What was Christ's object in founding the society which is called by his name? (p. xxii.) But according to the one that object was the establishing of a happy, wellorganized, morally pure "universal commonwealth" on earth; in which "the majesty of men was to be worshipped, gathered up in the person of its Eternal Sovereign, Christ Jesus." According to the other, that object was the gathering of an elect body of men, separated from the universal mass of mankind, whose citizenship (politeuma, Phil. iii. 20) was not to be on earth but in heaven, and who consequently were not to mind (phronein, Col. iii. 2) things on the earth, but to seek those things which are above; who were not to worship the majesty of men, but to worship God through Jesus Christ their Lord; who, while a "peculiar people, zealous of good works," during their short sojourn as pilgrims here below, were to hold themselves in constant readiness at any moment to be caught up to meet their Lord in the air, since it was their destiny, in the closest union with Him, to reign with Him, to judge the angels and the world (1 Cor. vi. 3), and in that high majestic dignity to establish, with and through Him, a universal commonwealth, which not only was to comprise the inhabitants of the earth, but also those of the heavenly places. You see there is some difference between the conclusions which the writer of "Ecce Homo" has drawn from the facts of the Gospel, and those which Paul drew. Permit me, however, to pause here for the present, as I see that my letter is already too long. Next month I hope to send you a continuation of my criticism. From The Saturday Review. THERE are born newspaper writers; and there are born magazine writers; and there are born writers in quarterlies. There are of course, besides these, an indefinite number of other writers who happen in a greater or less degree to contribute to newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies, but of whom we should find it difficult to say that they might not with equal success have taken up some other line instead of that which they have actually chosen. It is, however, of the former class that we now wish to speak. writer, the impossibility of charging him with any bad passion, with anything beyond a deficient feeling for the poetic faculty exerting itself in certain new and somewhat startling directions. To Coleridge, indeed, and to him alone, Jeffrey was more positively unfair. Suppose even so slight a change as that Jeffrey had written in a magazine instead of a quarterly review, he could never have had the same influence; his want of liveliness, which, as it was, helped him to gain a character for judicial impartiality, would then have been a hindrance to him. The typical magazine writers are Professor WilIt would be difficult, at least in England, son and De Quincey; and which is the most where newspaper-writing is anonymous, to typical it would perhaps be hard to say. say who especially have been the typical Here, again, there are other magazine writnewspaper writers. But of writers in quar-ers who cannot be reckoned inferior in abilterlies Lord Jeffrey is, facile princeps, the ity to Wilson or De Quincey, who yet are model, the central type. Not that he was by no means equally characteristic in this the ablest, or anything like the ablest, of particular respect. Some, for instance, of those who have given their thoughts to the Mr. Carlyle's most brilliant productions apworld through this medium. To go no fur-peared first in magazines; but their having ther than the Edinburgh Review, both Syd-so appeared was in a sense accidental ney Smith and Lord Macaulay were much they might just as well have come out as a cleverer men, and their articles were much complete book at once. But the stamp of cleverer articles than those of Jeffrey. But the magazine is on everything written by it may be doubted whether they produced either Wilson or De Quincey. so great an immediate effect, whether their Unlike Jeffrey, both of these two were influence as reviewers over their contempo- men of genius. Moreover, while their most raries was felt equally with that of Jeffrey; salient characteristics were startlingly disand it is quite beyond question that Jeffrey's similar, the subtler qualities of their genius power was far greater, in proportion to his were by no means unlike. A fine and beauability, than was theirs. Sydney Smith and tiful irony expressed itself equally through Macaulay, had they even been wholly de- the apparent animalism of the one and the barred from reviewing, would perhaps have apparent egotism of the other. Wilson, at produced an effect on the world not inferior first sight, seems a mere boy; you cannot to that which has in fact resulted from their read through ten pages of him without findefforts. But Jeffrey, had he not been a re-ing some rollicking piece of bodily exerviewer, and moreover a quarterly reviewer, would have been nobody. Here he was precisely in his place; he had the very qualities which made him, not indeed the real leader, but the recognised arbiter of his generation in literary judgments. He was emphatically not a man of genius; he had no overpowering instinct, no inspiration, not even any special insight or enthusiasm. But he had an ever