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Untitled Review, The Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany, vol. 48, no. 2 (March 1850), pp. 331–2.
Anonymous
On The Christian Examiner, see selections #49, #82, and #83. As this piece shows, even religious magazines could recommend Hume’s History, although — like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall — it needed to be read with “cautious watchfulness.”
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Messrs. Phillips, Sampson, & Co. have completed the publication of their valuable library edition of Hume’s History of England, unabridged, by the publication of the sixth volume, which contains a carefully prepared Index to the whole work. They were led to this undertaking by the success of their edition of Macaulay’s History, the best and cheapest that has appeared in this country. Their edition of Hume may now be purchased on fair paper and in good binding at a price less than the cost of a single volume of it, when the History first appeared in England. It is evident that only a very large sale can remunerate the publishers in such an undertaking. There is a charm in those Tory pages, which gives the work a claim to a place in every library, and the literary public should show an appreciation of the risk which publishers venture, when they offer sterling works at a price which rivals in cheapness the paper-bound novels and trash of the day. The publication of Hume is now followed by Milman’s edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The work will appear in six volumes, two of which have been already issued. Mr. Milman has translated and copied nearly all the notes of M. Guizot upon Gibbon’s text, and these, together with the English editor’s own careful and valuable comments, give us this great work in a form which completes its value, and neutralizes its risk. Gibbon’s History never can be superseded. Its wealth of learning, its felicities of style, its vivid pictures and masterly generalizations, will insure it readers, let who may rewrite the annals of declining and falling Rome. The scattered sarcasms and innuendoes, unfavorable alike to Christianity and to morality, which, with all their humor and adroitness, made Gibbon’s work unsafe for some readers, are rendered harmless by the cautious pen of Milman. We cannot but commend these works to all who will read them with that cautious watchfulness which they required.
The same publishers have issued nine numbers of their splendid edition of Shakspeare [sic], in which they give away gratuitously a whole play, with full notes and illustrations, in each number, and charge but twenty-five cents for a steel engraving of its heroine. They also have in press two works with the following titles: — “The Life and Religion of Mohammed. Translated from the Persian, by Rev. J. L. Merrick, a Missionary of Persia during eleven years”; a work which received the high commendation of the Oriental Society, before which it was read. “The Atheism of France,” by Alphonse de Lamartine; written for the purpose of showing the people of France why they have no better success in their attempts to sustain a republican government.