i tion is pleasant and entertaining, nor can we most slightly impeach its accuracy. ART. 45. A Letter to the Right Hon. Henry Addington, Chancellor of the Exchequer, &c. on the Establishment of parochial Libraries, for the Benefit of the Clergy. By a Kentish Clergyman. Svo. 1s. 6d. Rivingtons. 1802. The worthy author proposes a plan to the minister, which, in the present national embarrassments, is not, we fear, likely to occupy his attention. His wish is, that in every parish there should be a library, under the care of the resident clergyman. The expense, for the whole kingdom, he has calculated at little more than half a million. The advantages are manifest. Both preacher and people would receive continual improvement; and, as the selection of these books is to be vested in the bishops, there cannot be a danger of useless or improper writings being introduced into such parochial libraries. ART. 46.-Elements of War: or, Rules and Regulations of the Army, in Miniature: shewing the Duty of a Regiment in every Situation. By Nathaniel Hood, Lieut. sewed. Debrett. 1803... 12mo. 75. These Elements are remarkably neat and perspicuous. The obser vations are highly proper and well supported; and the whole is well calculated for the improvement of younger officers. ART. 47.-A Letter to the Proprietors of East-India Stock, respecting the present Situation of the Company's Affairs both abroad and at home; in Answer to the Statements given in the latter Part of the third Report of the special Committee of the Court of Directors respecting private Trade, dated the 25th of March, 1802. 8vo. 3s. sewed. Hatchard. 1802. Singularly opposite are the opinions respecting the real state of the Company's finances, and the mode by which their trade should be conducted. A fugitive pamphlet has not, however, a sufficient claim on us, to call for a minute investigation of the subject. The author reasons with apparent candour and propriety, and seems to be sufficiently acquainted with his subject; but, were we to notice his work particularly, we could point out the sources of some errors which would greatly alter the result of his calculations. CRITICAL REVIEW. AUGUST, 1803. ART. I.-The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society: a Poem, with philosophical Notes. By Erasmus Darwin, M.D. F.R.S. &c. 4to. 11. 5s. Boards. Johnson. 1803. THERE is a peculiarity in the views, the deductions, and the style, of Dr. Darwin, which renders it impossible to misname the writer, and produces a stronger and more appropriate character than we remember to have met with in the productions of any modern author whatever. In direct contradiction to what has uniformly occurred to us in antiquity, and what we have generally noticed in later times, poetry and philosophy appear throughout the whole of his compositions to be sworn and irreconcileable foes, for ever striving for the mastery, and consequently producing an indeterminate, discordant, and oftentimes incomprehensible effect, adverse to the merit, and inconsistent with the pretensions, of each other. Had he been less of the poet, his philosophy would have been more accurate-had he been less of the philosopher, his poetry would have been more admirable. Even in the mere article of dialect, the language of the one, when exhibited either in the gaudy tissue of tropes and figures, or the recondite dress of technical phraseology, is reciprocally gross jargon to the other. Boldness of fancy, exquisite polish of metre, and elaborate attention to rhymes, may unquestionably combine in such an antagonist association: but poetry has a language of its own; and, if philosophy be the subject to be conveyed by it, this is the only language which must be employed. We have heard that many branches of philosophy have been rendered popular, from Dr. Darwin's mode of treating them: his poetry, we doubt not, has made multitudes of sciolists, though we question whether it have ever produced one proficient: his prose may have engendered many poetasters, without acquainting a single reader with any of the requisites of metre. These observations relate to the doctor's style. As to his views and his deductions, they are, as we have already noticed, equally his own. Never was the synthetic system carried to a more extravagant extreme. Other philosophers have generally CRIT. REV. Vol. 33. August, 1803. begun with the study of nature, and have derived their system from the facts and phænomena which she exhibits: Dr. Darwin, on the contrary, appears to have founded his system in the first instance; and all his investigations into nature are urged with a view of making her bend to the support of his own opinions. With this perpetual bias on his mind, he regarded the world before him but in one individual point of view; and hence all his publications possess such an extraordinary monotony and sameness, that he who reads the one reads the whole. The Botanic Garden and the Zoonomia, the Phytologia and the Temple of Nature, are the same unvaried work served up in so many new forms, sometimes communicated through the medium of technical verse, and sometimes of poetic prose. His theory of organic life does not differ essentially from that of M. Blumenbach; and both are derived from an intermixture of the system of Buffon with that of Brown, to which is added a