figure in a piece in which, but for your amicable assistamce, he might have passed without particular notice or distinction. A long sentence and, as usual, inelegant and cumbrous. This Letter is a faultless composition with exception of the one long sentence. L. VII. These are the gloomy companions of a disturbed imagination ; the melancholy madness of poetry, without the inspiration. The rhyme is a fault. Fancy' had been better; though but for the rhyme, imagination is the fitter word Ib. Such a question might perhaps discompose the gravity of his muscles, but I believe it would little affect the tranquillity of his conscience. A false antithesis, a mere verbal balance; there are far, far too many of these. However, with these few exceptions, this Letter is a blameless composition. Junius may be safely studied as a model for letters where he truly writes letters. Those to the Duke of Grafton and others, are small pamphlets in the form of letters. L. VIII. To do justice to your Grace's humanity, you felt for Mac Quick as you ought to do; and, if you had been contented to assist him indirectly, without a notorious denial of justice, or openly insulting the sense of the nation, you might have satisfied every duty of political friendship, without committing the honor of your sovereign, or hazarding the reputation of his government. An inelegant cluster of withouts. Junius asks questions incomparably well;-but ne quid nimis. L. IX. Perhaps the fair way of considering these Letters would be as a kind of satirical poems; the short, and forever balanced, sentences constitute a true metre; and the connection is that of satiric poetry, a witty logic, an association of thoughts by amusing semblances of cause and effect, the sophistry of which the reader has an interest in not stopping to detect, for it flatters his love of mischief, and makes the sport. L. XII. One of Junius's arts, and which gives me a high notion of his genius, as a poet and satirist, is this :-he takes for granted the existence of a character that never did and never can exist, and then employs his wit, and surprises and amuses his readers with analyzing its incompatibilities. L. XIV. Continual sneer, continual irony, all excellent, if it were not for the all;'-but a countenance, with a malignant smile in statuary fixure on it, becomes at length an object of aversion, however beautiful the face, and however beautiful the smile. We are relieved, in some measure, from this by frequent just and well-expressed moral aphorisms; but then the preceding and following irony gives them the appearance of proceeding from the head, not from the heart. This objection would be less felt, when the Letters were first published at considerable intervals; but Junius wrote for posterity. L. XXIII. Sneer and irony continued with such gross violation of good sense, as to be perfectly nonsense. The man who can address another on his most detestable vices in a strain of cold continual irony, is himself a wretch. L. XXXV. To honor them with a determined predilection and confidence in exclusion of your English subjects, who placed your family, and, in spite of treachery and rebellion, have supported it upon the throne, is a mistake too gross even for the unsuspecting generosity of youth. The words 'upon the throne,' stand unfortunately for the harmonious effect of the balance of placed' and 'supported.' This address to the king is almost faultless in composition, and has been evidently tormented with the file. But it has fewer beauties than any other long letter of Junius; and it is utterly undramatic. There is nothing in the style, the transitions, or the sentiments, which represents the passions of a man emboldening himself to address his sovereign personally. Like a Presbyterian's prayer, you may substitute almost everywhere the third for the second person without injury. The newspaper, his closet, and his own person were alone present to the author's intention and imagination. This makes the composition vapid. It possesses an Isocratic correctness, when it should have had the force and drama of an oration of Demosthenes. From this, however, the paragraph beginning with the words 'As to the Scotch,' and also the last two paragraphs must be honorably excepted. They are, perhaps, the finest passages in the whole collection. WONDERFULNESS OF PROSE. It has just struck my feelings that the Pherecydean origin of prose being granted, prose must have struck men with greater admiration than poetry. In the latter it was the language of passion and emotion it is what they themselves spoke and heard in moments of exultation, indignation, &c. But to hear an evolving roll, or a succession of leaves, talk continually the language of deliberate reason in a form of continued preconception, of a Z already possessed when A was being uttered-this must have appeared godlike. I feel myself in the same