This we must reserve for another opportunity. We pass to say a few words about the book before us. The late Dr. Stark, of Dennyloanhead, was not much known beyond his own body, but within that somewhat large circle, no minister was more esteemed. Indeed, esteem' or 'respect' was a term more exactly measuring the general feeling entertained toward him than either admiration' or 'love.' He was not a brilliant man, nor a man of genius; he was in private a most amiable person, but this lay disguised under a somewhat cold and dry exterior-and as Wordsworth hath it,—

'You must love him ere to you

He did seem worthy of your love.'

But while loved by his intimates, and admired by a large class of auditors, including his own people, he was esteemed by all for his solid strength of mind, his integrity of character, and the massive energy of his eloquence.

We have heard him preach repeatedly, and, though young at the time, we retain a vivid recollection of his manner and effect, if not of the substance, of his discourses. He was rather a long preacher. This, however, in those days-1828, or so-was not cared for in Scotland, especially on the Sabbath evening of a sacramental day, when the church was crowded, and when men's minds were sweetened and solemnized by the previous services. The grand piano of a thousand hearts is ever then in tune, and poor is the performer who cannot, for a little hour, discourse on it excellent music. Stark struck it with a masterly hand. He commenced always calmly. For a while a certain stiffness adhered to his manner. His discourse moved on in a quiet steady current of didactic remarks rather than reasoning, of clear and sensible rather than eloquent or profound thought, his voice preserving the while an even tenour, and gesture there was absolutely none. By-and-bye, however, he began, in that fine old Puritanic phrase, to be enlarged,' his voice gradually rose, his form expanded; he became more rapid in his utterance, more energetic in his manner; his face, too, assumed a certain solemn glow of meaning, not like radiance, but like radiance awaking from slumber; and then came his climax and close-a long climax-a close of a full halfhour's duration. It was usually very powerful; you saw and felt the heat of the strong chariot wheel, nearing the end of its course. His voice had risen into a thunder peculiar to himself, neither harsh, nor shrill, nor hollow, but clear, strong, and overwhelming. His matter, too, had strengthened, if not sublimated -if it had not become flame, it had become 'lion's marrow.' His audience, if they neither wept nor trembled, yet listened in

the deepest silence, and their sigh when he had done seemed that of one touched heart. For the power of the last half-hour had been that of strict and practical appeal; he had been dealing-and dealing like a master in Israel-with the consciences, and not the feelings or fancies merely of his hearers, and they said, or at least felt, if not a consummate orator, this man is a preacher who needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of life.'

Such, indeed, was precisely Stark's character. He was a first-rate preacher of righteousness, and expounder of divine truth. His power lay in strong good sense, expressed with manly directness, and carried home with overwhelming earnestness to the heart and the conscience.

We find such qualities very marked in the volume of sermons before us. Without exactly fulfilling all the criteria of a perfect sermon, they possess many of those qualities which make sermons valuable and influential. They are rich not indeed in imagery or original conception, but in evangelical truth; they are full of matter,' and their language is clear, chaste, and massive.. Mr. Edmond-for sometime his colleague, himself a preacher of much 'mark and likelihood,'--has some striking remarks on his preaching:

'His robustness of mind did not dwarf his emotions. His mind stood like the firm oak's trunk; but not that trunk, barren, rugged, sapless, but branching, virescent, graceful, inviting to rest under its grateful shade. This character of massiveness and power was a predominant quality of his preaching. It might be traced in his very style. In hearkening to his discourses you were ever and anon introduced to some cumulus of clauses, where the huge sentence, forked and branched like a great tree, spread before you in formidable agglomeration. Yet it had unity and symmetry of its own, and the very accumulation lent it power. It moved with a sort of elephantine cumbrousness, but with elephantine strength too. The same characteristic was conspicuous in his manner. His voice and gesture had singular power about them. In his ordinary conversation, too, you could trace the same quality. He scarcely ever made a remark of which the hearer might not feel that it was worthy of utterance. His very gait and walk were indicative of strength and steadfastness.'

His stature was a little above the middle size; his form erect; his countenance somewhat dry and saturnine, but acute and expressive, and could sparkle into humour, or glow with manly sympathy and affection. When perfectly at ease, as we have said, he was a delightful companion, bland, humorous, full of heart and friendliness, qualities which were felt to be more engaging as contrasting with the majesty of his usual

manner.

We refer our readers, who would know more of this eminent man, to the interesting and well-written memoir by Mr. Edmond. The Reverend W. Steven of Largs, his son-in-law, has also judiciously and ably discharged the office of editor.

We recommend, in fine, his sermons, not as fulfilling the highest ideal of their art, nor as entirely free from the faults we have found in the modern pulpit, but as an excellent specimen of Scotch preaching. Scotchman as the writer of this paper is, he is forced to admit that he prefers the English sermon writers to the Scotch. Strange as it might seem, the inhabitants of the Plain,' have discovered more imagination than we of the Mountain.' We have no Jeremy Taylor, nor Dr. Donne, nor Howe, nor Barrow, nor John Scott, nor Hall, nor Foster, among our divines. The great merit of the Scottish divines is clear solid sense; their great deficit is genius. Chalmers and Irving, to be sure, had this; but neither of them could write English; they used in general a barbarous patois of their own. Neither can we commend the sermons before us for their imaginative qualities. But next, perhaps, to Dr. MacRies, they furnish about the best example of those qualities of strength, earnestness, and spiritual sap, which have made the preaching of the Scottish minister, from the days of John Knox downwards, so powerful in guiding the intellects, warming the hearts, and sustaining the religious energy and zeal of his fellow-countrymen.*

ART. III.-The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., a Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Queen Anne. Written by Himself. In Three Volumes. Second Edition. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1852.

