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surely may a man be wakened to rapture by the magnificence of God, while his life is deformed by its rebellions, and his heart rankles with all the foulness of idolatry against Him.

Well, then, let us try the other way of bringing the temporal nature of visible things to bear upon your interests. It is true that this earth and these heavens will at length disappear; but they may outlive our posterity for many generations. However, if they disappear not from us, we most certainly shall disappear from them. They will soon cease to be anything to you; and though the splendour and variety of all that is visible around us should last for thousands of centuries, your eyes will soon be closed upon them. The time is coming when this goodly scene shall reach its positive consummation. But, in all likelihood, the time is coming much sooner, when you shall resign the breath of your nostrils, and bid a final adieu to everything around you. Let this earth and these heavens be as enduring as they may, to you they are fugitive as vanity. Time, with its mighty strides, will soon reach a future generation, and leave the present in death and in forgetfulness behind it. The grave will close upon every one of you, and that is the dark and silent cavern where no voice is heard, and the light of the sun never enters.

2. ON SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS.

The awakening from spiritual death calls for a peculiar and a preternatural application. We say preternatural, for such is the obstinacy of this sleep of nature that no power within the compass of nature can put an end to it. It withstands all the demonstrations of arithmetic. Time moves on without disturbing it. The last messenger lifts many a note of preparation, but so deep is the lethargy that he is not heard. Every year do his approaching footteps become more distinct and more audible; yet every year rivets the affections of sense more tenaciously than before to the scene that is around him. One would think that the fall of so many acquaintances on every side of him might at length have forced an awakening conviction into his heart. One would think that, standing alone and in mournful survey amid the wreck of former associations, the spell might have been already broken which so fastens him to a perishable world. Oh! why were the tears he shed over his children's grave not followed up by the deliverance of his soul from this sore infatuation? Why, as he hung over the dying bed of her with whom he had so oft taken counsel about the plans and the interests of life, did he not catch a glimpse of this world's vanity, and did not the light of truth break in upon his heart from the solemn and apprehended realities beyond it? But no. The enchantment, it would appear, is not so easily dissolved. The deep sleep which the Bible speaks of is not so easily broken. The conscious infirmities of age cannot do it. The frequent and touching specimens of mortality around us cannot do it. The rude entrance

of death into our own houses cannot do it. The melting of onr old society away from us, and the constant succession of new faces and new families in their place, cannot do it. The tolling of the funeral-bell, which has rung so many of our companions across the confines of eternity, and in a few little years will perform the same office for us, cannot do it. It often happens, in the visions of the night, that some fancied spectacle of terror or shriek of alarm have frightened us out of our sleep and our dream together. But the sleep of worldliness stands its ground against all this. We hear the moanings of many a death-bed, and we witness its looks of imploring anguish, and we watch the decay of life as it glimmers onward to its final extinction, and we hear the last breath, and we pause in the solemn stillness that follows it, till it is broken in upon by the bursting agony of the weeping attendants; and in one day more, we revisit the chamber of him, who in white and shrouded stateliness lies the effigy of what he was; and we lift the border that is upon the dead man's countenance, and there we gaze upon that brow so cold, and those eyes so motionless; and in two days more we follow him to the sepulchre, and, mingled with the earth among which he is laid, we behold the skulls and the skeletons of those who have gone before him; and it is the distinct understanding of nature, that soon shall every one of us go through the same process of dying, and add our mouldering bodies to the mass of corruption that we have been contemplating. But mark the derangement of nature, and how soon again it falls to sleep, among the delusions of a world, of the vanity of which it has recently got so striking a demonstration. Look onward but one single day more, and you behold every trace of this loud and warning voice dissipated to nothing. The man seemed as if he had been actually awakened, but it was only the start and the stupid glare of a moment, after which he has lain him down again among the visions and the slumbers of a soul that is spiritually dead. He has not lost all sensibility any more than the man that is in a midnight trance, who is busied with the imaginations of a dream. But he has gone back again to the sensibilities of a world which he is so speedily to abandon, and in these he has sunk all the sensibilities of that everlasting world on the confines of which he was treading but yesterday. All is forgotten amid the bargains, and the adventures, and the bustle, and the expectation of the scene that is immediately around him. Eternity is again shut out, and amid the dreaming illusions of a fleeting and fantastic day, does he cradle his infatuated soul into an utter unconcern about its coming torments, or its coming triumphs. Yes! we have heard the man of serious religion denounced as a visionary. But if that be a vision which is a short-lived deceit, and that be a sober reality which survives the fluctuations both of time and of fancytell us if such a use of the term be not an utter misapplication, and whether, with all the justice, as well as with all the severity of truth, it may not be retorted upon the head of him who, though

