small number of wounds inflicted in the pruning; by the clean and handsome appearance of the vine; and by the great ease with which it is managed, in consequence of its occupying but a small portion of the surface of the wall.'—p. 100.

Mr. Hoare in the next page gives these few plain general rules for the pruner:

1st. In pruning, always cut upwards, and in a sloping direction. 2nd. Always leave an inch of blank wood beyond a terminal bud, and let the cut be on the opposite side of the bud.

3rd. Prune so as to leave as few wounds as possible, and let the surface of every cut be perfectly smooth.

4th. In cutting out an old branch, prune it even with the parent limb, that the wound may heal quickly.

5th. Prune so as to obtain the quantity of fruit desired, on the smallest number of shoots possible.

'6th. Never prune in frosty weather, nor when a frost is expected. 7th. Never prune in the months of March, April, or May. Pruning in either of these months causes bleeding, and occasions thereby a wasteful and an injurious expenditure of sap.

8th. Let the general autumnal pruning take place as soon after the 1st of October as the gathering of the fruit will permit.

'Lastly, use a pruning-knife of the best description, and let it be, if possible, as sharp as a razor.'-p. 102.

The serpentine method of training he considers preferable to every other. (p. 108.)

The sorts recommended by Mr. Hoare for culture are the Black Hamburgh, Black Prince, Esperione, Black Muscadine, Miller's Burgundy, Claret Grape (harsh, as a table fruit, unless well ripened), Black Frontignan, White Frontignan, Malmsey, Muscadine, and White Sweet-water. According to our experience, which is indeed but limited, it requires a very good aspect and favourable season to afford well-ripened Frontignan grapes upon open walls; but the thing has been done.

And here we cannot help observing how many hill-sides, sheltered nooks, and sunny slopes, are to be seen upon the aprici colles of the south and west of England, where the wild thyme and the heather now grow, but which might be rich with mantling vines and purple clusters. Sussex and Hampshire have many such spots; and in Devonshire cob, conservative cob, with his projecting pent-house of a straw hat to keep the fruit dry, might be loaded with luxurious bunches.

Our author, full of zeal for his favourite pursuit, has a chapter on the planting and management of vines in the public thoroughfares of towns.

Vines,' says he, which are planted against any description of walls

that

that bound public thoroughfares, ought always to have their bearing branches trained at such a height from the ground as shall put it out of the power of mischievous persons to injure the foliage or to gather the fruit.'

This looks well enough upon paper, and the effect would no doubt be very romantic; but the adoption of the plan might give rise to confused notions about meum and tuum, which the schoolboys of the neighbourhood would in all probability settle-however high the stem might be-before they could arrive at the fruiting point.' We would, however, gladly see a low wall covered with well-managed vines, stretching along the north side of the terrace-walk that borders the Regent's Park, in the garden of the Zoological Society. The southern side of the wall would have a very beautiful appearance when well covered in the summer and autumnal months; and then how refreshing the fruit would be to the surviving monkeys!

Before we close this notice of a useful work, deserving of a better commentary, may we be pardoned for offering a word in favour of another society, to which, in our opinion, much praise is due? It is not that this society has merely made the rich familiar with many lovely flowers and healthful fruits of all seasons, from the peep of the first crocus to the fall of the last apple,

'That dances as long as dance it can,'

but that it has spread many of these beautiful and sapid prodụctions through the land. The dahlia may be seen at every cottage door; and the methods of forcing upon cheap principles have been so widely diffused that the hard-handed London artisan may now cool his September palate with a slice of melon for a small copper coin. If it were but in being auxiliary to the spread of these innocent pleasures among the people, enough has been done to make every good man wish well to the Horticultural Society of London.

ART. III-Plotini Opera Omnia. Ed. Fredericus Creuzer. 4to. Oxon. E Typographeo Academico, 1835.

THIS sumptuous edition of Plotinus, the most profound writer of the Alexandrian school of philosophy, reflects credit as much on the learning of the editor, the celebrated Frederic Creuzer, as on the liberality of the University of Oxford, by whom the publication was undertaken.

Of

Of Plotinus himself, and his doctrines, we have no intention to speak minutely. English readers of the present day must have made far greater progress in a deep philosophy, before we could venture, without ridicule, to place before them even a list of his subjects. Questions of Fate of the Essence of the Soul' of Intellect, and Ideas, and Being How from the First and the. One proceeds that which comes after the One' Whether all souls be one of the Good and the One, as identical of the three principal Substances, and the two Matters' Whether there are Ideas of Individuals'-and How the soul is something intermediate between a divisible and indivisible essence:'-these are not questions for English ears in the nineteenth century; though no sensible man will join in the abuse lavished by Brucker, and other less respectable critics, on the frivolity and absurdity of the abstract speculations themselves, in which the Alexandrian philosophers indulged, and with which it was impossible for them, as deep inquirers, to dispense, without compromising the very foundation of a rationalistic system.

