Reviews and Notices of Books. 127 
ful: a vast light is, on every side, diffused from small sparks of 
truth, and a huge crop of errors springs from the least root of 
falsehood. In the sciences especially, from slender threads are 
suspended the greatest weights, nor are the least things contemned 
without the greatest damage. As a whole machine perishes and 
becomes unfit for use by the misplacing of one wheel, and a huge 
elephant often perishes by the breach of a little vein; so some- 
times one only notion, which may seem small and barren, if ill 
placed and badly understood, will, from a fruitful offspring of 
consequences, derive upon any science a vast confusion, a gross 
darkness, and a manifold mass of error. Aristotle (who also 
maintains his own accuracy and strict diligence in some most 
minute things) has wisely observed, in the words most worthy of 
notice which are extant in the fifth chapter of his first book de 
Ceelo, ‘Any little wandering is presently increased and multi- 
plied to ten thousand times greater by such as recede from the 
truth,’’ &c., &c. 
Should the reader desire to see other specimens of the copious- 
ness of Barrow, we would refer him to his theological writings. 
They are full to overflowing, but broad and deep as they are full. 
It may seem to be something like an example of the reductio ad 
absurdum to speak, as Barrow did, for eight mortal hours on the 
government of the tongue, it is nevertheless true that his discus- 
sion of that subject fills eight sermons. hat their delivery 
occupied only eight hours is more than we dare affirm. In the 
pulpit, Barrow was wont on occasions to weary his hearers. 
When he preached before the Lord Mayor, he is said to have 
gone on for three hours and a-half. It is maliciously suggested 
that he had not been invited to the dinner which was to follow 
hard upon the sermon, and that he took this ingenious mode of 
revengine himself for the neglect. We do not believe this. It 
was not like Barrow. What we do believe, on the testimony of 
his most intimate friend, is, that he had but one fault—he was a 
little too long in his sermons. Preaching in Westminster Abbey 
on a week day, the attendants finding him still in the midst of 
his subject when the time for showing the cathedral to strangers 
had arrived, set the organ to play against him, and so blew him 
out. Barrow was certainly not a popular preacher. His dis- 
courses were far too massive for ordinary hearers. Nor do we 
imagine that he succeeded much better on secular subjects. He 
began his public career as Professor of Greek in the University in 
1660. He appears to have lectured to empty benches. ‘* There 
I sat,” he says, ‘in the professorial chair like Prometheus fixed 
to his solitary rock, or muttering Greek sentences to the naked 
walls like an Attic owl driven out from the society of all the 
other birds of the air.” And we have no reason to believe that 
his Lucasian lectures proved generally attractive. It must be 
