temperament, a jolly Protestant father confessor, and this attracted him to the side of the laughing muse. Yet he abounds in quiet, beautiful touches both of poetry and pathos. Burke had, according to Mr. Rogers, little or no wit, although possessing a boundless profusion of imagery. To this we demur. His description of Lord Chatham's motley cabinet; his picture, in the "Regicide Peace," of the French ambassador in London; his description of those "who are emptied of their natural bowels, and stuffed with the blurred sheets of the 'Rights of Man;'" his famous comparison of the "gestation of the rabbit and the elephant;" his reply to the defence put in for Hastings, that the Hindoos had erected a temple to him ("He knew something of the Hindoo Mythology. They were in the habit of building temples not only to the gods of light and fertility, but to the demons of small-pox and murder, and he, for his part, had no objection that Mr. Hastings should be admitted into such a Pantheon")-these are a few out of many proofs that he often exercised that most brilliant species of wit which is impregnated with imagination. But the truth is, that Burke, an earnest, if not a sad-hearted man, was led by his excess of zeal to plead the causes in which he was interested in general by serious weapons, by the burning and barbed arrows of invective and imagination, rather than by the light-glancing missiles of wit and humor. Jeremy Taylor, with all his wealth of fancy, was restrained from wit partly by the subjects he was led through his clerical profession to treat, and partly from his temperament, which was quietly glad, rather than sanguine and mirthful. Some writers, again, we admit, and as Mr. Rogers repeatedly shows, vibrate between wit and the most melancholy seriousness of thought; the scale of their spirits, as it rises or sinks, either lifts them up to piercing laughter, or depresses them to thoughts too deep and sad for tears. It was so with Plato, with Pascal, with Hood, and is so, we suspect, with our author himself. Shakspeare, perhaps, alone of writers, while possessing wit and imaginative wisdom to the same prodigious degree, has managed to adjust them to each other, never allowing either the one or the other unduly to preponderate, but uniting them into that consummate whole, which has become the admiration, the wonder, and the despair of the world.

Mr. Rogers, alluding to the astonishing illustrative powers of Jeremy Taylor, Burke, and Fuller, says finely, "Most marvellous and enviable is that fecundity of fancy which can adorn whatever it touches, which can invest naked fact and dry reasoning with unlooked-for beauty, make flowerets bloom even on the brow of the precipice, and, when nothing better can be had, can turn the very substance of rock itself into moss and lichens. This faculty is incomparably the most important for the vivid and attractive exhibition of truth to the minds of men." We quote these sentences, not merely as being true, so far as they go, but because we want afterwards to mark a special inconsistency in regard to them which he commits in a subsequent paper.

We have long desired, and often expressed the desire, to see what we call ideal geography-i. e., the map of the earth run over in a poetic and imaginative way, the breath of genius passing over the dry bones of the names of places, and through the link of association between places and events, characters and scenery, causing them to live. Old Fuller gives us, if not a specimen of this, something far more amusing; he gives us a geography of joke, and even from the hallowed scenery of the Holy Land, he extracts, in all reverence, matter for inextinguishable merriment. What can be better in their way than the following? "Gilboa.-The mountain that David cursed, that neither rain nor dew should fall on it; but of late some English travellers climbing this mountain were well wetted, David not cursing it by a prophetical spirit, but in a poetic rapture. Edrei. The city of Og, on whose giantlike proportions the rabbis have more giant-like lies. Pisgah. Where Moses viewed the land; hereabouts the angel buried him, and also buried the grave, lest it should occasion idolatry." And so on he goes over each awful spot, chuckling in harmless and half-conscious glee, like a schoolboy through a morning churchyard, which, were it midnight, he would travel in haste, in terror, and with oft-reverted looks. It is no wish to detract from the dignity and consecration of these scenes that actuates him; it is nothing more nor less than his irresistible temperament, the boy-heart beating in his veius, and which is to beat on till death.

Down the halls of history, in like manner, Fuller skips

along, laughing as he goes; and even when he pauses to moralise or to weep, the pause is momentary, and the tear which had contended during its brief existence with a sly smile, is "forgot as soon as shed." His wit is often as withering as it is quaint, although it always performs its annihilating work without asperity, and by a single touch. Hear this on the Jesuits: Such is the charity of the Jesuits, that they never owe any man any ill-will-making present payment thereof." Or this on Machiavel, who had said, "that he who undertakes to write a history must be of no religion;" "if so, Machiavel himself was the best qualified of any in his age to write a history." Of modest women, who nevertheless dress themselves in questionable attire, he says, "I must confess some honest women may go thus, but no whit the honester for going thus. That ship may have Castor and Pollux for the sign, which notwithstanding has St. Paul for the lading." His irony, like good imagery, often becomes the shorthand of thought, and is worth a thousand arguments. The bare, bald style of the schoolmen he attributes to design, "lest any of the vermin of equivocation should hide themselves under the nap of their words." Some of our readers are probably smiling as they read this, and remember the DRESS of certain religious priests, not unlike the schoolmen in our day. After commenting on the old story of St. Dunstan and the Devil, he cries out, in a touch of irony seldom surpassed, "But away with all suspicions and queries. None need to doubt of the truth thereof, finding it où a sign painted in Fleet Street, near Temple Bar."

