ges they possess in prospect, we have made a little calculation of the probable bulk, expense, and time of publication of the improved Thesaurus, which we have reason to believe is within bounds at all events, as it is a rule of three sum, any error which has slipped in will be easily detected. The 688th page of Mr. Valpy's Thesaurus corresponds with the 53d of the original work; consequently, if the same proportion be observed throughout, the new edition will be just thirteen times as bulky as the old one. Now the original work consists of three goodly volumes in folio, besides the fourth volume of indexes, and the fifth of glossaries. It is true that a very considerable part of the fourth volume is taken up with the Appendix, which the present Editors have inserted in the body of the work: but it is not to be doubted, that the additions and corrections, which they will have to make at the conclu sion of the work, will be in proportion to the bulk of it; so that our calculation will not exceed the truth. And thus it appears, that the actual dictionary will occupy at least thirty-nine folio volumes; but as it is reasonable to conclude, that the farther the work proceeds, the greater will be the accumulation of materials, which the Editors seem resolved to pour out iλw buλazʊ into this capacious reservoir, it is not unreasonable to calculate upon the addition of three or four volumes extra. To these we have to add the treatises, which the Editors have thought fit to publish in the first two numbers, and which, in conjunction with the Glossaries, will form a separate volume.-Upon the whole, we may reckon that the work, when complete, will occupy at least fifty good folio volumes, and very probably more. The price of each Number to the subscribers is one guinea for the small paper, and two guineas for the large. Each volume will comprehend at least four numbers; so that the cost of the whole work will be to the little subscribers 200 guineas, and to the large, 400, 'inest sua gratia parvis.' This we believe to be a calculation which falls short of the truth.

The time which the publication will occupy, according to the present rate of proceeding, will not be less than seventy years-a melancholy consideration for those subscribers, who are ambitious of seeing their names in the list of the 1100; since we are informed, in a notice prefixed to one of the parts, that the Dedications, List of Subscribers, &c. will be given in the last number. But who can undertake to say what will be done or given, in a book which is to make its appearance in the year 1889? Messrs. Valpy and Barker, together with all their subscribers-printer, editor, readers and critics will, long before that distant day, have been gathered to the Stephenses and Scapulas of other times. Wo betide the luckless wight, who has determined to reserve the enucleation of hard words, beginning with any letter after pi, which he may meet with

in the course of his studies, till the latter numbers of the improved Thesaurus shall come forth!-Such a work as this deserved an antediluvian race of publishers and purchasers.

It may be said, that it was impossible to ascertain beforehand, with any degree of precision, the magnitude of a work of this nature, and therefore that the subscribers have no right to complain of the unforeseen extension of the price and time. Why then did the conductors of the work pledge themselves to certain limits?

In a prospectus printed in the Classical Journal seven years ago, it is said that the work will be published in twenty-four numbers; to be completed in four or five years.' The first number appeared in 1815; and at the present moment six or seven numbers, we believe, have made their appearance. But we have seen only four; of which the last column, numbered 688, corresponds, as we observed, with p. 53 of the original work. Now the total number of columns in the three volumes of the original work, is 6273; and as 53 are to 688, so are 6273 to 81,430 and a fraction. The number of columns in one number of the new edition is about 360, and the quotient of 81,430 divided by 360 is 226 and a fraction. Add to this the fourth volume, which will probably occupy ten numbers more at least, and we shall have 236 numbers, which, with the Glossaries, and the two first numbers, will make up nearly 240 numbers, being just ten times as many as are announced in the Prospectus; and the expense will be to the noble and plebeian subscribers respectively 480 and 240 guineas. Thus by another calculation, we have arrived at a result still more alarming than the first; and even this, we are convinced, falls short of the actual evil. The proposals were, in the first instance, for a republication of Stephens's Thesaurus; a work, which the scarcity of the original edition would have rendered valuable and useful. Then it was to be an improved and enlarged edition; this was suspicious but when the first number made its appearance, containing not one word of the Thesaurus, but a farrago of treatises by various authors, most of them of common occurrence, such as that of Kuster de verbis mediis, some of the subscribers took the alarm, and declined having any thing further to do with a work, which set out with a complete deviation from the Prospectus, which had induced them to give the sanction of their names. It is very obvious that there were two distinct plans of proceeding, either of which the publishers might with propriety have adopted. The first was, to give a new edition of Stephens, incorporating the additions which he has inserted in the Index, verifying and giving accurate references for the quotations, and nothing more. This was the original plan of the present edition. Their first intention 'was only to incorporate into the Thes. (an elegant abbreviation!) 'those words with which H. Stephens met after the completion of

