put it on the king's ulcers, and he was cured" et curatus est." Hezekiah demanded a sign to convince him that he should be cured. Isaiah said to him, "Shall the shadow go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?" And Hezekiah answered, "It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees; let the shadow return backward ten degrees." And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord, and he brought the shadow ten degrees backwards from the point to which it had gone down on the dial of Ahaz. We should like to know what this dial of Ahaz was; whether it was the work of a dial-maker named Ahaz, or whether it was a present made to a king of that name, it is an object of curiosity. There have been many disputes on this dial; the learned have proved that the Jews never knew either clocks or dials before their captivity in Babylon; the only time, say they, in which they learned anything of the Chaldeans, or the greater part of the nation began to read or write. It is even known that in their language they had no words to express clock, dial, geometry, or astronomy; and, in the book of Kings, the dial of Ahaz is called the hour of the stone. But the grand question is to know how king Hezekiah, the possessor of this clock, or dial of the sunthis hour of the stone,-could tell that it was easy to advance the sun ten degrees. It is certainly as difficult to make it advance against its ordinary motion as to make it go backward. The proposition of the prophet appears as astonishing as the discourse of the king: Shall the shadow go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees? That would have been well said in some town of Lapland, where the longest day of the year is twenty hours; but at Jerusalem, where the longest day of the year is about fourteen hours and a half, it was absurd. The king and the prophet deceived one another grossly. We do not deny the miracle, we firmly believe it; we only remark that Hezekiah and Isaiah knew not what they said. Whatever the hour, it was a thing equally. impossible to make the shadow of the dial advance or recede ten hours. If it were two hours after noon the prophet could, no doubt, have very well made the shadow of the dial go back to four o'clock in the morning; but in this case he could not have advanced it ten hours, since then it would have been midnight, and at that time it is not usual to have a shadow of the sun in perfection. It is difficult to discover when this strange history was written, but perhaps it was towards the time in which the Jews only confusedly knew that there were clocks and sun-dials. In that case it is true that they only got a very imperfect knowledge of these sciences until they went to Babylon. There is a still greater difficulty which the commentators have not thought of; which is, that the Jews did not count by hours as we do. The same miracle happened in Greece the day that Atreus served up the children of Thyestes for their father's supper. The same miracle was still more sensibly performed at the time of Jupiter's intrigue with Alcmena. It required a night double the natural length to form Hercules. These adventures are common in antiquity, but very rare in our days, in which all things have degenerated. DICTIONARY. THE invention of dictionaries, which was unknown to antiquity, is of the most unquestionable utility; and the Encyclopædia, which was suggested by Messrs. Alembert and Diderot, and so successfully completed by them and their associates, notwithstanding all its defects, is a decisive evidence of it. What we find there under the article DICTIONARY would be a sufficient instance; it is done by the hand of a master. I mean to speak here only of a new species of historical dictionaries, which contain a series of lies and satires in alphabetical order; such is the Historical Literary and Critical Dictionary, containing a summary of the lives of celebrated men of every descrip tion, and printed in 1758, in six volumes, 8vo. without the name of the author. 66 66 The compilers of that work begin with declaring that it was undertaken by the advice of the author of the Ecclesiastical Gazette, a formidable writer," they add, "whose arrow," which had already been compared to that of Jonathan, never returned back, and was always steeped in the blood of the slain, in the carnage of the valiant."