during the whole of our troublesome pilgrimage as to the goal of our course; and let us bear with the greater fortitude our present afflictions because the race is short, and we are destined not to the fugitive enjoyments of this life, but to the possessions of that blessed eternity in which we shall participate the wisdom and righteousness of God. "But as you, my learned and pious friend, are well acquainted with these truths, I have written the more briefly; and I pray God to invigorate both your body and mind. Farewell." To those of our readers who are at all conversant with either the Ecclesiastical or Civil history of the period of the Reformation, the character of Melancthon, must be so well known as to supersede the necessity of any particular delineation: and such of them as have hitherto known little of him cannot fail to be induced by the extracts we have now `made from Mr. Cox's book, to entertain the most favourable sentiments regarding it. Cotemporary with Luther, and co-operating with him in his opposition to the church of Rome, the biography of Melancthon becomes inseparably connected with that of the great Reformer. If by universal consent Luther excelled in personal courage, in decision of character, and whatever else may be considered as constituting the fortiter in re; she suffrages of three centuries have uniformly awarded to Melancthon the precedence in regard to extent of learning, acuteness of intellect, meekness, and gentleness of manners, with every other amiable quality which is essential to the suaviter in modo. When we read the life of Luther our admiration is ex cited at his zeal, his intrepidity, his coolness, and personal bravery; The narrative of Melancthon involuntarily insinuates itself into our affections, and we are compelled to love him. Indeed, Luther himself knew and cheerfully admitted, his friend's superiority, both in capacity and erudition. With regard to the manner in which Mr. Cox has aquitted himself of the task that he undertook, we are persuaded that no liberal mind will deny him the praise of patient research, of judicious selection in regard to his materials, or of correctness and impartiality in his statements. His style is always perspicu VOL. I. | ous and neat, and the whole volume exhibits unquestionable proof of an elegant and cultivated mind. He apthe model of Roscoe's Life of Lorenpears to have formed his book upon zo de Medicis, with which it is not altogether unconnected in subject, and whether we regard its exterior appearance or its intrinsic value, it need not shrink from a comparison. We find fault with nothing but the portrait of Melancthon that is prefixed to the volume: and that, though a fine engraving, must, if it exhibit any likeness of the original, completely confute the maxim that the counténace is the truest index of the mind. When Mr. Cox's work reaches a second edition, which it cannot. fail to do as soon as it shall become generally known, we recommend it to him to cast an eye over the twentysixth book of Thuanus's History of his own time, towards the close of which he will find an interesting account of Melancthon from the pen of that eminent writer; an historian who, to use the words of Bishop Burnett," though he lived and died in the communion of the church of Rome, yet has delivered things to posterity with such candour and fairness, that his authority is disputed by none but those of his own party." Circumstances altogether unconnected with the writing of this article led us very recently to look into De Thou's volumes, and we were gratified in finding so handsome an Eulogy on the great man whose life forms the subject of Mr. Cox's book. A Sermon, preached at Leeds, April 16, 1815, on occasion of the execution of Mr. Joseph Blackburn, Attorney at Law for Forgery: with details of conversations with him during his imprisonment. By Richard Winter Hamilton, Minister of Albion chapel, Leeds. 2nd. edit. London, Longman and Co. 1815. pp. 64. Pr. is. Or all the compositions that ever came before us, under the title of a Sermon, this is unquestionably the most singular. The circumstances which occasioned it, were of such general notoriety, and excited such universal interest, that it is needless for us to recapitulate them. But the 2 E singularity which attends the publica- extensive with its nature, and between God and the sinner, there yawns and stretches a chasm, that is equi-distant with the extremes of the divine complacency, and the divine wrath. Personifications however rich their depictions and unconstrained their latitude: Analogies however imposing the objects of parallel, and the media of comparison can never expose the consequences of sin to the extent of fact, or the range of demonstration.All that is infectious in disease, and restless in torment, cannot meet the maladies that waste the spiritual habit and wither the rage, conceited in the sallies, and the immortal hopes: All that is violent in ghastly in the despair of madness cannot answer to the perverted faculties and broken balance of an eternally conscious mind. And its punishments must be too exquisite for the most august and vivid images to pourtray :-the process of jurisprudence in the formation of its decision, bolize with the developement of our inand infliction of its sanction cannot symward character, and the adjudgment of the late Dr. Johnson. To raise the our eternal destiny: and though the elec laugh against the latter, some Grub-tric fires, and rarest essences of the sky street writer took the pains to select were blown to an ardor beyond the keenest from the Rambler, all