watchful common sense, a sympathy with progress and with all forms of thought not too violently eccentric, generosity of temper, and guardedness of expression. And hence, while the attacks of the Quarterly on Keats and Tennyson produced no lasting effect whatever, the attacks of Jeffrey on Wordsworth produced a great and continued effect. It is impossible to read them even now without admiration for their neatness and plausibility; essentially unjust, they yet escape the condemnation of injustice, from the evident candour of the cise, some audacious joke, some highly appreciative notice of the pleasures of eating and drinking. He tears over the mountains; he clears twenty-three feet in a single leap (this a real piece of sober fact); he has a perfectly voracious appetite, and an unlimited capacity for toddy. He hurls abusive epithets at his political and poetical adversaries with a most surprising vigour. But a real delicacy of nature lies beneath this outward show, and reveals itself in time. He has the trick of returning back upon himself, and making amends for some unusually caustic piece of criticism by a generous surrender. Nowhere is this more remarkable than in his review of the early productions of Tennyson, which in many parts, as is well known, is by no means sparing in its censure (and, to say the truth, deservedly so), yet ends with these words, after quoting some of the more beautiful pieces of the poet: -“Looking over our article, we see that the whole merit of it lies in the extracts, which are beautiful exceedingly." And, in fact, there were few men in whom Wilson could not discern some merit. To Jeffrey and Brougham, widely as he differed from them, he was gracefully courteous. Even Mr. Tupper, whose portentous continuation of Christabel now lies embalmed in the Essays of Christopher North, like a fly in amber, was not dismissed by him without some measure of encouragement; and though Mr. Tupper has since proved most conclusively to the world his possession of a thickness of skin on which neither satire nor encouragement is of any avail, it can hardly be laid to Wilson's charge, as a fault, that he did not foresee the eccentric and uncouth developments of that remarkable person. To some writers, indeed, Wilson was far too indulgent, and, from his reverence for religion, especially indulgent to those who wrote in a religious strain. Mr. Bowles's heavy, dull, violent tracts in verse, full of everything a poem should not have, void of everything that a poem should have, were treated by him with a respect that at the present day seems quite unaccountable. On the other hand, what a model of satire is his review of Sir Humphry Davy's Salmonia! We know of hardly any other instance of a satire so severe, and so justly severe, in which yet the person satirized is treated, not merely without virulence or animosity, but without even the assumption of superiority on the part of the satirist, with a true gentlemanliness and dignity of tone concealing itself beneath inextinguishable laughter. And if a certain want of generosity is to be imputed to him in his criticisms of Leigh Hunt and what he called the " Cockney school, he made amends for it by a fuller appreciation afterwards. The great charm of Wilson, as of all humourists, is the contrast between the superficial aspects of his nature and those undercurrents which he appears studiously to shroud, and which reveal themselves only to the more careful observer. Where we had thought there was nothing but physical enjoyment, suddenly is seen to be thought and spirituality. Nature, instead of being to him a servant of all work, is truly a divine goddess, the opener of secret things; his loud talking in her presence is but a veil to hide what he feels from the vulgar. The pure animalist, the pure sentimentalist, and the pure cynic are alike unbearable; but the man who can combine them in the proper proportion will affect others deeply and enduringly. Genuinely to do so needs great grasp of mind; nor indeed can they be com bined in precisely équal proportions consistently with unity of endeavour. Some one must be the predominant and true motive, while the others represent past or superficial modes of feeling, which are only not laid aside because they serve as channels of communication and mutual understanding between the writer and other men. Now in Wilson the animalist is apparently and in outward show predominant, but the sentimentalist really so-using the word sentiment not in an invidious sense, but as signifying sympathy with some past or external mode of feeling; while cynicism is never put on by him except as a transparent mockery, in a spirit of audacious bravado, amusing from its very incongruousness. De Quincey also was a humourist — a compound of the sentimentalist and the cynic; and in him also the sentimentalist must, on the whole, be held to have predominated. Though cynicism was to him something more than an outward veil or superficial feeling, it entered more deeply into his nature than animalism did into Wilson's. The famous Essay on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts is one of the masterpieces of cynicism; and the humour of it consists in this cynicism being suppressed and ignored by the writer, who pretends to