Charms of our Native Place-Country Life and Town Life-Portraits of Middle-aged People.

To Mrs. RICHARD TOWNSEND, Norwood.

Chester Place, July 7th, 1848.-It strikes me, dear Mrs. Townsend, that you would be better off, as regards your health and spirits, if you resided in Regent's Park, or some airy part of London, than at Norwood, sweet and (for a summer-spell) enviable as Norwood is. Your husband seems to be much engaged, and the society of any country place is necessarily limited. Our native place is quite a different affair. There every stick and stone, or at all events, every nook and woody clump, and turn of the well-known river, whose sounds were the first that struck upon our infant ears,-there, all the old familiar faces, however hum-drum or even unpleasing to strangers, are full of interest from old association. We see in these objects not simply their present selves, but a host of past impressions, which, as it were, illuminate them,-impart to them both a general luminous glow, and a rich mosaic embroidery, which render them far more interesting in our eyes, than new ones though infinitely more striking, as seen for the first time.

Here I have almost too much excitement from intercourse with interesting people. I feel the charm of London society deeply, but my nervous system is so weak and irritable, that I seem always on the verge of being outdone, even though I keep quite on the outskirts of the gay, busy world, and go out little in comparison with most of my friends, very seldom (never if I can help it) two nights consecutively.

I am now sitting to Mr. L for my dear old friend Mrs. Stanger. E. thinks that the picture promises well. Some of my friends decline sitting because they are middleaged, and middle-age is neither lovely nor picturesque. My

objection is not the plainness of the stage of life, but the variability of my nervous state, and consequently of my looks. Sometimes the artist is forced to work away at the gown (at least Mr. R was sometimes) because the face is actually gone away pro tempore.

VI.

Teaching Work-Dickens as a Moralist for the Young.

To Mrs. H. M. JONES.

Herne Bay, August 17th, 1848.-My sister and Cleft us last Monday; young D remains with us till Friday. He reads Homer to me, and this with H.'s readings, and E.'s, is as much in that way as my nerves will stand; for I can do everything that I ever could, a little, but nothing much or long. The hundred lines with each youth, and sometimes Pindar or Horace beside, which seems nothing to my brother, is a good deal to me. They like to talk with me and each other about "Harry Lorrequer and other military and naval novels, and above all about the productions of Dickens, the never-to-be-exhausted fun of Pickwick, and the capital new strokes of Martin Chuzzlewit. This last work contains, beside all the fun, some very marked and available morals. I scarce know any book in which the evil and odiousness of selfishness is more forcibly brought out, or in a greater variety of exhibitions. In the midst of the merry quotations, or at least, on any fair opportunity, I draw the boys' attention to these points, bid them remark how unmanly is the selfishness of young Martin, and I insist upon it that Tom Pinch's character, if it could really exist, would be a very beautiful one. But I doubt, as I do in regard to Pickwick, that so much sense, and deep, solid goodness, could co-exist with such want of discernment and liability to be gulled. Tigg is very clever, and the boys roar with laughter at the "what's-his-name place whence no thingumbob ever came back;" but this is

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only a new edition of Jingle and Smangles. Mark Tapley also is a second Sam Weller. The new characters are Pecksniff, and the thrice-notable Sairey Gamp, with Betsy Prig to show her off.

VII.

Mr. Coleridge's Philosophy inseparable from his Religious TeachingHis View of the Inspiration of Scripture.

To Miss MORRIS.

