The Press. — London, England, 1855-08-18 00:00:00

AUG. 18, 1855. process is used to obtain a material upon which the records of the tribes, the deeds of the chiefs, and the laws of the priests, are in scribed. Stripping the bark off a small tree (the morus papyrispera), they soak, dry, and polish it as the Egyptians did the papyri. The discovery of modern paper supervened upon the use of papyrus. Whether we owe it to the Chinese or not it is impossible to say; butwe find that about the year 1050 the papyrus of Egypt had fallen into disuse, and a species of strong paper made of cotton and other mixed materials was adopted in its place. By degrees the manufacture improved, paper mills moved by water were erected in Italy and in other parts of Europe, and there was a general emulation to produce paper of superior quality. Fuller, whom Mr. Herring quotes, makes some curious observa tions on the subject:— He says—" Paper participates in some sort of the character of the country which makes it : the Venetian being neat, subtle, and court-like ; the French light, slight, and slender; and the Dutch thick, corpulent, and gross, sucking up the ink with the sponginess thereof." He complains that the paper manufactories were not then sufficiently encouraged, considering the vast sums of money expended in our land for paper out of Italy, France, and Germany, which might be lessened, were it made in oar nation. " To such who object," says he " that we can never equal the perfection of Venice paper, I return, neither can we match the purity of Venice glasses, and yet many green ones are blown in Sussex, profitable to the makers, and convenient to the users, our homespun paper might be found beneficial." From the use of cotton that of rags was adopted about the fifteenth century, but for some two hundred years no improvement whatever took place in the mechanical means employed in the manufacture of paper, and it was then only by the public spirit of the Fourdriniers—a name famous and unfortu nate—that the ingenious invention of a Frenchman named Didot was success fully organised and set to work. From that invention, the modern Paper-making machine, we owe everything in our present manufac ture of paper. Need we add the moral to the tale? The Fourdriniers, through their un ceasing efforts to bring the machine to per fection, became bankrupt in '47, and the last surviving partner but a few months since was carried to his grave a comparative beggar ! The opinion of one so qualified as Mr. Her ring is worth noticing upon the subject of the scarcity of rags, and of the possibility of manu facturing paper from other materials. Speaking of the number of experiments tried, he re marks : In the library of the British Museum may be seen a book, printed in low Dutch, containing upwards of sixty specimens of paper, made of different materials, the result of one man's experiments alone, so far back as the year 1772. In fact, almost every species of tough fibrous vege table, and even animal substance, has at one time or another been employed : even the roots of trees, their bark, the bine of hops, the tendrils of the vine, the stalks of the nettle, the common thistle, the stem of the hollyhock, the sugar-cane, cabbage-stalks, wood-shaving, sawdust, hay, straw, willow, and the like. Mr. Herring, however, does not thing favor ably of any of the substitutes proposed fer rags : All that can be said as to the suitableness of fibre in general may be summed up in very few words ; any vegetable fibre having a corrugated edge, which will enable it to cohere in the mass, is fit for the purposes of paper making ; the extent to which such might be applied can solely be determined by the question of cost in its pro. duction ; and hitherto, everything proposed has been ex cluded, as in the case of the plantain or banana, either by 'the cost of freight, the cost of preparation, or the expenses combined. Our author concludes that— For all writing and printing purposes, which manifestly are the most important, nothing has yet been discovered to lessen the value of rags, neither is it at all probable that there will be ; indeed, the value of paper for some time past has considerably declined, while during the most exciting period of last year, the scarcity so much talked of, was, in fact, comparatively trifling. The amount of information contained in this volume is considerable, and upon a sub ject on which very little is known. Moreover, the whole process of modern paper manufac ture is fully explained; and accurate plates of the different machines used help to render the description familiar. An able introduc tion to the volume has been written by Dr. Croly. THE PRESS. The Besefit of Christ's Death. Probably Written by Aonio Paleario. Reprinted in Facsimile from the Italian Edition of 1543; together with a French Translation printed in 1551; from Copies in the Library of St. John's College, Cambridge. To which is added an English Version made in 1548, by Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire, now first Edited from a MS. preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge. With au Introduction, by Churchill Babington, 8.D., F.L.S., Fellow of St. John's College, Cam bridge, and Member of the Royal Society of Literature. London : Bell and Daldy. Ws have copied nearly at full length the title page of this curious volume, and yet we have not exhausted all its contents, of which the two epigraphs are not the least remarkable. Thus the editor prints from the German historian Ranke the following sentence : " Though many thousands of the work on the " 'Benefits Bestowed by Christ' were dis " semmated, not one was suffered to escape : " the book entirely disappeared, and is no " longer to be found "; and to this assertion is appended another from Mr. Macaulay, in his most dogmatic tone :—" The Inquisitors " detected in it the Lutheran doctrine of Jus " tification by Faith alone: they proscribed " it; and it is now as hopelessly lost as " the second decade of Livy." With these hints by way of introduction, the attention of those curious in book-research is sure to be stimulated by such a volume. Our own attention has been drawn to it in consequence of the interest with which we perused the little work published in 1847 by the Religious Tract Society. The Rev. John Ayre (minister of St. John's, Hampstead) is justly pronounced by Mr. Babington to be " the true restorer of the treatise of Paleario." Mr. Ayre printed his version of " The Benefit of Christ's Death " from the old English trans lation ; and in that form it excited deserved attention, partly on account of its cu riosity, and also on account of the uncom mon ability of the eloquent work itself. We could have wished that Mr. Babington had given us a more detailed account of the life of Paleario, as in Mr. Ayre's volume the pre liminary memoir is of considerable interest ; and we feel assured that the name of