it commodious, year after year, until humour was gratified, or convenience suited.

Such was the course of proceeding;-and what is the defence? From that defence we may at once dismiss the attempt to represent an analogy between Sir W. Scott's flat denials, and the case of an accused person pleading Not Guilty in a court of justice. There is not the slightest analogy or moral similarity between the two cases. The writing of the Waverley Novels was not charged on the author as a crime: were the fact proved against him, the law had no penalty to inflict. But, further, the essence of the negation in the two instances is diametrically and totally different. The denial of a robbery on the part of a culprit before a Judge, is not even supposed to persuade any man that the accused did not commit the

robbery: but the deliberate purpose of the denials on the part of the author of Waverley, was to persuade men that he was not the author. Had he believed that they would have no more persuasive effect than the plea of Not Guilty from the lips of a criminal on trial, he would not have taken the trouble of uttering them.

Of the remainder of the defence it is not more difficult to dispose. A doubtful answer, it is said, would have implied a degrading suspicion that Sir Walter Scott was not duly sensible of the merit of Waverley. Therefore, to prevent such a suspicion, deliberate and persevering falsehood was lawful! Does the conclusion deserve a single word in refutation? Or a doubtful answer would have had, like a direct avowal, the effect of discovering the secret. And what if the secret had been discovered? What was the secret? That a certain person wrote certain novels : a secret of no moment in its results

to any human being unless it were to the author; and to him only because "such was his humour." Therefore, to preserve such a secret, deliberate and persevering falsehood was lawful. Is a word of refutation here necessary? The principle essentially involved in this defence is, That whenever a question is proposed by A to B, which A has no right to require B to answer, B may lawfully use falsehood in reply. Thus, were a person to ask me whether I ever was at a puppet shew, and on some ground of humour or convenience I was disinclined to answer truly, I should be at liberty to deny that I was ever present at one, though I had attended twenty during the preceding year. More serious illustrations of such morality might be framed.

I

In the preceding observations, which it would have been culpable not to put strongly, I would be understood to speak rather concerning the moral topics of the case, than concerning the individual, in various points of view so highly respectable, to whom it has been impossible not to refer. ought too well to remember the warning, "Consider thyself, lest thou also be tempted," to venture to be confident that had I been in the circumstances of the author of Waverley, I should have acted better. With respect to the public, I am anxious that his authority should not lead them into evil. And with respect to himself I am sincerely solicitous that he may re-examine the subject, and under aspects to which he seems not to have paid adequate regard; in a word, that he may fully inquire by the light of Divine revelation what are those principles and that conduct which alone can be acceptable to a God of truth.

X. Y.

1. Archbishop LAURENCE's Book of Enoch.

2. OXLEE's Letters on recent Apocryphal Publications. 3. BUTT's Genuineness of the Book of Enoch investigated.

(Concluded from p. 426.)

IN our last Number, after laying before our readers the literary history of the apocryphal Book of Enoch, and an analysis of the work itself, and shewing that there is no evidence that it was extant before the Christian era, or in the days of the Apostles, we stated various conjectures which have been promulged relative to its authenticity and value; adding, that our own opinion had settled at the lowest point in the scale, and undertaking to prove in a future Number, that the book itself contains internal evidence that it was not written before the middle of the second century after Christ. To the proof of this point we now address ourselves.

We must first, however, shew the inconclusiveness of the argument advanced by Dr. (now Archbishop) Laurence, in support of his opinion, that the Book of Enoch was com.. posed shortly before the Christian era; namely, about the year B. C. 30. The assumption that it must, of necessity, be allowed to have been written before the date of St. Jude's Epistle, we have already disposed of; for though the learned editor says, that this "admits of no question " (p. xxiii.), we must beg permission to appeal from so summary a decision of the very point in dispute. Dr. Laurence's principal argument is drawn from the pretended prophecy respecting the seventy shepherds (from chapter lxxxviii. ver. 95, to chapter xc), divided into succes sive series of thirty-five, twentythree, and twelve. He reckons thirty-five kings of Judah and

