[Thedate of the year, in my copy, I suspect, must be an error, as Jean of Tournes, the printer, flourished about the middle of the sixteenth century, and many of his books are dated M.D.LIII. I therefore imagiue that the first figure of the four I's should have been L, instead of an I.] After the leaf of the title is an eminent merchant and clothier of Collumpton, co. Devon, I observed several angels, elegantly carved, et the roots of the ogee-branches, hold address of seven pages, thus introng in fanciful positions the figures duced: "GOLDEN Calf. "The smocking bill the greate trompette did blaw: [fire, The people hard the voice of God in Wiche with greate noise to Moses geveth his law, [good desire. Wherein sheweth him his zeale and "On God living Israel docth not passé, Seing Moses long in the mount remain: Maketh in Oreb cast a calf in a masse, Then as his God doeth him prai and retain. "Befor this calfe is offring immoled, Be Israel, that his God doeth forgette: And so his faith most holie violed, Lightlie sinning be idolatrie greate. Being, therfor, nomor of God mindfull, His wholl minde is therto sette, that he must [full, Eate still, and danse, for his body sinFar from his God, willeth live at his lust. "Moses doeth se Israel himself marre, And to his God wickedlie do wronge: Wherefore angrie, the tables breaketh with great care [harte spronge. Of his swet lawes, which first in his GENT. MAG. December, 1808. exemplified in the annexed drawing (fig. 3, 4, 5, 6). As this cypher appears also in some other antient Churches, and does not seem to have been explained in a satisfactory manner, I shall feel obliged to any of your learned Correspondents, if some few rays of light are thrown on the subject. 2. H. F.A.S. Mr. URBAN, College-hill, Oct. 15. ON visiting, a short time since, the Crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral, where are preserved a few remains of the monuments erected in the former structure, and which are now placed under the great East window, I was particularly struck with the superior execution and bold relief of an upright figure, represented in a winding-sheet, tied at the head and feet, the face only being exposed; the folds of the drapery and whole execution of which may be pronounced admirable, and is, in every respect, de serving the attention of the Artist and Antiquary. (See fig. 7.) Upon a closer examination, I discovered it to be executed in white marble, and to be in no place at all mutilated or defaced. Upon turning over Sir Wil liam Dugdale's History of St. Paul's, p. 63, I found a description and rough engraving of a Monument erected to the memory of Dr. John Donne, the Divine and celebrated Satirist; where' a figure, bearing every resemblance to the one in question, is placed on ap an urn, and standing upright in a circular niche; which, together with the description given of it in his Life, I think will prove it to be the same. As the origin of this figure is rather curious, I have extracted the account given of it in Donne's Life, by Isaac Walton, and present you a drawing taken from the original. "A Monument being resolved upon, Dr. Donne sent for a carver to make for him in wood the figure of an urn, giving him directions for the compass and height of it, and to bring with it a board, of the just height of his body. These being got, then, without delay, a choice painter was got, to be in readiness to draw his picture, which was taken as followeth: Several charcoal fires being first made in his' large study, he brought with him into that place his winding-sheet in his hand; and having put off all his cloaths, had this sheet put on him, and so tied with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed as dead bodies are usually fitted to be shrouded, and put into their coffin or grave.. Upon this urn he thus stood, with his eyes shut, and with so much of the sheet turned aside as might shew his lean, pale, and deathlike face, which was purposely turned toward the East, from whence he expected the second coming of his and our Saviour Jesus Christ. In this posture he was drawn at his just height; and when the picture was fully finished, he caused it to be set by his bed-side, where it continued, and became his hourly object, till his death; and was then given to his dearest friend and executor, Doctor Heury King, then chief Residentiary of St. Paul's, who caused him to be thus carved in one entire piece of white marble, as it now stands in that Church; and, by Dr. Donne's own appointment, these words were to be affixed to it as his Epitaph. JOHANNES DONNE, Sac. Theol. Profess. [mis Donne, that (as his friend Sir Henry Wotton had expressed himself) It seems to