that in order to be pious, it is not necessary to be dull,' but even dulness itself is far more decorous than the puerile conceits, the flaunting metaphors, and all that false finery of rhetorical declamation, in which these writers have tricked out their most solemn and important subjects. At the time, indeed, when they studied and wrote, the glories of ancient literature had faded; sophists and rhetoricians had taken the place of philosophers and orators; nor is it wonderful that from such instructors as Libanius, they should learn to reason ill and write affectedly. But the same florid effeminacies of style, which in a love-letter of Philostratus, or an ecphrasis of Libanius, are harmless at least, if not amusing, become altogether disgusting when applied to sacred topics; and are little less offensive to piety and good taste than those rude exhibitions of the old Moralities, in which Christ and his Apostles appeared dressed out in trinkets, tinsel, and embroidery.

The chief advantage that a scholar can now derive from the perusal of these voluminous Doctors is the light they throw upon the rites and tenets of the Pagans, in the exposure and refutation of which they are, as is usually the case, much more successful than in the defence and illustration of their own. In this respect Clemens Alexandrinus is one of the most valuable, being chiefly a compiler of the dogmas of ancient learning, and abounding with curious notices of the religion and literature of the Gentiles. Indeed the manner in which some of the Fathers have been edited, sufficiently proves that they were considered by their commentators as merely a sort of inferior classics, upon which to hang notes about heathen gods and philosophers. Ludovicus Vives, upon the City of God' of St. Augustine, is an example of this class of theological annotators, whom a hint about the three Graces, or the

F

god of Lampsacus, awakens into more activity than whole pages about the Trinity and the Resurrection.

The best specimen of eloquence we have met among the Fathers at least that which we remember to have read with most pleasure is the Charisteria, or Oration of Thanks, delivered by Gregory Thaumaturgus to his instructor Origen. Though rhetorical like the rest, it is of a more manly and simple character, and does credit alike to the master and the disciple.' But, upon the whole, perhaps St. Augustine is the author whomif ever we should be doomed, in penance for our sins, to select a Father for our private reading-we should choose, as, in our opinion, the least tiresome of the brotherhood. It is impossible not to feel interested in those struggles between passion and principle, out of which his maturer age rose so triumphant; and there is a conscious frailty mingling with his precepts, and at times throwing its shade over the light of his piety, which gives his writings an air peculiarly refreshing, after the pompous rigidity of Chrysostom, the stoic affectations of Clemens Alexandrinus, and the antithetical trifling of Gregory Nazianzen. If it were not too for the indelible stain which his conduct to the Donatists has left upon his memory, the philosophic mildness of his tract against the Manichæans, and the candour with which he praises his heretical antagonist Pelagius, as sanctum, bonum et prædicandum virum,' would have led us to select him as an example of that tolerating spirit, which, we grieve to say, is so very rare a virtue among the Saints. Though Augustine, after the season of his follies was over, very sedulously

1 The abstract of this Oration which Halloix professes to give in his Defence of Origen, is so very wide of the original, that we suspect he must have received it, at second hand, from some inaccurate reporter.

avoided the society of females, yet he corresponded with most of the holy women of his time; and there is a strain of tenderness through many of his letters to them, in which his weakness for the sex rather interestingly betrays itself. It is in the consolatory epistles, particularly, that we discover these embers of his youthful temperament-as in the 93rd to Italica, on the death of her husband, and the 263rd to Sapida, in return for a garment she had sent him, in the thoughts of which there is a considerable degree of fancy as well as tenderness.

