“My dear
Milman,—I received your letter here yesterday, having
come hither to see the savants” (the British Association) “in their
glory. I squeezed in in the evening, and found Buckland amusing, with puns and conundrums about the
ichthyosauri, an assembly of nearly 2000 Christians, male, female, young and
old—horrid humbug, but the newspapers will give you enough of it. I shall
be at Rokeby, in Yorkshire, in another week, and, as there is a good library
there, shall begin and think again of business. As the Murrays are both out of town, I need not write
about anything to Albemarle Street; but I wish you would
find the exact title of a book called something like ‘Origines Biblicæ,’ lately
published by a Mr. Beke, of London, which
I heard much spoken of by a clever man I met a week or two ago. Mr.
Beke, it seems, has discovered that the Mityraem”
(Mithraim?) “of the Pentateuch is not Egypt, but Arabia Petræa, and
my friend appeared to think he had established many points of his argument. I
can’t believe that the universal tradition could
have been wholly wrong on such a matter; but pray, look at the book and
consider it along with Arundel, who is,
| 104 | LIFE OF J. G. LOCKHART. |
“I have heard nothing of the last Quarterly Review, except from yourself and Murray, whose intelligence is that he has rarely sold so many copies of a Number, and that pleases him. I thought and think the Number a bad one, all but your own article, and that on Bérard. It is the radical vice of a certain acute mind1 that it really is cursed nil admirari, and therefore I must try, as far as possible, to keep it at work in such affairs as French politics and French memoirs.
“My wife unites with me in earnestly hoping that Mrs. Milman may soon shake off the relics of her disorder.—Ever sincerely yours,
