a sentence of stern and loud defiance. This escape perceiving, he will gather up his strength, and laugh it off as reverie. And then remark him in his sleep-how his countenance suffereth change, and his breast swelleth like the deep; and his hands grasp for a hold, as if his soul were drowning; and his lips tremble and mutter, and his breath comes in sighs, or stays with long suppression, like the gusts which precede the bursting storm; and his frame shudders, and shakes the couch on which this awful scene of death is transacted. Ah! these are the ebbings and flowings of strong resolve and strong remorse. That might have been a noble man; but he rejected all, and chose wickedness, in the face of visitings of God, and therefore he is now so severely holden of death.

"And reason doth often resign her seat at the latter end of these God-despisers. Then the eye looks forth from its naked socket, ghastly and wildterror sits enthroned upon the pale brow-he starts-he thinks that the fiends of hell are already upon him-his disordered brain gives them form and fearful shape-he speaks to them-he craves their mercy. His tender relatives beseech him to be silent, and with words of comfort assuage his terror, and recall him from his paroxysm of remorse. A calm succeeds, until disordered imagination hath recruited strength for a fresh creation of terror; and he dies with a fearful looking-for of judgment, and of fiery indignation to consume him."

This is undoubtedly striking; but is it original vigour, or a mere collection of appalling circumstances, which it required little skill to assemble? We have marked in italics the single idea that we did not recognise as common-place.

We like the following much better. The prevailing sentiment has little novelty, but it is natural and affecting, and is given in better taste. Describing the lukewarmness of modern Christians, and their addiction to worldly enjoyments and pursuits, he proceeds-

They carry on commerce with all lands, the bustle and noise of their traffic fill the whole earth-they go to and fro, and knowledge is increased-but how few in the hasting crowd are hasting after the kingdom of God! Meanwhile, death sweepeth on with his chilling blast, freezing up the life of generations, catching their spirits unblessed with any preparation of peace, quenching hope, and binding destiny for evermore. Their graves are dressed, and their tombs are adorned; but their spirits, where are they? How oft hath this city, where I now write these lamentations over a thoughtless age, been filled and emptied of her people since first she reared her imperial head! How many generations of her revellers have gone to another kind of revelry !— how many generations of her gay courtiers to a royal residence where courtier-arts are not!-how many generations of her toilsome tradesmen to the place of silence, where no gain can follow them! How time hath swept over her, age after age, with its consuming wave, swallowing every living thing, and bearing it away unto the shores of eternity! The sight and thought of all which is my assurance that I have not in the heat of my feelings surpassed the merit of the case. The theme is fitter for an indignant prophet, than an uninspired sinful man."

We cannot forbear extracting one more passage for the singularity, if not the excellence of the style. It is quite in the manner of an ancient Covenanter

"I would try these flush and flashy spirits with their own weapons, and play a little with them at their own game. They do but prate about their exploits at fighting, drinking, and death-despising. I can tell them of those who fought with savage beasts; yea, of maidens who durst enter as coolly as a modern bully into the ring, to take their chance with infuriated beasts of prey; and I can tell them of those who drank the molten lead as cheerfully

as they do the juice of the grape, and handled the red fire and played with the bickering flames as gaily as they do with love's dimples or woman's amorous tresses. And what do they talk of war? Have they forgot Cromwell's iron hand, who made their chivalry to skip? or the Scots Cameronians, who seven times, with their Christian chief, received the thanks of Marlborough, that first of English captains? or Gustavus of the North, whose camp sung psalms in every tent? It is not so long that they should forget Nelson's Methodists, who were the most trusted of that hero's crew. Poor men! they know nothing who do not know out of their country's history, who it was that set at nought the wilfulness of Henry VIII. and the sharp rage of the virgin Queen, against liberty, and bore the black cruelty of her Popish sister; and presented the petition of rights, and the bill of rights, and the claim of rights. Was it chivalry? was it blind bravery? No-these second-rate qualities may do for a pitched field, or a fenced ring; but, when it comes to death or liberty, death or virtue, death or religion, they wax dubious, generally bend their necks under hardship, or turn their backs for a bait of honour, or a mess of solid and substantial meat. This chivalry and brutal bravery can fight if you feed them well and bribe them well, or set them well on edge; but in the midst of hunger, and nakedness, and want, and persecution, in the day of a country's direst need, they are cowardly, treacherous, and of no avail.-Oh! these topers, these gamesters, these idle revellers, these hardened death-despisers !-they are a nation's disgrace, a nation's downfall."