Israel to the Babylonish captivity; twenty-three foreign monarchs (that is, four Babylonian, eleven Persian, and eight Macedonian), to the recovery of independence by the Asmonæan family; and twelve native princes, to the reign of Herod -before whose death, A. D. 2 (that is, B. C. 2 of the common calculation), the author of this pretended prophecy must have written, if this interpretation be correct. But Mr. Oxlee has brought forward powerful objections to the numeration of the first series of thirty-five, as only to be made up by counting contemporary sovereigns of Judah and Israel, and by omitting Zimri, Zechariah, Jehoahaz, and Shallum; and he justly observes of the second series of twenty-three, that it is abhorrent to the language of Scripture to give the name of "shepherds" to those princes who overran the land: he proposes, therefore, to interpret the seventy shepherds, of the Jewish heads of tribes who governed the people during the captivity (pp. 111-113). It is manifest, therefore, that no solid argument for the age of this book can be built upon such uncertain ground. Let us look, then, into the book itself for internal evidence of the period in which it was written.

It may be fairly gathered from the astronomical part of the book of Enoch (chaps. lxxi-lxxxi), that it was not written till a considerable period after the Julian reformation of the calendar, that is, till long after the year B. C. 46. To make this clear, we shall give a short outline of these chapters. The PseudoEnoch, with a ridiculous affectation of considerable astronomical science ("explained to him by Uriel the holy angel!"), professes to give an account of the revolution of the sun. This account, in fact, is nothing

tions. He then proposes a correction of these false years (not by introducing an embolimic month at stated intervals in the lunar year, nor by adding five epagomenæ, or supernumerary days, at the end of the luni-solar year, the only methods in use up to the time of Cæsar, but) by lengthening particular months, without reference to the lunations; so that the whole annual period may embrace a solartropical revolution. Now this method being peculiar to the Julian calendar, places it beyond all doubt that the author had that reformation expressly in his view; for though it is true that his months do not correspond exactly to the Julian, and that his year is, by a gross mistake, made to comprise three hundred and sixty-four instead of three hundred and sixtyfive days, yet these errors are to be attributed to his affectation of simplifying and improving the Julian calendar, from which it seems unquestionable that he must have borrowed his ideas. The following passage (chap. lxxxi. 5, 6) most distinctly refers to the inconvenient methods of reckoning the years which were superseded by the Julian principle: "Four [days]," says the writer," are added, and appertain to the four quarters of the year respecting these, men greatly err, and do not compute them in the computation of every age; for they greatly err respecting them; nor do men know accurately that they are in the computation of the year but indeed these are marked down for ever, one [day] in first gate [December], one in third [March], one in fourth September], and one in sixth [June]." Now it appears very improbable that the PseudoEnoch should have had the folly as well as the effrontery to propound his new calendar, as antediluvian revelation from Heaven, within sixteen, or even forty six years from the decree of the Ror an senate; as must have been the case, if Dr. Laurence be right in his conjecture that this work was written about

B.C. 30, or at least before the Christian era. The actual Julian edict on the calendar, would have been too fresh in popular recollection for such a gross pretension of an astronomical revelation from "Uriel, the holy angel," to be tolerated an instant. These facts are infinitely more consistent with the supposition (which we think we can presently establish) that this forgery was perpetrated about two centuries after the Julian reformation : a period, neither too near that event for the imposture to be at once manifest; nor too remote from it for a Jew to be tempted to claim the honour of the discovery for his nation, with whose legends it well coincided. Selden (De Anno. Civ. Vet. Jud.) mentions a Hebrew tradition, that the children of Issachar ascended up to the firmament, and brought down solar and lunar computations for the use of man! The Book of Enoch asserts that the angel Barkayal taught the observers of the stars, Akibeel taught signs, Tamiel astronomy, and Asaradel the motion of the moon! Why then should Julius Cæsar be allowed to have the merit of the new calendar, when sufficient time had elapsed to render it safe to ascribe it to Uriel? The least interval which can be well allowed for the safe advancement of such a claim, brings us into the second century of the Christian era; the period in the course of which the Book of Enoch is for the first time quoted (so far as we have any evidence), and which, also, was "particularly fruitful in Apocryphal productions," as Carpzov has well observed. (Carpzov, Crit. Sac. p. 2. c. ii.)

A still more direct proof that this spurious book was not written till after the date of St. Jude's Epistle, exists in the pretended prophecy of the " ten weeks." (chap. xcii.) In this prophecy (as Dr. Laurence has himself justly observed), each mystical day is to be taken as including one hundred years, and consequently each week for seven hundred years; and the whole period of the world's existence (" ten weeks")