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launched by these opposing powers; but the spirit of religion in the country and the love of the Church will be too strong for them all, if only we can resolve to see with our own eyes, to discountenance alarmists, and to vindicate not for the clergy alone, but for the Church, the fair play which is all that she demands. The question between clerical power and lay power is one; that between Church power and State power is another. The former is a question that in this age and country can be attended with little serious difficulty on the side of clerical domination; and we perceive with cordial satisfaction that everywhere the clergy express the desire to see more scope and more power given to the laity, the true laity, of the Church. And the real weakness of their case, in regard to such measures as the Clergy Relief Bill, we take to lie not in the argument upon the merits, but in these three causes: first, that we are still too much given to be sticklers for advantages often unreal, and at best external and secondary, and that we thereby break the force of any appeal made to Parliament on grounds of conscience and religion; secondly, that mutual suspicions hold us back from adopting the generous resolution to act for the Church as a whole, and to trust to her own laws, her own spirit, her own tendencies as a whole for the solution of internal difficulties and the healing and composing of divisions; thirdly, that the judicial system of the Church is unsatisfactory and wants reform, while its legislative system is in abeyance, and is perhaps also unfit to be drawn out of it for accomplishing what the Church requires. Might we presume upon advising those who wage the public strife on her behalf, we should say-Contend only for what is worth contending for; estimate what is worth contending for as, a generation hence, it will be wished that it had now been estimated; seek points of contact with such persons as misapprehension only keeps in the attitude of adversaries; apply first to brother churchmen the rule often and justly recommended for a wider application, of looking more to points of agreement and less to points of difference; give mutual encouragement to mutual trust; and above all, study the means of uniting with the clergy in the bonds of systematic and powerful order the already vast and rapidly growing body of intelligent laymen, now a mere fluctuating multitude, but then to be glorious as an army with banners. When this shall have been done, then, and not till then, will the Church of England fulfil her better destiny, and achieve great acts, not for herself alone, but for the country and for Christendom.

ART.

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By Thomas Gisborne

ART. III.-1. Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society. Vol. IX., Art. XI., On the Failure of Deep Draining,' &c. By Wm. Bullock Webster. London, 1848.

2. Mechi's Experience in Drainage, &c. Third Edition. London, 1848.

3. Essays on the Philosophy and Art of Land Drainage. By Josiah Parkes, C.E. London, 1848.

PINDAR

bequeathed to us the maxim ' Αριστον μεν ύδως, το which the Portuguese have added the equally pithy proverb, 'Water is wealth.' The present state, the early history, and the ancient remains of eastern and southern countries concur in informing us, that the first and most successful efforts of agriculture were directed to an artificial supply of water to the various objects of cultivation. The special promise made to the Israelites was, The land, whither thou goest in to possess it, is not as the land of Egypt, where thou sowedst thy seed, and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs: but the land whither thou goest is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven.' And so our northern and sea-girt isle drinketh the rain of heaven to repletion; immensum cœlo ruit agmen aquarum.' We do not span our valleys with aqueducts, and rib the sides of our hills with superficial courses, to convey adventitious water to our agriculture. On the contrary, we invoke ingenuity to devise, and science and labour to execute, subterranean conduits to relieve our cultivated lands from the excess of water which they receive from the skies. When the agricultural interest congregates for the purpose of mutual condolence or congratulation, their pattern men never fail to declare that draining is the foundation of agricultural improvement-and that, if there be salvation for them, it is to be found in draining. Every here and there a booby exists who says, ' How can you expect grass to grow if you take the water away from it? How in a dry summer?' But he is overwhelmed at once by the rush of the agricultural mind in an opposite direction. Through the length and breadth of the land a crusade has been preached against water. Pipes and collars are the devices of this national movement. This is the piping time of peace.' We have put our necks into the collar, have taken suit and service, and have sworn allegiance to this cause. We find ourselves associated with a very motley crew, who are brought together indeed by some unity of object, which they not only seek to attain by various and incongruous means, but carry on a fierce internal controversy, in which every disputant accuses the plan of his opponent of failure, and boasts largely of his own success. We will endeavour to impart to our

readers

readers the conclusions on which, after some experience, a close observation of the works of those who claim to be authorities in this matter, and a painful and ill-requited attention to the literary and oratorical war which is raging around us, we have determined to base our own practice.

But before we take a prospective view of our craft, we must glance at its early history, and at the various steps and stages by which it has arrived at its present position. Though the ancients for the most part courted water as an ally to their agriculture, they did not hesitate in many cases to encounter it with great energy and perseverance as its enemy. They were not slow to perceive the extraordinary vegetative capacity of those amphibious lands, which are deposited by large rivers within the debateable margin of two elements, of which their agricultural poet says, Huc summis liquuntur rupibus amnes

Felicemque trahunt limum.'