We cannot allude to these fair correspondents of Augustine without remarking that the warmest and best allies of the Fathers, in adopting their fancies and spreading their miracles, appear to have been those enthusiastic female pupils, by groups of whom they were all constantly encircled; whose imaginations required but little fuel of fact, and whose tongues would not suffer a wonder to cool in circulating. The same peculiarities of temperament which recommended females in the Pagan world as the fittest sex to receive the inspirations of the tripod, made them valuable agents also in the imposing machinery of miracles. At the same time, it must be confessed that they performed services of a much higher nature; and that to no cause whatever is Christianity more signally indebted for the impression it produced in those primitive ages, than to the pure piety, the fervid zeal, and heroic devotedness

None of the Fathers, with the exception perhaps of St. Jerome, appears to have had such influence over the female mind as Origen. His correspondence with Barbara is still extant. She was shut up by her Pagan father in a tower with two windows, to which, in honour of the Trinity, we are told, she added a third. St. Jerome had to endure much scandal, in consequence of his two favourite pupils, Paula and Melania, of which he complains very bitterly in the epistle 'Si tibi putem,' &c.

of the female converts. In the lives of these holy virgins and matrons, in the humility of their belief and the courage of their sufferings, the Gospel found a far better illustration than in all the voluminous writings of the Fathers: there are some of them, indeed, whose adventures are sufficiently romantic to suggest materials to the poet and the novelist; and Ariosto himself has condescended to borrow from the Legends his curious story of Isabella and the Moor, to the no small horror of the pious Cardinal Baronius, who remarks with much asperity on the sacrilege of which that vulgar poet' has been guilty, in daring to introduce this sacred story among his fictions. To the little acquaintance these women could have formed with the various dogmas of ancient philosophy, and to the unencumbered state of their minds in consequence, may be attributed much of that warmth and clearness with which the light of Christianity shone through them; whereas, in the learned heads of the Fathers, this illumination found a more dense and coloured medium, which turned its celestial beam astray, and tinged it with all sorts of gaudy imaginations. Even where these women indulged in theological reveries, as they did not embody their fancies into folios, posterity, at least, has been nothing the worse for them; nor should we have known the strange notions of Saint Macrina about the soul and the resurrection, if her brother, Gregory of Nyssa, had not rather officiously informed us of them, in the dialogue he professes to have held with her on these important subjects.2

1 From the story of the Roman virgin Euphrasia. See also the Life of Euphrosyna (in Bergomensis de Claris Mulieribus), which, with the difference of a father and lover, resembles the latter part of the Mémoires de Comminges.

2 Opera, tom. ii. p. 177. Edit. Paris, 1638.

We now come to Mr. Boyd's Translations, which are preceded by a short, but pompous preface, in whose loftiness of style we at once discover that, like that insect which takes the colour of the leaf it feeds upon, the translator has caught the gaudy hue of his originals most successfully. Indeed, from the evident tendencies of this gentleman's taste, we should pronounce him a most dangerous person to be entrusted with a version of the Fathers; for, the fault of these writers being a superabundance of metaphors, and Mr. Boyd being quite as metaphorically given as themselves, the consequence is, that, wherever there is a flourish of this kind. in the original, he is sure to add another of his own to it in the translation; which is really too much of a good thing.' If double flowers are to be held monsters in botany, with much greater reason must these double and treble flowers of rhetoric be accounted monstrosities in the system of taste. The first specimen we shall give is from the Peroration of St. Chrysostom's Third Oration on the Incomprehensible,' where the Saint is speaking of the season of the Eucharist :—

In a moment so sublime, how exalted should be thy hope, how great thy longing for salvation! Heaven's canopy resounds not with the piercing cry of mortals only: angels fall prostrate before their Lord: archangels kneel before their God. The season itself becomes an argument on their lips; the oblation an advocate in their cause. And as men, in the office of intercession, cutting down branches of olive, wave them before their king, by the blooming plant reminding him of mercy and compassion; so likewise the host of angels, in the place of olive-branches extending the body of their Lord, invoke the common Parent in the cause of human nature! What strain seraphic bursts on my enraptured organs? I hear their celestial accents! I hear them even now exclaiming-We entreat for those whom thou didst love with so God-like an affection, as to yield up thy life for