the uncouth flame, it could not burn with the fury of and barbarous terms of Latin deriva- that indignation which shall devour the tion with which that work abounds; adversaries." and stringing those together, as a 'The sentence which we have now boy does birds eggs, in the way of extracted, forms a part of the introfamiliar conversation on trifling sub-duction to the Sermon; and as our jects, the effect was ludicrous in the ablest masters of Rhetoric lay it extreme. We strongly suspect that down for a rule that the exordium Mr. Richard Winter Hamilton must be always simple, and the preacher have met with this book in his boy- cool; so we find Mr. H. rising graish days; and, unhappily, mistaking dually as he proceeds in the discusfor excellent, what was only intended sion of his subject, and thus, agreefor burlesque, he has made it the mo- able to the laws of poetry, "the sound del of his own style! But to attempt becomes an echo to the sense." The to give the reader any thing like an first thing that he undertakes to prove adequate verbal description of the from the words of the text is that curiosity of the thing,is utterly vain; sin is of itself progressive; or, in the he must see with his own eyes, and simple style of the Psalmist, Ps. i, 1. hear with with his own ears in order The man who walketh in the counsel to judge aright; and that he may do of the ungodly soon comes to stand so, we shall lay before him almost at in the way of sinners, and at last sits random a few extracts from the Ser- in the seat of the scornful. But let inon, the text of which is, James i. us attend to the sublime illustration 15. "When lust hath conceived, it of Mr. Hamilton: bringeth forth sin," &c. The reader will, no doubt, recollect, that Paul speaks of sin as being "exceeding sinful:"-but let him mark how it is described by the preacher in the Sermon before us; "Those dispositions that disgrace the dotage, havein their master principle vitiated the youth, and marked the maturity;-and any supposed contrarieties consist more in appearances than fact. Tho' different the signs thro' which the moral nature passes; and different the aspects it assumes, as it travels the zodiac of life, yet it wheels upon one axis and sweeps for "To whatever is excellent in the divine character it stands opposed, and meets with malignity, whatever there is of good-ward thro' one impulse. And thus the very ness-with fraud, whatever there is of laws of the mental economy, give decided justice-with ignorance, whatever there evidence to the process of sin. is of wisdom-with deception, whatever Very fine to be sure, but is this there is of truth. Its effects must be co-prose or poetry? Again: "Hapless was the hour when the individual degraded mercy to weak in dulgence and frail instinct, forgetting a midst its tenderness that it is august as justice, and awful as purity. These perfections as companion orbs revolve around the character, but when once withdrawn it [the character] swings from its attractions and drops from its poize; or as a planetary belt they encircle it," &c. We suppose something like this is what the Critics have in view when they speak of "prose run mad!" But to proceed with our author : "If the character throws itself in any particular attitude it is difficult to recover the natural posture; and tho' the singularity might arise merely from an accidental cause, yet it may require some lengthened process to rectify. Thro' the influence of habit feeling may strain it from its native scope, and the powers of the constitution be wrenched from their original sockets. When the machinery of the mind is first thrown into action, it works thro' a roughness of wheel and stubborness of spring, with jurring and confounding attrition ;but when the action is continued, the philosophic chimera of perpetual motion is realized and confirmed. But when habits are formed upon evil passions and principles it is impossible to calculate on their mischievous extent. We have then to grapple, not merely with the strength of our depravity, but with the disadvantages of a prepared barrier and circumvallation. We have then to resist, not merely an enemy conscious of its injustice, but a commonwealth that relies upon its precedents and is regulated by its laws.-Ah! the will is always volatile to sin, why should we then fun its heats and accelerate its impulse? The mind always gravitates to evil,-why then should we multiply its tendency by additional weight and bias? Who would add momentum to an avalanche from the Andes, or wing with more cruel speed the bolt that hisses from the secret place of thunder? furnished of the vile bombast with which the pages of this pamphlet are stuffed, we suppose we may be excused from further enlarging on its contents. But to speak the truth, it has really been more than a match for our patience. Of the sixty-four pages of which it consists, we read on regularly till we came to p. 25, where meeting with the following sentence we could actually proceed no further. If the "When the person moves in scenes of dissipation what a giddiness enfeebles the mind; how incompetent for serious thought or high-toned contemplation; how useless to society and lost to himself! Who he really is he forgets amid the grotesque appearances and laughable caricatura of a moral masquerade, where every method is employed not merely to delude each other, but to absorb even the consciousness and identity of the individual, in a character not more vapid in conception than wanton in vice. In the pursuit of every bubble that is blown, and every butterfly that is winged, he