No. 26. VOL. 1.] LONDON, Friday, June 27, 1828. [PRICE 6d.

In closing the first volume of the "THE LION," though all our words have been meant for our readers, we must have one in particular, and in somewhat of a soft, complimentary and subdued tone, such as passes when serious reflection is in action, and impression meant to be made by gravity and seriousness of manner. We would say to each reader: "Well, how, upon the whole, do you like this first volume of "THE LION?" Do you like it well enough to proceed with a second? It is your proceeding to purchase it, and to lend it, and to recommend it, that can make it interesting to us. In proportion as you make it interesting to us by supporting it, shall we make it interesting to you in the reading. As much depends on pecuniary support, as on talent in this matter, for it is a painful drudgery to be toiling mentally against the pecuniary stream.".

We have confessions to make, which are these:-We have sold enough to cover expenses, but not enough to reward the labour thrown into the work. The sale is steady, a little above the point of costs, but not great enough to induce the neglect of any other object for it. Under these considerations, we should certainly suspend it for half a year, were it not a matter of importance, that Mr. Taylor, in his present confined situation, should have a weekly.communication with the public, an importance as interestingly great to the public as to himself. But though the work will be edited under some disadvantages, the principal writers being all absent from the printer, we shall proceed, and leave the printer to do the best he can with it.

We have also to confess, that, we are proud of "THE LION," and feel assured, that it is a matter of political as well as moral Printed and Published by R. CARLILE, 62, Fleet Street. 3 F

No. 26.-VOL. I.

and social importance, that such a work should be continued. It is an extreme point in discussion and public teaching that should not be abandoned.

We confess also, that we have made some slight deviations from our prospectus in the first Number. We have been drawn into circumstances, on which we did not then calculate. We did not then expect the further persecution of Mr. Taylor, and much less that he would have been so Christianly and ruffianly treated on receiving judgment, by the judges and lawyers of the Court of King's Bench. On finding this renewed state of Christian ruffianism and persecution, we confess that we lost the temper which we promised, in our first Number, under other circumstances, to keep. Nor is it fairly to be expected, that we should recover it, until this persecution has died away, and nothing more of the kind be threatened. We pledge ourselves to be hostile to hostility; but as soon as our opponents be pleased to treat our disquisitions and discussions as matters of mutual instruction, we shall recover good temper, that is, soft temper, no hostile feeling, and meet them with the best feelings, for the best of pur

poses.

We therefore request the continuance of all past support, and the endeavour of each friend to circulate this publication in his peculiar circle of acquaintances, or neighbourhood, or connection.

It cannot be said that we have no talent embodied in the work; we presume to boast of more useful talent embodied in this work than in any other periodical extant. We have a clergyman without superstition, in the Rev. Robert Taylor, and a poet without the aid of fiction, in I. W. Imray. We have politics free from personalities, and that treat of nought but principles; and we have morals without defects. We see nothing of the same kind in any other publication. We have also other very able correspondents.

We have published the philosophical drama of “ ALTAMONT," by I. W. Imray, in a separate pamphlet, with a few corrections, for sixpence; and, in short, we shall continue to do all the good we can, in a way that unites our own with the public interest.

LOVE'S LAST LOOK.

AN old domestic show'd the way,
To where the dead Eliza lay;

The house, her temporary tomb,

Was silent in a solemn gloom.

That stillness-which, with ev'ry breath,

We draw, conveys a sense of death,

And intimates that all is fled,

Save love's last vigil,-and the dead.

The matron went my steps before,
Until we reach'd the chamber door,
And then, I motion'd her away,
To bend me o'er Eliza's clay.
As I approached, the sable pall

Waved its dark welcome,-Oh! how all,
That she had said,-that she had done,
Came o'er me; ev'ry welcome gone!
Each gentle look, each fond word spoken
Pass'd through my heart, and left it broken.
'Twas in that chamber, we had met,
How happily, how fondly,-yet-
I may not, never can forget.
And now I stood beside her bier,
To feel she was, and was not there.
With trembling hands, I drew aside
The mantle, and a moment eyed-
The superscription of her years,
And then, I own I did-shed tears.
Scarce twice ten summer suns had fled
The twentieth shone upon her-dead.
Almost unconscious what they did,
My hands removed the coffin's lid,
And slowly as the admitted light
Gave her pale features to my sight,
Methought she never look'd so fair-
So interestingly-as there.

Upon her brow,-and on her cheek,
There was the same mild, loving, meek,
Beauteous expression, as of old;
But when I touched it,-it was cold.
Yet as I gazed; despite of death,
Her bosom seem'd to heave with breath.
I know the world, with erring zeal,
Proclaims, the sceptic cannot feel;
But, life-warm feelings in his breast
Glow, as in all the living rest.
Oh! I that moment would have given
All earth for the one hope of heav'n,
It then, had been most truly sweet,
To deem that we again should meet
In light, and love, I cared not where,
So that Eliza was but there!
Enough, I pressed the extended hand,
Stretch'd not by love's, but death's command,
Impress'd one last kiss on the clay,
Then closing up the 'charnel's prey,
Let down the pall, and stole away.

I. W. IMRAY.

MACKEY'S THEORY.

