150 CRITICAL NOTICES OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. 



nounce the name of Bacon,) * impeached for receiving bribes from 

 the suitors in his court. And yet notwithstanding the notoriety of 

 all these disgraceful events, not to say a word of the divorce of Lady 

 Essex, the murder of Overbury, the pardon of his murderer, and 

 the elevation of Villiers, whose public and private conduct when 

 first minister of the crown is synonymous with all that is absurd 

 or execrable, has Hume the hardihood to mate the assertion just 

 quoted. That man then, to our thinking, must be made up of irre- 

 concilable contradictions, who after the records of these transac- 

 tions can affirm, that Burnett's is a judgment uttered by prejudice, 

 when he so emphatically said in speaking of James, " It is certain, 

 no king could die less lamented, or less esteemed than he was."* 



M. R. S. L. 



CRITICAL NOTICES OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. 



A Lecture delivered at the Opening of the Chertsey Literary and 

 Scientific Institution, January 4th, 1838 ; by the Rev. Robert 

 Jones, D.D., M.R.S.L., Vicar of Bedfont, and Vice-president of 

 the Institution at Staines : 8vo, London, 1838, pp. 38. 



With their small heads and little minds paralyzed by the virulence 

 of a senseless and shameless vanity, there may be giddy sciolists who, 

 from the profundity of their shallowness, will wish to disparage the 

 style and objects of Dr. Jones' Lecture, by whispering to " birds of 



had laid upon French wines. His guilt must have been very manifest ; or 

 else the voice of the whole house of peers would not have been against him. 

 Sir Fulk Greville, for the Chancellorship of the Exchequer gave £4000 to 

 Lady Suffolk and Lady Somerset Birch, Negociations, 320. 



|[ The fairest diamond, says Howell, may have a flaw in it, when alluding 

 to this great man's fall by corruption ; but how familiar must that practice 

 have been, when " the master of wisdom" could offer this plea in mitigation 



of misconduct : " I hope I shall not be found to have the troubled fountain 



of a corrupt heart, in a depraved habit of taking rewards to prevent justice ; 

 however I may be frail, and partake of the abuses of the times." — See Ba- 

 con's affecting letter to the king, in his works, vol. ii, p. 589. 



* History of his oivn Time, vol. i, p. 2'J. 



