To which I say: Thanks for help!
I predict that Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts will somewhat resemble the Pilgrim's Progress in their fate. Written for the cottage, and long remaining in their original position, they will become classical works of their kind. Most assuredly this will happen if my assertion cannot be upset, namely, that they contain the first specimens of fiction addressed to the world at large, and widely circulated, in which dramatic—as distinguished from puppet—power is shown, and without indecorum.
According to some statements I have seen, but which I have not verified, other publishing bodies, such as the Christian Knowledge Society, have taken the same liberty with the names of the dead as the Religious Tract Society. If it be so, the impropriety is the work of the smaller spirits who have not been sufficiently overlooked. There must be an overwhelming majority in the higher councils to feel that, whenever altered works are published, the fact of alteration should be made as prominent as the name of the author. Everything short of this is suppression of truth, and will ultimately destroy the credit of the Society. Equally necessary is it that the alterations should be noted. When it comes to be known that the author before him is altered, he knows not where nor how nor by whom, the lowest reader will lose his interest.
A TRIBUTE TO WILLIAM FREND.
The principles of Algebra. By William Frend.[[441]] London, 1796, 8vo. Second Part, 1799.
This Algebra, says Dr. Peacock,[[442]] shows "great distrust
of the results of algebraical science which were in existence at the time when it was written." Truly it does; for, as Dr. Peacock had shown by full citation, it makes war of extermination upon all that distinguishes algebra from arithmetic. Robert Simson[[443]] and Baron Maseres[[444]] were Mr. Frend's predecessors in this opinion.
The genuine respect which I entertained for my father-in-law did not prevent my canvassing with perfect freedom his anti-algebraical and anti-Newtonian opinions, in a long obituary memoir read at the Astronomical Society in February 1842, which was written by me. It was copied into the Athenæum of March 19. It must be said that if the manner in which algebra was presented to the learner had been true algebra, he would have been right: and if he had confined himself to protesting against the imposition of attraction as a fundamental part of the existence of matter, he would have been in unity with a great many, including Newton himself. I wish he had preferred amendment to rejection when he was a college tutor: he wrote and spoke English with a clearness which is seldom equaled.
His anti-Newtonian discussions are confined to the preliminary chapters of his Evening Amusements,[[445]] a series of astronomical lessons in nineteen volumes, following the moon through a period of the golden numbers.