O that our hours were spent,
Among the sons of men,
To praise the Omnipotent,
Amen, yen, and Amen!
The ludicrous passages are not many in number. The following is one which Pennant first presented to the world; being the soliloquy of Jonah within the whale's belly; taken from "The Flowers of Zion:"—
Here apprehended I in prison ly;
What goods will ransom my captivity?
What house is this, where's neither coal nor candle,
Where I nothing but guts of fishes handle?
I and my table are both here within,
Where day neere dawned, where sunne did never shine,
The like of this on earth man never saw,
A living man within a monster's maw.
Buried under mountains which are high and steep,
Plunged under waters hundreth fathoms deep.
Not so was Noah in his house of tree,
For through a window he the light did see;
Hee sailed above the highest waves a wonder-,
I and my boat are all the waters under;
Hee in his ark might goe and also come,
But I sit still in such a straitened roome
As is most uncouth, head and feet together,
Among such grease as would a thousand smother.
I find no way now for my shrinking hence,
But heere to lie and die for mine offence;
Eight prisoners were in Noah's hulk together,
Comfortable they were, each one to other.
In all the earth like unto mee is none,
Far from all living, I heere lye alone,
Where I entombed in melancholy sink,
Choakt, suffocat, &c.
And it is strange that, immediately after this grotesque description of his situation, Pegasus again ascends, and Jonah begins a prayer to God, conceived in a fine strain of devotion.
BROWN, James, a traveller and scholar of some eminence, was the son of James Brown, M. D. who published a translation of two "Orations of Isocrates," without his name, and who died in 1733. The subject of this article was born at Kelso, May 23d, 1709, and was educated at Westminster School, where he made great proficiency in the Latin and Greek classics. In the year 1722, when less than fourteen years of age, he accompanied his father to Constantinople, where, having naturally an aptitude for the acquisition of languages he made himself a proficient in Turkish, modern Greek, and Italian. On his return in 1725, he added the Spanish to the other languages which he had already mastered. About 1732, he was the means of commencing the publication of the London Directory, a work of vast utility in the mercantile world, and which has since been imitated in almost every considerable town in the empire. After having laid the foundation of this undertaking, he transferred his interest in it to Mr Henry Kent, a printer in Finch-Lane, Cornhill, who carried it on for many years, and eventually, through its means, acquired a fortune and an estate. In 1741, Brown entered into an engagement with twenty-four of the principal merchants in London, to act as their chief agent in carrying on a trade, through Russia, with Persia. Having travelled to that country by the Wolga and the
