trous Jerusalem, the former purity of her religion was similarly represented by silver and strong wine, v. 22.

Chap. ii. v. 2. Even shall be, in an after-course of the days, established the mountain of the temple of Jehovah upon the top of the mountains: even it shall be exalted above hills: even, as a river, shall flow unto it all the nations. The site of the temple at Jerusalem was elevated, and called a mountain. Of chap. i. v. 24-25. denounce captivity; 26--27. promise restoration 21-30. describe Nebuchadnezzar's invasion; and 31. represents the destruction of Babylon. What, therefore, should probably be foretold in the commencement of chap. ii. competent readers may discover.

V. 3. Surely from Sion shall go forth instruction; even a word of Jehovah from Jerusalem.' The competent reader of the original may not wish to contradict J. J. in the meaning here and in other places given by him, and long before by many others.

V. 12-19. Surely a day from Jehovah shall be against every one that is arrogant, that he may be silenced: even against every one that is haughty, that he may be humbled: even against all the cedars of Lebanon: even against all the oaks of Bashan: even against all the mountains, the high ones: even against all the hills, the exalted ones: even against every tower, highly raised: even against every mound, strongly fortified: even against all ships of Tarshish: even against every lovely work of design: that may bow down the loftiness of men: even may be humbled the height of mortals : but may be exalted Jehovah alone in that day. Then the idols shall totally disappear.'

The day from Jehovah was the invasion by Nebuchadnezzar. V. 13-16. contain a plain allegory denoting exalted persons. The prophet referred to the idolatry of his countrymen : but J. J. and many others may see the downfal of universal idolatry predicted.

V. 22. Cease ye among yourselves from man, whose breath is in his nostrils. Surely in what is he to be regarded?' may denote, either the great of Jerusalem, the examples of idolatry; or the likeness of man, the idols of silver and gold; or both.

Preparatory to this exhortation, and as a reason why it should be regarded, is the account of the fate of Jewish idols and idolaters in the day of, for, or from Jehovah, the invasion by Nebuchadnezzar. V. 20. In that day shall a man cast away his idols of silver; even his idols of gold, which every one hath made for his private use: that he may bow himself down to moles, even to bats, [21.] after having entered into caves of the rocks,' &c.

‹ A day of Jehovah,' or an extraordinary, or very great day, in the superlative degree, is, chap. xiii. v. 6. also denounced against Babylon: but in the same words the day of Jehovah, or the invasion of Nebuchadnezzar, occurs in Joel i. v. 15. The same event is also termed a day of Jehovah,' Joel ii. 1. 2.-iii. 14. and by other prophets, as Ezekiel xiii. 5. Zephaniah i. 7. A like event is a day of Jehovah,' Obadiah 15. Malachi iv. 5. The prophet Isaiah, or any other, is not to be interpreted only from himself, and much less from the common translations of him. The prophets so constantly refer to Moses,' and copy his expressions, that, while the import of the original terms in the law-giver is conceived only from the common translations, criticism upon the prophets is beginning at the wrong end.

Waltham, Chelmsford, June 21, 1811.

G. S. C.

Critical and Explanatory Notes on the PROMETHEUS DESMOTES of ÆSCHYLUS, with Strictures on the NOTES and the GLOSSARY to MR. BLOMFIELD's Edition.

V. 4.

NO. III.

-τόνδε πρὸς πέτραις

ὑψηλοκρήμνοις τὸν λεωργὸν ὀχμάσαι,

ἀδαμαντίνων δεσμῶν ἐν ἀῤῥήκταις πέδαις.

The curious reader will find, in the British Critic for August,

*If the want of a Classic Moses is doubted, let any one say, why in Numbers ix. 10. the word, which the LXX translate as usual, is entirely omitted in the English translation? The reason will appear, when Moses's use of the word is explained in its place.

some remarks which prove the great antiquity of the punishment of crucifixion; but the author might have expatiated more largely in the subject: I will venture to supply his omissions. Tavernier says, in the Collection of Dr. Harris, vol. 1. p. 820. "Among the Tunquinese, it is a great dishonor to have the head bare, for they shave all criminals, and if any person be found without hair, they apprehend him, and carry him to the governor, who causes him to be nailed to a cross immediately. Ogilby, in his Japan, p. 226, when he is speaking of the Roman method of crucifixion, says that sometimes "the long pole had two sticks nailed across, one above and the other below, on the uppermost of which they made fast their arms, and on the undermost the feet: this last was in use among the Japanners, but, instead of nailing, they tied them, sometimes laying the cross down on the ground, and there raising that and the crucified up together: at other times, they first made the cross fast in the ground, setting three ladders against it, on the middlemost of which the sufferer ascended, being pulled up on both sides by ropes made fast to his hands: sometimes they tie the condemned to a cross-pole by his hands, and then by two ropes with a pulley hoist him up to the top: moreover, others strip them stark-naked as they were born; but the Japanners tie them on two cross-pieces of timber with their clothes on: this custom was also used by the Romans, though but seldom." Ogilby says, in the same place, "The Japanners also torture their crucified after another manner than the Romans, Greeks, Syrians, Persians, Africans, and other people: the Romans and Greeks caused them to be whipped with scourges full of sharp rowels, either tied to a pillar in the court house, or else all the way till they came to the cross: the like relates Philo, that the Roman General Flaccus caused a great many Jews in Alexandria to be nailed to the cross, which had before, in the open court, been miserably whipped." The curious reader will find more on the Japannese method of crucifixion, in the Travels of John Albert de Mandelsoe, and of William Adams, in the Collection of Dr. Harris, Vol, 1. p. 791, and p. 863.: : he may consult also Ogilby's Japan, p. 70. 168. 200.