prized for the sagacity of a firm, secular, and much-exercised understanding, and honoured in the market-place for his experience in the walks and ways of this world's business, has not so much as entered upon the beginning of wisdom, but is toiling away all his skill and all his energy on the frivolities of an idiot's dream.

3. CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

Man is the direct agent of a wide and continual distress to the lower animals; and the question is, "Can any method be devised for its alleviation?" On this subject that Scriptural image is strikingly realized "the whole inferior creation groaning and travailing together in pain" because of him. It signifies not to the substantive amount of the suffering, whether this be prompted by the hardness of his heart, or only permitted through the heedlessness of his mind. In either way it holds true, not only that the arch-devourer Man stands pre-eminent over the fiercest children of the wilderness as an animal of prey, but that for his lordly and luxurious appetite, as well as for his service or merest curiosity and amusement, Nature must be ransacked throughout all her elements. Rather than forego the veriest gratifications of vanity, he will wring them from the anguish of wretched and ill-fated creatures; and whether for the indulgence of his barbaric sensuality or barbaric splendour, can stalk paramount over the sufferings of that prostrate creation which has been placed beneath his feet. That beauteous domain, whereof he has been constituted the terrestrial sovereign, gives out so many blissful and benignant aspects; and whether we look to its peaceful lakes, or to its flowery landscapes, or its evening skies, or to all that soft attire which overspreads the hills and the valleys, lighted up by smiles of sweetest sunshine, and where animals disport themselves in all the exuberance of gaiety, this surely were a more befitting scene for the rule of clemency than for the iron rod of a murderous and remorseless tyrant. But the present is a mysterious world wherein we dwell. It still bears much upon its materialism of the impress of Paradise. But a breath from the air of Pandemonium has gone over its living generations; and so "the fear of man and the dread of man is now upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, and upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into man's hands are they delivered: every moving thing that liveth is meat for him; yea, even as the green herbs, there have been given to him all things." Such is the extent of his jurisdiction, and with most full and wanton license has he revelled among its privileges. The whole earth labours and is in violence because of his cruelties; and from the amphitheatre of sentient nature, there sounds in fancy's ear the bleat of one wide and universal suffering, a dreadful homage to the power of nature's constituted lord.

