the reach of my observation, were discernible | from his lunar voyage, his first employment agonizing intensities of suffering, abysses of was to disenchant the infuriate knight, on pollution and of guilt, attesting the awful whose deliverance he had been bent when an powers both of endurance and of activity of ill-timed curiosity led him so far a-field. Even minds ejected from the defences, and despoiled so, returning from the solar sphere to which of the narcotics, once afforded them by their the theory of a future life has unexpectedly animal structure. Awakened to a sense of conducted us, we must dissolve the fiction untheir inherent though long-slumbering ener- der which we have thus far proceeded, and regies, they were captives. Exposed to every store the theorist himself to his sublunary life, painful excitement by which the sentient fa- which he is so well able to enjoy and to imculty can be stimulated, they were naked. prove. No longer the imaginary biographers Reading on the face of nature inscriptions till either of his terrestrial or his celestial career, now illegible, they saw in them their own con- but mere contemporary critics, we must exdemnation. Remembering each incident of empt him from all responsibility for so much their former existence, they found in each as a single word of this narrative of his immorfresh aliment for despair. Disabused of the tal existence. It exhibits, with at least no inillusions of sophistry and self-love, truth shed tentional inaccuracy, the substance of anticion them the appalling glare of inevitable light. pations, which, if regarded but as a chapter Interchanging thoughts without the possibility in some new Atlantus, might be borne with of disguise, every foul and malignant desire as indulgently as other Utopian discoveries, diffused among them a deadly contagion. Des- which the world has been none the worse for titute of any separate wants or interests, their contrasting with the genuine but vapid pleabodies could no longer minister to them the sures of this transitory state. That a veil abpoor relief of an alternation of distress. The solutely impenetrable conceals from us the reluctant and occasional spectator of such realities of that condition into which all the woes, I found in faith, and hope, and meek successive generations of men have passed, adoration, the solace which my labouring spi- and into which we are following them, no one rit required-a task commensurate with my will seriously dispute. But neither can it be now elevated powers, though the firmest and denied that to penetrate that dark abyss is at the holiest of mortals, while yet detained in his once a desire which has been felt, and an tenement of flesh, would have been crushed attempt which has been made by every race, and maddened beneath the burden of that fear- nay almost by every individual of our species. ful sight.

In the schools of the world, I had wandered in the endless mazes of fate and free-will, and the origin of evil. An inhabitant of the great celestial luminary, I became aware of relations till then unheard of and inconceivable; between the Emanative Essence and the hosts of subordinate spirits, and of questions thence resulting, of such strange and mighty import, that, prostrating myself before the wisdom and benevolence of the Most High, I was still compelled, in reverential awe, to acknowledge how inscrutable even to my expanded capacity was the thick darkness which shrouds his secret pavilion.

If Scipio had his dream of colloquies after death with the wise and good of all ages, the Esquimaux has his heaven where seal-skins may be procured in placid seas, and undying lamps are fed with inexhaustible supplies of the odorous grease of bears. Mahomet promised his Arabian converts "rivers of incorruptible water and rivers of milk, the taste whereof changeth not; gardens planted with shady trees, in each of which shall be two flowing fountains; couches, the linings whereof shall be of thick silk interwoven with gold, and beauteous damsels, refraining their eyes from beholding any but their spouses, having complexions like rubies and pearls, and fine Nor were there wanting tasks, which sum- black eyes." The stream can rise no higher moned to the utmost height of daring the most than the fountain. Our ideas of immortal good courageous of the inhabitants of the sphere to are but amplifications of our mortal enjoywhich I had been translated. Glorious recom- ments. To sublimate our conceptions of felipense was to be won by deeds such as immor- city, by associating together all innocent and tal beings only could undertake or meditate. not incompatible delights, and by subtracting Ministers of the Supreme, we braved at his from them every alloy of pain, satiety, and bidding the privation of all other joys in the languor, is to create for ourselves the only delight of prompt obedience to his will. We heaven with the contemplation of which hope waged with his enemies fierce conflicts, and can be sustained and activity invigorated. He exposed ourselves to ills, intense during their who carefully surveys the Elysium which reacontinuance, in proportion to the exquisite sen- son or imagination has laid out and planted sibilities of our purified corporeity. Impelled for him in the next world, will acquire far by irresistible compassion, by the cravings of better acquaintance with the "happy gardens" insatiable benevolence, or by the vehement to which choice or fortune has directed him in desire to obtain or to impart tidings affecting the happiness of our own or of other orders of thinking beings, our active powers, with all our resources of constancy, magnanimity, and prudence, were called into habitual exercise; nor were there wanting dignities to be attained, or sceptres to be won, as the meet reward of illustrious achievements.