take his stand as a sentimentalist, as a sympathizer with those modes of feeling which the fine arts arouse in those who study them. And yet, when one has penetrated through the superficial sentimentalism to the underlying stratum of cynicism, there is seen in the far distance yet another frame of mind which denies or throws doubt on the reality of the cynicism, and thereby renders it bearable. De Quincey's nature was indeed a complicated one. Who can forget the little touches in his essays on Wordsworth and Coleridge, by which, in the middle of his exuberant floods of admiration for those great poets, he suddenly checks himself into coldness, and into what would be called sarcasm were it not so slight and fleeting, seeming to say, "After all, you need not be so much surprised; these men had a great deal of luck, and a certain knack, but at bottom they were men like you or me, and had some very prosaic qualities indeed." No doubt it was the consciousness of his own great powers, the greatness of which was comparatively unrecognised, that caused this sudden stopping of his enthusiasm. For in England, even more than in any other country, it is simplicity and direct force of aim that gains a man power and reputation. A man whose desires and purposes are complex, however much they may testify to his ability, stands here at a great disadvantage compared with one whose plies the electric and magnetic currents range is comparatively limited, but who whereby the solid and fixed forms are knows what he wants, and strikes straight blended into a whole. Perfect freedom is at the point. Thus it is that Wordsworth its essence. Moreover, it is a social kind has attained a higher reputation than Col- of writing; it is done far better when many eridge, who, beyond doubt, had the more persons of harmonious views and disposicomprehensive nature. And it was from tions unite, than by a solitary thinker. this cause that De Quincey was, in public And at the present day the impulse of Engestimation, disregarded in comparison with lish minds is entirely towards concentration men who had not a tithe of his subtle in- and earnestness and definiteness of thought; sight, but who let their real purpose be this has come in a variety of ways, but plainly apparent. The only perfectly sim- principally through the influence of such men ple things that De Quincey ever wrote were as Mr. Mill, Mr. Carlyle, Dr. Newman, and his Autobiographic Sketches, and these are Dr. Arnold-men differing in all respects indeed exquisite; they remind one of but this, that they had an intense certainty Charles Lamb, and, with less concentra- of their meaning, and impressed the necestion, have in some respects the charm of a sity of such certainty on others. But flexiyet greater freshness. bility, which is the very opposite of this intense certainty, is the peculiar excellence of periodical writing. And the padding (appropriately so named now- - but who would have thought of terming the Essay on Murder padding?) of all existing magazines is tame even in the best specimens (we again except Mr. Arnold); sometimes useful, as supplying statistics or thought, but quenching life and spirit as certainly as carbonic acid gas. Does laughter or light satire ever ring through the solemn precincts of Macmillan? Do the apostles of the Fortnightly ever introduce a joke into their evangelical discourses? Mr. Frederic Harrison, if we remember right, attempted it some little time ago; but he did it with so preternaturally solemn a tone, and with such earnestness of asseveration that he did not really mean to joke at all, that all fear of the risk that the attempt might be repeated was at once removed. The audacity which strikes the reader of both Wilson and De Quincey is closely allied to their humour, which enabled them to say the most startling things without offence, since they had continually in reserve an undercurrent of meaning, perceptible by the intelligent, and which, as in the case of a man whose looks insinuate something different from his words, hinted very clearly, "You are to take all this cum grano." Herein they are contrasted with Sydney Smith, whose witty and startling combinations of ideas never hinted any other meaning than that which he expressed in his ordinary language. It is, in fact, in this that the much-talked-of distinction between wit and humour consists; the contrasts and surprises which are the essence of a witty observation are contrasts between things purely external to the speaker, whereas the humourist has a perpetual contrast or antagonism between different parts of his own nature. However, there is no need to despair. One era passes away, and another comes The beginning of this century was the up, and if nothing else in the world recurs, time when periodical writing flourished in the moods and tempers of men do so. We England more than ever before or since. have passed from Addison to Dr. Johnson, Now, it is nearly a lost art; or at least al- and from Dr. Johnson to De Quincey, and most the only man who possesses it is Mr. from De Quincey to the present day. Let Matthew Arnold. For periodical writing is us hope that English literature may yet reto literature what conversation is to speech; cover from the "malady of thought" — of it