The style now noticed long disgraced the writings of our divines; and we see it sometimes still employed by some of a certain stamp.  Matthew Henry, whose commentaries are well known, writes in this manner on Judges ix.:—­“We are here told by what acts Abimelech got into the saddle.—­None would have dreamed of making such a fellow as he king.—­See how he has wheedled them into the choice.  He hired into his service the scum and scoundrels of the country.  Jotham was really a fine gentleman.—­The Sechemites that set Abimelech up, were the first to kick him off.  The Sechemites said all the ill they could of him in their table-talk; they drank healths to his confusion.—­Well, Gaal’s interest in Sechem is soon at an end. Exit Gaal!”

Lancelot Addison, by the vulgar coarseness of his style, forms an admirable contrast with the amenity and grace of his son’s Spectators.  He tells us, in his voyage to Barbary, that “A rabbin once told him, among other heinous stuff, that he did not expect the felicity of the next world on the account of any merits but his own; whoever kept the law would arrive at the bliss, by coming upon his own legs.”

It must be confessed that the rabbin, considering he could not conscientiously have the same creed as Addison, did not deliver any very “heinous stuff,” in believing that other people’s merits have nothing to do with our own; and that “we should stand on our own legs!” But this was not “proper words in proper places.”

ORIGIN OF THE MATERIALS OF WRITING.

It is curious to observe the various substitutes for paper before its discovery.

Ere the invention of recording events by writing, trees were planted, rude altars were erected, or heaps of stone, to serve as memorials of past events.  Hercules probably could not write when he fixed his famous pillars.

The most ancient mode of writing was on bricks, tiles, and oyster-shells, and on tables of stone; afterwards on plates of various materials, on ivory, on barks of trees, on leaves of trees.[7]

Engraving memorable events on hard substances was giving, as it were, speech to rocks and metals.  In the book of Job mention is made of writing on stone, on rocks, and on sheets of lead.  On tables of stone Moses received the law written by the finger of God.  Hesiod’s works were written on leaden tables:  lead was used for writing, and rolled up like a cylinder, as Pliny states.  Montfaucon notices a very ancient book of eight leaden leaves, which on the back had rings fastened by a small leaden rod to keep them together.  They afterwards engraved on bronze:  the laws of the Cretans were on bronze tables; the Romans etched their public records on brass.  The speech of Claudius,