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1815.]

Edict of a Polish Bishop.

Coote, Swan, Hooper, Stork, Crane, Heron, Hern, Swift, Swallow, Martin, Goldfinch, Finch, Bulfinch, Nightingale, Linnet, Wren, Sparrow, Pheasant, Peacock, Jay, Pye, Pigeon, Dove, Parrot, Titmouse, Bunting, Crake, Colly (a name for a blackbird in the West of England,) Blackbird, Knot, Heathcock, Flamant, Woodlark, Lark.

You may depend on all the above being authentic names of men; all which could be particularized, as they are in the original copy, but for brevity sake it is omitted. Many were taken from the courts of law and bankrupts.

Bath, Feb. 10, 1815.

MR. EDITOR,

I WISH I could meet the wishes of your correspondent Scrutator, who very properly would trace to its origin the superstitious idea of apparitions, and he might justly have added sorcery, witchcraft, and enchantments! I hope, how ever, that soine of your intelligent friends will take up the subject. Meantime I beg to send you a translation of au edict, published about 80 years ago, by the then Bishop of Cujavia and Pomerelli, in Poland; as it may give a hint to some of our divines, and, I hope, not be wholly uninteresting to your readers at large.

EDICT.

"It is surprising to hear how every year persons are apprehended, and without ground and reason accused and indicted of sorcery and witchcraft; but far more astonishing are the proceedings of ignorant judges and justices, who, in contempt of the higher powers, the known laws of the realm, and authority of our episcopal and spiritual function, not only commit them upon the credit of malicious aspersions, but also put the accused to the ludicrous and superstitious WATER-TRIAL! by binding their hands behind their backs, veiling their eyes, and unmercifully clinging their hands in a split block; also by torturing them three days to bring the poor wretches to confession!

"Thus, by the terrible pain, and the dread of an horrible engine, they have not only declared themselves guilty, but also have impeached others entirely innocent; who, after having undergone the torture, have been bound again, put in the stocks, and been singed, and, at last, wickedly condemned to the flames!

"We cannot without horror and trem

bling reflect on the sufferings of so many honest and innocent people of both sexes, who, on being impeached of being wizards and witches, have suffered tortures; lost their Ives or reputation; or gained the ill-will, dread, and hatred, of their neighbours,

NEW MONTHLY MAG.-No. 15.

205

Wherefore, to avert God's wrath and punishment over the whole kingdom, for those abominable crimes, we forewarn and charge all judges, justices, and others, on pain of public excommunication, not to act in such cases without our spiritual inspection.

"We shall commission men, prudent

and experienced in the laws of the land, to examine into the merits of the accusations. We also order that the prisoners be allowed to walk free without fetters; not to wound or hurt persons when taken, nor to blind their eyes, nor to make them undergo the water trial. And, in order to prevent such proccedings for the future, we have ordered this Edict to be published from the pulpit in all the churches of our diocese, to the end, that if any information should be given about witches, we, or our spiritual court, may be immediately acquainted thereof. And to prevent more effectually pious people from being disturbed in their devotion, we command our clergy to take particular notice of such as, during divine service, shall unbecoming noise, to force them out of the call out, grumble, baik, or make any other

church; for we have experienced that some out of mere laziness, others out of villany, have feigned themselves possessed, thereby, either to draw alms of charitable people, or else to deprive the innocent of their good name and reputation.

"Let any priest, but particularly preachers, instruct common people in their duty, and draw them from superstitiously observing natural events; and from believing those invented tales calculated for the GAIN of the publishers of them. [Oh, Joanna!!!]]

"We also charge every preacher to exhort those people to repentance; and parents, whenever they observe any tendency in their children towards superstition, to wean them in time from such follies."

I beg to make an observation on the question proposed by Common Sense, (p. 32 of your last number,) without attempting to answer it.

formerly, and is still in some parts, that It used to be a common thing in Wales, when a man whose name was John Tho mas had a son, he would call him Thomus Jones; hence, John ap (the son of) Thomas ap David ap William, &c. Feb. 6, 1815.