should not be too personal, nor too sci-thought that is, exclusive and despoticentific, nor too earnest, but a mixture of all these, the play of fancy over all subjects, lighting up here and there their depths, but not grappling with them, pouring itself abroad but not contracting itself to any too determinate aim. It is the fluid which sup and regain that fine balance of thought and feeling, of diffusiveness and concentration, of impulse and defined purpose, which marks an epoch and a flowering time in the history of a nation. From The Examiner. Life of Sir John Richardson. By the Rev. Hood, who met with an untimely end during the Expedition. Writing to his father a few days before starting, Dr. Richardson says: "The hope of acquiring the power of rendering her [his wife] more comfortable, and the possibility of obtaining some portion of fame and inducements which I have to undertake the Exproving myself worthy of her affection are the pedition, and are the only motives strong enough to enable me to endure so long an absence." The vessel in which the party started, the Prince of Wales, left Gravesend on the 23rd May, 1819, and after a stormy passage they arrived at York Factory, where they found the Hudson's Bay Company and the NorthWest Fur Company fighting about their with drink. From York Factory the explorers pushed on to Cumberland House, where they passed the winter. In a letter from this place to his wife, dated March 6, 1820, he writes: IF the Decline and Fall of the British Empire should ever come to be written by some historian of the future, the chapter which treats of the Expeditions to the Arctic regions will not be its least interesting portion. Nothing so well and truly illustrates the best elements of British character. The resolution and perseverance which have borne and maintained the English race over so many portions of the earth have nowhere been more conspicuous than in the search for the North-West Passage. Equal courage and hunting-grounds and killing off the natives determination may have been displayed on other fields of English energy, but in none have they been accompanied with less of those haughty and overbearing qualities which sometimes degrade courage into cruelty, and determination into oppression. A laudable ambition, a love of adventure, and "When I began my letter, I thought of the a passion to penetrate the unknown were the pleasure you must be feeling, as an admirer of motives that actuated the resolute and hardy the works of God, in perceiving the earth burstmen who, in succession, faced the austere ing its frozen bands, and vegetation putting rigours of the extreme North. To force her have felt on such an occasion, was fresh in my forth her powers. The joy, the exultation I secrets from nature at the certain loss of or- mind, and I could not but contrast it with the dinary comforts and probably of life itself, depression produced by a winter unusually exwas an object worthy of British effort; and tended. Winter, in unspotted livery, surrounds although the success of the achievement is us. The snow covers the ground to the depth not likely to be attended with any practical of three feet, and the trees bend under their advantage, it is satisfactory to know that the ponderous load. If we pass the threshold of our problem of a North-West Passage, which hut, and enter the forest, a stillness so profound had so long tantalised geographers and nav-prevails, that we are ready to start at the noise igators, has been at length solved. created by the pressure of our feet on the snow. The close of the great Napoleonic war left The screams of a famished raven, or the crash many active spirits disengaged, and the en- of a lofty pine, rending through the intenseness ergy and activity which it had called forth of the frost, are the only sounds that invade the would naturally seek for employment else- solemn silence. When in my walks I have acciwhere. Accordingly we find Mr. Richard-dentally met one of my companions in this son, after spending his early years as Naval Assistant-Surgeon on board of the Nymphe, the Hercule, the Blossom, the Bombay, and the Cruiser, and settling down, as he thought, to civil life and matrimony, accepting the post of Surgeon and Naturalist to the first overland expedition to the Polar Sea (18191822). In the interval between the paying off of the Cruiser and his Arctic appointment, Mr. Richardson visited America, took out his diploma of M. D. and married. Having been born in 1787, near Dumfries, he was thirty-two years of age when he sailed on the Expedition, which he considered the turning point of his life, and for which he gave up his home and practice at Leith. The command of the Expedition was given to Lieut. Franklin, and his companions were Mr., afterwards Sir G. Back, and Mr R. dreary solitude, his figure, emerging from the What must "I must not, however, go on writing in this strain; there are yet two months of winter to come, and I must endeavour to acquire and preserve that contentment which can render every offer themselves to one who is disposed to look for them." situation tolerable. A thousand consolations On the return of fine weather the party left Cumberland House and reached Fort Enterprise on Aug. 19, 1820; having trav-. |