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the work, and which he has thrown into his Index-to insert in 'the Thes. Scott's Appendix-and to verify the quotations. But 'they mean to extend their plan, because thy entertain little doubt 'of the success of their undertaking,'a i. e. in a pecuniary point of view. The other was, to publish an entirely new Thesaurus, on the plan of Stephens, but according to a more philosophical arrangement, availing themselves of the collections of more recent philologists, and introducing such alterations and improvements as might have been deemed expedient. Instead of which, the present editors have most injudiciously endeavoured to combine the two plans.

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In a publication, which professes to be a new edition of Stephens's Thesaurus, we may reasonably expect to find the labours of that lexicographer so distinctly separated from the recent additions to his work, that we shall have no difficulty in determining what is Stephens's and what is not. But so little is this just and necessary assignment of property attended to in the present work, that it is extremely difficult for the student to ascertain what portion of an article belongs to the original edition, and what is peculiar to the new. Parenthesis within parenthesis, and bracketed brackets confuse us in our inquiry, and demand more time than we can af ford to bestow upon the parentage of each remark.

One decisive example of each meaning, is as good as twenty. If instances are piled one upon another at this rate, from the margins and commonplace books of industrious scholars, we shall come by degrees to have a Thesaurus, comprising all the works of all the Greek authors, but in shreds and patches. It will scarcely be credited, that 139 columns are occupied by the single word Ayahua, or rather by a series of dissertations upon every thing relating to ornaments, images, and decorations of all kinds, with occasional episodes upon matters altogether foreign, which happen to cross the Editor, as he is hunting the word ayaλua through all the mazes of philology. It is curious to observe how frequently he loses the scent, and goes off upon a new track, if some curious expression or custom thwarts his path. For instance, the word ayaλua occurs in the last line of an epigram, which the editor transcribes at full length, as usual, (for it is no uncommon thing for him to give us half a page of an author at a time,) and in which epigram, mention is made of the custom which hunters had, of suspending some part of the game to a tree, as an offering to some deity; a custom known to every fourth-form boy. Accordingly, off goes the editor, in a note upon this practice, not containing one word about αγαλμα. In the next page but one, because Εκατης αγαλμα is used by Aristophanes to signify a dog, he actually begins a dissertation,

a Classical Journal. No. XIX.