MR.

ARTHUR.

1. EDITOR, THE reflections of a writer, under the signature John, (in your 13th number, p. 29,) on the Cyclopædia, and its venerable editor Dr. Abraham Rees, seem to require some notice; though the extreme want of candour and justice which they betray, appears to me such as to invalidate their title to any attention as a matter of right. VOL. III.

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206

Defence of Rees's Cyclopædia.

In a work of such extent, and professedly written by an ample variety of authors, it would be unfair to make the final editor rigorously answerable for every expression in every article. It is enough if the total of such a work exhibit general consistency and uniform fairness, combined with honourable independence of sentiment. But, with relation to the accusations of John, the editor of the Cyclopædia stands in no need of this apology. It has been his honour, through a long and universally respected life, to be distinguished as the uniform friend of religious and civil liberty to all sects and parties as well as to his own; while, conscientiously acting on the principle of sole and personal responsibility to Gop, he has gloried in the name and character of a Protestant Dissenter.

With regard to the life of Mr. Pitt, if John had been desirous of communicating a just character of that article, he could not have avoided the acknowledgment that it pays high, but discrimina tive, honour to the memory of that great statesinan; while it avows, in an open and respectful manner, an entire difference of opinion on several momentous questions of principle and policy. Does John conceive that no man is to be held respectable, well-informed, or truly patriotic, unless he can blindly idolize Mr. Pitt?

With relation to the particular anecdote, the non-insertion of which your correspondent represents as the result of some unworthy motive, he perhaps is not aware that it does not stand upon good grounds of evidence, and that it has been contradicted by high authority. Your correspondent also rests severe accusations on a sentence or two in the life of the late Bishop Porteus; passing by, as in the former instance, all equitable mention of the other parts, and the general tone of the article. The good bishop had strenuously exerted himself to procure the more strict and general observance of Good Friday, as a day of fasting and cessation from business. "This," say the biographers, understand the Christianity of the New Testament, is contrary to the injunctions of our holy religion."

"if we

John is perhaps not aware that the essential principle of the religion of Protestant Dissenters is, that the Holy Scriptures, and not the prescriptions of men, are the rule of faith and religious practice. This principle cannot be better expressed than in the words of the ex

[ April 1,

cellent Bishop Hall:-"It is a dangerous thing, in the service of God, to decline from his own institutions. We have to do with a power which is wise to prescribe his own worship, just to require what he has prescribed, and powerful to revenge that which he hath not required." (Works, folio edit. 1647, vol. i. p. 874, On Nadab and Abihu.)

If John, or any other person, will adduce evidence that the New Testament enacts, or in any way sanctions the religious observance of Good Friday, Easter, Christmas, or any other days or seasons, except the first day of every week, as the Christian Sabbath, he may be assured that Protestant Dissenters will be the most ready and zealous observers of such seasons. Till then they will certainly continue to act under the persuasion that the obligation of obedience to Christ as their only lord and master, and "the head of his body, the church," binds them to refuse compliance with any human authority which presumes to usurp any portion of HIS supreme rights. I request the favour of John's seriously reflecting on the following paragraph from a learned writer of the seventeenth century; and, if he can furnish a fair and logical answer to it, I shall be one to acknowledge myself sincerely obliged to him.

When men set forth new sacraments to seal up God's grace and remission of sins; what is it, but as if some falsifier should make conveyances of crown land, seal them with a signet of his own counterfeit making, and call it by the name of the king's privy seal? When they make a new form or frame of churches, as provincial, national, or catholic, with arch-priests and prelates to overawe them, might they not, with as good right, alter the form of the commonwealth, making new powers and jurisdictions, with new magistrates to controul them? When they make solemn days of assembly, and call them holy; when they make new canons, constitutions, and ceremonies, and call them ecclesiastical, sacred, laudable; in constraining men to keep and do them, they deal with Christ and his kingdom, as they that in a civil state should take upon them, without commission, to appoint new terms, sessions, and assizes; to forge new laws, statutes, court-rolls, and evidences, and compel men to credit and obey them. The kings of the earth would not suffer such innovation or alteration in their civil politics, lest their honours should be impeached." (Ains

1815.]

