BOLTON CORNEY.
Petition for the Recall from Spain of the Duke of Wellington (Vol. iv., p. 233.).
—ÆGROTUS asked if a copy of the petition to the above effect from the Corporation of London to the Crown can be found, as it is a droll historical document, which should not sink into oblivion; he jumps at the conclusion that it does exist, but I think is mistaken. Through the kindness of a friend who is in the Corporation, I have had the journals searched, and have not been successful in finding any address to the above tenor. There are abundance congratulating the Prince Regent on the successes of the Duke, but none of censure. I have likewise ascertained that some of the oldest servants of the City feel quite sure that no such address was ever carried. If ÆGROTUS can give me any grounds for his belief, or anything likely to aid my inquiry, I will renew the search.
E. N. W.
Southwark.
Miscellaneous.
NOTES ON BOOKS, SALES, CATALOGUES, ETC.
If any doubt could exist as to the value of the Germania of Tacitus, as an invaluable contribution to the history of all the Teutonic races, a glance at the Appendix to Klemm's Germanische Altherthumskunde, in which that author has enumerated not only the best editions and translations of the Germania, but also the most important dissertations to which it has given rise, would at once dispel it. The scholar and the antiquary of this country may therefore be congratulated on the fact of Dr. Latham having prepared an edition of it, which has been issued under the title of The Germania of Tacitus, with Ethnological Dissertations and Notes. Although "the work," to use Dr. Latham's own words, "is rather a commentary upon the geographical part of the Germania, than on the Germania itself—the purely descriptive part relating to the customs of the early Germans being passed over almost sicco pede,"—yet our readers will have no difficulty in estimating its importance, when we inform them that the Ethnological Dissertations and Notes which accompany the text may be said to embody the views, (ofttimes indeed dissented from by Dr. Latham,) of Grimm and Zeuss, and the learning with which those distinguished men have illustrated the subject. Indeed, Dr. Latham, who sets an example of openly acknowledging his obligations to other scholars which we should be glad to see more generally followed, expressly states, that whether the work before us took its present form, or that of a translation with an elaborate commentary of Zeuss's learned and indispensable work, Die Deutschen und die Nachbarstämme, was a mere question of convenience.
If the story that we have heard be true, namely, that one of the most learned and active members of the episcopal bench did, at a late clerical meeting, hold up a copy of Whitaker's Clergyman's Diary and Ecclesiastical Directory, and pronounce it to be a little book so full of useful and invaluable information as to be indispensable to every clergyman, it is clear that the work is beyond all criticism.
The Family Almanack and Educational Register for 1852, contains—in addition to full particulars of nearly a thousand public schools, colleges, and universities, and a list (containing upwards of a thousand) of the principal private schools in the kingdom,—a vast amount of miscellaneous information (including for the first time the Statutes of the Irish University) and statistical tables, and so forms a volume which no person interested in the great question of education can at all do without.