peculiar superstructure of his own. Dr. Darwin was strictly a materialist all his principles, and the application of those principles, depend upon the truth of the atomic philosophy, to every monad of which he attributes almost as ample powers as Democritus himself, and very considerably more than were admitted by Epicurus, or his very elegant and enlightened pupil Lucretius. It is true, that, in the beginning of his Zoonomia, he intimates the possibility of pure spirit, and its connexion with a material frame: but it is an intimation totally repugnant to his own hypothesis, which derives the mind and the body equally from material molecules, and attributes to different organisations of such molecules all the faculties of motion, perception, consciousness, intelligence, reminiscence, love and hatred, virtue and vice, which appertain either to the body or the soul; and he seems merely to have been betrayed into such a concession, from the desire of palliating the charge of extreme heterodoxy, and of courting popularity at the expense of consistency. : The botanic system of Linnæus is a most happy and convenient arrangement; and, though solely intended for the purposes of the natural historian, is eminently calculated for the service of poetry. Dr. Darwin studied it when a young man, and, with all the enthusiasm of Claudian, devoted it to this very service; and what he at first regarded figuratively, he at length persuaded himself to believe as fact. Hence, from the division of plants into males and females, he supposed them to be actuated by sexual sensations:-by degrees he attributed to them all the hopes and fears, all the pleasures and pains, of human love--he ascribed to them the organs of womb, lungs, nerves, and brain-he conceived them to be actuated by an intelligent principle, and, in their amours, to be at times modest and reserved, and at times bold and libidinous-in some instances false and coquettish, in others constant and faithful-now guilty of adultery, and now even of Onanism. This our readers may regard as in some measure out-heroding even the licentiousness of poetry: it might, however, have been tolerated in his Botanic Garden; but, when afterwards brought forwards and supported in the plain dress of prose-when openly avowed as his serious belief in two bulky quartos on the Laws of Organic Life, and still more minutely developed since, and with supplementary observations, in another quarto, entitled Phytologia-the temperate and sober inquirer can scarcely regard the author in any other light, than as either hallucinated himself, or purposely endeavouring to hallucinate the world. But we must return to the work immediately before us, in which the same doctrines, and carried to the same degree of absurdity, are merely re-produced in a new form, and in many instances confirmed by the very same examples. The poem is a posthumous publication; yet the whole appears to have been fully prepared for the press anterior to the decease of the author; in consequence of which, the preface, which is short, is of the doctor's own composition, and dated Priory, near Derby, January 1, 1802. The poem itself is founded on the allegoric scenery exhibited in the Eleusinian mysteries, which our author conceives to have related to the philosophy of the works of nature, together with the origin and progress of society, and to have been explained, by the hierophant or priestess, to the ini-. tiated. It is divided into four cantos, which treát progressively of the production of life-the re-production of life-the progress of the mind-and the origin of society. The exordium is highly beautiful, and laboured with uncommon success. By firm immutable immortal laws Impress'd on nature by the Great First Cause, How Love and Sympathy with potent charm Four past eventful ages then recite, And give the fifth, new-born of Time, to light; Swell with deep chords the murmur of their woes; Immortal Love! who ere the morn of Time, You! whose wide arms, in soft embraces hurl'd And youths and virgins chant the living lay.' P. 3. In this extract, the address to Love loses no small degree of dignity, from the use of the colloquial pronoun you, instead of the more elevated and appropriate thou; and the conceit of requesting that the poet's verses might be written with the arrows of Cupid is rather adapted to the meridian of modern Rome than of London, and would have been more in character in the pages of Guarini than of Dr. Darwin. To speak the truth, however, Love is the chief and almost the only subject of the work. In his youthful years, the doctor never could have been a more complete votary of Venus. The poct enters the sublime and spacious temple of Nature: he implores the goddess to instruct him in the origin of things, and she, kindly consenting, appoints the priestess Urania to this purpose. Her figure is thus elegantly delineated: Her snow-white arm, indulgent to my song, Thin folds of silk in soft meanders wind Down her fine form, and undulate behind; The purple border, on the pavement roll'd, Swells in the gale, and spreads its fringe of gold.' r. 17. The hierophant commences her course of lectures on natural philosophy as follows: "God the first cause!-in this terrene abode Ere time began, from flaming chaos hurl'd Rose the bright spheres, which form the circling world; |