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Pall Mall Gazette.

GULF STREAM -MR. LECKY, in his " History | best, to make out a case of unknown and unof Rationalism," has some very acute observa- measured hypothetical equatorial currents, tions on the manner in which established and re- which may impinge on our shores, not to reinspectable impostures usually disappear from state the object of our ancient belief. among mankind. The instance which he selects as an example is that of witchcraft, but others might be cited. As he shows, impostures of this class and magnitude do not generally lose their influence by slow degrees, as might have been expected. They break down all at once, with little warning beforehand, and they never The Metaphors of St. Paul. By John S. seem so vigorous as just before they break down. Howson, D. D., Dean of Chester. (Strahan). The belief in witchcraft was never more com- - This little book may be reckoned among the pletely received as orthodox, or more solidly de- recreations of a divine who has done a great fended by ecclesiastics and lawyers, than in the deal of serious work in the way of Biblical study, middle of the seventeenth century. By the end and has done it very well. Mr. Howson takes of that century it had ceased to exist altogether four subjects, "Roman Soldiers,' "Classical in the educated classes. Now it is clear that Architecture," "Ancient Agriculture," and some such fate as this suddenly threatens our "Greek Games," and shows how they suggest venerable friend, the Gulf Stream. Almost some of St. Paul's most striking metaphors. The down to the present year, faith in his potency four are treated in as many chapters, and of and his extraordinary manner of meddling with these the first and the fourth strike us as being the climate of these islands and North-western particularly good. St. Paul borrows, it is true, Europe in general was all but universal in sci- many illustrations from agricultural and archientific circles, and what may be termed general tectural matters; but these hardly possess the circles also. Nobody sought much for proof of picturesqueness of those which he takes from it; it was received as something self-evident. military affairs, and from the national games of Two phenomena were certain: that our winter Greece; nor is there any passage connected with climate is exceptionally warm and damp, and the former which can be altogether ranked with that a large stream of hot water is continually the two famous appeals which begins, “Put ye flowing in our direction out of the Gulf of Mex- on the whole armor of God," and "Know ye ico four thousand miles off. Whenever an effect not that they which run in a race. . is given, and a cause is wanted, it is wonderful The most common fault of a book of this kind is how unanimously popular reasoning acquiesces a tendency to put a meaning into passage which in the first suggested. But when the eyes of is not really there. Dr. Howson seems wholly inquirers were opened to the circumstance that free from it. His applications are ingenious, to the stream of hot water flowing out of the Gulf many readers they will be novel, but they are of Mexico is only a few miles wide and of very never strained or far-fetched. He is probably moderate depth, and, moreover, that where it is right, for instance, in suggesting that "the pullhottest and strongest it exercises no appreciable ing down of strongholds," in 2 Cor. x. 3-6, reeffect at all on the winter climate of the neigh-fers to the destruction of the Cilician hill forts, boring shore-that of the Southern States of the Union, which, for the latitude, is exceptionally severe people began to be startled by the extreme inadequacy of the cause in question to produce the effect alleged. Again, though the fact of the mildness of the climate of the northwestern coat of the old continent is undoubtedly established, it seems certain that the climate of corresponding latitudes on the north-western coast of America is quite equally mild. Even in the extreme north, close to Bhering's Straits, forests grow luxuriously, and yet there is no Pacific Gulf Stream to produce this strictly analogous temperature. Once persuaded that our knowledge is insufficient to form trustworthy conclusions, we readily drop preconceived opinions; and the Gulf Stream has, it may be feared, collapsed. Mr. Findlay, at the Geographical Society a few weeks ago, pronounced its doom. Of course there was some hesitation in that scientific body, and there have been partial attempts to set up our old idol again: the latest may be read in a letter of Dr. Wallich, addressed to the Times of Tuesday. But any one may see that these well-meant efforts are calculated, at

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of which he must have heard from his relatives in Tarsus. Dr. Howson is sometimes didactic, always with plenty of good sense and good taste; sometimes he takes opportunity of giving interpretations which are of great worth. We would specially express our gratitude for what he says of two very difficult passages (2 Tim. ii. 20-21, and Rom. ix. 21-23), which bear on the subject of predestination. Once or twice, indeed, we feel constrained to differ from him. The words "Sown in corruption," &c., in 1. Cor. xv., surely refer not to the putting of a seed into the ground, which would be but an accilental resemblance, but to the processes of human birth. On another matter, we think that he is scarcely correct. Rome was certainly a great military monarchy, but it can scarcely be correct that, as Dr. Howson suggests, the sight of soldiers was anything like as common in the provincial towns as it is now on the Continent. All the Roman provinces were held by a force which was not equal to the present French. Army. St. Paul, however, had personally sufficient experience of soldiers to make military metaphors very ready to his use. Spectator.

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HISTORICAL SKETCHES OF THE REIGN OF Greek and Latin at their fingers' end, not

GEORGE II.

