listening, the doing and saying all manner of strange things, which usually accompany the dénouement of a love

affair; and which are very pleasant and intoxicating to the parties immediately concerned, rather inconvenient and absurd to the bystanders (especially if they have abjured matrimony, or are past it), and insufferably stale, flat, and unprofitable,

when retailed at third-hand, and committed to paper.

Of the further events of that auspicious day, no details need here be given, for they have nothing to do with the progress of this tale. Suffice it to say, that when, after returning to St. Swithun's for the evening service, the several members of the party took leave of each other, and when, at his sister's

suggestion, Sir Henry, though sorely against the grain, left Mary to recover, as best she could, the flutter and agitation of the most important day of her life, he engaged himself to join the Warden's breakfast table on the following day."

Our admiration of Mr. Paget's volume rises as we proceed with our extracts. Some rubicund farmer, destitute of the instincts of a father and the feelings of a gentleman, might have jested with a young man who had been dancing with his daughter round a Maypole; and, walking home with her afterwards, "lagging behind the rest of the party;" and have said "jokingly," "We w'ont look at the broken shoe ribbon, or the rent in the gown, or the misfortune, be it what it may;" but this would have been plebeian coarseness; whereas Mr. Paget knows how to give grace and elegance to such passages; and to shew how persons of conditionso different to the Clapham "flirting girls and under-bred young men"-should behave in walking home from church. If "Mr. Swamp, the Evangelical Perpetual Curate," has preached too "serious" a sermon, there should be introduced, as a contrast, a model of a clergyman somewhat past middle life, a doctor of divinity," of established name and reputation in the Church," a well-read divine, sound CHRIST, OBSERV. No. 62.

classic, finished gentleman, and so forth, to relieve the mind of the young ladies who walk home with him by mixing his good advice (for Dr. Clinton does give some good advice) with as much as he can recollect of Shakespeare. It is a delightful variety, like a jig on a church organ, for an elderly clergyman to quote the comedy of "As you like it," walking home on Sunday from Church. And then the above cited speech, which in the lips of a farmer would be coarse, becomes delicate and witty when the speaker is Dr. Clinton, and the young lady his daughter has been walking with a young Baronet, whom the reverend father is addressing, comparing his daughter to "Thais in the palace of Persepolis;" and declaring, that after the "broken shoe ribbon or rent in the gown,' " "I shall never be able to trust Mary with you again;" -and this before the Baronet, so far as the father knew, had made any offer of marriage to Mary. Had a farmer "joked" thus, it might have been thought he was asking the young man to marry his daughter; but see what it is to be genteel! "How the joke sparkles! How the wit refines!" And how beautifully elegant the reverend father's appreciation of his daughter's sensitiveness of character, in supposing that something had happened to her shoe ribbon or gown, which only she and the young Baronet were acquainted with, and which prevented her coming into the presence of her father and female friend. And how kind the father's forbearance, "We w'ont look." We congratulate the Baronet on Mr. Paget's inimitable sketch of his reverend father-inlaw's portrait. Oh ye Claphamites, hide your diminished heads in the presence of Dr. Clinton and the Rector of Elford! As for the word "jokingly," it must be a misreading of the printer for "jest

R

teel characters. As for his heroes and heroines at the beer-shop, those who are choice in their reading must refer to his pages for their amenities. Most of them are intended to "point a moral;" especially "Abraham Goodman," the "serious" footman, who sings psalms to lull suspicion while he loosens the bars of his mistress's windows to let in robbers; and who "on the morning of the far-famed Bible Meeting, declared himself too unwell to leave his bed, and accordingly ate, drank, and slept therein for the remainder of the day;" in order that he might be at home at night to pack up the plate and decamp with "Tom Pipes," his colleague. Mr. Paget seems especially to pride himself upon his delineation of this character. Doubtless there are cheats who affect piety to cajole the pious; but we pity the clergyman who can delight in devising such characters; and this not for the sake of exciting indignation at their vile hypocrisy, but in order to elicit scoffs at the principles which they profess to take up. Did the Bible Society teach footman Abraham" (there is a good jest, becoming a Bishop's chaplain, in choosing this Scripture name for his villain) to unscrew bars, and steal plate, and get drunk? Perhaps Mr. Paget sincerely thinks it did; for he informs us, that in consequence of the evangelical sermons of "the Rev. Jeremy Swamp, Perpetual Curate of Berkingholt,'