Ralph Allen, Peter Annett and John Kidgell.

worth on Idolatry, ch. i. § 19: printed at New York, 1640.)

Your correspondent must be greatly a stranger to the religious and literary history of our country, to need information that the Rev. Robert Robinson was a dissenting minister at Cambridge, who died in 1790, and whose numerous writings, and his translations of Saurin's Sermons and Claude's Essay on the Composition of a Sermon, have made his name familiar beyond, as well as within, the circle of the dissenting body. John is also entirely mistaken in taking for granted that Mr. Robinson "treated the subject of our Lord's Sufferings, Cross, and Passion, with humour." I am no advocate for jocularity in discussing any serious subjects; but justice obliges us to observe, that Mr. R.'s arguments and Occasional irony (whether right or wrong) were directed solely and exclusively against the usurpations and innovations of men in those concerns which he be lieved to be the sacred province of the Most High.

MR. EDITOR,

J. P. S.

THE inquiries made by A Gleaner on the subject of what may well be called neglected biography, happen by a singular coincidence to relate chiefly to persons respecting whom I had considerable trouble in procuring authentic information, for the purpose of elucidating some passages in Churchill's poems, of which I published an edition in 1804. RALPH ALLEN, ANNETT and KIDGELL, are all mentioned by the satirist; the first is noticed by the circumstance from which he derived his fortune and his best title to fame, namely, as the inventor and farmer of the cross-posts now so universal throughout the kingdom. His connexion with Warburton, who married his niece, induced him to claim the honours of literature, by a correspondence on behalf of the corporation of the city of Bath with Lord Chatham, who replied with contemptuous condescension; and the letters, though attributed to Warburton, were meagre enough to be the productions of Mr. Allen's pen, who appears to have been a very worthy good sort of man, but whose successful industry had given him a rank in society somewhat higher than his talents in other respects justified. Pope, in the first edition of his poems, had designated

him thus:

"Let low-born Allen, with an awkward

shame,

Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame."

207

Warburton, anxious for the gentility of
his uncle and patron, prevailed upon the
poet to change the epithet lowborn, in
the subsequent editions, to humble, and
in a note attributes to Allen all and
more than the virtues of the "Man of
Ross."

Churchill treats him with less cere

mony:

"Be the plain track from henceforth mine;
Cross-roads to Allen I resign:
Allen, the honour of this nation;
Allen, himself a corporation;
Allen, of late notorious grown
For writings none or all his own;
Allen, the first of letter'd men,
Since the good bishop holds his pen,
And at his elbow takes his stand,
To mend his head, and guide his hand."

Ghost, book iv. The mention of Peter Annett is very slight, and alludes to his having stood twice in the pillory in the year 1762, for writing a deistical paper, entitled The Free Inquirer. His age and decent ap

pearance seem to have conciliated the
populace, and defeated the proposed
effect of that very questionable mode of
punishment.

"Might I, tho' never rob'd in ermine,
A matter of this weight determine,
No penalties should settled be
To force men to hypocrisy ;
To make men ape an awkward zeal,
And feeling not, pretend to feel;
I would not have-might sentence rest
Finally fix'd within my breast-

Ev'n Annett censur'd and confin'd,
Because we're of a different mind."

Ghost, book iv.

Of KIDGELL it would be difficult to speak in terms of sufficient severity. He

was

the infamous informer against Wilkes's infamous poem, and through the medium of the then famous Lord March, (afterwards Duke of Queensberry,) whose chaplain he was, and the no less famous Lord Sandwich, made a formal complaint against the manuscript poem in the House of Lords. Thus, but for this knot of worthies, the public eye and ear would never have been shocked with the knowledge of that most licentious poem, which was by bribery and other surreptitious means obtained by Kidgell from the private press of its witty but profligate author.

