though the author soon wrote: "The word sacred is a damper to the dramas. It is tying a millstone round the neck of sensibility, which will drown them both together.... Bishop Lowth has just finished the dramas, and sent me word that although I have paid him the most swinging compliment he ever received, he likes the book more than he can say. But the Bishop of Chester's compliment was the most solid; he said he thought that it would do a vast deal of good, and that is the praise best worth having. Well, I think I have said enough for myself now, as I could treat you with some more fine things from other quarters, and which I believe as little as those who utter them; so there is no harm done on my part at least, for I had neither the guilt of falsehood, nor the weakness of credulity."
No doubt these dramas did good. They were excellent Sunday reading when such literature was scarce; and thus the excellent Jonas Hanway (whose Book of Nature is really beautiful), after sitting down to it in fear and trembling lest undue liberties had been taken with Scripture, had no sooner finished than he carried three or four copies to a boarding school for young ladies, and told the governess it was her duty to see that all the girls studied it thoroughly.
It would be of little use now, for the lack of Biblical research into Eastern manners and customs almost necessarily brings the scenery into the general con-