is indifferent to the permanent interests of his nature, and if he thinks at all, vainly infers that his self-flatteries shall reverse the sentiments of the divine justice, and suspend the blows of the divine wrath. hazard be against him he shall retrieve his fortunes by further play: if his powers are shattered by debauch, then the midnight riot shall restore them; if bosomfriendships fail, he shall close the wound by society most seductive and worthless; if remorse embitter his happiness, he shall aggravate its causes, and having been lascerated by the whips shall heal his stripes by the poison of the scorpions; if recollection trouble him, he shall swell its contents, louden his clamours, deepen its damnation. The sharper or procuress, the hector or courtezan shall be his companion spirits; from the ignominy of the bagnio he shall fly to the revels of the tavern; mad with the vexations of disappointment, the fumes of ebriety, the despair of insolvency, again he shall rush to the table of chance: the box is raffled, and the die is cast: mark the paroxysms of struggling misery and suppressed laughter: see that idiot stare, the vacant suspence, the hurried gait, the abrupt departure, and they tell that yonder unrecorded turf covers the suicide. Miserable votary to fashi Here we must pause a moment for reflection. It is now about two thousand years we believe since Longinus favoured the world with his treatise "On the Sublime," and the subject has occupied the pens of the most able writers that have arisen in every ́successive century down from that time to our own age, when we vainly imagined the topic had been exhaust-onable life! What respect hast thou left ed by the labours of Burke and Beattie. But we have now found out our mistake-for after all that has been written, it still remained for Mr. Richard Winter Hamilton to furnish the world with a perfect specimen of the Sublime of Nonsense! After the specimens that we have behind thee to build thee a sepulchrė? What worth didst thou ever exemplify to inaround thy hillock, but it prattles thy folly; spire funeral verse? The child cannot play the pilgrim cannot rest upon thy turf, but in pensive mood he abhors thy guilt; the traveller, as "haply some hoary swain" recites thy story, shall hurry on as he justifies thy doom. Ohe jam satis!-If the reader wish for more, we beg him to have recourse to the pamphlet itself, Ubi plura nitent. To Mr. Hamilton we offer, at parting, two words of advice: one is, that he employ his first leisure hours in translating his Sermon out of the barbarous dialect in which it is at present clothed, into plain, familiar, English prose, such as shall render it intelligible to any old woman in his congregation. He will not only find this to be a very profitable exercise to himself, but he will have the satisfaction of perceiv-1 ing on comparison that no two things in the creation can be more dissimilar. The other is, that he take for the text of his next Sermon the words of the apostle, 1 Cor. ii. 1—5. CARMEN FLEBILE: An Ode to the Memory of the late Rev. Andrew Fuller, of Kettering. 8vo. pp. 15. Gale and Co. THIS little piece contains a very affectionate tribute of respect to the memory of Mr. Fuller. As a specimen we shall select the ninth stanza, in which we think the writer has given a very correct and striking description of what Fuller was in the pulpit. "There with his message from above, Enfilam'd with holy zeal and love, The heav'nly Preacher stands ;I see with mighty cares oppress'd The heavings of his anxious breast To enforce divine commands ! the poem had been a little more stately and majestic. Not having the honour of being ourselves initiated into the Ars Poetica, we know not better how to explain what we have in view, than by pointing the author to the first six lines of Miss Seward's Elegy on the death of Captain Cook, as an example of what we think the introduction to an Elegiac Ode should be. Ye who ere while for Cook's illustrious brow Pluck'd the green laurel, and the oaken bough; Hung the gay garlands, on the trophied oars, And pour'd his fame along a thousand shores, Strike the slow death-bell-weave the sacred verse, And strew the Cypress o'er his honoured hearse." There is also a Monody on the death of Major André, written by which are perhaps superior to the the same lady, the opening lines of above-and we never could read them without feeling the blood run cold in our veins ! The Family Visitor; or, the supposed Address of a Member of a Bible Association. Hamilton. 1s. We know not which to admire most; the plan or the execution of this little piece. If we are correctly informed it is the production of Mr. Innes of Ediuburgh, and we beg leave to re Slow, deep, and clear, the stream of commend it to the notice of all the thought flows on: His language plain and pure, friends of the Bible Society, as admirably calculated to point out to them His manner form'd to impress—but not how they may carry more fully into allure, His voice sonorous, strong! The tale he'd tell, sinners count a dream. Without the smallest intention to insinuate that we could ourselves produce better poetry, we hope the author will however excuse the freedom we take in hinting to him the propriety of revising some of his lines: for instance, the last line but one in the third stanza. We are also suspicious that there is in the former part of the eighth stanza an air of flippancy which is not quite suitable to the nature of "a mournful elegy," -though the remarks are in themselves perfectly just. We could have wished, too, that the opening of effect