When Astolpho descended on the hippogriff

this. Judged by this standard, and giving him credit for having made his public confessions with entire candour, the author of the “Theory of a Future Life" may be esteemed a wise and happy man-wise, because he has no fear of acknowledging to himself or to others the dependence of his spiritual on his animal economy, and affects no superhuman disdain of mere bodily gratifications; and happy, because

Christianity is for the daily use of homely people. Precepts affecting all the happiness of this life, and doctrines involving all the interests of the next, are not to be delivered in that honeyed discourse which steeps the soul in self-oblivion. When truth appears amongst mankind in her severe and native majesty, she rejects the services of her accustomed handmaids, erudition, poetry, rhetoric, philosophy and criticism. Eloquence alone attends her, but it is an eloquence of which the mere words are unheeded-a weapon of such edge and temper as to be irresistible in the grasp of the feeblest hand.

his felicity consists in bringing the body into | pursuits with which theology maintains an in that unresisting servitude to the mind, without dissoluble connexion. We are constrained to which freedom and serenity are but empty doubt whether his regrets are as wisely indulged words. Such as is his paradise in the highest as they are eloquently expressed. conceivable degree, such in the highest attainable degree must be his earthly Eden. Dismiss it if you will as a midsummer night's dream; yet must it be confessed that it is such a dream as could visit no slumbers but those of one whose fancy was pure from sensual defilement, and whose intellect had been trained to active exercise and to close self-observation. Or, give the theorist credit for nothing more than having skilfully selected the most alluring possibilities of future good from the many celestial schemes with which the poetry and the poetical prose of all ages abounds, and still it will be true that the choice has been guided by opinions such as every one would wish to adopt, and by tastes which in our better moments we should all desire to gratify. The time subtracted, for such visions, from the scarcely more substantial delights among which we are living, will send us back to the cares of life, not less fitted resolutely to endure them, and to the pleasures of life, not less prepared wisely to enjoy them.

And feeble indeed are many of those which attempt to draw this durindana from the scabbard. Malignity itself cannot accuse our pulpits and theological presses of beguiling us by the witchcraft of genius. They stand clear of the guilt of ministering to the disordered heart the anodynes of wit or fancy. Abstruse and profound sophistries are not in the number of their offences. It is a mere calumny, to accuse Style in literature is like manner in society them of lulling the conscience to repose by any -the superficial index, which all can read, of Syren songs of imagination. If the bolts of ininternal qualities which few can decipher. If spired truth are diverted from their aim, it is the author of these books had cared, or had no longer by enticing words of man's wisdom. been able, to write with ease and simplicity, or Divinity fills up her weekly hour by the grave had he disguised his meaning under spasmodic and gentle excitement of an orthodox discourse, contortions, or had he talked over these grave or by toiling through her narrow round of sysmatters in the tone of a blunt and sagacious tematic dogmas, or by creeping along some humourist, or had he dissolved them in religious low level of schoolboy morality, or by addresssentiment, or flattened them down to the level ing the initiated in mythic phraseology; but of a monotonous orthodoxy; in short, had he she has ceased to employ lips such as those either risen to the graces of nature, or conde- of Chrysostom or Bourdaloue. The sanctity scended to those of affectation, he would have of sacred things is lost in the familiar routine had more numerous and enthusiastic admirers. of sacred words. Religion has acquired a Language in his hands is an instrument of technology, and a set of conventional formulas, wonderful volume, flexibility, and compass; torpifying those who use and those who hear but produces harmonies of such recondite them. Her literature also bears the impress elaboration, that the sense aches for the even of an age in which the art of writing has wellflow of a few plain words quietly taking their nigh proved fatal to the power of thinking; proper places. Felicitious expression is an when the desire to appropriate gracefully has excellent thing in its season; but serve up a superseded the ambition to originate prowhole octavo full of exquisite sentences, and foundly; when the commercial spirit envelopes neither the guest nor the cook himself can and strangles genius in its folds; when demiclearly tell what the repast is made of. In the gods and heroes have abandoned the field; and works of the historian of Enthusiasm, as in the holiest affections of the heart die away in those of Dr. Channing, penury and affluence silence; and the ripest fruits of the teeming of thought are made to look so like each other, mind drop ungathered into the reaper's bosom; that they must be undressed in order to be dis--an age of literary democracy and intellectual tinguished; and while he is making out which is which, the courteous reader is apt to lose his courtesy. In proportion as he is the more profound thinker of the two, the Englishman is the more to be upbraided for the perverse ingenuity which thus mars his own success. Objects so elevated as his, should not have been exposed to such hazard. What those objects are has already been partly explained, but they demand additional illustration.

