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and not to have the promotion of Education made a pretext for an extension of the Test Act, and for levying a vexatious rate that shall compel their contributions to parochial institutions over which they can have no control, and from which they will derive no benefit.

Dr. Butler's Letter refers to certain clauses in Mr. Brougham's Bill for improving the administration of Endowments, and is occupied in shewing that his scheme of converting Grammar Schools into Schools for teaching English reading, writing and accounts,-in other words, Parish Schools, would frustrate the intention of the Founders, and be a serious injury to the cause of learning. Dr. Butler writes well, and argues soundly. There is no fear that his voice will not be heard. There are scholars and gentlemen enough in the British Senate to secure from invasion the rights of learning, if not the rights of conscience. There was a time when the English Dissenters would have felt their interests equally secure in the hands of senators allied to them, not by party, but by conscientious principle, and not less competent than zealous to defend them. Dissent, except in the equivocal form of Socinianism, has long disappeared from among the higher classes; but the steady adherence of the Whigs to the grand principles of constitutional liberty, civil and religious, has hitherto commanded the attachment, and merited the confidence of that large portion of the nation who recognise those principles as their only safeguard. But this attachment is not to the men: it is an allegiance to the cause. Mr. Brougham may cheaply estimate the support, as he may despise the creed, of those he would term Sectaries and Methodists. But we earnestly recommend him to pause before he makes a deliberate sacrifice of their interests and his own principles. Should he persevere, we cannot but believe that he will draw down the rebukes of his own political friends: for how can they yield him their support, without such a virtual dereliction of their most distinguishing principles as would involve a forfeiture of character, and leave them, deserted by the nation, a powerless and disappointed faction?

Art. II. An Account of the Arctic Regions, with a History and Description of the Northern Whale-fishery. By W. Scoresby, jun. F. R.S.E. Illustrated by twenty-four Engravings. 2 vols. 8vo. Edinburgh. 1820.

PARTLY influenced, perhaps, by the marvellous and Munchausen-like engraving of a whale playing at battledore and shuttlecock with a boat and its crew, we took up these volumes with very low expectations of gratification. They have somewhat of a clumsy look about them; and it was an awkward circumstance, that we had it strongly in recollection that Capt. Ross's publication, notwithstanding its formidable apparatus of silver icebergs, carmine snow, leaping bears, and Esquimaux beauties, was a very dull and unprofitable book. We had, in fact, begun to suspect, how important soever to the cravings of science, Arctic and Antarctic discoveries might be deemed, yet, that there hung over those foggy and frost-bound regions, some spell fatal to all attempts at giving vivacity to subjects and scenery so gloomy and unvaried. Mr. Scoresby has, however, pleasantly disappointed us, although his work is not very dexterously put together, and a more judicious selection and compression of his materials, would have given them a more general interest. There was no pressing necessity for the allotment of considerable space to the repetition of statements contained in books so easily accessible as the volumes of Egede, Crantz, Coxe, and Barrow; and a few introductory pages might have communicated an ample proportion of such facts, dates, and references as were necessary to prepare the uninformed reader for the subsequent chapters. There is, beside this, a quantity by no means small, of matter very susceptible of abridgement; and it would have been altogether advantageous to the popularity of the work, had it been, as might easily have been done, comprised within the limits of a single substantial volume. Nor was it necessary to enhance the expenses of publication by the two ill-judged hors d'œuvres prefixed by way of frontispieces; one representing an ineffectual endeavour to invert a ship damaged by the ice, and the other, a boat thrown keel upwards into the air by a whale. We have not the smallest doubt of their scrupulous accuracy, but they have too much the air of a bait; they have little value as illustrations, and are by no means of extraordinary merit as specimens of art. We have now, we believe, pointed out all the defects of any consequence that we have discovered in the work; and so highly do we think of it on the whole, and so much have we been interested by it, that we should have thought it quite unnecessary to mention them but with the view of suggesting hints for the improvement of a second edition.

If that opportunity be not afforded, we shall attribute the failure entirely to the accumulative system adopted in the first.

The Polar regions have, at all times, since the extension of geographical knowledge, been the object of eager curiosity; but various circumstances of situation, both positive and relative, have contributed to give us a much more intimate and profitable connexion with the Northern, than with the opposite extremity of the globe. Independently of the difference in point of proximity, the Arctic Pole can be approached nearer by several degrees than its antipodes, though, from recent discoveries, it seems probable that our knowledge of the latter is likely to be considerably increased. After the brilliant discoveries of Vasco de Gama and Christoval Colon had awake the attention and stimulated the enterprise of commercial adventurers, it was suggested that shorter routes might be found to the regions of wealth by pursuing a Northerly navigation. In this direction, three questions presented themselves for solution. Was the communication practicable by the North-east ?-Or by the Northwest? Or might it not be possible at once to traverse the polar sea? The North-easterly course has been at different periods investigated, and, we believe, completed; the earlier and partially successful attempts having been made chiefly by English navigators, the more extensive discoveries being subsequently effected by Russian voyagers. This communication is, however, clearly useless for commercial purposes, since the impediments are such as to make it impossible for a vessel to complete the navigation, supposing it indeed fairly practicable, in a less time than five or six years. But, though the enterprises of the different nations of Europe have not been successful in obtaining here a shorter route to the Pacific, they have resulted in opening two advantageous channels for commerce, the Spitzbergen fishery and the Archangel trade.