the laudable object of that noble institution. A Letter to the Rev. Luke Kirby, on the Doctrines of the Trinity, the Agency of the Devil, &c. By W. Curson, South Creak, Norfolk. Is. THE design of this tract is to defend the doctrines of the revealed distinction in Deity, the divinity of Christ, and his atonement for sin, against a Socinian minister who had attacked them. The author has shewn an intimate acquaintance with his bible; and while giving a reason of the hope that is in him, he has handled the weapons of the christian warfare with great success against the gainsayer. We have been much pleased with his pamphlet. It well deserves encouragement. Religious and Literary Entelligence. BRITISH AND FOREIGN BIBLE this great work. The circle widens every day for the selection of those qualities which are essential to the entire developement of all its plans; and I trust it has a motion and power almost independent of human casualty. It seems as if all had resolved to make every sacrifice for its future prosperity. Like the Ephesian Magi, they are willing to give up what they most value for the general benefit. This work looks like the work of God. It is simple-it is sublime. It accomplishes the greatest good by the plainest means. It was born in danger, it has flourished in the midst of opposition. The stamp of providence, impressed upon its infant features, have expanded in the fervid countenance of its maturity. It is true, all men do not seem to think this, but I have no conception of the different grounds of their dissent. In speaking of this, howeyer, I will only express my regret. If a learned prelate has spoken warmly of that opposition, it was from the high generosity of his heart, from his Christian jealousy and grief that any man should close his eyes, and linger in voluntary darkness; it was from his natural surprize that any man, gathering himself up in his own little corner, should claim possession of all the heat and light in the world. [Continued from page 181.] WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, Esq. moved the thanks of the meeting to John Thorn ton, Esq. for his conduct as Treasurer during the last year, and a request that he would hold the same office the ensuing year. Mr. W. remarked, "I could almost wish that it had fallen to my lot to make some other motion than that which I now hold in my hand, because I feel reluctant to speak of individual merit when the object of the day is so large; but I cannot resist giving my testimony of respect to the present and the departed. Of my dear friend, your late Treasurer, I can find no language too strong for praise. It has been said, that men are seldom much respected by those who have familiar and easy access to them. I can testify, in this instance, that the remark is utterly false. A long and intimate friendship with Mr. H. Thornton, made me more acquainted with his worth. Viewing him closely, I saw the soundness of his understanding, and the excellency of his heart: no man earned the gifts of fortune with more justice; no man dispensed them with more liberality. Distinguished by great and good qualities, they were I congratulate the Society on the Reall at the service of religion. Holding port. It is one of the most extraordinary the rank of a Legislator, no man threw records that has ever been given. It has around his public pursuits more of the p-told of things, that but for it would have rity of his faith. A father and a friend: No man brought into his private intercourse, more of the wisdom, more of the disinterestedness, more of the broad and general principle of his public duty. The death of such a man, is, to the community, the loss of a most valuable member; to his family and friends, a deep affliction; to the Bible Society, the deprivation of services, zealous, pure, and effectual. been beyond all belief; it promises events, which, but for the efforts of this Society, would be beyond all expectation. I congratulate myself, my Lord, in having been permitted to meet this assembly once more. Never did a traveller pass through a desert with the expectations of finding a refreshing stream to slake his thirst with more delight, than I came this day to witness the scene before me. It is a While, however, we deplore the loss day of happiness and freshness to the huof Henry Thornton, we rejoice that ano- man heart. For myself, I have no words ther individual of that respected name to express my feelings of reverence and has come forward, to supply his place- delight; my deep prostration of soul at and that, a grandson of JOHN THORNTON. the Providence that has been displayed, It is no slight honour to a young man to and at the mighty scene that is opening be selected for such a situation; and while before us. Here we behold people of all we give him thanks for the past, and re- nations and complexions praying for our quest his services for the society in future, success, and a multitude, whom no man we feel that we confer on him an obliga- can number, crowding to the altar of our tion,—we would not pay compliments to God, to have the impurities of their naany man, especially on the subject of the ture cleansed, their hearts made whole, Bible Society. Whatever loss we may and their garments washed in the blood sustain, yet while we are assembled on of the LAMB. It astonishes. It leaves such a subject, we have no reason to de- my spirit no voice but that of praise; its spair. Neither talent nor zeal, nor virtue, suddenness, its immensity, are all characnor knowledge, will ever he wanting interistic of its infinite Author; it has all the |