Secluded from the worlds of business and of literature, but a keen observer of both, and viewing all sublunary things in their bearing on the eternal welfare of mankind, our author mourned over the low estate of theology amongst us, and of those higher intellectual

socialism, in which no bequests are made to remote posterities, and no structures are rising to command and break the universal mediocrity.

From the retirement which he knows so well how to describe and to enjoy, our author casts a mournful gaze round this dreary horizon. Acquainted, perhaps, but too distinctly with the religious parties of his native land-their infirmities and their faults, he longed for the advent of a more catholic spirit, of a more intense and unostentatious piety, and of theological studies animated by some nobler impulse than the hire of booksellers or the praise of ephemeral critics. By expostulation and by example he has endeavoured thus to regenerate

the national character. Nor are the qualifica- | the national character, which might vie with tions which he has devoted to this enterprise those of Olney and of Weston in piety and earof an ordinary kind. Measured by Etonian nestness, in genuine freedom of thought, in and Christchurch standards, he may not be en- the relish for domestic pleasures, and for all titled to a place amongst accomplished scholars; the innocent delights of life, in the filial love but he possesses stores of knowledge which of God, and the brotherly love of man. Learnmight atone, could such guilt admit of expia- ing and logical acumen, and a certain catholition, even for the crime of a false quantity. city of mind, which the poet neither possessed Familiar with the elements, at least, of all nor needed, impart to the works of the essayist physical science, and intimately conversant a charm, without which it is vain, in these with ecclesiastical history, he has explored the days, to interfere in the debates which agitate enigmas of the human heart, even too deeply society. There is a charm, too, even in his disfor his own repose. His bosom yearned, and taste for the pursuits most in request amongst his mind toiled for the happiness of mankind; us; for it springs from the grandeur of the but his labours would seem not to be well sus- ideal excellence by which his imagination is tained by the cheering influence of hope. He possessed. Omniscience, though veiling its loves children, for they are as yet exempt from intimations in the coarse mantle of human the prevailing degeneracy; and the face of na- language, will still emit some gleams of that ture, for it reflects the creative intelligence; radiance which illumines the regions of the and books, for they are the depositories of blessed; and these he would reverently gather human wisdom; and the universal church, for and concentrate. There is in Christianity an it is the ark freighted with the best treasures, expansive power, sometimes repressed but and charged with the destinies of our race. never destroyed; and that latent energy he Man also he loves, but with feelings pensive if strives to draw forth into life and action. not melancholy, and fastidious even when Those mysteries which shroud the condition most benignant. In his many books, there is and the prospects of our race, however inscrunot a tinge of spleen; but they exhibit that dis- table to the slaves of appetite, are not absogust for the follies and the vices of the world, lutely impervious to a soul purified by devout which with some is the aliment of satire, with contemplation; and to these empyreal heights others a fascination alluring them to the very he aspires at once to point and to lead the evils they despise, with a few, amongst whom way. To him whose foot is firmly planted on our author must take his place, at once a sum-the eternal verities of heaven, there belong mons to exertion and a motive to sadness.