These sufferings are really felt. The beasts of the field are not so

many automata without sensation, and just so constructed as to give forth all the natural expressions of it. Nature hath not practised this universal deception upon our species. These poor animals just look, and tremble, and give forth the very indications of suffering that we do. Theirs is the distinct cry of pain. Theirs is the unequivocal physiognomy of pain. They put on the same aspect of terror on the demonstrations of a menaced blow. They exhibit the same distortions of agony after the infliction of it. The bruise, or the burn, or the fracture, or the deep incision, or the fierce encounter with one of equal or superior strength, just affects them similarly to ourselves. Their blood circulates as ours. They have pulsations in various parts of the body like ours. They sicken, and they grow feeble with age, and, finally, they die, just as we do. They possess the same feelings; and, what exposes them to like sufferings from another quarter, they possess the same instincts with our own species. The lioness robbed of her whelps causes the wilderness to ring aloud with the proclamation of her wrongs; or the bird whose little household has been stolen fills and saddens all the grove with melodies of deepest pathos. All this is palpable even to the general and unlearned eye; and when the physiologist lays open the recesses of their system, by means of that scalpel under whose operation they just shrink and are convulsed as any living subject of our own species, there stands forth to view the same sentient apparatus, and furnished with the same conductors for the transmission of feeling to every minutest pore upon the surface. Theirs is unmixed and unmitigated pain, the agonies of martyrdom without the alleviation of the hopes and the sentiments whereof they are incapable. When they lay them down to die, their only fellowship is with suffering; for in the prison-house of their beset and bounded faculties, there can no relief be afforded by communion with other interests or other things. The attention does not lighten their distress as it does that of man, by carrying off his spirit from that existing pungency and pressure which might else be overwhelming. There is but room in their mysterious economy for one inmate,-and that is, the absorbing sense of their own single and concentrated anguish. And so in that bed of torment whereon the wounded animal lingers and expires, there is an unexplored depth and intensity of suffering which the poor dumb animal itself cannot tell, and against which it can offer no remonstrance-an untold and unknown amount of wretchedness of which no articulate voice gives utterance.

XIII. LORD JEFFREY.

FRANCIS JEFFREY was born in Edinburgh in 1773, and after the usual classical education at the High School of his native town, repaired to Glasgow University, and from thence to Oxford. On the completion of his education he returned to the Scottish metropolis, and

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adopted the profession of the law. In 1802, in co-operation with Brougham and Sydney Smith, he began the "Edinburgh Review," a publication which must ever be linked with the name of Jeffrey. At the same time he was assiduous in his professional avocations; and his ready eloquence, command of language, powers of persuasion, and clearness of intellect, soon made him conspicuous at the bar. At length, in 1829, he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates; the next year, when the Reformed Ministry came into power, he was made Lord Advocate, and a few years later he was advanced to the Bench as one of the Lords of Session. He continued to discharge his duties with unabating energy, and to the satisfaction of all parties, till his death, 26th January 1850. His writings consist of his "Contributions to the Edinburgh Review," part of which have been published, and have met with a large amount of public favour. He may be considered as the founder of the modern school of criticism, and of the "Review" as it now exists. As a critic, Jeffrey is distinguished in general by strict impartiality, and an urbanity of manner unhappily not always characteristic of the critic. His language, without aspiring to eloquence, is neat, perspicuous, and varied,-in fact, possesses all the excellences which belong to the style of a literary critic. He is sometimes not explicit enough in his opinions, which he enounces boldly and then explains away by numerous qualifications; and he has been accused of having no sympathy with the profounder feelings which are said to exist in modern poetry; but on this he has been perhaps misunderstood, and perhaps, also, his opinions are not so wholly untenable as is sometimes imagined; at all events, he did good service to literature by beating down the pretensions of literary adventurers, and by constantly holding up to public admiration and imitation the glorious era of Shakspere, and Bacon, and Taylor.

1. MORTALITY OF THE IMMORTALS. (REVIEW OF CAMPBELL'S

SPECIMENS, MARCH 1819.)

Next to the impression of the vast fertility, compass, and beauty of our English poetry, the reflection that occurs most frequently and forcibly to us, in accompanying Mr Campbell through his wide survey, is that of the perishable nature of poetical fame, and the speedy oblivion that has overtaken so many of the promised heirs of immortality! Of near two hundred and fifty authors whose works are cited in these volumes, by far the greater part of whom were celebrated in their generation, there are not thirty that now enjoy anything that can be called popularity, whose works are to be found in the hands of ordinary readers, in the shops of ordinary booksellers, or in the press for republication. About fifty more may be tolerably familiar to men of taste or literature-the rest slumber on the shelves of collectors, and are partially known to a few antiquaries and scholars. Now the fame of a poet is popular, or nothing. He does not address himself, like the man of science, to the learned, or those who desire to learn, but to all mankind; and his purpose being to delight and be praised, necessarily extends to all who can receive pleasure or join in applause. It is strange, then,