It would be beside our province to engage in any discussions upon the purely theological parts of Mr. Irving's work; but there are other matters rather hastily introduced, as it strikes us, and intemperately handled, and indeed in some degree affecting ourselves, upon which we cannot refrain from offering a few remarks. We allude to his vehement and sweeping denunciations against the literature of the day

"Our zeal towards God, (he says) and the public good, hath been stung almost to madness by the writings of reproachable men, who give the tone to the sentimental and political world. Their poems, their criticisms, and their blasphemous pamphlets, have been like gall and wormwood to my spirit, and I have longed to summon into the field some arm of strength, which might evaporate their vile and filthy speculation, into the limbo of vanity, whence it came."

This must not be taken to apply solely to those publications that have been recently under prosecution, and which we, profane as Mr. Irving may think us, reprobate as sincerely as himself; neither is it an incidental ebullition, but one of the ever-recurring anathemas in which he has indulged against his intellectual contemporaries, with their un. godly recreations," their Magazines of wit and fashion," their "deathdespising" Reviews of the latest publications. Poor Mr. Colburn, he little dreamt, some few months back, of what was brewing for him at the other side of the Tweed; he little expected that one of these Sundays he might be summoned, with a duces tecum of the New Monthly and its contributors, to the bar of this spiritual police-office in Hatton Garden, to answer for their dark and Anti-Calvinistic ways. But there we are--and without cavilling upon points of jurisdiction, we would simply ask our judge to examine us before he condemns us, and then candidly to say whether, in point of fact, we are to be classed among the sinister signs of the times. Is it unholy to indulge once a month in a little unwounding pleasantry? Is a letter from the Alps a deed of darkness? A description of St. Peter's, or Notre Dame, a lurking attack upon the kirk of Scotland? Had our Parthian Glance at a

departed year any tendency to shake the public confidence in a future state? Is the Ghost of Grimm as graceless and vicious as the embodied Baron himself was? We would respectfully put it to Mr. Irving's conscience, in his uninspired moments, whether these are matters that can endanger the souls of the readers or the writers? and whether, as a Christian censor of the age, he may not be risking his dignity and influence in exaggerating, like an ostentatious sophist in want of topics, the innocent pastimes of, on the whole, a tolerably well-conducted generation, into abominations that will surely be visited with neverending wrath?

But there is another and a more important question which this gentleman has been indiscreet enough to raise. He has crossed the Tweed with the avowed design of calling out, as it were, the intellect of the age for the supposed affronts it has offered to his notions of religion. We say nothing of the self-possession of any single person undertaking so adventurous a project; but, as the sincere friends of religion, we deprecate it as an ill-considered and dangerous proceeding. With regard to the main point, the malignant influence against which his zeal is directed, we consider Mr. Irving's assertions on the subject to be full of his characteristic exaggeration. There are now, as there at most times have been, many men of talent among the influential classes, who, unfortunately for themselves, are cut off by their peculiar habits of thinking from the consolations of Christianity, but perhaps there never was a period when such persons so cautiously abstained from the promulgation of their particular opinions. There may be one or two exceptions, but the great mass of the persons to whom we refer feel too deeply the importance of religious sanctions to the well-being of society to think of substituting in their place the cold and unavailing dogmas of a philosophical creed. Feelings of decorum, of good taste, and even of personal respectability, come in aid, and confirm those habits of salutary forbearance. The question then is, whether any service can be rendered to religion by the tone and manner which Mr. Irving has assumed towards this class. Will defiance and abuse convert them? Will offensive personalities even against those who have declared their opinions, conciliate the rest? Is it wise, by unfairly confounding poetry and criticism with blasphemy, to alarm the self-love of many, who are already, tacitly it may be, but virtually upon his side? And lastly, is there no danger in impressing upon the other orders of the community that among the high and educated all sense of religion is extinguished? These are matters upon which we cannot undertake to dwell, but it really does occur to us that they deserve Mr. Irving's most serious consideration. It would be a miserable ending of his mission to discover too late that his zeal had produced mischiefs beyond the powers of his oratory to heal.

Mr. Irving is a man of warm feelings, and can eulogise as exorbitantly as he censures. It may be interesting to know that one of the schools of modern poetry has escaped his condemnation. In the midst of his treatise upon "Judgement to come," we have the following burst of rhetorical criticism. The subject is Mr. Wordsworth

"There is one man in these realms who hath addressed himself to such a godly life, and dwelt alone amidst the grand and lovely scenes of nature, and

the deep unfathomable secrecies of human thought-would to Heaven it were allowed to others to do likewise! And he hath been rewarded with many new cogitations of nature and of nature's God; and he hath heard, in the stillness of his retreat, many new voices of his conscious spirit-all which he hath sung in harmonious numbers. But mark the Epicurean soul of this degraded age! They have frowned on him; they have spit on him; they have grossly abused him. The masters of this critical genera tion (like generation, like masters) have raised the hue and cry against him; the literary and sentimental world, which is their sounding-board, hath reverberated it; and every reptile, who can retail an opinion in print, hath spread it, and given his reputation a shock, from which it is slowly but surely recovering. All for what? For making nature and his own bosom his home, and daring to sing of the simple but sublime truths which were revealed to himfor daring to be free in his manner of uttering genuine feeling, and depicting natural beauty, and grafting thereon devout and solemn contemplations of God. Had he sent his Cottage Wanderer forth upon an 'Excursion' amongst courts and palaces, battle-fields, and scenes of faithless gallantry, his musings would have been more welcome, being far deeper and more tender than those of the heartless Childe;' but because the man hath valued virtue, and retiring modesty, and common household truth, over these the ephemeral decorations or excessive depravities of our condition, therefore he is hated and abused."