motives of such force, and a courage, so un daunted, as should burst through all resistance; and he calls on those who enjoy this high privilege to assert their native supremacy above the sordid ambition, the frivolities, and the virulence of the lower world. The voice thus raised in expostulation will die away, not unheeded by the interior circle he addresses, nor unblessed by a meet recompense; but unrewarded, we fear, by the accomplishment of these exalted purposes. Eloquent as is the indignation with which our anonymous monitor regards the low level to which divine and human literature has fallen amongst us, and mean as is his estimate of the pursuits with which the men of his own days are engaged, a hope may perhaps, without presumption, be indulged, that less fastidious and not less capable judges will pronounce a more lenient sentence on us and on our doings.

Casting off these depressing influences, he has devoted all the resources of a comprehensive understanding, and all the affections of a benevolent heart, to correct the general debasement, and to exhibit a model of those higher pursuits to which he would reclaim his generation. Enthusiasts, fanatics, spiritual despots, sciolists in education-pastors who slumber within the fold, and the robbers who spoil it, form a confederacy, the assailant of which should be encouraged by the gratitude of all good men. If the soul of William Cowper has transmigrated into any human frame, it is that of the historian of Enthusiasm. Not, indeed, that the poet has found a successor in the magic art of establishing a personal and affectionate intimacy between himself and his read- | ers. There is no new fireside like that of Olney round which we can gather; nor any walks like those of Western Underwood, of In the great cycle of human affairs there are which we are the companions; nor a heart at many stages, each essential to the consummaonce broken and playful, whose sorrows and tion of the designs of Providence, and each amusements are our own; nor are we sur-separated by broad distinctions from the rest. rounded by a family group, with tame hares, They whose province it is to censure, and they spaniels, bird-cages, and knitting-needles, as whose desire it is to improve their age, will familiar to us as those of our own boyhood, never find their sacred fires extinct from the and almost as dear,-each in turn reflecting mere want of fuel. History and theory are the gentle, thoughtful, elevated mind of him to always at hand with humiliating contrasts to whom they belonged, in all its vicissitudes of the times we live in. That men have been despondency and hope, of grave wisdom, and better or might be better than they are, has of mirth as light and pure as that of infancy. been true since the first fathers of our race This is the high prerogative of genius, address-returned to their native dust, and will still be ⚫ing mankind at large through the vernacular true as long as our planet shall be inhabited idiom of one land in the universal language of all.

But Stamford Rivers, the dwelling-place of the anonymous writer of these volumes, has given birth to a succession of efforts to exalt

by their descendants. But below the agitated surface of the ocean, under-currents are silently urging forward, on their destined path, the waters of the mighty deep, themselves im pelled by that Power which non may ques

tion or resist. Human society obeys a similar which, in a different age, would have becn influence. Laws as anomalous in appear- consecrated to more splendid, though not perance, as uniform in reality, as those which haps to more worthy undertakings. direct the planetary movements, determine the present state, and regulate the progress of commonwealths, whether, political, literary, or religious. Christianity demands the belief, and experience justifies the hope, that their ultimate tendency is towards the universal dominion of piety and virtue. But it is neither pious nor rational to suppose, that this consummation can be attained by any sequence of identical causes constantly working out similar effects. The best generations, like the best men, are those which possess an individual and distinctive character. A chain of splendid biographies constitutes the history of past centuries. Whoever shall weave the chronicles of our own, must take for his staple statistics illuminated by a skilful generalization. Once every eye was directed to the leaders of the world; now all are turned to the masses of which it is composed. Instead of Newtons presiding over royal societies, we have Dr. Birkbecks lecturing at mechanics' institutes. If no Wolseys arise to found colleges like that of Christ Church, Joseph Lancaster and William Bell have emulated each other in works not less momentous at the Borough Road and Baldwin's Gardens. We people continents, though we have ceased to discover them. We abridge folios for the many, though we no longer write them for the few. Our fathers compiled systems of divinity-we compose pocket theological libraries. They invented sciences, we apply them. Literature was once an oligarchy, it is now a republic. Our very monitors are affected with the degeneracy they deplore. For the majestic cadence of Milton, and the voluptuous flow of Jeremy Taylor's periods, they substitute the rhetorical philosophy, invented some fifty years since, to countervail the philosophical rhetoric of the French Revolution; and put forth, in a collection of essays for the drawing-room, reproofs which the hands of Prynne would have moulded into learned, fierce, and ponderous folios.