[We copy the following article from a New York publication, entitled the PARTHENON, No. 1, Vol. 1, Wednesday, August 22, 1927, and introduce it into THE LION, because we would draw Mr. Mackey's attention to Dr. Mitchill's scriptural and scripturist's attempt to invalidate his theory. We can supply sets of Mr. Mackey's works at 14s. per copy, containing several pieces, in addition to that published by Hunt and Clarke.]

COMMUNICATED BY DR. S. L. MITCHILL.

SAMPSON ARNOLD MACKEY has published at Norwich in England, a book of nearly two hundred pages, with several prints, under the title of the Mythological Astronomy of the Ancients demonstrated by restoring to their Fables and Symbols their original meanings. The second edition was published in 1824.

A favourite object of the author is, to reduce the vast chaos of time, as he calls it, measured astronomically for millions of years, while the earth was rolling round the sun for myriads of ages, to regular order or calculation. The diffidence he felt in bringing out a regular theory of time, induced him to seize an opportunity offered by the Rev. C. C. Clarke, in his Wonders of the Heavens, to quote this paragraph: "The tropics must have formerly been forty-five degrees from the equator, to produce such animals and vegetables as we find imbedded in the mineral strata of our country." This liberal statement having been inserted in his first preface, a number of Mr. Mackey's friends were induced to buy Mr. Clarke's book, under a presumption that it agreed in all its parts with Mr. M.'s theory of time. They, however, found there was a wide variance; Mr. C. having endeavoured to explain many natural phenomena upon the hypothesis set up by Sir Richard Phillips, against the theory of Sir Isaac Newton.

The first part of the work is a poem with notes and illustrations, after the manner of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. In this way he attempts to convince his readers that the zodiac, and most of the other constellations, were invented by the Egyptians, at least forty thousand years ago; inasmuch as the celestial signs then agreed with their latitude, agriculture, and commerce.

He adopts the notion of the great Atlantis island having been swallowed by an earthquake about eleven thousand years ago; that it belonged to the Phenicians, who had discovered the West Indian islands and other parts of America, and named them the garden of the Hesperides.

He affirms roundly, that there was a time when the Ecliptic and the Equator coincided; and another time when the Equator was at a right angle with the Ecliptic. The former happened 403,000 years before the days of Callisthenes, the philosopher, contemporary with Alexander of Macedon. The latter occurred since; and from the dreadful havoc of waters, and the tremendous commotion of the elements during that period, he has denominated it the Age of Horror.

The author has made a display worthy of Horne Tooke himself, of his etymological and philological research. The Nine Muses were the proclaim. ing symbols of the niue labouring months in Lower Egypt, where the land was covered during the other three months of the year by the inundation of

the Nile. The three Parca were three images of women set up to proclaim the working of flax. The three Furies were emblems of the three months in which the people of Egypt were employed in gathering and pressing their fruit. The story of Ceres and Proserpine refer to the ripe grain of harvest, and the seed saved for the ensuing crop. Leviathan is the river Nile. Pegasus, Andromeda, and the Swan, are the ships engaged in the commerce of the Euxiue and Mediterranean seas. Niobe was the symbol of the Nile, rising fourteen cubits by the floods, which were represented by her fourteen children, said to have been slain by Apollo, when he dried the land. The legend of Phaeton refers to what he terms the Age of Horror, when the pole of the earth being within the plane of the ecliptic, the sun must inevitably be lost for many weeks. It was the symbol of summer. In the same age, Argus was the symbol of winter; representing the earth covered with snow, and surmounted with a spangled sky.

There are various other interpretations of the ancient mythology, the whole of which is ascribed to the Egyptians. From these inventors they were borrowed by the Greeks. The author treats the latter with high disapprobation, for their ignorance of the true meaning of these mysteries, and their perverseness in distorting their sense in ways that the contrivers never intended turning their genuine spirit frequently into ridiculous nonsense.

In an appendix to this part of his book, the author attempts a mythological explanation of many registers of time made by the Hindus; which, he says, the fanaticism of the missionaries has degraded by the most erroneous epithets. After explaining in his own and peculiar manner how the fables and symbols of the nations surrounding Phenicia were calculated to keep alive in the minds of men, the horrors of remote antiquity, when the pole of the earth was within the plane of the ecliptic, he goes on to show that the Hindu astronomers have done the like in every part of their extensive empire. And by an astronomical operation, known to the Chinese as well as the Hindus, that the sun visited the poles every year, and had been observed to shine six days without setting.

In short, Mr. Mackey, relying upon the exposition he has made of the legends and stories of Egypt, India, and China, as well as of Greece, as referring to celestial phenomena, concludes, that although some of these people reckon in their respective annals many millions of years, he has never been able to trace a higher antiquity of Babylon, or Babel, than four hundred and seventy thousand years! And this remote chronology is deduced from the precession of the equinoxes, and the supposed alteration of the earth's axis during the long series of ages!

His second part is entitled the Key of Urania, the wards of which will unlock all the mysteries of antiquity. In this he labours to engage the persons, characters, and events of the Jewish Scriptures into his mythological interpretation by astronomical aid; particularly the prophecies and visions of Ezekiel, Daniel, and John. Notwithstanding the hatred of the Jews for astronomy, he says the feast of the Passover is confessedly of that denomination; being always kept at the vernal equinox. But when he attempts to explain away the histories of Abraham, Noah, and Moses, by resolving them into astronomical symbols, many of his readers will probably follow him with doubt or denial. Other parts of his researches will in like manner excite