NO. X. THE NOVELIST.

to speak of youth, and vivacity, and high spirits, and knowledge of the world. There was Henry Fielding, for instance, writing bad plays, and painfully casting about what to do with his genuis. What was he to do with it? having at the same time an ailing wife and little children, burdens which Pegasus can take lightly en croupe, when he is aware what he is about, and has his course clear before him, but terrible drawbacks to the stumbling steed which is seeking a path for itself across the untrodden ways. It is impossible to give any sketch of one of the two great novelists of the age without introducing the other. Fielding has a thousand advantages to start with over our homely forefather. He is so genial, so jovial, such a fine gentleman; so high an impulse of life and current of spirit run through his books. His wickednesses are not wicked, but mere accidents - warmth of blood and rapidity of movement carrying him away. And then his knowledge of the world! Richardson's knowledge was only of good sort of people, and secondary litterateurs, and-women, who are not the world, as everybody knows. This curious distinction of what is life and what is not, which has prevailed so widely since then, probably originated in the eighteenth century; though the observers of the present day might be tempted, in the spirit of an age which inquires into everything, to ask why Covent Garden should teach knowledge of the world more effectually than Salisbury Court, and whether players and debauchees throw more light upon the workings of human nature than honest and reasonable souls, this is so entirely taken for granted by critics, that it would be in vain to make any stand against so all-prevailing a theory; and yet the question is one which will suggest itself now and then to the unprejudiced. But, notwithstanding the superior knowledge of the world, which gave Fielding an advantage over Richard

Of all the many branches in which literature flourishes, there is none which has been so widely and universally developed in our own generation as that of fiction. We are informed on all sides that we have made immense progress in positive knowledge of every description; but we can see for ourselves the astonishing progress which has been made in that special track of art, which demands, some people think, the minimum of knowledge, cultivation, or training. It has come to be a common doctrine that everybody can write a novel, just as it used to be that everybody, or rather anybody, might keep a school; and in point of fact, nowadays most people do write novels, with a result which can scarcely be called satisfactory. The art is as old as human nature; and yet it is not so old in its present shape but that we can identify the fountain from which so many springs have flowed. The similitude is one too energetic, too violent, however, for the subject. The modern English novel, which is in everybody's hands nowadays; which gives employment to crowds of workpeople, almost qualifying itself to rank among the great industries of the day; which keeps paper-mills going, and printing-machines, and has its own army of dependants and retainers, as if it were cotton or capital, the English novel, we say, arose, not with any gush, as from a fountain, but in a certain serene pellucid pool, where a group of pretty smiling eighteenth-century faces, with elaborate heads," and powder and patches, were wont to mirror themselves in the middle of George II.'s reign; while Pope was singing his melodious couplets, and Chesterfield writing his wonderful letters, and Anson fighting with the winds and seas, and Prince Charlie planning the '45. From all the confused events of which the son-notwithstanding his better acquaintworld was full-bewildering destruction of the old, still more bewildering formation of the new the spectator turns aside into the quaintest homely quiet, the most domestic, least emotional, of all household scenes, and there finds Samuel Richardson, a good printer, a comfortable, affectionate, fatherly tradesman, kind to everybody about him, and very much applauded by his admiring friends, but with no special marks of genius that any one can see. Other men of far greater personal note breathed the same air with this active, pottering, and virtuous bourgeois; men with good blood in their veins, and gold lace on their coats, and

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ance with polite society, and immensely greater spring and impulse of genius - it was the old printer, and not the young man of the world, who found out the mode of employing his gift. The path once opened was soon filled with many passengers; but to Richardson must be given the credit of having directed the stream towards it and opening the way.

Richardson's personal history is of a kind unique in literature. He had lived half a century in the commonplace world before any one suspected him of the possession of genius. Ordinary duties, commonplace labour, had filled up his fifty years. He had

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*** **** *** * 272 Pet-lift 5: 1 2 ** **, tad more chiging 1 Fitne's yen, ho took a bom :ć we 09, wine Aalef menn of eommayang with the wisire or tis bir tenga “we wilding genderer. wil i crte's caughter. That be “ony carumon school learning." and why presne whoblox to epar him on; Sfteen chose a business, was to disks a ANA WEEK NA Wndurament at all, except the great deal better for Samuel, as well as for forumdings of that but vain, bail benevos, his future readers. He describes himself Tek impulses tey benefit, others which has in- !as being not fond of play," and of being deed produced much print, but little liters-called Serious and Gravity by the other

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The triumph of the old fogy over boys, who, however, sought his society as the splendid young adventurer is complete a teller of stories, some of which were from Cory pobrubar. It may be said that his memory, but others, "of which they Muharem did not mean it, but that in no would be most fond, and often were way debarda from the glory of his original affected by them," of his own invenMy Phakrapeare probably did not mean it tion. "All my stories carried with them, with While the young man, torn with a I am bold to say, a useful moral," says the thousand cares, fried ineffectual hackneyed virtuous romancer. way of working, much as every needy wit they did; for whatever may be the objecFrampted to poor comedies in the taste of tion of the precocious modern child to an the day, inferior even to the previously ex-over-demonstrative moral, there can be no eating ruddish, and utterly unworthy of his doubt that stern poetic justice, and the own powers the loundrum old printer most rigid awards of morality, are always glided calmly into the undiscovered path most congenial to the primitive intelliwhich was to bring fame to both of them.gence. It was not only schoolboys, how

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