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The possibility of reaching the North Pole by sea, is one of those questions which we do not feel the slightest appetite for discussing. Daines Barrington collected a considerable mass of questionable authorities to prove that the 83rd, or even the 84th parallel of latitude, might be occasionally accessible; and other ingenious speculators have calculated on the chance of a pleasant trip across an open polar sea. Since Capt. Parry has sailed over Sir John Ross's Croker mountains,' we shall be rather shy of affirming the impractibility of impossibilities; but we may at least venture to assert that every well attested fact is directly in the teeth of the feasibility of a transpolar navigation. The North-west passage seems to have been the favourite object with the more enlightened class of adventurers; and perhaps there is not another chapter in the great history of naval enterprise, that records the names and exploits of better seamen,

Baffin,

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or of more consummately skilful and daring men. Frobisher, Davis, Hudson, and recently Parry, have displayed in this difficult and perilous quest, knowledge, intrepidity, and perseverance, unsurpassed in the annals of voluntary effort and endurance. It excites a still greater surprise and admiration, that the earliest and most successful ventures were hazarded in vessels which would now be rejected as altogether unfit for á distant voyage; in small barks scarcely adequate to the stowage of the provisions and stores necessary for a far less exposed and complicated navigation. Mr. Scoresby is, indeed, of opinion, that very large ships are not well adapted to the dangerous service of the northern seas, since they lose in strength and tenacity more than they gain in tonnage. The discoveries of Baffin were made by him in a vessel of only 55 tons; Hudson afterwards navigated the same bark; and Davis sailed in mere cockleshells of 50, 85, and 10 tons. But the grand secret of their fearlessness was, trust in God: they encountered the dangers of the Icy Sea in the full conviction that Providence was at their helm; and as their little sea-boat danced on the foam of the tempest, or subsided into its furrow, their unshaken reliance was on the all-seeing eye and the all-directing hand of the great Preserver. It is with great pleasure that we cite from Mr. Scoresby's first volume, the following manly and judicious

comment.

Another observation which must be made by every reader of the voyages of our old navigators, and which must be particularly gratifying to those who consider religion as the chief business of this life, is the strain of piety and dependence on Divine Providence which runs through almost every narrative. Their honest and laudable acknowledgments of a particular interference of the Almighty, in working out deliverance for them in times of difficulty and danger; and their frequent declarations, expressive of their reliance upon Providence, for assistance and protection in their adventurous undertakings, are worthy of our imitation. Thus, while our modern voyagers are much in the habit of attributing their most remarkable deliverances to "luck," "chance," and "fortune," those of old evidenced certainly a more Christian-like feeling under such circumstances, by referring their deliverances to that Great Being from whom alone every good thing must be derived. They only who have a similar dependence on Providence, and who have been occasionally in trying situations, can duly appreciate the confidence and comfort which this belief is calculated to afford under the most appalling circumstances.'

After being the subject of great vicissitudes in general opinion, and appearing to be at last decided in the negative by the observations of Sir Jolin Ross, the existence of a Northwest passage from Baffin's bay to the Pacific, seems to be satisfactorily established by the subsequent voyage of Capt. Parry. We are, however, released from the present consideration of this

question, by our expectation of a speedy opportunity of communicating the substance of the better conducted enterprise of the latter. New efforts are in preparation. Capt. P. has accepted the command of the expedition; and Lieut. Franklyn is pursuing the same object by land, so that we may at length hope for a final solution of this interesting inquiry. Mr. Scoresby seems to be an advocate for the last mentioned mode of investigation, and even goes so far as to suggest the expediency of attempts to reach the Pole by travelling over the ice. It is, however, obvious, that this proposal takes many things for granted, which are at least doubtful: the level continuity of the ice, the non-occurrence of land, with a multitude of subordinate particulars, present themselves for verification, before this appalling journey could be undertaken in earnest.

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Mr. Scoresby's account of the Arctic regions was originally intended to include the whole of their circumference; but Iceland and Greenland having obtained the recent notice of Mr. Henderson, Sir George Mackenzie, and Professor Giesecké, be has excluded those divisions from his survey. But of such tracts as have fallen under his own observation, he has given clear, vivid, and interesting descriptions, accompanied with such anecdotes and illustrations as his own experience and the authentic information of others had supplied him with. In describing the seven icebergs,' he introduces the circumstances of a providential escape from the effects of a tremendous avalanche from the summit of the seaward edge of a glacier. His boat was rowing towards the base of the frozen precipice, with the intention of passing along it, when he saw an immense mass detach itself from the brow of the cliff, and shivering into countless fragments, strike the waves into foam and tempest. Purchas, in his' Pilgrimes,' relates the particulars of a melancholy catastrophe occasioned by a similar event. A vessel, in 1619, had been driven on shore by the setting in of the ice from the sea, and while the crew were using their strenuous endeavours to get her off, a large frozen mass was precipitated from an adjacent berg, and nearly crushed with its shattered ruins the stranded ship. Her foremast was carried away, her mainmast broken, and her bowsprit sprung; three of her men were killed, and others wounded.

Spitzbergen and its islands,

⚫ with some other countries within the Arctic circle, exhibit a kind of scenery which is altogether novel. The principal objects which strike the eye, are innumerable mountainous peaks, ridges, precipices, or needles, rising immediately out of the sea, to an elevation of 3000 or 4000 feet, the colour of which, at a moderated istance, appears to be blackish shades of brown, green, grey, and purple; snow or ice in striæ or patches, occupying the various clefts and hollows in the sides of

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