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Paget ever reads anything more grave than the books out of which he has learned his " slang" dialect ("Pork and piety,' My eyes, wo'nt they stare?" " 'Pug's hole,' "He regularly cleaned out six old cats," meaning cheated six elderly ladies; and the like)-for we cannot suppose he has acquired it by personal intercourse-we would recommend him to read the striking address delivered by Dr. Chalmers, in the year 1815, to the inhabitants of Kilmany, in which he shewed what had been the effect of "evangelical preaching" in a very wicked parish. We wish we had room for more than the following brief extract.

"And here I cannot but record the

effect of an actual, though undesigned, experiment, which I prosecuted for upwards of twelve years among you. For the greater part of the time, I could expatiate on the meanness of dishonesty, on the villainy of falsehood, on the despicable arts of calumny, in a word,

upon all those deformities of character, which awaken the natural indignation of the human heart against the pests and disturbers of human society. Now, could I, upon the strength of these warm expostulations, have got the thief to give up his stealing, and the evil speaker his censoriousness, and the liar his deviations from truth, I would have felt all the repose of one who had gotten his ultimate object. It never occurred to me that all this might have been done, and yet every soul of every hearer have remained in full alienation from God. But the interesting fact is, that, during the whole of that period in which I made no attempt against the natural enmity of the mind to God; while I was inattentive to the way in which this enmity is dissolved, even by the free offer on the one hand, and the believing acceptance on the other, of the Gospel salvation; while Christ, through whose blood the sinner, who by nature stands afar off, is brought near to the heavenly Lawgiver whom he has offended, was scarcely ever spoken of; or spoken of in such a way, as stripped him of all the importance of his character and his offices; even at this time I certainly did press the reformations of honour, and truth,

and integrity, among my people; but I tions having been effected amongst never once heard of any such reforma

them.

"It was not till I got impressed by the utter alienation of the heart in all its desires and affections from God; it was

not till reconciliation to Him became the distinct and the prominent object of my ministerial exertions; it was not till I took the Scriptural way of laying the method of reconciliation before them; it was not till the free offer of forgiveness through the blood of Christ was urged upon their acceptance, and the Holy Spirit, given through the channel of Christ's Mediatorship to all who ask it, was set before them as the unceasing object of their dependance and their prayers; it was not, in one word, till the contemplations of my people were turned to those great and essential elements in the business of a soul providing for its interest with God, and the concerns of its eternity, that I ever heard of any of those subordinate reformations which I aforetime made the earnest and the zealous, but I am afraid at the same time, the ultimate object of my earlier ministrations.

"You have at least taught me, that to preach Christ is the only effective way of preaching morality in all its branches; and out of your humble cottages have I gathered a lesson, which I pray God I may be enabled to carry, with all its simplicity, into a wider theatre, and to bring, with all the power of its subduing efficacy, upon the vices of a more crowded population."

But as Mr. Paget, we suppose, will not condescend to listen to Dr. Chalmers, any more than to "a heathen man and a publican," we exhort him to read the Fathers passim. Or if he prefer Papal authorities, there is a good monition in the Constitutions of Otho, respecting Bishops' Bishops' chaplains, which, though referring to vestments, will apply equally to other things, such as writing books: "Ut possint episcopi alios melius ad honestatem vestium, &c. provideant ut à suis Clericis commensalibus hoc prius faciant observari." It might, however, break Mr. Paget's heart for the Bishop to silence his Pickwickian tales, as he did the Tracts; but books which make men say, "My eyes, wo'nt they stare" to see a Bishop's chaplain write thus, ought not to have been written. The proposed treatise on