But even the more practical ethics of Plotinus-his inquiries into the nature of man, of virtue, and of the mind-are involved in an obscurity, which will effectually save them, as perhaps he himself intended, from being profaned by vulgar eyes. The first lessons in philosophy, which he had derived, in company with Origen, from Ammonius at Alexandria, he engaged with them not to divulge; and such a resolution was not likely to render the instruction, which he continued to give, very clear and perspicuous.* Writing he did not practise till he was nearly fifty years old. Even then his tracts (for they are scarcely more) were confined to a few select readers; and as he neglected to inscribe them himself, their titles were not a little confused. His subjects were selected without any order, as accidental questions arose; and they were chiefly addressed as answers to the inquiries of his favourite pupils-pupils, it may be necessary to add, unlike the idle boys to whom the name is now mostly confined; but learned, hard-headed men, who went to school at forty years of age, and staid there the rest of their lives. When we add that he could not endure to look over his own compositions-that his eyesight was too bad to read his own writing-that this writing was far from beautiful-that his words. often ran into each other-that his spelling was not the most accurate οὔτε τῆς ὀρθογραφίας φροντίζων, ἀλλὰ μόνον τοῦ νοῦ ἔχου was that he threw down his thoughts upon paper, as he had arranged them in his mind, as if he was copying from a book, and very often in the midst of some ordinary conversation, and Ibid. c. iv. p. 53. Ibid. e. vii. p. 57.

Vit. Plotin. e. iii. p. 52. VOL. LXVI. NO. CXXXI.

without minding interruptions-and that this to the great surprise of his pupils, ὃ πάντες ἐθαυμάζομεν, * was his practice to the last; we shall not be surprised to find, like even Longinus himself, that with all our anxiety to study the treatises on the Soul and on Being, we are quite unable to get through them.'+ One mistake, says Porphyry, Longinus evidently laboured under. He fancied the obscurity of the text was caused by the blunders of the copyist, not knowing that it was the usual style of the philosopher; and that the edition of which he complained was, in fact, the most correct extant. Eunapius, another philosopher of the same school, makes a similar confession. From the heavenly elevation of his soul, and the perplexed and enigmatic style of his writings,' Plotinus, he candidly acknowledges, was a very tiresome and unpleasant person to listen to,'-Capùs nai dvonxoos. If it had not been for Porphyry himself, who threw his language into shape-as a French writer has done for the modern philosophy of Mr. Bentham-and, in the language of the Greek biographer, like an electric conductor,' brought down his thoughts to the level of mortals' understanding," they would still have been soaring in a region far above the ken of even a philosophic eye.

Probably few readers, in this degenerate day, will assent to the notion, that Porphyry, with all his merits as a polisher and interpreter, has reduced the lucubrations of Plotinus to that perfect facility and clearness — εἰς τὸ εὔγνωστον καὶ καθαρὸν — for which Eunapius gives him credit. If the Alexandrian system is to be studied, it will be chiefly through the commentaries of Proclus, who has imbibed far more of the clearness, and even of the eloquence, of Plato, and relieves the dryness of his metaphysical discussions by occasional bursts of poetry, and at all times by the elaborate ingenuity with which he converts into allegory the most simple words of his text-book. His works, indeed, are scattered at present, and very imperfectly edited. few manuscripts have been collated; and much critical skill is still required, especially to supply the deficiencies of the foreign editors. Even the poverty of the typography, compared with the beautiful execution of the Clarendon Plotinus, is enough to suggest a wish that a Proclus may be published in the same form, and with equal care; and thus the University will have supplied an admirable foundation for the study of one of the most interesting portions of the philosophy of the human mind.

The history of the Alexandrian school occupies a space of about 300 years,-extending from the beginning of the third century, when it was founded by Ammonius Saccas, to about

Ibid. c. viii. p. 59.
Plot. Vit. c. xx. p. 70.

Epist. Longin. Vit. Plot. c. xviii. Eunap. in Porphyr., p. 9. Edit. Boiss.

530 A.D., when the chairs of philosophy at Athens were suppressed by Justinian, and Isidore of Gaza, with his colleagues, took refuge in Persia.

The circumstances which give to it such peculiar interest are chiefly these:

It is, in the first place, the final development, the last act, in the great drama of Greek rationalism; and it is impossible to contemplate the vast influence, which this spirit, as matured in Greece, has exercised on the destinies of man, whether with regard to the formation of his mind, or to the propagation of Christianity, without watching, with great curiosity, its whole course, but especially its close, when it seems to have roused itself from a long torpor, and thrown up, as a last effort, one transient but brilliant flame previous to its final extinction.

In the second place, it stands in a peculiar relation to the noblest and best portion of Greek philosophy. It was a revival of Platonism, but of Platonism in a new atmosphere and soil; and we may observe in this transition a fact like the most interesting phenomenon exhibited in botany or zoology, when a plant or animal is enabled to naturalise itself in a strange locality by the extraordinary development of some organ or function originally very subordinate. What in Plato was a religious philosophy, became, in the hands of the Alexandrians, a philosophical religion; and this is the real distinction, important though minute, between the two schools.

Thirdly, the new Platonism was the form in which the same spirit of Greek philosophy, even when apparently dead, lay hid, from the end of the fifth century, in the monasteries of the East, from whence it was transferred into the West through the works ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite. In this, also, it was revived in the fifteenth century by the exiled Greeks at Florence; and in this introduced into England by some of our own great theologians, in the most flourishing period of English philosophy. John Smith, Cudworth, Norris, and More,* were Alexandrian, not Athenian Platonists; and no little injustice has been done to Plato by assuming them as fitting interpreters of a writer, whom they scarcely quote, comparatively with Proclus and Plotinus; a writer whose practical views and principles were very far removed from the mere abstract speculations, to which men, who know little of his system, have persisted in attaching his name.

But there is a still more interesting feature in the history of the school of Alexandria-its relation to Christianity.

It was raised up as the last and most formidable antagonist of the Christian faith; most formidable from its elaborate assimilaTo these may be added Burnett, Widrington, Wilkins, and Theophilus Gale.