THE
Repository
OF
ARTS, LITERATURE, COMMERCE,
Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics,
For JANUARY, 1809.
The First Number.
The suffrage of the wise,
The praise that’s worth ambition, is attain'd
By sense alone, and dignity of mind.
INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF THE USEFUL AND POLITE ARTS.
At the commencement of a new year,[1] it seems natural to pause, and look back upon the period which has just been completed, to review the more important events, to examine their causes and consequences, and to form some kind of estimate of their relation to ourselves individually, or as they tend more generally to affect the aggregate of human happiness. Feelings of a similar nature lead us, at the commencement of a new work, which embraces so wide a circle, to trace the map of literature, to examine the progress of discovery in the arts
- ↑ The computation of the beginning of the year has been varied at different periods of our history, and was never legally settled for civil affairs till the parliamentary alteration of our calendar. From Bede’s time down to the Norman conquest, the constant practice was, to compute the year from Christmas-day. After the conquest, Gervaise, a monk of Canterbury, mentions several different ways of computation during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; some from the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Circumcision, and others from the Passion of our Lord: but he chuses to fix the commencement of the year to Christmas-day; “because,” says he, “we compute the age of men from their birth.” Matthew Paris and others prove this uncertainty for many years afterwards. T. Walsingham,
No. I. Vol. I. B