MR. THACKERAY, the author of these volumes, is already known to the public as a writer of fiction, chiefly through his 'Pendennis' and ' Vanity Fair,'-works which, though marked by some defects, have obtained a wide and deserved popularity. This, we are inclined to think, will not be much augmented by the work before us. Not only does the same author manifestly re-appear in these pages, but with him the prominent characters of his former productions with nothing

We may add, that Dr. Stark published, many years ago, a volume of sermons, much admired at the time, and displaying all the qualities of the present volume in a more elaborate form.

changed but their dress, while some peculiar defects make their first appearance in Esmond.'

There are not many novelists who, like Godwin, have been ambitious enough to produce a work, the interest of which is made to turn on some other central point than that of youthful love. To such an attempt, however, Mr. Thackeray has, as nearly as possible, committed himself; for although all his characters are not of one sex, and although his hero does not escape the snares both of love and marriage, yet the author has ingeniously contrived to alienate the sympathies of the reader from his hero in both, and mischievously to combine with the sweets of love an extract of 'poppy and mandragora,'—an element of tedium and nausea.

'medio de fonte leporum

Surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat.'

When he presents youth and beauty, it is passionless and frivolous, and when he depicts the ardour of woman's love, he associates it with mature years and fading charms. Indeed, the reader might be almost tempted to suppose that Mr. Thackeray is seeking to solve the problem of how much popular interest can be attracted to a novel from which all the beauties most proper to that class of literature are excluded; in which the plot is a puzzle, and the development of it an ever-increasing disappointment.

As a mere narrative of facts it is clumsy and unintelligible, and its complexity is increased by the narrator most commonly speaking of himself in the third person, but not unfrequently in the first. Nay, even the style in which the whole merit of the book consists, is open to serious objection. The antiquated forms of expression in which it abounds, are quite unnecessary to mark the age of Addison. The quaint typography, too, looks very much like a clap-trap. Nor is the mind drawn into illusion by reading on the title-page, immediately above the date 1852, printed for Smith, Elder, & Company, over against St. Peter's Church in Cornhill,' nor by discovering from the next page, that Messrs. Bradbury and Evans prosecute their laudable vocation in the precinct of Whitefriars.' But this is not all; just in proportion as Mr. Thackeray assumes this adopted style do his sentences become stiff and unnatural, and whenever he rises to real eloquence, as he frequently does, it is quite evident that he has come home from his chronological wanderings to his proper location in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, if we could forget the lumpy, insulated haths and doths, which make a progress through his paragraphs somewhat like walking along a road newly subjected to the first

operations of MacAdam, the involution of the sentences would render it a wearisome book. Long parentheses here and there suspend the progress of thought, while the mode of punctuation would seem to have been adopted for no other purpose than to perplex and annoy. So, too, the narrative itself presents the most slovenly inconsistencies. Thus, in describing an accident which befel one of the characters, who leaped from a carriage, the horses of which were running away, the author says: His large periwig and feathered hat had fallen off, and he was bleeding profusely from a wound on the forehead, and looking, and being, indeed, a corpse!' Of course, the reader dismisses this gentleman from his attention with a mental requiescat in pace. But in a few lines he finds his mistake, and reads: He was half an hour before he came to himself, by which time Dr. Tusher and little Frank arrived, and found my lord not a corpse, indeed, but as pale as one!'

Having said this much in necessary depreciation of Mr. Thackeray's performance, we will endeavour to bring the reader better acquainted with it by presenting an analysis of the narrative, introducing the author in person in those passages which best illustrate his unquestionably great ability.

The reader does not see but feels his way through a number of dark passages to the fact that Henry Esmond, the subject of this autobiography is the legitimate son of Thomas Lord Viscount Castlewood, by a poor girl whom he met with abroad, seduced, and married, when he thought himself dying; but whom, on his recovery, he deserted, and married a painted dowager of the court of James II., by whom he had no issue, and continuing steadfast in the service of the last of the Stuarts, met his death at the battle of the Boyne. His son, the hero of the tale, had always been regarded as illegitimate, and it seemed, as if in reparation for the wrong of his birth, that he was received at the ancestral seat of Castlewood, and educated there under a certain Dr. Holt. This Holt was a Jesuit priest, who, with the exception of the viscount himself, was the sole depositary of the secret of Esmond's legitimacy. Like many other fathers of the same order, Holt engaged in many deep intrigues in furtherance of the monarch's views, and schooled the boy to secresy by those methods corporal and mental for which the order of St. Ignatius have made themselves notorious. But the intrigues of the Jesuit and his patron excited suspicion, and the result was, in spite of secret exits, changed dresses, and burnt manuscripts, the exile of Holt, the imprisonment of the viscountess, and the death, as has been said, of Lord Castlewood at the Boyne.

As Thomas Viscount Castlewood was supposed to have died.