Churchill, iudignantly zealous for his friend Wilkes, devotes the concluding forty lines of his admirable satire, entitled "The Author," to the most nervous delineation of the villany of Kidgell's conduct, and winds up the invective by

208

Biographical Memoir of Joseph Bramah.

naming the object of it in his happiest
and peculiar style of bitter irony.
"Are these the arts which policy supplies?
Are these the steps by which grave church-

men rise?

Forbid it, Heaven! or should it turn out so, Let me and mine continue mean and low. Such be their arts whom interest controuls: KIDGELL and I have free and modest souls; We scorn preferment which is gain'd by sin, And will, tho' poor without, have peace within,"

The particulars I was able to collect are given in the notes on the above pas sages, and contain some curious circumstances relating to the persons in question; but a further and fuller account of them may now be found in that inexhaustible fund of literary biography, Mr. Nichols's Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, which would have spared me many a laborious research, and will afford to future biographers and editors a never-failing source of the best authenticated facts relating to all persons directly or indirectly connected with the literature of the last century.

By reference to the third volume of that work, your correspondent Robertus will find that he was mistaken in his supposed discovery of Huddleston Wynne at Bristol in 1786, as it appears that he died in 1775; but most probably the person alluded to by Robertus was a son of that unfortunate poet, of whom a very interesting account is given by Mr. Nichols. W. T.

Gray's Inn, Feb. 8, 1815.

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. JOSEPH BRAMAH.

By WILLIAM CULLEN BROWN, M. D, WERE posthumous reputation to be measured by the actual benefit which mankind have derived from the useful inventions of meritorious individuals, the name of few men would be considered as entitled to greater respect than that of the late Mr. Joseph Bramab, the celebrated engineer and mechanist. I do not mean to allege that the labours of Mr. Bramah, however ingenious, give him a claim to rank in the catalogue of such inventive philosophers as Galileo, Torricelli, and Sir Isaac Newton-phe nomena of such rare occurrence in the intellectual world-while I maintain that the numerous highly useful improvements introduced into mechanics by this inde fatigable self-taught genius, were the extent and success of their application in promoting the arts of life duly appre

[April 1,

ciated, ought to perpetuate his name to late posterity.

Mr. Bramah was born in the village of Stainborough, in Yorkshire, on the 2d of April, in the year 1749, O.S. His parents, who were respectable people in moderate circumstances, and who rented a farm on the estate of the Earl of Strafford, as he was the oldest of five chil dren, deemed it advisable to give him such an education as seemed best cal culated to qualify him for conducting an agricultural business. It appears fair to conclude, that it is not to the formation of his mind by such an education, which must necessarily have been very imperfect, but to his untutored native genius alone, that the surprising improvements, in the application of mechanical powers to such a variety of useful purposes, which he afterwards effected, are attributable. No kind of reflection is meant to be thrown on his memory by the mention of this circumstance; a circumstance which, on the contrary, so strongly demonstrates the natural powers with which he was gifted, in common, among others, with the great John Hunter, who, though at thirty years of age he had exercised the trade of a carpenter, after wards became the first physiologist of his day; and the justly celebrated Frank, in, who, when a young man, had been in the capacity of no more than a com→ mon journeyman printer,

At this period one of those accidents, on which the future destiny in life of remarkable characters has been very commonly found to hinge, altered the direction of his mind, together with the mode of living which his father had projected for him.

About the age of sixteen, an incurable lameness of his right ankle, with which he became affected, having disqualified him for the active life of a farmer, he was bound apprentice to a neighbouring carpenter and joiner, who, fortunately for him, proved to be a man of considerable ingenuity.

1

That, however, previously to his being apprenticed to this man he had evinced a strong natural bias to mechanics, is obvious, from his having been in the habit of devoting his entire leisure to various pieces of handiwork, which displayed no small ingenuity. In proof of which, and of his early perseverance, when a mere boy he commenced and finished the construction of two violoncellos and a violin; one of the former was then purchased at the price of three guineas, and among connoisseurs is still

1815.]