breathe faintly, and posterity shall look upon it as an artificial iniracle'." There is a note in Zouch's edition of Walton's work, by which it appears to be the workmanship of no less an Artist than Nicholas Stone, the eminent statuary, who lived in the reigns of James and Charles 1. and executed several excellent monuments; particularly one to the memory of a branch of the Bedford family, for which he received This note contains the two following memorandums, extracted from a copy of his pocket-book : 1120. "in 1631, I made a tombe for Dr. Donne, and sette it up in St. Paul's, London; for which was paid by Dr. Mountford the sum of £120. I took £60. in plate, in part of payment." "1631. Humphrey May, a workman employed under Stone, finisht the statue for Dr. Donne's Monument, £8." Should you consider this communication so far acceptable to your Readers as to give it a place in your Magazine (by which you will not only oblige me, but contribute your assistance to what appears to have been the prevailing ambition of the Divine, viz. the transmission of his name to posterity), I may, at a future time, send you drawings of some of the remaining figures, if I can discover to whose memory they were executed; which, I conceive, will render them more worthy attention. SAMUEL PATERSON.. Mr. URBAN, Νου. 4. SEND You three views (fig. 8, 9, and 10), of a Watch formerly be post varia studia quibus ab annis teneri-longing to Oliver Cromwell, which fideliter, nec infeliciter incubuit; instinctu et impulsu Sp. Sancti, monitu et hortatu Regis Jacobi, ordines sacros amplexus, anno sui Jesu 1614, et suæ ætatis 42, Decanatu hujus ecclesiæ indutas 27 Novembris, 1621. Exertus morte ultimo die Martii, 1651, Hic licet in Occiduo cinere aspicet eum cujus nomen est Oriens." Walton's Life of Doune, p. 97. And at the concluding part of his work, Walton, speaking of Dr. rox's friendship for Donne, says (alluding to this figure), "He lived to see as lively a representation of his dead friend as marble can express; a statue, indeed, so like Dr. he took out of his fob at the siege of Clonmell, and presented to the ancestor of the present Colonel Bagwell, whose it now is. The name of the maker, William Clay, is engraved on the work within-side. The outer, or golden circle, indicating the day of the month, revolves one division every 24 hours; whereby the number of the day is opposed to the index hand above. P. Q. and quoted in your Review of that ILLUSTRATIONS OF HORACE. To AUGUSTUS. [In continuation from our last.] Plautus ad exemplar Šiculi properare Epi charmi; easily decided. Seeing these terms are contrasted together, I suppose the gravitate should refer to the superior solidity of the matter, and arte to the neater claboration: the former had more weight, the latter more taste. -- Morc Perhaps, however, the vincére may relate to Plautus, of whom.mention had been made immediately before; and then the sense, without doubt, would be; Cæcilius excelled him in neatness and sobriety, Terence in the art of composition. over it should be recollected, by the way, that we must not (as has been often done) place this judgment tothe account of Horace; he introduces it as the sentence of the critics whom the publick in his time were in the habit of implicitly following; and he is so far from subscribing to it, that he rather endeavours to invalidate it by all that he observes upon the ques tion concerning the preference of the antients to the moderns. Et supit, et mecum fecit, et Jove judicet æquo.] The judgment which Horace in this passage passes on the most admired Roman poets of the sixth century, from father Ennius down to the other moiety of Menander, as C. Cæsar calls him, seems so harsh and unreasonable, that we cannot refrain from taking it into a stricter examination. Here naturally arise two questions which are to be answered. The first is: do these an with which Horace speaks of them? The other will present itself when we shall have answered the formér. Vincere Cæcilius gravitate, Terentius arte.] Epicharmus, a Pythagorean, and a poet of the Old Comedy, flourished about the time of the tyrant Hiero of Syracuse, and therefore anterior to Aristophanes. Plato, in his Theætetes, assigns him the highest station among the comic poets of his age. He composed upward; of fifty plays, of which we have nothing remaining except the names and a few fragtient poets deserve that little esteem ments. If, as our Poet would lead us to infer, he was 'the archetype to Plautus, as in all probability Accius was to Sophocles, and Afranius to Menander, the loss of his works is to be lamented. Cæcilius was somewhat older than Terence, and appears, like him, to have borrowed