29 MAY 1830, Page 16

THE REVIEWER'S TABLE.

1. Dr. Lardner's Cabinet Cycloptedia— 4. Greek Exercises ; or an Introduc- The Cities and Principal Towns of the tion to Greek Composition. By the World, Vol. I. Rev. F. E. J. Valpy.

2. A Grammar or the German Language, 5. Observations on an Eligible Line of

on an entirely New Principle. By a Frontier for Greece as an Independent Medical Student. State. By Lieut.-General Sir Richard 3. Protestant Truths and Roman Catholic Church; with a Preface by the Right Errors ; a Tale. By the Rev. Plumpton Hon. R. Wilmot Horton, M.P. Bidg- Wilson. way.

I. Tins volume of the Cabinet Cyclopeedia contains the concise but picturesque description of about seventy towns in Great Britain and Ireland, the Netherlands, France, and Spain. It is written in a free, animated, and perspicuous style; with good sense, good taste, and competent information. Many of the wood cuts are clever.

2. The "new principle" on which the Medical Student has Oompiled his German Grammar is this : he leaves out all the diffi-

cult parts,—such as the difference in the declension of adjectives when preceded or not by a word which has already taken the sign of the gender and case—such as the use separately or conjoined of the two parts of compound verbs—such as the syntax, contain- mg numberless perplexities for every learner,—and having left out all the difficult parts, he has produced a small grammar almost destitute of rules. It contains the nine parts of speech, duly set forth in a large clear type, just as they may be found in any of the

grammars already compiled ; but they are unaccompanied by one rerkark or one direction, or even one novelty of arrangement, to facilitate the acquisition of the language. The author does not enable learners to conquer the difficulties of the German tongue —he tells them there are none. Notwithstanding these deficien- cies, the Medical Student's Grammar may be useful. It puts into the hands of those routine persons who learn without ever asking why or wherefore, a brief manual of what they are usually in- structed to commit to memory.

3. The reverend author, who dedicates his production to the Bishop of Bath and Wells, intimates to the reader the nature of the work in the following significant piece of writing— "The object of the narrative has been to correct erroneous views of religious character, and to show the influence arising from different sys- tems of belief upon the conduct and affections of two beings united in marriage, in trial and in adversity ; and highly will the author be re- warded if the heart of the Christian answers, that it is a true tale—if, from this illustration of modes of faith and practice, some mind that sought only amusement in the fabulous, may be led seriously to apprehend the excellence, the grace, the importance to us all, of that which is scrip- tural and true."

The object so very definitely pointed out here, the author en- deavours to attain by throwing what POWER calls a "teaspoonful" of crude, superficial, polemical learning, into a narrative of the Leadenhall Street school. The hero of the tale is an Irish Ca- tholic gentleman of large fortune, who marries a Protestant lady; by whom he is converted from his "Roman Catholic errors," after he has escaped hanging at Wexford, and treated his most amiable and virtuous wife with a degree of cruelty, the account of which is disgusting from its improbability, and which would be more dis- gusting if it should turn out that the picture was drawn from life. We see no good purpose that can be served by such a publication.

4. This is a second and much improved edition of these excel- lent Exercises. One superiority which this book possesses above all others of the same class, is that it renders a reasonable degree of industry and attention sufficient anti necessary to enable the student to obtain the translation which he requires ; the cr being such as to steer between the necessity, on one ha, of a constant and fatiguing reference to a dictionary, and the more absurd and more " fatal facility" which is the result, on the other hand, of placing the translation of every word above or below the word to be translated. To this edition are subjoined some exqui- site specimens of the different Greek dialects, extracted from THUCYDIDES, ARISTOPHANES, PLATO, DEMOSTHENES, THEOCRI- TUS, and SAPPHO ; together with the well-known critical canons of PORSON and DAWES, which touch upon and illustrate some of the subtlest delicacies of Greek composition.

5. General CHURCH, who on such a question is the best pos- sible witness, has written a letter to Mr. WILMOT HORTON, his brother-in-law, and which Mr. W. HORTON has published, strongly and pointedly condemning the boundary line chalked out by the Al- lies for Greece. It is difficult to say whether they have been guided by bad faith or by extreme ignorance—ignorance not only ofa polil tical kind, but even of physical geography : it is impossible, how; ever, not to see, from General CHURCH'S statement, that the ar- rangement cannot fail to be most disastrous to the Greeks. Sup- posing the Turks to be put in possession of Patradgik, Carpenitza., and Vrachoii, the General declares—and in this he appeals in part to his own experience—that they can with perfect ease turn the Thel'mopylm on the east, and can descend on Salona or Lepanto, without troubling themselves with Missolonghi, on the west. The intended line also deprives the Greeks of every thing like a seaport to the north of Lepanto ; for Missolonghi is only a roadstead, and the other ports are beyond the Achelous. As to the Aspropota- mus (the Achelous), it is fordable for eight months in the year, and does not present even a shadow of a barrier. The line chosen i by the Allies s so much the more to be deprecated, because the country, for a great way beyond it, is and has been long in the hands of the Greeks, who are thus compelled to give up a defen- sible frontier, which they had already occupied.