In these sparkles of wit and humor, there is, we notice, not a little consciousness. He says good things, and a quiet chuckle proclaims his knowledge that they are good. But his best things, the fine serious fancies, which at times cross his mind, cross it unconsciously, and drop out like pearls from the lips of a blind fairy, who sees not their lustre, and knows not their value. Fuller's deepest wisdom is the wisdom of children, and his finest eloquence is that which seems to cross over their spotless lips, like west winds over half-opened rosebuds-breathings of the Eternal Spirit, rather than utterances of their own souls. In this respect and in some others, he much resembled John Bunyan, to whom we wonder Rogers

has not compared him. Honest John, we verily believe, thought much more of his rhymes, prefixed to the second part of the "Pilgrim's Progress," and of the little puzzles and jokes he has scattered through the work, than of his divinely artless portraiture of scenery, passions, characters, and incidents in the course of the wondrous allegory. Mr. Rogers quotes a good many of Fuller's precious prattlings; but Lamb, we think, has selected some still finer, particularly his picture of the fate of John Wickliff's ashes. Similar touches of tender, quaint, profound, and unwitting sublimity, are found nearly as profusely sprinkled as his jests and clenches through his varied works, which are quite a quarry of sense, wit, truth, pedantry, learning, quiet poetry, ingenuity, and delightful nonsense. Rogers justly remarks, too, that notwithstanding all the rubbish and gossip which are found in Fuller's writings, he means to be truthful always; and that, with all his quaintness and pedantry, his style is purer and more legible than that of almost any writer of his age. It is less swelling and gorgeous than Browne's, but far easier and more idiomatic; less rich, but less diffuse, than Taylor's; less cumbered with learning than Burton's; and less involved, and less darkened with intermingling and crossing beams of light than that of Milton, whose poetry is written in the purest Grecian manner, whilst his English prose often resembles not Gothic, but Egyptian architecture, in its chaotic confusion and misproportioned magnificence.

Mr. Rogers' second paper is on Andrew Marvel, and contains a very interesting account of the life, estimate of the character, and criticism of the writings of this "AristidesButler," if we may, in the fashion of Mirabeau, coin a combination of words, which seems not inapt, to represent the virtues of that great patriot's life, and the wit and biting sarcasm of his manner of writing. He tells the old story of his father crossing the Humber with a female friend, and perishing in the waters; but omits the most striking part of the story, how the old man in leaving the shore, as the sky was scowling into storm, threw his staff back on the beach, and cried out, "Ho, for Heaven!" The tradition of this is at least still strong in Hull. Nothing after Marvel's integrity, and his quiet, keen, caustic wit, so astonishes us as the fact

that he never opened his lips in Parliament! He was "Nospeech Marvel." He never got the length of Addison's "I conceive, I conceive, I conceive." There are no authentic accounts of even a "Hear, hear!" issuing from his lips. What an act of self-denial in that of bad measures and bad men! How his heart must sometimes have burned, and his lips quivered, and yet the severe spirit of self-control kept him silent! What a contrast to the infinite babblement of senators in modern days! And yet was not his silence very formidable? Did it not strike the Tories as the figure of the moveless Mordecai at the king's gate struck the guilty Haman? There, night after night, in front of the despots, sat the silent statue-like figure, bending not to their authority, unmovable by their threats, not to be melted by their caresses, not to be gained over by their bribes, perhaps with a quiet, stern sneer resting as though sculptured upon his lips, and, doubtless, they trembled more at this dumb defiance than at the loud-mouthed attacks and execrations of others; the more as, while others were sometimes absent he was always there, a moveless pillar of patriotism, a still libel of truth, for ever glaring on their fascinated and terror-stricken eyes. Can we wonder that they are very generally supposed to have removed him from their sight, in the only way possible in the circumstances, by giving him a premature and poisoned grave?

In his third paper, Rogers approaches a mightier and more eloquent, but not a firmer or more sincere spirit than Marvel -Martin Luther. Here he puts forth all his strength, and has, we think, very nobly vindicated both Luther's intellectual and moral character. Hallam (a writer whom Rogers greatly over-estimates, before whom he falls down with "awiul reverence prone," from whom he ventures to differ with "a whispered breath and bated humbleness," which seem, considering his own calibre, very laughable, yet of whose incapacity as a literary critic, and especially as a judge of poetry, he seems to have a stifled suspicion, which comes out in the paper on Fuller, whom Hallam has slighted) has underrated Luther's talents, because, forsooth, his works are inferior to his reputation. Why, what was Luther's real work? It was the Reformation. What library of Atlas folios-ay, though Shak speare had penned every line in it-could have been compared