his pieces in great measure from Menander and other poets of the New Comedy in Athens. He cannot have been a bad author, since Cicero at least leaves it doubtful whether the first place among the Roman comic writers does not belong to him * *; although in two other passages he accuses him of not having writ the lan guage in its purity. What the Critics precisely meant by the gravity for which they gave Cæcilius, and the art for which they gave Terence, the preference, is a matter not so *De opt. gener. orator. cap. i. + Brut. cap. Ixxiii. Epist. ad Attic. vii. 3. In the famous verses which Suetonius has preserved to us in the life of Terence. I shall not here, to favour the antients, lay any stress on the argument which is deducible from the high esti mation which they uniformly retained during the sixth and seventh centuries. of the Republic. We know pretty well how much or little that argument weighs. In the mean time, it is not to be forgotten that the period between the usurpation of Sylla and the last civil war, that is, the time when Cicero flourished, was precisely the age when Roman literature was at its prime; that in no other did more excellent wits, both as to num ber and intrinsic merit, appear together in Rome; and that in no other was Greek literature, as the standard of of the Roman, more esteemed and Cultivated. The conclusion therefore: if the ol' Roman poets, at such a period, by such persons, were uniformly prized, their works constantly heard, read, and every moment quoted with pleasure they could not have been so bad; they must have had a right to demand something more than mere veniam, as Horace has it; this conclusion, I say, seems to arise from very just premises; aud that the middle proposition is an undeniable matter of fact, no one, at all conversant in Cicero's works, will harbour a doubt. But we have no need to appeal to extraneous authority, whatever weight it might even have in the case before us. Several compositions of some of these authors so greatly disparaged by Horace, are come down to us. We may try Cicero's favourable opinion of the witticisms of the Roman Epicharmus* by our own faculties; and the Plautini sales, against which Horace so vehemently declares in his letter to the Pisones, have ever since the restoration of letters to the present day found as many admirers as they had in Rome. Even those whose delicacy may be sometimes shocked by this Poet, whose piece, for the most part represent only the manners of vulgar life, do justice to his comic genius, are charmed with his sallies of wit; and often when alone in their study laugh as outright at his brilliant conceits, as though they were seated in the pit of the old Roman theatre. Even at present the plays of Terence are the delight of all readers of taste, and the parity and elegance of the language, on account of which it was formerly thought an honour to Lælius to ascribe them to him +, is perhaps the least of those graces which so particularly captivate the man of fine feelings, the discerner of character, and every elegans formarum spectator. But even the antient poets, of whom we can only judge from a few scattered fragments, an Ennius, a Pacuvius, appear even in these fragments in a quite different aspect, than that wherein they are here shewn us by Horace. For instance, the following picture of a finished coquetie; Quasi in choro pila ludens Alii dat digito literas. She throws herself like a ball from hand to hand In the circle of youths, and communicates with all; With this she chats, to the other she nods, The third she takes by the hand, and treads On the foot of the fourth; gives her ring. To the fifth to look at, throws to the sixth A kiss, sings with the seventh, And in the mean time talks with the eighth Who would have expected this picture from old gaffer Ennius? Or what Poet would be ashamed of the following description of a storm, which Cicero has handed down to us from Pacuvius? Interea prope jam occidente sole inhorrescit mare, Tenebra conduplicantur, noctisque et nimbum occæcat nigror; Flamma inter nubes coruscat, colum somitu contremit, Grando mista imbri largifluo subita turbine præcipitans cadit, * Duplex omnino est jocandi genus, unum illiberale, petulans, flagitiosum, obscœnum: alterum elegans, urbanum, ingeniosum, facetum; quo genere non modo Plautus noster, et Atticorum antiqua comædia, sed etiam Socraticorum philosophorum libri referri sunt. Cicero, de Offic. lib. i. cap. 29. + Secutus sum - Terentium, cujus fabellæ propter elegantiam sermonis putabantur à Caio Lælio scribi. Id. ad Attic. vii. 3. + See Fragm. Veler. Poetar. Lat. Edit. H. Stephani, p. 131. Cic. de Orature, lib. iii. cap. 39. There |