that gave him occasion to tell us, if we would raise our thoughts as far as they could reach, we might be able to aim at some dim and seeming conception how matter might at first be made,' &c. This suffices to show what was the general purport of Locke's expressions, and that Mr Stewart's conjecture is at least nearer to the truth than Dr Reid's. [Compare Newtoni Opt. q. 31.

body in the Eucharist, in which the Papists have grafted the doctrine of transubstantiation." He says:

"Now nothing can be more evident than that both the sound and explication of this important doctrine are founded altogether on the supposition of external matter; so that, if this be removed, there is not any thing left whereon to build so much as the appearance of a question.-For if, after this, it be inquired whether the substance of the bread, in this sacrament, be not changed into the substance of the body of Christ, the accidents or sensible appearances remaining as before; or suppose this should be affirmed to be the fact, or at least possible, it may indeed be shown to be untrue or impossible, on the supposition of an external world, from certain consequential absurdities which attend it; but to remove an external world, is to prick it in its punctum saliens, or quench its very vital flame. For if there is no external matter, the very distinction is lost between the substance and accidents, or sensible species of bodies, and these last will become the sole essence of material objects. So that, if these are supposed to remain as before, there is no possible room for the supposal of any change, in that the thing supposed to be changed, is here shown to be nothing at all." (P. 95.)

But we must conclude.-What has now been said, in reference to a part of its contents, may perhaps contribute to attract the attention, of those interested in the higher philosophy, to this very curious volume. We need hardly add, that Mr Benson's Memoirs of Collier should be bound up along with it.

LITERATURE.

I-EPISTOLÆ OBSCURORUM VIRORUM;

THE NATIONAL SATIRE OF GERMANY.*

(MARCH, 1831.)

Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, aliaque ævi decimi sexti monimenta rarissima.-Die Briefe der Finsterlinge an Magister Ortuinus von Deventer, nebst andern sehr seltenen Beytraegen zur Litteratur-Sitten-und Kirchengeschichte des Sechszehnter Jahrhunderts. Herausgegeben und erlaeutert durch DR ERNST MUENCH. 8vo. Leipzig: 1827.

WITH the purest identity of origin, the Germans have shown always the weakest sentiment of nationality. Descended from the same ancestors, speaking a common language, unconquered by a foreign enemy, and once the subjects of a general government, they are the only people in Europe who have passively allowed their national unity to be broken down, and submitted, like cattle, to be parcelled and reparcelled into flocks, as suited the convenience of their shepherds. The same unpatriotic apathy

* [Translated into German by Dr Vogler, in the Alles und Neues of 1832; after being largely extracted in various other literary journals of the Empire. I am aware of no attempt to gainsay the proof of authorship here detailed; or, in general, the justice of the criticism.-A considerable number of additions have been inserted in this article; but these, as they affect no personal interest, it has not been thought necessary often to distinguish.]

is betrayed in their literary as in their political existence. In other countries taste is perhaps too exclusively national; in Germany it is certainly too cosmopolite. Teutonic admiration seems, indeed, to be essentially centrifugal; and literary partialities have in the Empire inclined always in favour of the foreign. The Germans were long familiar with the literature of every other nation, before they thought of cultivating, or rather creating, a literature of their own; and when this was at last attempted, θαῦμα τῶν ἀπόντων was still the principle that governed in the experiment. It was essayed, by a process of foreign infusion, to elaborate the German tongue into a vehicle of pleasing communication; nor were they contented to reverse the operation, until the project had been stultified by its issue, and the purest and only all-sufficient of the modern languages degraded into a Babylonish jargon, without a parallel in the whole history of speech. A counterpart to this overweening admiration of the strange and distant, is the discreditable indifference manifested by the Germans to the noblest monuments of native genius. To their eternal disgrace, the works of Leibnitz were left to be collected by a Frenchman; while the care denied by his countrymen to the great representative of German universality, was lavished, with an eccentric affection, on the not more important speculations of Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, and Cudworth. But no neglect, even by their own confession, has weighed so long or so heavily against the Germans, as the want of a collective edition of the works of their great national patriot, ULRICH VON HUTTEN, and of a critical and explanatory edition of their great national satire, the EPISTOLÆ OBSCURORUM VIRORUM. This reproach has, in part, been recently removed. Dr Muench has accomplished the one, and attempted the other; we wish we could say,-accomplished well, or attempted successfully. We speak at present only of the latter; and, as an essay towards (what is still wanting) an explanatory introduction, shall premise a rapid outline of the circumstances which occasioned this celebrated satire,-a satire which, though European in its influence, has yet, as Herder justly observes, "effected for Germany incomparably more, than Hudibras for England, or Garagantua for France, or the Knight of La Mancha for Spain." It gave the victory to Reuchlin over the Begging Friars, and to Luther over the Court of Rome.

The Italians excepted, no people took so active a part in the

revival of ancient literature as the Germans; yet in no country did the champions of the new intelligence obtain less adventitious aid in their exertions, or encounter so formidable a resistance from the defenders of the ancient barbarism. Germany did not, like Italy and France, allure the learned fugitives from Constantinople, to transplant into her seminaries the language and literature of Greece; and though learning was not here deprived of all liberal encouragement, still the princes and nobles of the Empire did not, as the great Italian families, emulate each other, in a munificent patronage of letters. But what in Germany principally contributed to impede the literary reformation, was the opposition which it met with in the great literary corporations themselves. In the other countries of Europe, especially in France and England, the first sparks of the rekindled light had been fostered in the universities; these were in fact the centres from whence the new illumination was diffused. In Germany, on the contrary, the academic walls contained the most resolute enemies of reform, and in the universities were found the last strongholds of an effete, but intolerant scholasticism. Some, indeed, of the restorers of polite letters, taught as salaried or extraordinary instructors, (professores conducti,) in the universities of Germany; but their influence was personal, and the toleration which they obtained, precarious. Dependent always on the capricious patronage of the Prince, they were viewed as intruders by those bodies who constituted and governed these institutions. From them they encountered, not only discouragement, but oppression; and the biography of the first scholars who attempted, by public instruction, to disseminate a taste for classical literature in the great schools of Germany, exhibits little else than a melancholy series of wanderings and persecutions,abandoning one university only, in general, to be ejected from another.

The restoration of classical literature, (and classical literature involved literature in general,) was in Germany almost wholly accomplished by individual zeal, aided, principally, by one private institution. This institution was the conventual seminary of St Agnes, near Zwoll, in Westphalia, founded by the pious

* No thanks, however, to the Universities. They, of course, resisted the innovation. A king and a minister, Francis and Wolsey, determined the difference; but for them, Budæus and Colet might have been persecuted like Buschius and Reuchlin.