This last quotation reminds me of an important passage in the 12th c. of Tacitus's Germany, which requires some elucidation: Distinctio pœnarum ex delicto: proditores et transfugas arboribus suspendunt; ignavos, et imbelles, et corpore infames, cœno ac palude, injectâ insuper crate, mergunt: diversitas supplicii illuc respicit, tanquam scelera ostendi oporteat, dum puniuntur, flagitia abscondi. Dr. Hill, in his Work on Latin Synonymes, says under Facinus,

Scelus, and Flagitium : "The opposition between scelus and flagitium is here very strongly marked: crimes of a slighter, though not of a venial nature, were punished openly by the Germans, in order to deter those, who witnessed the punishment, from committing the crimes which led to it: those, again, which they held to be of a deeper dye, they treated in a manner that would have done credit to proficients in the theory of penal law: supposing that even the knowledge of gross crimes might corrupt the mind that was a stranger to them, they punished them in secret, and by that means prevented impure conceptions from becoming familiar to those, in the rigor of whose virtue the state was concerned." But it was not the intention of Tacitus to say that the Germans punished flagitious crimes in secret: there was no more secrecy in the mode of punishing by immersing the culprit in a pond under a hurdle, than there was in the mode of punishing by suspending the offender upon a tree: both were done openly, and in public; but there was this difference between the two punishments, that the offender, who was suspended upon the tree, as we hang criminals upon a gibbet, remained there to warn the passenger against committing the same offence, whereas the criminal, who was .punished by the crates, was punished as rapidly as possible, and his carcase was not exposed, because they wished to bury the whole affair in oblivion, lest the youthful mind should become familiarised to the crime. How remarkably the ideas of the Romans upon the subject of crimes and punishments corresponded to the ideas of the Germans, as they are here explained by Tacitus, will appear by the following quotations.-1. Suetonius, in his Life of Caligula, Book iv. c. 16. says, "Spintrias monstruosarum libidinum ægrè, ne profundo mergeret, exoratus, urbe submovit: what Suetonius means by ne profundo mergerent, will be very obvious, if these words are compared with a passage in Livy, when he is speaking of the punishment of Turnus: Novo genere leti dejectus, ad caput aquæ Ferentinæ, crate supernè injectâ, saxisque congestis, mergerentur. (Book 1. c. 51.)-2. The manner, in which the Romans punished parricide, affords a second proof of this similarity: the person, who was convicted of this crime, was severely flagellated, as we are informed in Dr. Adam's Roman Antiquities, p. 274. was obliged to put wooden sandals upon his feet, was

These are the readings of the Variorum Edition, but for mergeret read mergerent, and for exoratus read exoratas.

2

hooded, as we are told by Cicero in his Tract on Invention, Book 2. c. 50. was sewed alive in a sack, with a dog, a cock,' and a monkey, and was thrown in that state into the sea, or the next take, river, or pond. Tacitus has unfolded the principle of the Roman law in this passage; and I must confess that I prefer the sensible and profound observation of Tacitus to the rhetorical explanation of Cicero in his Speech for Sextius Roscius Amerinus, c. 26.3 We shall see this similarity between the principle of the Roman and the Gothic law in a clearer point of view, if we recollect that in the punishment of parricide, the original law, as it was established by the Twelve Tablets, was this, that the culprit should be sewed alive in a sack, and thrown in that state into the sea, or the nearest lake, river, or pond: that neither the monkey, nor the viper, nor the dog, nor the cock, were put into the sack in the age of Cicero, may be concluded by his silence upon the subject in the passage which has been quoted in the Note from his Oration for Sextus Roscius Amerinus; and this idea is confirmed by another passage in the Tract on Invention, where the whole process of punishment is accurately described: the animals were, as Ruperti shrewdly

Seneca Excerpt. Controv. V. 4., as Gibbon observes in his 44th c. on Roman Jurisprudence, (and the historian might have added Juvenal Sat. viii. v. 214.) also mentions serpents: Modestinus says a viper.

2 Juvenal Sat. 13. v. 156. as Gibbon says, pities the monkey: it is a singular fact that Italy produces no monkies, but, continues Gibbon, “the want could never be felt till the middle of the sixth century revealed the guilt of a parricide: L. Ostius, after the second Punic war, was the first parricide, and P. Malleolus was the first matricide during the Cimbric War: see Plutarch's Life of Romulus, and Livy Epit. L. 68."

3 Nonne videntur hunc hominem ex rerum naturâ subtulisse et eripuisse, cui repentè cœlum, solem, aquam, terramque ademerint; ut, qui eum necàsset, unde ipse natus esset, careret iis rebus omnibus, ex quibus omnia nata esse dicuntur? Noluerunt feris corpus objicere, ne bestiis quoque, quæ tantum scelus attigissent, immanioribus uteremur; non sic nudos in flumen dejicere, ne, cùm delati essent in mare, ipsum polluerent, quo cetera, quæ violata sunt, expiari putantur. Denique nihil tam vile, neque tam vulgare est, cujus partem ullam reliquerint. Etenim quid tam est commune, quàm spiritus vivis, terra mortuis, mare fluctuantibus, litus ejectis? Ita vivunt, dum possunt, ut ducere animam de cœlo non queant; ita `moriuntur, ut eorum ossa terra non tangat; ita jactantur fluctibus, ut nunquam abluantur; ita postremò ejiciuntur, ut ne ad saxa quidem mortui conquiescant.

4 Quidam judicatus est parentem occidisse: ei statim, quòd effugiendi potestas non fuit, ligneæ soleæ in pedes inductæ sunt; os autem obvolutum