Biographical Memoir of Joseph Bramah.

reckoned to be a very correct instrument. The circumstance of the violin, in particular, is mentioned to shew at how very early a period that perseverance manifested itself, which became so prominent a trait in his character in after life; for it was prepared by him from a solid block of wood, after the incessant labour of many months, merely with the help of an axe and such edgetools as he contrived to get formed from razor-blades by a neighbouring smith; who, it may be worthy of remark, afterwards became very useful to him, in quality of principal workman at his extensive manufactories in different parts of the metropolis.

Having completed his apprenticeship with no great opportunity of improvement, he was prompted, most likely, by that restless spirit of ambition, which is the usual concomitant of genius, to go in search of a higher sphere of action, and to encounter objects more worthy of his attention, the conquest of which might redound more to his credit, and prove a stronger incentive to his exertions. He accordingly repaired to London, and, after working some time in the shop of an eminent cabinet-maker there, commenced business in the same line for himself; in which he might have continued long enough to his own great detriment, as well as that of the country at large, but for the fortunate occurrence of the circumstance about to be mentioned. Here I would beg leave to premise that, however the allusion to the very useful invention of which I am about to take notice, may be subject to be ludicrously or sneeringly regarded by the giddy and inconsiderate, it cannot but be esteemed in itself, and altogether independently of the still more important discoveries to which it consequently gave rise, as one which ought to ensure to its author the gratitude of every individual in these realms by whom personal cleanliness, (the boast of Englishmen,) comfort, and health, are held to be, as they unquestionably are, objects of the first consideration. About the present period, being engaged in making some water-closets, which had been recently improved by Mr. Allen, but were left by him still very imperfect, and comparatively inapplicable to gene ral use, he was led, by the opportunity afforded him by confinement, in consequence of a fall, to reflect to what extent the improvement might be made to contribute to the comfort and health of families, provided the objections to which

209

it still remained liable were sufficiently obviated. Having succeeded to his mind in removing the defects in question, he procured a patent, and, hiring a house in Denmark-street, commenced as manufacturer of these commodities, in addition to his business of cabinet-maker in general. It is in the highest degree creditable to him, as a mechanic, and a proof of the simplicity and perfection of this invaluable domestic apparatus, that, in spite of a host of pretended improvers upon it, allured by his unprecedented success and consequent patronage, it has continued, for nearly forty years, to meet the unqualified approba→ tion of the public, without being subject to the slightest alteration. To one or two of the most obnoxious of these interlopers, who thus dishonestly would have defrauded him of the merit and emolument of his invention, he was in justice to himself compelled, however reluctantly and against his natural antipathy to litigation, to oppose that admirable resource of the injured--the power of a jury of his countrymen; from whom, to their honour, he promptly received the redress that was due to him.

The rapid sale of his invention im proved his circumstances so much as to enable him to undertake the manufac ture of the pumps, pipes, &c. required in its construction; which he contrived and arranged with a degree of simplicity and suitableness greatly contributing to the utility and effect of the whole; and, although for some time afterwards he confined himself to the use of the common Lifting Pump, he in no small measure simplified its form, and thereby acquired the merit of affording a pattern to the rest of the trade.

After the completion of this excellent invention, and enjoying the satisfaction of perceiving its universal adoption, at least among those within whose reach its purchase lay, his ever-active mind seems next to have suggested to him the consideration of the fabrication of the locks then commonly in use, and the remedying of their imperfection. Hav ing, with the most persevering industry, investigated the principles on which all preceding locks had been constructed, down to the last improved one of Mr. Baron, he demonstrated the complete fallacy and insecurity of them all, not excepting the last-mentioned one; to the author of which, however, with the candour which is so commonly the characteristic of superior genius, he wil lingly allows all the merit of great inge,

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