weather he cleaves wood. All this is doubtless very becoming and proper. Hunting, drinking, shooting, playing at cards, and the like, are modes of employing time, wholly inconsistent with a strictly religious life. Of any life, pursued to excess they make terrible waste. Nor is it the smallest justification of such who exceed, that, possibly those who take not such sports, or who join not in those diversions, have seldom or never been favoured with opportunities to indulge them, at that time of life, when the relish and habits of them are acquired. In early life, this was the predicament of the confessionalist; which, however, by no means impairs the force of his general reasoning: and pious natures will still, as much as ever, revolt at practices, which, unless they are repressed, may even become dangerous to the existence of piety altogether.

The Memoirs record the third marriage of the confessionalist. In the confessions, we have an agreeable account of his father-in-law, with whom he dines once a week. This gentleman is a lawyer, and, though of such a profession, is, Mr. L. assures us, a peaceable gentleman, and a very honest man. The poor own his bounty, the church his piety. He is good to his poor neighbours, and goes to church once a week. This respectable man is an exemplary instance of the justness of that observation, which says, that in all classes and professions, there are the good to overawe the bad. On Sunday, when the service is in the afternoon, the old gentleman and the confessionalist relate to each other all the droll adventures they can recollect, mutually listening, with patience, to stories which they have heard twenty times before.

This character of his father-in-law occurs in the letter to Jack Jolly; who, it appears, as well as the brother of Jack, died very near the time when that letter was written.

Mere common-place observations form none of the kind of observations looked for in a book of this sort. Mostly all the observations of Mr. Lackington are common-place; which have as much to do with confessions as with hunting, shooting, or horse-racing. The whole are not thus irrelevant. His observations, respecting the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, although not new, are judicious: and some remarks occur on the subject of a death-bed repentance, which may be perused with advantage. He rightly thinks a death-bed unsuitable for repentance; it is a time of sickness, when the body is agonised with pain, or overwhelmed with disorders. Novel-writers have tended to propagate the belief in the efficacy of a death-bed repentance. Dramatic writers have done so too; and the confessionalist thinks they have done so without the authority of reason or of revelation. In the divine volume we read that an entire change of heart and life is necessary to constitute thorough repentance. The same doctrine is taught by natural religion. The Persians in their iredem, the ancient Bramins in their sacred books, Confusius in his ethics, morals; these, all of them, with the simple circumstance of a different mode of unfolding and arranging their sentiments, hold precisely alike notions in respect to repentance. Death-bed repentance is more a Christian than a Hea

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then topic. Yet, among the philosophers, usually denominated heathen, the same, or nearly the same, trine was taught. It was an idea of Plato's, that even though they should pass the remainder of their lives in repentance, yet that for venial sins, however the transgressors might repent all their lives afterwards, they must, of necessity, be, for a time, cast into Tartarus. In his essay on the immortality of the soul, this philosopher, who, for the day in which he lived, was no despicable authority, supposes that in Elysian, our heaven, evil intails on man its own miseries. Plato says just the same thing in his Commonwealth. He fancies that souls, both good and bad, transport their evil dispositions with them into the other world. Dr. Scott* pursues, through all its ramifications, this doctrine of the famous Greek philosopher;, and no philosopher. would be discredited by more than even ordinary attention to those notions of Plato, which we are here considering. The translator of the Inferno of Dante, Mr. Boyd, himself an elegant classic, and truly sensible man, gives a summary, and one by no means uninteresting, of the Platonic doctrine. Boyd, however, has not rendered his author with the utmost correctness. What Plato says is, that whenever the souls of men leave the body, spirits, like themselves, doubtless associate with them." Plato urged this idea to the guilty. He was of opinion, that just as men had acted here they would find their eternal station. Fiends were always, to be fiends, occupying the regions of infernal

* Chapters i. ii. and iii. of his Christian Life.

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woe. Hence the unavoidable necessity for more than equivocal, limited death-bed repentance. Hence, too, it is evident, that, repentance consists in a change of disposition and life, and not in a momentary sorrow. The Indians, peculiar in every thing, have a notion, that they shall go to heaven, if they can but die with a cow's tail in their hand. We laugh at this notion of the Indians: but what is our death-bed repentance more than the dying with a cow's tail in our hand.

Such an easy method of wiping off the stain of damning sins, few will think the proper method; because most of us know that the repentance of moments for the sins of years is not even dust in the balance. The knaves and fools, all the rascals of this world, might hope to be partakers of the joys of heaven, were a death-bed repentance sufficient. In this case, those wretches who have made a hell of this world, to themselves and all connected with them, getting to heaven, would make a hell of that also. What worse hell could be than for a perfectly honest man to live eternally with a rogue, or a virtuous woman with an old bawd; a Howard with a Roberspierre; a Lucretia with Mother Johnson; Jonas Hanway with Paul Jones; Penelope with a modern wife; Aspasia and Octavia with Cleopatra and Xantippe; Guyon and Bourignon with Ninon de L'Enclos and Lady Mary Wortley Montague; Socrates and Plato with Petroneus and Chatres; Wesley and Whitfield with Woolston and Tom Paine; my own dear first wife with the infidel lady who accused my friend Dick to her husband; myself with Jack Abershaw; Mrs. H. Moore and Mrs. Rowe with Mrs. Behn

and G. A. Bellamy; the Man of Ross with Elwes; Bigot Mary with Lady Jane Gray; Sophronia with Sappho; Nero and Bonaparte with Alfred and George III. Never were characters and natures more opposite, yet if a death-bed repentance were all sufficient, as it is by many, too many, thought to be, the whole group would meet in that place hitherto supposed to have been, from the commencement of the world, allotted for the righteous," for the souls of men made perfect." This jargon, then, of the dramatic and novel writers, this belief so cruel to ourselves, this notion of the adequate efficacy of a death-bed repentance, it is incumbent on us to explode. Do not let it be said that a notion so barbarous, wild, and superstitious, was prevalent in the nineteenth century of the religion of Christ! That

The wise and learned, high and low,

And those who ought the truth to know,
In faith of cow-tail die resign'd,

Never attending to the mind;

Till when the solemn shade of death,
As gasping for a moment's breath,
Alarms them for the hour to come,

Or for their long, eternal home.

The situation of the duellist is, in this respect truly awful. He fights and falls in the twinkling of an eye; yet the novelist, dramatic writer, or poet, still knowing there could have been no preparation, would waft the souls of such to heaven. Horde*, in a poem, otherwise far from silly, draws a character of this description; and

Rev. J. Horde.