characters more worthy of his attention, has led me far beyond my first intention; but it is not unimportant to expose the false zeal which has occasioned these attacks on our elder patriots. It has been too much the fashion first to personify the Church of England, and then to speak of different individuals, who in different ages have been rulers in that church, as if in some strange way they constituted its personal identity. Why should a clergyman of the present day feel interested in the defence of Laud or Sheldon? Surely it is sufficient for the warmest partizan of our establishment, that he can assert with truth,-when our Church persecuted, it was on mistaken principles held in common by all Christendom; and at all events, far less culpable was this intolerance in the Bishops, who were maintaining the existing laws, than the persecuting spirit afterwards shown by their successful opponents, who had no such excuse, and who should have been taught mercy by their own sufferings, and wisdom by the utter failure of the experiment in their own case. We can say, that our Church, apostolical in its faith, primitive in its ceremonies, unequalled in its liturgical forms; that our Church, which has kindled and displayed more bright and burning lights of genius and learning, than all other Protestant churches since the reformation, was (with the single exception of the times of Laud and Sheldon) least intolerant, when all Christians unhappily deemed a species of intolerance their religious duty; that Bishops of our church were among the first that contended against this error; and finally, that since the reformation, when tolerance became a fashion, the Church of England, in a tolerating age, has shown herself eminently tolerant, and far more so, both in spirit and in fact, than many of her most bitter opponents, who profess to deem toleration itself an insult on the rights of mankind! As to myself, who not only know the Church Establishment to be tolerant, but who see in it the greatest, if not the sole safe bulwark of toleration, I feel no necessity of defending or palliating oppressions under the two Charleses, in order to exclaim with a full and fervent heart, Esto perpetua!

In murky air, glared fiercely as I pass'd;-
They welcomed me with bitter laughs of scorn,
They pledged me in the brimming cup of hate.-
But stay your wild career,
unbridled thoughts,

Or frenzy must unseat my reason's sway,—
Again give license to my lawless will!-
And yet I know not, if that demon rout
Be fancy stirred by passion's power, or true;—
Or life itself be but a shadowy dream,
The act and working of an evil will!—
Dread scope of fantasy and passion's power!
Oh God! take back the boon, the precious gift
Of will mysterious.-Give me, give again,
The infliction dire, fell opiate of my griefs;
Sharp wound, but in the smart the panoply
And shield against temptations, that assail
My weak and yielding spirit!-Madness, come!
The balm to guilt, the safeguard from remorse,
Make me forget, and save me from myself!

A CHARACTER.

A BIRD, who for his other sins

Had lived amongst the Jacobins ;

Tho' like a kitten amid rats,

Or callow tit in nest of bats,
He much abhorred all democrats;
Yet nathless stood in ill report
Of wishing ill to Church and Court,
Tho' he'd nor claw, nor tooth, nor sting,
And learnt to pipe God save the King;

Tho' each day did new feathers bring,
All swore he had a leathern wing;
Nor polished wing, nor feathered tail,
Nor down-clad thigh would aught avail:
And tho' his tongue devoid of gall—
He civilly assured them all;—
"A bird am I of Phoebus' breed,
And on the sunflower cling and feed;
My name, good Sirs, is Thomas Tit!
The bats would hail him brother cit,
Or, at the furthest, cousin-german.
At length the matter to determine,
He publicly denounced the vermin;
He spared the mouse, he praised the owl;
But bats were neither flesh nor fowl.
Blood-sucker, vampire, harpy, goul,
Came in full clatter from his throat,
Till his old nest-mates changed their note
To hireling, traitor, and turn-coat,-
A base apostate who had sold

His very teeth and claws for gold ;—
And then his feathers!-sharp the jest-
No doubt he feathered well his nest!
A Tit indeed! aye, tit for tat-
With place and title, brother Bat,
We soon shall see how well he'll play
Count Goldfinch, or Sir Joseph Jay !"
Alas, poor Bird! and ill-bestarred-
Or rather let us say, poor Bard!
And henceforth quit the allegoric
With metaphor and simile,
For simple facts and style historic :-
Alas, poor Bard! no gold had he.
Behind another's team he stept,

ries of witches, or the fables of Greece and Rome, But there are those who deem it profaneness and irreverence to call an ape an ape, if it but wear a monk's cowl on its head; and I would rather reason with this weakness than offend it.

The passage from Jeremy Taylor to which I referred, is found in his second Sermon on Christ's Advent to Judgment; which is likewise the second in his year's course of sermons. Among many remarkable passages of the same character in those discourses, I have selected this as the most so: "But when this Lion of the tribe of Judah shall appear, then Justice shall strike, and Mercy shall not hold her hands; she shall strike sore strokes, and Pity shall not break the blow. As there are treasures of good things, so hath God a treasure of wrath and fury, and scourges and scorpions; and then shall be produced the shame of lust and the malice of envy, and the groans of the oppressed, and the persecutions of the saints, and the cares of covetousness and the troubles of ambition, and the insolence of traitors, and the violence of rebels, and the rage of anger, and the uneasiness of impatience, and the restlessness of unlawful desires; and by this time the monsters and diseases will be numerous and intolerable, when God's heavy hand shall press the sanies and the intolerableness, the obliquity and the unreasonableness, the amazement and the disorder, the smart and the sorrow, the guilt and the punishment, out from all our sins, and pour them into one chalice, and mingle them with an infinite wrath, and make the wicked drink off all the vengeance, and force it down their unwilling throats with the violence of devils and accursed spirits."

That this Tartarean drench displays the imagination rather than the discretion of the compounder; that, in short, this passage and others of the same kind are in a bad taste, few will deny at the present day. It would, doubtless, have more behoved the good bishop not to be wise beyond what is written on a subject in which Eternity is opposed to Time, and a death threatened, not the Negative, but the positive Opposite of Life; a subject, therefore, which must of necessity be indescribable to the human understanding in our present state. But I can neither find nor believe, that it ever occurred to any reader to ground ou