Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/137

 Notices of New Books. 127 passage from Aristotle's Rhetoric, which refers to a Nicanor, who cannot be identified (as he assumes) with the Stagirite in Harpocration ; he then adds, "meminit Dinarch. c. Dem. pp. 90 and 92;" a reference which should not have been reprinted, as it is given in the next note of Vale- sius : " Pro 'Ynepidrjs forte At Lvapxos, nam in Dinarchi c. Dem. oratione Nicanoris fit mentio non semel, p. 90." As we now have the passage of Hyperides referred to by Harpocration, such a note as this can only mis- lead. The same may be said of Maussac's note, in which he mentions several Nicanors, one of whom lived under Hadrian, while none can be identified with any of those spoken of by Harpocration.] ' Ch. B. The Bible in the Middle Ages, with remarks on the Libraries, Schools, and social and religious aspects of Mediaeval Europe, by Leicester Am- brose Buckingham ; London, T. C. Newby, 1853, 8vo. pp. 305. [The author of this volume is a layman and a Roman Catholic. De- sirous, it would seem, of winning from us a more favourable estimate of Mediaeval Christianity, he undertakes to prove that one of the most popular objections to it is unfounded and absurd. The following ex- tracts will evince the general animus of his production : " We seek in vain, in the records of mediaeval centuries, for any act of the church, in her councils, tending even indirectly, to prevent or impede the reading and diffusion of authentic versions of the unmutilated scrip- tures," p. 39. In p. 41, the author is still more explicit : " It was not until versions of the Bible, held by the church to be mu- tilated and spurious, had issued from the press, and become disseminated among the people, and false teachers perverting the sense of Holy Writ, had sought to mislead the simple by the citation of corrupted texts of their defective Scriptures in maintenance of their new opinions, that the Church put forth the strong arm," &c. And in p. 42 we are informed distinctly, that Christendom had no experience of this law until " the sixteenth century." Nay, Mr Bucking- ham has on this subject made a strange and very startling discovery. He asserts that Roman pontiffs ultimately took a hint for getting rid of the vernacular translations from Henry VIII. of England, or at least that it was left for this redoubted monarch to impose " restrictions which had no existence under the dominion of the Church." Now we must here join issue with the author, not indeed on points of doctrine, but of fact. It is quite true, that by the statute 34 and 35 Hen. VIII. c. 1, the reading of the New Testament in English was interdicted to women and artificers, prentices, journeymen, servingmen of the degree of yeomen or under, husbandmen and labourers : but the prohibition, as the date itself (1542) would shew, was one result of the ascendancy obtained in Henry's later years by Gardiner and other zealots of the anti-reforma- tion school. To them we owe the " Statute of the Six Articles " (the " whip withe sixe stringes"), which they had carried, in the teeth of a determined opposition, two years before. But even if this point were