which is continued through fifty-five columns, upon the sacrifices offered to Hecate and other gods, and the different titles of Hecate, and notes on the Tpißao, and Sophron, and appariga and Mercury, and the ancient chemists, and what not!-but not a word of or relating to ayaλua in the whole of this enormous excrescence, Again, we have a careful enumeration of all the passages which contain any mention of αγαλμα Διος, Πανος, Απολλωνος, &c. and so on through the whole pantheon; which kind of obscura diligentia is much the same as would be that of an English lexicographer, who, under the word Church, should proceed to enumerate St. Paul's Church, St. James's Church, St. Pancras, St. Botolph, St. Benet Fink, Alhallows Barking, and Christ Church, which, of course, would furnish a good opportunity for several dissertatory columns upon Oxford, Cardinal Wolsey, &c. And this it is to edit Stephens! We are fully sensible of the difficulty of the undertaking, and how vain it is to expect to please every body; but the want of judgment, and of consideration for the subscribers' eyes and pockets, which is manifested in this and in similar instances, must not pass without reproof. The editors seem to have raked together all the commonplace books of all the readers of Greek, who have been in the habit of using interleaved lexicons, or roomy margins, for the purpose of pouring all their contents into this captious and terrible sieve.' If, for instance, Mr. Schaefer or Mr. Boissonade, very learned and excellent men, (the former of whom has a strange trick of writing long notes in indexes,) happen to have elucubrated, for their own satisfaction, a disquisition upon some particular word, or, as the learned editor would say, to have dissertated upon it; no matter how much extraneous discussion is introduced, which has no immediate connexion with the word in question, away it goes to the Ædes Valpianæ, in Took's Court, and thence into the Thes. whole and entire. The consequence is, as we have shown, that in numerous instances, instead of a clear, methodical account of a word, with its various meanings regularly deduced, and illustrated by a few opposite and decisive authorities, we have long, desultory diatribes on a great many other words, which are not, to be sure, the words that we are inquiring for, but they are of the same genus; they all end, perhaps, in w, or they have all a peculiar twist in the head or tail, and therefore, says the editor, as you are curious about one of them, here they are all-walk in, ladies and gentlemen, and see what you shall see! But we must beg pardon for sporting with the feelngs of the large paper subscribers, the four hundred guinea gentlemen, to whom all this dilatation of bulk is a very serious concern. Let them, however, take comfort in the consideration, that in proportion to the growth of the Thesaurus, will be the number of tallpaper copies in their libraries, and of course the increase of their

own satisfaction.-The editors are aware of the censure which they have deservedly incurred in this respect, and have offered the following apology in a recent number of the Classical Journal.

'Should any of the subscribers, from a cursory view of the work, 'be disposed to infer that, as so much space is employed in the ex'planations of some words, there is but little chance of the under'taking ever being completed within the prescribed limits, the edi'tors would add, that much of the matter, both in the text and notes, 'relates to words which will come under discussion as they pro'ceed. The quotations, for instance, introduced from the Greek 'writers and the Greek grammarians, to illustrate the various sig 'nifications of the word Ayahua, are equally applicable to the illustrations of the synonymes 'Αναθήμα, Ανδριας, Βρετας, Γραφή, Ερανόν, &c. [synonymes, forsooth!] and thus the work is in reality ad'vanced in proportion to the extent of such matter.'

But this defence, although plausible, is not true. The question is not, whether every word is to be illustrated at equal length; but whether a proportionable number of words, throughout the alphabet, are to serve as pegs for notes and dissertations; and we do not hesitate to affirm, that if the editors preserve any degree of consistency or plan, and illustrate other classes of words in the same manner as they have elucidated ayahua and some others, the magnitude of the entire work will even exceed that which we have assigned to it.

[Here many extracts are made, and comparisons with the original Thesaurus. He adds ;]

We are aware that we have to apologize to our readers for wasting so much valuable paper upon these uninteresting extracts; but we were desirous of giving one or two specimens of the enormous rate at which the editors are trifling with the time and money of their subscribers. It really seems as if the encouragement they have met with, had filled them with such a lively sense of gratitude, and such a desire to gratify their kind patrons, that they have determined to make the Thesaurus literally a xrna es asi, a book to be purchased for ever, a cyclic library, a publication at once periodical and perennial; compiled, as they themselves say, 'not for the present generation only, but for posterity also.'-Insere, Daphni, pyros, carpent tua poma nepotes!-an heir-loom, to be bequeathed in some such clause as the following: Item. I give and bequeath to my dear son, A. B. all those thirty-three volumes in folio, entitled A New and improved edition of Stephens's Thesaurus, being so much of the said work as has been yet published; also I hereby devise to him and to his heirs for ever, all my right and title in the remaining twenty or more volumes of the said work, upon condition of his or their paying, from time to time, the sum of two pounds two shillings, lawful money of Great-Britain, for each number as it