In the state of letters, there is no maintaining a polity in which the three elements of power are blended together in harmonious counterpoise. There a monarch infallibly becomes a despot, and a democracy subjugates to itself whatever else is eminent, or illustrious. Divines, poets, and philosophers, addressing millions of readers and myriads of critics, are immediately rewarded by an applause, or punished by a neglect, to which it is not given to mortal man to be superior or indifferent. Inform the national mind, and improve the general taste up to a certain point, and to that point you inevitably depress the efforts of those who are born to instruct the rest. Had Spenser flourished in the nineteenth century, would he have aspired to produce the Faery Queen? Had Walter Scott lived in the sixteenth, would he have condescended to write the Lady of the Lake? Our great men are less great because our ordinary men are less abject. These lamentations over the results of this compromise are rather pathetic than just. It forms one indispensable chapter in the natural history of a people's intellectual progress. It is one of the stages through which the national mind must pass towards the general elevation of literature, sacred and profane. We know not how to regret, that genius has from the moment abdicated her austere supremacy, and stooped to be popular and plain. Mackintosh surrendered his philosophy to the compilation of a familiar history of England. Faithless to his Peris and Glendoveers, Mr. Moore is teaching the commonalty of the realm the sad tale of the woes inflicted on the land of his birth. No longer emulous of Porson, the Bishop of London devotes his learned desire to preparing cheap and easy lessons for the householders of his diocess. Lord Brougham arrests the current of his eloquence, to instruct mechanics in the principles of the sciences which they are reducing to daily practice. Tracts for the times are extorted from the depositories of ecclesiastical tradition, obedient to the general impulse which they condemn, and constrained to render the Church argumentative, that they may render her oracular. Nay, the author of the "Natural History of Enthusiasm" himself, despite his own protests, yields at length to the current, and has become the periodical writer of monthly tracts, where, in good round controversial terms, the superficial multitude are called to sit in judgment on the claims of the early fathers to sound doctrine, good morals, and common sense. Let who will repine at what has passed, and at what is pass

It is impossible to prevent-is it wise to bewail, this change in our social and intellectual habits? During the inundations of the Nile, the worship of the mysterious river ceased, and no hymns were heard to celebrate its glories. Idolatry lost its stay, and imagination her excitement; but the land was fertilized. Learning, once banked up in universities and cathedrals, is now diffused through shops and factories. The stream, then so profound and limpid, may now, perhaps, be both shallow and muddy. But is it better that the thirst of a whole nation should be thus slaked, or that the immortals should be quaffing their nectaring, if they will allow us to rejoice in what is apart in sublime abstraction from the multitude? There is no immediate and practicable reconcilement of these advantages. Genius, and wit, and science, and whatever else raises man above his fellows, must bend to the universal motives of human conduct. When honour, wealth, public gratitude, and the sense of good desert, reward those who teach elementary truth to the people at large, the wisest and the best will devote to that office powers,

to come. If we witness the growth of no immortal reputations, we see the expansion of universal intelligence. The disparities of human understanding are much the same in all times; but it is when the general level is the highest that the mighty of the earth rise to the most commanding eloquence.