for even so "serious" a prelate as "geese" is quite another matter; Bishop Horne, has, in his "Essays and Thoughts," a head devoted to "asses." He says, "There are wild asses in South America; and they have three properties which bear a moral application." The third of these qualities which the Bishop affirms suggest a moral, is, that "they are troublesome neighbours, and make a most horrid noise." He then proceeds to say, that a gentleman kept an ass, which was so troublesome with his noise, that his master caused him to be beaten when he vociferated, in consequence of which the animal was fain to pine away and die, "for want," says the Bishop, "of the liberty of making his own frightful noise." The good Bishop has also a chapter upon "books," the perusal of which may be useful to Mr. Paget, who advertises that he has " has lately published "—that is, within a short space of time-the following volumes, of the same character with that in our hands: "St. Antholin's, a Tale for the Times ;" "Tales of the Village, first series ;" Ditto, second series; Ditto, third series; "Milford Malvoisin ;" and now "the Warden of Berkingholt," and another is promised. Bishop Horne's first remark is, "It is with books as with animals; those live longest, with which their parents go longest before they produce them." He has also another remark under this head of "books," which we might have done well to have looked at before we wrote our review; for Mr. Paget has seduced us into a lighter style than we ordinarily employ. "Sir Peter Lely," says the Bishop, "made it a rule never to look at a bad picture, having found by experience that his pencil took a tint from it." But in all gravity, we deeply lament that any clergyman should think he does God and his Church service by such publications as that in our

hands. If our ample extracts do not justify our severity of remark, we entreat pardon of the author, of our readers, and of One whose judgment is of infinitely greater moment. We might have argued more disquisitionally, but we have at least argued honestly. If Mr. Paget does not really know what he satyrizes under the name of "Evangelicalism," he ought not to have written his book; if he does know, still more ought he not to have written it. If he wished to raise a laugh, he should have chosen a less serious subject; if he wrote with a serious purpose, he should have written very differently. Our conviction is, that the book is levelled against much that is Scriptural in doctrine and holy in practice; and so believing, we dared not use flattering words; amusing ourselves with the tale while we deprecated the moral.

We said, that having to do with a "nibbler," we would fish with a light fly on the shallows of Elford; -but we now bethink ourselves that Elford is on the banks of the Tame, (a river not much noticed, whereas its namesake has risen to renown from its junction with the Isis at Oxford-just as we might have overlooked Mr. Paget's not very "tame" book had he not been the Bishop of Oxford's chaplain) and that it (Elford) derives its name, as antiquaries say, from its being "a ford abounding in eels;" so that we might perhaps with advantage have penetrated beneath the superficial froth, to "sniggle" in the mud; for Mr. Paget's book, theologically considered, is as "muddy' as it is frothy. But it only reached us, and that by the gift of a friend who thought it deserved attention, as we were considering of a subject for our second review; so that we took it up at random, and fished extempore, allowing the line to run off the reel wherever the "antics" (Mr. Paget's word) of the fish

happened to carry it. But the next time Mr. Paget "rides abroad," we trust he will let us know, that we "may be there to see.' We hope also that he will send us his treatise on geese;" for we should not be surprised if he really adopted our suggestion. He will of course have a tempting subject for his dissertation in the dull, "tiresome," "prosy" 'Evangelicals," who have not even the poor wit to say "Bo to a goose;" and he will also have a more vulgar inducement in his publisher's list of new editions, which shews that some men's geese, though they are not swans, yet lay "golden eggs." Should any person surmise that we have written ironically, and that after all we think Mr. Paget's novels very silly, and should not therefore have taken the trouble of noticing them, we will reply in the words of an old proverb preserved by the venerable Camden ("Remains," 1614, p. 303), "As deep drinketh the goose as the gander; one of the meanings of which may be-not to quote a more trite proverb respecting these birds and the garnishing for them-that we are not always to say, "Oh it is only a goose;" as if that were no great matter; for we remember the witty Chamberlain of London's retort, "You say the sense of the City is against me; I am glad of it: for if you poll the sense and I the nonsense, I shall beat you ten to one." Thus, very absurd books may produce powerful effects upon weak minds; (for "quidquid recipitur, ad modum recipientis recipitur;") and may therefore require exposure. But if Mr. Paget should write more largely upon geese, we will give him as a motto for his treatise, the objurgation of Sir Thomas More's wife to her husband when she wished to stir him up to undertake great enterprises: "Will you sit still by the fire, and make goslings in the ashes with a stick, as children