HYPATIA; OR, NEW FOES WITH AN OLD SIR FACE.* IR THOMAS BROWNE compares heresies to the river Arethusa, which loses its current, and passes underground in one place, to reappear in another. He talks, in his quaint fashion, of a certain metempsychosis of ideas, according to which the soul of one man appears to pass into another, and opinions find, after sundry revolutions, men and minds like those that first begat them.' No philosopher has yet arisen fully to follow out the hint of that fanciful old physician to whose egoistic yet genial soliloquizing we still hearken in the pages of the Religio Medici. A cynic might, perhaps, regard Adelung's History of Human Folly as already occupying nearly all the ground embraced by such a study. Has not Shakspeare said 'One touch of nature makes the whole world kin, That all with one consent praise new-born gauds, True, as Shakspeare always is—yet what a fascinating theme does the very rebuke disclose. Such an inquiry into the processes by which antiquity has been thus attired in the show of novelty,-into the history of that mysterious interpenetration of old and new,-into the laws, if laws there be, according to which dead thoughts are periodically raised to life, and the past is summoned to play its part under the freshly-painted mask of the present,-might well task the Hypatia; or, New Foes with an Old Face. By CHARLES KINGSLEY, jun. 2 vols. John W. Parker and Son. VOL. II. B |