But whatever may be the justice of the hopes we thus indulge for future generations, our business is with ourselves. If, as we think,

they are well judging who devote the best gifts of nature and of learning to the instruction of the illiterate, the praise of wisdom is not to be denied to such as write with the more ambitious aim of stimulating the nobler intellects amongst us to enterprises commensurate with their elevated powers.

original thinker. He is rather exempt from fear than animated by ardent courage in announcing the fruits of his inquiries. A great master of language, he is himself but too often mastered by it. He is too much the creature, to become the reformer, of his age. His assiduity to please is fatal to his desire to command. His efforts to move the will are defeated by his success in dazzling the fancy. Yet his books exhibit a character, both moral and intellectual, from the study of which the reader can hardly fail to rise a wiser and a better man. Standing aloof from all vulgar

No strenuous effort for the good of mankind was ever yet made altogether in vain; nor will those of our author be fruitless, though the results may fall far short of his aspirations. The general currents of thought and action can never be diverted from their channels, except by minds as rarely produced as they are won-excitements, heedless of the transient politics derfully endowed. Energy, decision, and a selfreliance, independent of human praise or censure, are amongst their invariable characteristics. To this sublime order of men the Recluse of Stamford Rivers does not belong. Nor can a place be assigned to him among those calmer spirits, whose inventive genius, or popular eloquence, has enabled them from their solitudes to cast on the agitated masses of society seeds of thought destined at some future period to change the aspect of human affairs. He is an independent more than an

and the fugitive literature of his times, and intent only on the permanent interests of mankind, he has laboured to promote them with an honest love of truth, aided by brilliant talents, comprehensive knowledge, and undaunted intrepidity. And thus he has come under the guidance of principles, which no man can cultivate in his own bosom, or earnestly impart to other minds, without earning a reward which will render human applause insignificant, or reduce the neglect of the world to a matter of comparative indifference.

THE PORT-ROYALISTS.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1841.]

ALL religions, and all ages, have their saints; of a steep cleft or hollow, intersecting the motheir men of unearthly mould; self-conquerors; notonous plain across which he has been sublime even in their errors; not altogether passing. The brook which winds through the hateful in their very crimes. If a man would verdant meadows beneath him, stagnates into understand the dormant powers of his own na- a large pool, reflecting the solitary Gothic arch, ture, let him read the Acta Sanctorum. Or, if" too the water-mill, and the dove-cot, which rise high this price of knowledge," let him at least from its banks; with the farmhouse, the deacquaint himself with the legends of the later cayed towers, the forest-trees, and the innumeheroes of the Gallican church. Of all ascetics rable shrubs and creepers which clothe the they were the least repulsive. They waged slopes of the valley. France has many a lovewar on dullness with the ardour of Dangeau lier prospect, though this is not without its and St. Simon, and with still better success. beauty; and many a field of more heart-stirring While macerating their bodies in the cloisters interest, though this, too has been ennobled by of Port-Royal, they did not cease to be French heroic daring; but through the length and. men and French women of the Augustan age. breadth of that land of chivalry and of song, While practising the monastic virtue of silence the traveller will in vain seek a spot so sacred their social spirit escaped this unwelcome re- to genius, to piety, and to virtue. That arch straint, in a body of memoirs as copious as is all which remains of the once crowded mothose which record the splendour and the mise-nastery of Port-Royal. In those woods Racine ries of Versailles. In a series of volumes, of first learned the language-the universal lanwhich the above is the first, the author is about guage-of poetry. Under the roof of that to tell their story in the language (vernacular humble farmhouse, Pascal, Arnauld, Nicole, and erudite) of his country and his times. A De Saci, and Tillemont, meditated those works, rapid sketch of it may be of use in directing which, as long as civilization and Christianity the attention of our readers to one of the most survive, will retain their hold on the gratitude remarkable episodes in ecclesiastical history. and reverence of mankind. There were given He whose journey lies from Versailles to innumerable proofs of the graceful good huChevreuse, will soon find himself at the brow mour of Henry the Fourth. To this seclusion * Reuchlin, Geschichte von Port-Royal. Der Kampf retired the heroine of the Fronde, Ann Genedes Reformirten und des Jesuistischen Katholicismus. vieve, Duchess of Longueville, to seek the 1 ter Band: bis zum Tode Angelica Arnauld. (Reuchlin, peace which the world could not give. Madame History of Port-Royal. The Struggle of the Reformed de Sevigne discovered here a place "tout of Angelique Arnauld.) 8vo. Leipsic, 1839.

and the Jesuitical Catholicism. 1st vol.: to the death

propre a inspirer le desir de faire son salut."