of which I feel to be very invigorating. I was very glad to find that there was not a syllable of the Lecture on Pope, which jarred with my estimate of him, which I a little feared. But the passage quoted from Warton, page 10, and another of your own, page 16, "Twas not so much the pomp and prodigality of heaven,' etc. express, though with far more precision, exactly the reasons which I briefly alleged for ranking Pope in the second order, but, in that order, first. I congratulated myself much on perceiving so far this agreement, and in all the admiration which the lecture contains, I heartily concur.

"The passage, page 105, 'Heaven was made for those who had failed in this world,' struck me very forcibly several years ago, when I read it in a newspaper, and became a rich vein of thought in which I often quarried; especially when the sentence was interpreted by the Cross, which was failure, apparently.

"My sentence, 'The best poetry demands study as severe as mathematics require,' is very justly open to criticism; but more, I think, from the unfinished abruptness of the phraseology than from its real meaning. The best poetry has a sense which is level to the apprehension at once; not being obscure in expression, nor metaphysical or scholastic in thought; but then any one who had caught this meaning at the first glance would be greatly mistaken if he supposed that he had got all, or nearly all, it meant.

"The dewdrop that glitters on the end of every leaf after a shower is beautiful even to a child; but I suppose that to a Herschel, who knows that the lightning itself sleeps within it, and understands and feels all its mysterious connections with earth and sky and planets, it is suggestive of feeling of a far deeper beauty; and the very instances you allege, Macbeth and the Iliad, would substantiate what I meant, though not what I awkwardly perhaps seemed to say. Macbeth, all ac

tion, swift and hurried in its progress towards dénouement, is intelligible at once. But I spent myself many weeks upon it, and only began at last to feel that it was simple, because deep. Some exquisite and fine remarks of Mrs. Jameson on certain characters in it, and profounder ones of Coleridge on others, have brought out a meaning that we feel at once was in it, and not forced upon it. In the sense I meant, I should say Macbeth could not be understood, especially as a whole, except with hard study.

"I am very much tempted to accept the challenge of page 28, in the Lecture on Pope. 'I would beg any of the detractors of Pope to furnish me with another couple of lines from any author whatever, which encloses so much sublimity of meaning within such compressed limits, and such precise terms.'

"If it were not that the cartel is addressed only to Pope's detractors, I think I should allege that wonderful couplet of the Erd Geist in Faust

"So schaff' ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit
Und wirke der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid;'

at least if I might interpret them by Psalm cii. 26, 27.

"In the graceful courtesy with which your lordship acknowledges that there is 'some identity of view between us,' I receive the best and most cheering reward that my little pamphlet has obtained.”

The Lecture on Wordsworth was delivered before the members of the Athenæum, and was to have been followed by a second on the same subject; but Mr. Robertson's health was never afterwards equal to the exertion. This lecture has not had the advantage of his own corrections. He was criticized by the South Church Union Chronicle

as teaching in it "Pantheism," and as unfairly attacking High Churchmen. To this he replied in the following letter:

"In the columns of the Brighton Guardian, denominated the South Church Union Chronicle,' I see some strictures on certain expressions attributed to me in my Lecture upon Wordsworth. With the tone of the strictures, excepting one sentence which I regret,-not for my own sake, for it is untrue, but for the writer's sake, for it is rude and coarse-I can find no fault. The whole criticism, however, is based on a misconception. It proceeds on the assumption that I complained, with blame, that—

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High Churchism regarded with peculiar reverence a sanctity as connected with certain places, times, acts, and persons,' &c.

"I did not use those words. That was not my definition of High Churchism; and to have condemned it as so defined would have contradicted my argument, for I was actually at the moment justifying Wordsworth, who is well known to have entertained such feelings. Had I so spoken, I should have condemned a feeling of the relative sanctity of such things; a feeling which I comprehend too entirely to have any inclination to interfere with.

“What I did say was as follows: The tendency of Pantheism is to see the godlike everywhere, the personal God nowhere. The tendency of High Churchism is to localize the personal Deity in certain consecrated places, called churches; certain consecrated times, called Sabbaths, fast days, and so forth; certain consecrated acts, sacramental and quasi-sacramental; certain consecrated persons, called priests.'

“I endeavoured to show that the tendency is not necessarily the error; and that there are High Churchmen, like Words

worth, who recognize in such places, persons, and acts, a sanctity only relative and not intrinsic,—relative to the worshippers, without localizing or limiting Deity in or to the acts, times, or places; Pantheistic and High Church tendencies, each false alone, balancing each other in the particular case of such men.

"I have no intention of entering into controversy on this point; and I should, according to my hitherto invariable practice, have left both the misrepresentation and the criticism unnoticed, were it not that the words, as they stand, if used by me, would have evidenced an unworthy desire of turning aside from my subject to pander to the passions of my audience, and seeking a miserable popularity by an attempt to feed that theological rancour which is the most detestable phase of the religion of the day.

"I do not merely say that I was not guilty of this paltry work. I I say it is simply impossible to me. To affirm, whatever may be taught by our savage polemics, whether Tractarian or Evangelical, that the new commandment is NOT this— 'that ye hate one another '—and that discipleship to Christ is proved more by the intensity of love for good than by the vehemence of bitterness against error, is with me a desire too deep, too perpetual, and too unsatisfied, to have allowed the possibility of my joining, even for one moment, in the cowardly cry with which the terrors and the passions of the half-informed are lashed by platform rhetoric into hatred of High Church

men."

And, as further elucidating his opinions on these subjects, the following extract from a letter which he wrote about this time will be of interest :

"I gratefully accept your hint about the definition of High Churchmanship. I will modify what I said, to prevent mis

understanding. At the same time, as High Churchmanship, in the sense in which I was then speaking, is in my view an error, I must represent it in its most developed, not in its modified form, and as the exact opposite of Pantheism. All grand truth is the statement of two opposites, not a via media between them, nor either of them alone. I conceive Wordsworth to have held both; the Personality of the Eternal Being, and also his diffusion through space. Now I cannot conceal my conviction that it is the vice of High Churchism in its tendency, to exaggerate the former of these, by localizing Deity in acts, places, &c. It is the vice of Pantheism to hold the latter alone.

"When a High Churchman fully recognizes the latter, as Wordsworth did, I care little for any trifling exaggerations of the former, and I will always fight for him and maintain that his High Churchism has no radical error in it, even though his expressions may to my mind seem to predicate locality of Him much more than I should like to do it. But when he represents Personality as a limitation to Time, Space, Acts, &c., instead of recognizing it in three essential points, all metaphysical and supersensual, viz: Consciousness, Will, Character, then I must earnestly and firmly oppose High Churchism, and say that its tendency is to localize; and I must quote anxiously those texts which, taken alone, have a Pantheistic sound. 'Howbeit, the Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands. Heaven is my throne; Earth is my footstool; what house will ye build for me,' &c.

"And indeed I do think that this is a very common and very dangerous tendency. I will modify my definition by saying it is the tendency of High Churchism. That it is not inseparable from it I showed by defending Wordsworth. High Churchism I hate. High Churchmen, many of them, I love, admire, and sympathize with."