-A sanguine interfectorum, ab adipe fortium sagitta Jonathæ nunquàm abiit retrorsùm. It will, no doubt, be easily admitted that the connection between Jonathan, the son of Saul, who was killed at the battle of Gilboa, and a Parisian convulsionary who scribbles ecclesiastical notices in his garret, in 1758, is wonderfully striking. The author of this preface speaks in it of the great Colbert. We should conceive, at first, that the great statesman who conferred such vast benefits on France is alluded to; no such thing, it is a bishop of Montpellier. He complains that no other dictionary has bestowed sufficient praise on the celebrated Abbé d'Asfeld, the illustrious Boursier, the famous Gennes, the immortal La Borde, and that the lash of invective on the other hand has not been sufficiently applied to Lanquet, archbishop of Sens, and a person of the name of Fillot, all, as he pretends, men well known from the Pillars of Hercules to the frozen ocean. engages to be" animated, energetic, and sarcastic, on a principle of religion; that he will make his countenance sterner than that of his enemies, and his front harder than their front, according to the words of Ezekiel," &c. He He declares that he has put in contribution all the journals and all the anas; and he concludes with hoping that heaven will bestow a blessing on his labours.* * Cowper humourously alludes to the puddling attempts to immortalize these passing dark lanterns of literature: "Oh fond attempt to give the deathless lot To names ignoble, born to be forgot. In dictionaries of this description, which are merely party works, we rarely find what we are in quest of, and often what we are not. Under the word Adonis, for example, we learn that Venus fell in love with him; but not a word about the worship of Adonis, or Adonai among the Phenicians, nothing about those very ancient and celebrated festivals, those lamentations succeeded by rejoicings which were manifest allegories, like the feasts of Ceres, of Isis, and all the mysteries of antiquity. But, in compensation, we find Adkichomia a devotee, who translated David's psalms in the sixteenth century; and Adkichomus, apparently her relation, who wrote the life of Jesus Christ in LowGerman. We may well suppose that all the individuals of the faction which employed this person are loaded with praise, and their enemies with abuse. The author, or the crew of authors, who have put together this vocabulary of trash, say of Nicholas Boindin, attorneygeneral of the treasurers of France, and a member of the Academy of Belles-lettres, that he was a poet and an atheist. That magistrate, however, never printed any verses, and never wrote anything on metaphysics or religion. He adds, that Boindin will be ranked by posterity among the Vaninis, the Spinozas, and the Hobbeses. He is ignorant that Hobbes never professed atheism, that he merely subjected religion to the sovereign power, which he denominates the Leviathan. He is ignorant that Vanini was not an atheist; that the term atheist is not to be found even in the decree which condemned him; and that he was accused of impiety for having strenuously opposed the philosophy of Aristotle, and for having disputed with indiscretion and acrimony against a counsellor of the parliament of Thus when a child, as playful children use, And there scarce less illustrious, goes the clerk." T. Toulouse, called Francon, or Franconi, who had the credit of getting him burnt to death;-for the latter burn whom they please, witness the maid of Orleans, Michael Servetus, the counsellor Dubourg, the wife of Marshal d'Ancre, Urbain Grandier, Morin, and the books of the jansenists. See, moreover, the apology for Vanini by the learned La Crosse, and the article ATHEISM. The vocabulary treats Boindin as a miscreant; his relations were desirous of proceeding at law, and punishing an author who himself so well deserved the appellation which he so infamously applied to a man who was not merely a magistrate, but also learned and estimable; but the calumniator concealed himself, like most libellers, under a fictitious name. Immediately after having applied such shameful language to a man respectable compared with himself, he considers him as an irrefragable witness, because Boindin, whose unhappy temper was well known, left an ill-written and exceedingly ill-advised memorial; in which he accuses La Motte, one of the worthiest men in the world, a geometrician, and an ironmonger, with having written the infamous verses for which Jean Baptiste Rousseau was convicted. Finally, in the list of Boindin's works, he altogether omits his excellent dissertations printed in the collection of the Academy of Belles-lettres, of which he was a highly distinguished member. The article FONTENELLE is nothing but a satire upon that ingenious and learned academician, whose science and talents are esteemed by the whole of literary Europe. The author has the effrontery to say that his History of Oracles does no honour to his religion." If Vandale, the author of the "History of Oracles," and his abridger Fontenelle, had lived in the time of the Greeks and of the Roman republic, it might have been said, with reason, that they were rather good philosophers than good pagans; but, to speak sincerely, what injury do they do to christianity by showing that the pagan priests were a set of |