Now all this, which was intended to be very fine, appears to us to be the merest puerile declamation; and it is, besides, (what is quite out of all rule in a Christian teacher) an attempt to domineer over the free expression of public opinion, in matters purely temporal, by spiritual threats and denunciations. If Mr. Wordsworth had been an extraordinarily gifted being, who had brought tidings of immortal truths in morals or science, and had been scurvily used by his age, it might have been pardonable, if not appropriate, in one of his friends to slide him into a theological treatise in the character of a dishonoured prophet. But the plain matter of fact is, that this gentleman's career has not been peculiarly sacred or supernatural; neither has it, as far as we can discover, been visited with that precise degree of martyrdom that could warrant so vehement an episode in his behalf. As to worldly matters, Mr. W. has long held a lucrative appointment under the Crown. We glance at this, not surely for the purpose of casting any imputation upon him or his patrons, but simply to shew that so far he has not been a neglected man. He has, on the contrary, been a fortunate and a favoured man. Mr. Irving should have recollected this, and have given the age of Wordsworth a little credit for so material an item in its dealings with him. But Mr. Wordsworth has been a poet, and the wrongs his genius has encountered from this " reptile" age, have been, it would appear, of so transcendant a cast, as to be made a fit subject of ghostly sympathy and indignation in a discourse upon doomsday and the doctrine of final retribution. Now these mighty and unprecedented indignities, which Mr. Irving would thus preposterously exalt into an affair of the skies, consist of two or three, not unfrequent, and with deference we say it, altogether earthy circumstances. Mr. Wordsworth is a clever man, and has the pardonable ambition of being thought so. Living at his ease-happily for himself, undistracted by the cares and bustle of active life, he has indulged a good deal in imaginative reveries, and has submitted numerous specimens of his musings to the decision of the

public. The public, not a very unusual proceeding, have differed upon their merits. They suited the taste of some, and these persons have been as ardent in their eulogies, as Mr. Irving or Mr. Wordsworth himself could desire. Others, however, took the "reptile" side of the question, and explained their reasons. They admitted, and warmly commended his occasional tenderness and sublimity, but they also saw much to condemn and deplore. They denied that they could understand him, where in point of fact he was unintelligible. They reprobated his propensity to form fantastic conjunctions between what was elevated in sentiment and mean and repulsive in real life. Adopting the principle, that verisimilitude was a prime essential in every work of art, they did not expect to be rated from the pulpit for suggesting that a pedlar, with a poetical pair of wings, was an innovation upon good taste that a sentimental leech-catcher was not at all adapted to catch the public-that a metaphysical vagrant could never be rendered an appropriate expounder of the mysterious movements of the soul of man. Mr. Irving may like all this, and we shall never make any unmannerly attack upon him for differing from us, but in the name of fairdealing, let him not overwhelm us with his holy vituperation for presuming in matters of criticism to judge for ourselves.

To conclude our remarks upon Mr. Irving and his oratory, we do not hesitate to assert, that he has altogether mistaken the extent of his powers, and the taste and spirit of the age before which it has been his lot to display them. He might have done in the days of Knox— proffers of martyrdom and flaming invectives were in those times provoked, and were therefore natural and laudable--now, they are unnecessary, and for that reason ridiculous. But it is Mr. Irving's fate, when he gets upon a favourite topic, to throw aside the important fact that he is living and exhorting in the year 1823, and in the metropolis of England. He is far fitter to be a missionary among semibarbarous tribes, than an enforcer of doctrines that are already familiar to his hearers; or he would do excellently well as a reclaimer of a horde of banditti in some alpine scene. There, amidst the waving of pines, and rustling of foliage, with rocks and hills and cataracts, and a wilder audience around him, his towering stature, vehement action, and clanging tones, would be in perfect keeping. His terrific descriptions of a sinner's doom would touch the stubborn consciences of his lawless flock. His copious tautology and gaudy imagery would be welcomed by their rude fancies as the most captivating eloquence. To them, his exaggeration would be energy--his fury, the majesty of an inspired intellect but in these countries his coming has been a couple of centuries too late. We understand that he has been called "an eloquent barbarian :" it would have been more correct to say that his was barbarous oratory.