Any person disposed to acquire, at a small expense of time and trouble, a general knowledge of the war which men of old carried on with the marsh and the fen, may consult the first two-andthirty columns of the great work entitled, The History of Embanking and Drayning of divers Fens and Marshes, both in Foreign Parts and in this Kingdom; extracted from Records, Manuscripts, and other authentic testimonies by William Dugdale, Esq., Norroy King of Arms.' This indefatigable man, though a very voluminous writer, scorns any superfluous exordium, and commences his book and the history of antediluvian draining by the following sentence:-That works of draining are most ancient and of divine institution we have the testimony of Holy Scripture.' After a passing notice of the draining of the earth on the subsidence of the Deluge, he proceeds to say, That those nations which be of greatest antiquity, and of chief renown for arts and civility, are also famous for their works of this nature, is evident from the practice of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Græcians, the Romans, and several others of which I shall give instance.' In pursuance of this purpose our author furnishes us with a detail of various works of draining, embankments, and outfalls commenced in Egypt shortly after the Flood, and carried on to the Christian era. Among the illustrious promoters of the art he names Mysis, Sesostris, Sabacon, Psammeticus, Necos, Psanimis, Bocchoris, Darius, Amasis, Alexander, the Ptolemies, Cleopatra, and Augustus Cæsar. He takes a somewhat discursive view of a navigable channel from the Nile to the Red Sea, which was commenced by Sesostris before the Trojan war, and, after several futile attempts by succeeding princes, was completed by a Ptolemy. The various routes by which the traffic of Europe passed

to

to the Indies do not escape his observation; and he settles the track of Solomon's voyage from Eloth to Ophir. For this varied information he cites, among his authorities, the sacred books of Exodus, Kings, and Chronicles, and appeals to the secular testimony of Herodotus, Theocritus, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Josephus, and Eusebius. Having thus happily dispatched Egypt, our author proceeds to Babylon. We learn, on the authority of Herodotus, Pliny, and Strabo, that the drainages of Belus and Gobaris were effected by improved outfalls, whereas their female successors in the art, Semiramis and Nitocris, worked by embankments. Nor are we left ignorant that it was Sir Walter Raleigh's opinion that the reason why there is so little written of Belus, who succeeded Nimrod as the first Assyrian monarch, is that he spent much of his time in disburthening the low lands of Babylon, and drying and making firm grounds of all those great fens and overflown marshes which adjoined to it.' Passing into Greece, our author, who never rashly rejects the miracles of a heathen god or of a popish saint, holds an even hand between Thessalian tradition, which imputes the draining of the lake Bæbeis to Neptune, and the opinion of Herodotus, which inclines to an earthquake; but,' says he, no man can deny it to be a very remarkable work of draining, or that it is now a place of extraordinary pleasantness.' Unless our school boy recollections deceive us, either some Musa Etonensis' or old Latin poet

says,―

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'Ut ferus Alcides Acheloia cornua rupit,
Dum petit amplexus, Deianeira, tuos.'

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We now learn, with reference we suppose to this story, that Achelois roared as a river, and not as a bull, and that the mythical horn broken off by Hercules was one of the river's devious courses; for they which collect truth out of fables say that Hercules, who was generally beneficial, for Eneus his father-in-law's sake, restrained the exorbitant overflowings of the river with banks and trenches, and drained a great part of the adjacent country; and that this was the cornucopia which the poets made to be the emblem of plenty.' We will not drag our readers through the Pompeian Marshes, the Fossa Mariana, or the Fucine Lake. Suffice it to say, that the alternate reclamations and refloodings of these and other Italian swamps are faithfully recorded from the consulate of L. A. Gallus and M. C. Cethegus unto the reign of Theodoricus. For all this we have the usual medley of authorities, commencing with Livy, Pliny, and minor Latin annalists, and ending with the Odyssey, the Iter ad Brundusium, and some inscriptions from a temple at Terracina. We are reminded, moreover, that a Roman consul, who had reduced

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his provinces to a state of tranquillity, was ordered by the senate, 'ne in otio militem haberent,' to employ his legions in winning lands from the sea on the coast of Latium; neither is the employment thought too mean for the legions, though consisting of freemen: a very natural reflection for Norroy King of Arms, being himself a practical drainer; and which he specially commends to the notice of the authorities at the Horse Guards.

For the drainages in the Belgic region our author claims no higher antiquity than A.D. 863. He assures us on the authority of Kilianus, the learned Euredius,' Sermundus, and the edicts of the Pistensian synod, that in 863 Baldwin the First, sonin-law of the Emperor Charles the Bald, commenced the works about Bruges. These works appear to have endured till the year 1169, when-a breach having occurred, the which the Flemings could by no means fill up, neither with wood, nor any other matter, for that all sunk as in a gulf without any bottom'by agreement between Floris, Earl of Holland, and Philip, Earl of Flanders, a thousand men, expert in making of dykes, were sent to stop the breach: who being come to the place, they found a great hole near unto this dam, and at the entrance thereof a sea-dog, that, for six days together, did nothing but cry and howl very terribly. They, not knowing what it might signify, resolved to cast this dog into that hole; whereupon a mad-headed Hollander, getting into the bottom of the dyke, took the dog by the tail, and cast him into the midst of the gulf, with earth and turf after him; so as, finding a bottom, they filled it up, by little and little.' Hence the name Hondtsdam, and the dog in the armorial bearings of the town of Dam.

I now descend to Holland and Zeland,' whence he proceeds to Friesland, Holstein, and Mexico. But we spare our readers even an enumeration of the authors, commencing with P. Bertius de Aggeribus,' and ending with Pierius Winsemius de rebus Frisicis' and the learned Schoneveldeus,' who are cited by this man of singular research in support of scraps of history, quasigeological deductions, moral reflections, and queer anecdotes. At length we are fairly landed on the sea-board of Kent, and find the history of English embanking and draining given, after our author's peculiar fashion, in 832 folio columns. We have waded through them; and hardly know whether to exhibit this feat to our readers as an example or as a warning. We will endeavour to impart to such of them as have not trod the path before us, a general idea of the ore and of the dross which this mine contains; leaving to their own taste the decision whether they will work it further. But we must premise that even those who are acquainted with the Monasticon' cannot read this work without marvelling

at

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