both of excise and custom. It was
published under the protectorate, but many copies had not been disposed
of ere Charles II. ascended the throne. Dr. Castell had dedicated the
work gratefully to Oliver, by mentioning him with peculiar respect in
the preface, but he wavered with Richard Cromwell. At the Restoration,
he cancelled the two last leaves, and supplied their places with three
others, which softened down the republican strains, and blotted
Oliver's name out of the book of life! The differences in what are now
called the _republican_ and the _loyal_ copies have amused the curious
collectors; and the former being very scarce, are most sought after. I
have seen the republican. In the _loyal_ copies the patrons of the work
are mentioned, but their _titles_ are essentially changed;
_Serenissimus_, _Illustrissimus_, and _Honoratissimus_, were epithets
that dared not shew themselves under the _levelling_ influence of the
great fanatic republican.

It is a curious literary folly, not of an individual but of the Spanish
nation, who, when the laws of Castile were reduced into a code under the
reign of Alfonso X. surnamed the Wise, divided the work into _seven
volumes_; that they might be dedicated to the _seven letters_ which
formed the name of his majesty!

Never was a gigantic baby of adulation so crammed with the soft pap of
_Dedications_ as Cardinal Richelieu. French flattery even exceeded
itself.--Among the vast number of very extraordinary dedications to this
man, in which the Divinity itself is disrobed of its attributes to
bestow them on this miserable creature of vanity, I suspect that even
the following one is not the most blasphemous he received. "Who has seen
your face without being seized by those softened terrors which made the
prophets shudder when God showed the beams of his glory! But as He whom
they dared not to approach in the burning bush, and in the noise of
thunders, appeared to them sometimes in the freshness of the zephyrs, so
the softness of your august countenance dissipates at the same time, and
changes into dew, the small vapours which cover its majesty." One of
these herd of dedicators, after the death of Richelieu, suppressed in a
second edition his hyperbolical panegyric, and as a punishment to
himself, dedicated the work to Jesus Christ!

The same taste characterises our own dedications in the reigns of
Charles II. and James II. The great Dryden has carried it to an
excessive height; an