Paleario will after this publication be far more fami liarly known than it is at present. Mr. Babington thus cursorily sketches the chief incidents in the life of Paleario Antonio dally Paglia was born in or about the year 1500, at Veroli, in the Campagna di Roma, and after studying under eminent masters with great success, passed several years in Rome. He then removed (in or about 15341 to Sienna, where he was made public teacher of Greek and Latin, and lecturer on philosophy and belles lettres. His letters (of which he published four books, and to which accessions have been since made) shew that he was on terms of intimacy with many of the most distinguished men of his day. Among his correspondents were Cardinal Bembo, Pietro Vittorio, Cardinal Sadoleti, Cardinal Maffei, and the Latin Pindar, Benedetto Lampridio. He was also the friend of M. A. Flaminio, to whom he was pecu liarly attached, of Bernardino Ochino, and of Cardinal Pole. His poem on the " Immortality of the Soul," in which he imitates the style of Lucretius, is termed by G.. 1. Vossius a divine and immortal composition ; and his rhetorical exercise " In L Murrenam," which affects to be delivered in opposition to Cicero, as well as other orations, which were written in sober seriousness, and his Epistles, " adeo feliciter exprimunt Ciceronem turn qua dictionem, turn qua numeros," that Morhoff doubts if any one is his superior in Latinity. Being driven from Sienna in conse quence of his freely-expressed attachment to the Reformed doctrines, he was invited to Lucca by the Senate, where he was elected to the office of Public Orator, a post of greater honour than emolument. This seems to have been in 1546. After remaining at Lucca about ten years, he ac cepted a more lucrative appointment at Milan, and became professor of elocution. Being persecuted in this city he meditated flight to another, and was on the point of removing, in 1566, to Bologna. But when Pius V. ascended the papal chair, Paleario and many others became the victims of his intolerance. He was removed to Rome under the custody of Frate Angelo di Cremona, the Inqui sitor, and after an imprisonment of more than three years was suspended on a gibbet, on the 3rd of July, 1570, and afterwards committed to the flames. " When we take into account," says McCrie, " his talents, his zeal, the utility of his writings. and the sufferings he endured, Paleario must be viewed as one of the greatest ornaments of the Reformed cause in Italy." Mr. Babington raises the question as to whether Paleario was really the author of this celebrated treatise. It is melancholy 791 to observe the frequency with which literary doubts are cast upon the authorship of bril liant pieces. We shall not here discuss the controversy about the authorship of this treatise, but we shall record our opinion that the word " probably " might be struck out of the preliminary titlepage in this volume. Not less than three different versions of Paleario's treatise are presented in this vo lume—viz., the Italian original, the French translation of 1552, and the English version by the Earl of Devonshire. The title page of the original stands thus : TRAT TATO VTILISSIMO DEL BENEFICIO DI OIESV CHRIST° CROCIFISSO, VERSO I CHRT STIANI. Venetiis Arid Bernardino de Bindonis. Anno Do. M.D.XXXXIII. And of the title of the French version the following is a copy:— DV BENEFICE DZ lESVS CHRIST CRVCIFTE, ENVERS LES CHRESTLENS. TRADUICT DE VULGATES ITALIEN, EN LANGAGE ~. £IIANcOYE. Venez a moy vote tour qui trauaillez et eater charge:, et is vous soulageray. 15.62. We need not copy the title of the English version of 1548. Unquestionably this work has a strong claim to be classed amongst " the curiosities' of literature. The treatise made a great noise in its time, and up to the present age it has always been supposed to have perished en tirely. How such a work came to be entirely suppressed shows us the amazing activity of the Inquisition. Mr. Babington, in giving the history of the work, says : The number of copies printed was truly astonishing, con sidering the age in which the book appeared : we cannot well estimate their number; but it may be thought that fifty thousand is much more likely to be under the sum total than above it. If any work of that age seemed likely to go down to all succeeding generations it was the " Trattato." Yet how uncertain are appearances! Within a century the book seems to have wellnigh vanished in almost every form : in another century it was believed to be definitely lost And elsewhere he observes : The Inquisitors were resolved not only to punish with death or imprisonment the chief admirers and abettors of the book, but also to destroy, if possible, every copy from off the faze of the earth. The resolution once made, they went to work with incredible energy and with almost miraculous succe4s. Wherever the terrors of the Holy Office reigned, the perniciusiosnan libretto was proscribed. Popes, kings, prelates, and councils conspired together to annihilate it. At Rome, at Venice, at Milan, at Paris, at Ant werp, at Medrd, the " Tratteto " was placed upon the black list, and sometimes under different titles in the same list. All this was done before the close of the sixteenth century. As early as the year 1570 every form in which the book had appeared is doomed : the " Benefizio di Christi) " in all its languages is denounced in the appendix to the Tridentine Index. _ By these vigorous measures, and by the extensive scale on which they were conducted, the Inquisitors appear to have destroyed almost all the copies before the close of the century. In our own country the English translation of 1573 was made from the French version, in consequence, doubtless, of the difficulty of procuring a copy of the original. In the following century the English version alone seems to have been reprinted : and the original appears to have been wellnigh unknown : although, for the sake of security, every form of the " Trattato " was again proscribed by the Inquisitors. Yet there are to be found in our own age and country persons who approve of the Church under whose tyranny such acts of despotism took place. For some singular particulars of the literary history of this work we must refer our readers to the volume. The treatise itself, for the tone of its religion and the vigour of its writing, we hold in the highest estimation. The author was able to seize his subject not only by its strictly religious points, but he possessed also a grasp of thought and power of riveting the general reader often denied to men of subtle faculties. His piety is manly, his views of the all•sufficiency of the Atone ment are almost Lutheran, and the thoroughly Christian character of his religion is stamped on every page. It is particularlv to be observed that in his composition no Italianism of doc trine is to be seen. In his creed there was apostolical plainness and simpheity, and with