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from the head, not from the heart. This objection would be less felt, when the Letters were first published at considerable intervals; but Junius wrote for posterity.

L. XXIII. Sneer and irony continued with such gross violation of good sense, as to be perfectly nonsense. The man who can address another on his most detestable vices in a strain of cold continual irony, is himself a wretch.

L. XXXV. To honour them with a determined predilection and confidence in exclusion of your English subjects, who placed your family, and, in spite of treachery and rebellion, have supported it upon the throne, is a mistake too gross even for the unsuspecting generosity of youth.

The words upon the throne,' stand unfortunately for the harmonious effect of the balance of 'placed' and supported.'

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This address to the king is almost faultless in composition, and has been evidently tormented with the file. But it has fewer beauties than any other long letter of Junius; and it is utterly undramatic. There is nothing in the style, the transitions, or the sentiments, which represents the passions of a man emboldening himself to address his sovereign personally. Like a Presbyterian's prayer, you may substitute almost every where the third for the second person without injury. The newspaper, his closet, and his own person were alone present to the author's intention and imagination. This makes the composition vapid. It possesses an Iso

cratic correctness, when it should have had the force and drama of an oration of Demosthenes. From this, however, the paragraph beginning with the words As to the Scotch,' and also the last two paragraphs must be honourably excepted. They are, perhaps, the finest passages in the whole collection.

WONDERFULNESS OF PROSE.

T has just struck my feelings that the Pherecydean origin of prose being granted, prose must have struck men with greater admiration than poetry. In the latter it was the language of passion and emotion: it is what they themselves spoke and heard in moments of exultation, indignation, &c. But to hear an evolving roll, or a succession of leaves, talk continually the language of deliberate reason in a form of continued preconception, of a Z already possessed when A was being uttered,—this must have appeared godlike. I feel myself in the same state, when in the perusal of a sober, yet elevated and harmonious succession of sentences and periods, I abstract my mind from the particular passage and sympathize with the wonder of the common people, who say of an eloquent man:-' He talks like a book!'

255

NOTES ON HERBERT'S TEMPLE AND

G

HARVEY'S SYNAGOGUE.

HERBERT is a true poet, but a poet sui generis, the merits of whose poems will never be felt without a sympathy with the mind and character of the man. To appreciate this volume, it is not enough that the reader possesses a cultivated judgment, classical taste, or even poetic sensibility, unless he be likewise a Christian, and both a zealous and an orthodox, both a devout and a devotional Christian. But even this will not quite suffice. He must be an affectionate and dutiful child of the Church, and from habit, conviction, and a constitutional predisposition to ceremoniousness, in piety as in manners, find her forms and ordinances aids of religion, not sources of formality; for religion is the element in which he lives, and the region in which he moves.

The Church, say rather the Churchmen of England, under the two first Stuarts, has been charged with a yearning after the Romish fopperies, and even the papistic usurpations; but we shall decide more correctly, as well as more charitably, if for the Romish and papistic we substitute the patristic leaven. There even was (natural enough from their distinguished learning, and knowledge of ecclesiastical antiquities) an overrating of the Church

and of the Fathers, for the first five or even six centuries; these lines on the Egyptian monks, Holy Macarius and great Anthony" (p. 205.) supply a striking instance and illustration of this.

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P. 10.

If thou be single, all thy goods and ground
Submit to love; but yet not more than all.
Give one estate as one life. None is bound
To work for two, who brought himself to thrall.
God made me one man; love makes me no more,
Till labour come, and make my weakness score.
I do not understand this stanza.

P. 41.

My flesh began unto my soul in pain,

Sicknesses clave my bones, &c.

Either a misprint, or a noticeable idiom of the word "began?" Yes! and a very beautiful idiom it is the first colloquy or address of the flesh.

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P. 46.

What though my body run to dust?

Faith cleaves unto it, counting every grain,
With an exact and most particular trust,
Reserving all for flesh again.

I find few historical facts so difficult of solution as the continuance, in Protestantism, of this antiscriptural superstition.

P. 54. Second poem on The Holy Scriptures.

This verse marks that, and both do make a motion
Unto a third that ten leaves off doth lie.

The spiritual unity of the Bible the order and connection of organic forms in which the unity of

life is shewn, though as widely dispersed in the world of sight as the text.

Ib.

Then as dispersed herbs do watch a potion,
These three make up some Christian's destiny.

Some misprint.

P. 87.

Sweet Spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A bor where sweets compacted lie.

Nest.

P. 92. Man.

Each thing is full of duty :

Waters united are our navigation:

Distinguished, our habitation;

Below, our drink; above, our meat:

Both are our cleanliness. Hath one such beauty?
Then how are all things neat!

'Distinguished.' I understand this but imperfectly. Did they form an island? and the next lines refer perhaps to the then belief that all fruits grow and are nourished by water. But then how is the ascending sap "our cleanliness?" Perhaps, therefore, the rains.

P. 140.

But he doth bid us take his blood for wine.

Nay, the contrary; take wine to be blood, and the blood of a man who died 1800 years ago. This

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