state, when in the perusal of a sober, yet elevated and harmonious succession of sentences and periods, I abstract my mind from the particular passage and sympathize with the wonder of the common people, who say of an eloquent man :- He talks like a book!' NOTES ON HERBERT'S TEMPLE AND HARVEY'S SYNAGOGUE. G. HERBERT is a true poet, but a poet sui generis, the merits of whose poems will never be felt without a sympathy with the mind and character of the man. To appreciate this volume, it is not enough that the reader possesses a cultivated judgment, classical taste, or even poetic sensibility, unless he be likewise a Christian, and both a zealous and an orthodox, both a devout and a devotional Christian. But even this will not quite suffice. He must be an affectionate and dutiful child of the Church, and from habit, conviction, and a constitutional predisposition to ceremoniousness, in piety as in manners, find her forms and ordinances aids of religion, not sources of formality; for religion is the element in which he lives, and the region in which he moves. The Church, say rather the Churchmen of England, under the two first Stuarts, has been charged with a yearning after the Romish fopperies, and even the papistic usurpations; but we shall decide more correctly, as well as more charitably, if for the Romish and papistic we substitute the patristic leaven. There even was (natural enough from their distinguished learning, and knowledge of ecclesiastical antiquities) an overrating of the Church and of the Fathers, for the first five or even six centuries; these lines on the Egyptian monks, "Holy Macarius and great Anthony" (p. 205) supply a striking instance and illustration of this. P. 10. If thou be single, all thy goods and ground Give one estate as one life. None is bound I do not understand this stanza. P. 41. My flesh began unto my soul in pain, Either a misprint, or a noticeable idiom of the word 'began?' Yes! and a very beautiful idiom it is the first colloquy or address of the flesh. P. 46. What though my body run to dust? Faith cleaves unto it, counting every grain, I find few historical facts so difficult of solution as the continuance, in Protestantism, of this anti-scriptural superstition. P. 54. Second poem on The Holy Scriptures. This verse marks that, and both do make a motion Unto a third that ten leaves off doth lie. The spiritual unity of the Bible the order and connection of organic forms in which the unity of life is shown, though as widely dispersed in the world of sight as the text. Each thing is full of duty: Waters united are our navigation : Distinguished, our habitation; Below, our drink; above, our meat: Both are our cleanliness. Hath one such beauty! Then how are all things neat! 'Distinguished.' I understand this but imperfectly. Did they form an island? and the next lines refer perhaps to the then belief that all fruits grow and are nourished by water. But then how is the ascending sap 'our cleanliness?' Perhaps, therefore, the rains. P. 140. But he doth bid us take his blood for wine. Nay, the contrary; take wine to be blood, and the blood of a man who died 1800 years ago. This is the faith which even the Church of England demands ;* for consubstantiation only adds a mystery to that of transubstantiation, which it implies. P. 175. The Flower. A delicious poem. Ib. How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clear Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing. "The late past frosts tributes of pleasure bring." U syl Epitritus primus + Dactyl + Trochee + a long word lable, which, together with the pause intervening between it and the word trochee, equals ʊʊʊ U U U form a pleasing variety in the Pentameter Iambic with rhymes. Ex. gr. * This is one of my Father's marginalia, which I can hardly persuade myself he would have re-written just as it stands. Where does the Church of England affirm that the wine per se literally is the blood shed 1800 years ago? The language of our Church is that "we receiving these creatures of bread and wine, &c. may be partakers of His most blessed body and blood :" that "to such as rightly receive the same, the cup of blessing is a partaking of the blood of Christ." Does not this language intimate, that the blood of Christ is spiritually produced in the soul through a faithful reception of the appointed symbols, rather than that the wine itself, apart from the soul, has become the blood? In one sense, indeed, it is the blood of Christ to the soul: it may be metaphorically called so, if, by means of it, the blood is really, though spiritually, partaken. More than this is surely not affirmed in our formularies, nor taught by our great divines in general. I do not write these words by way of argument, but because I can not re-print such a note of my Father's, which has excited surprise in some of his studious readers, without a protest.-S. C. |