1848.-I doubt not that though your American semiColeridgian, or rather Coleridgian only in fancy, imagines my father a "Heretic," in his formal divinity mind, yet that his heart and spiritual being, if he really have benefited in any way or degree worth speaking of, by his writings, is making a far different report. Why should a fine intellect (and most men allow my father that), united with a disposition to believe, and strong desire to be in sympathy with the religious, become suddenly effete and worse than useless, when applied to the discernment of religious truth? I know how vain it is to argue. But I say this to show you my own state of mind on these matters, not in any expectation of altering yours, or that of any of those who see the subject of religious belief, or rather the theory of faith, as you do. My father's religious teaching is so interwoven. with his intellectual views, as with all deep and earnest thinkers must ever be the case, that both must stand or fall together; and in my opinion those persons dream who think they are improved by him intellectually, yet consider his views of Christianity in the main unsound. There are some portions of his theology on which I feel unresolved, some which I reject; but in the mass they are such as both embrace me and are embraced by me. His view of Inspiration, as far as it goes, I do entirely assent to; and it is my strong anticipation, as far as I have any power to anticipate, that after a time, all earnest, thoughtful Christians will perceive that such a footing, in the main, as

that on which he places the Inspiration of Scripture is the only safe one,-the only one that can hold its ground against advancing thought and investigation. I refer not so much in this to examination of outward proof, but to reflection on the nature of the thing in itself, the discovery of the internal incoherency of the ordinary schemes of belief on this subject. I think it will be found how satisfyingly spiritual it is.

VIII.

Mr. Spedding's Critique on Lord Macaulay's Essay on BaconThe Ordinance of Confirmation-Primitive Explanations of its Meaning and Efficacy.

TO AUBREY DE VERE, Esq.

1848.—I am delighted and interested in a most high degree by the vindication of Bacon. It seems to me no less admirable for the principles of moral discrimination and truth, and accuracy of statement, especially where character is concerned, which it brings out and elucidates by particular instances, which as it were substantiate and vitalize the abstract propositions, than for the glorious sunny light which it casts on the character of Bacon. Then how ably does it show up, not Macaulay's character individually and personally, so much as the class of thinkers of which he is the mouthpiece and representative. There are numbers who dislike and suspect that anti-Bacon article, and would take in with avidity the refutation.

But can it be true that Bacon doubted whether Confirmation were a subsequent to Baptism? How can it be doubted by any one who knows what Confirmation is, what are the purposes of it?

There can be no doubt that Confirmation was in the beginning considered, if not a component part of the whole sacrament of Baptism, yet certainly a sacrament in which the regenerative Spirit was received. The two were united in time, and formed one double rite. Confirmation, or

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Imposition of Hands, was performed directly after Baptism ; and Tertullian affirms that men are prepared for the Spirit, or purified by the Baptismal rite,-that they receive the Spirit by Imposition of Hands.

I think we may argue from this, and many like dogmas of the early Fathers, that it is not possible to follow out the primitive rationale of Sacraments on all points. The Church afterwards separated Imposition of Hands from Baptism, and taught that the gift of the Regenerative Spirit appertained to the latter. Still Confirmation is surely a complement of Baptism, has a special reference to it, though it be not necessary to salvation, or an essential part of Baptism. The term "subsequent to Baptism" is ambiguous. Confirmation is not to confirm the Baptism, but to confirm or corroborate the baptized in the graces and spiritual edification originally received in baptism.

IX.

Pindar-Dante's "Paradiso "_"Faustina," by Ida Countess HahnHahn-Haziness of Continental Morality-A Coquette on Principle-Lord Bacon's Insincerity.

TO AUBREY DE VERE, Esq., Curragh Chase, Ireland.

Chester Place, 1848.-One feels proud of reading Pindar. It is like being at a fountain-head, at the fresh top of a lofty aerial mount, a wide prospect of the land of beauty spread out before one. The Second Pythian Ode contains one of those Scripture-like passages which one seems to have read somewhere in the Old Testament, but knows not exactly where, perhaps in the Psalms, in Job, or Isaiah.

Canto V. of the "Paradiso" is in the main rather dry, sententious, and unsensuous, but it reads impressively, and I feel this time, more than before, how finely the light keeps growing as one goes on in the "Paradiso," how the splendours accumulate, the glory deepens, the colours glow out more and more in ever richer variety.