to produce superiority in the other. And then there is another way besides its direct influence, in which piety leads to the prosperity and security of a land; I mean by the influence which it has in draw ing down the blessing of God. If there be a moral Governor of the universe, sin must provoke him, and holiness please him; if sin provoke God, he is able to punish it, for the destinies of nations are at his disposal, the balance of power is in his hand: bodies of men, as such, are rewardable and punishable only in this world, as death dissolves all bands, and reduces society to its elements, allowing the existence of neither families, churches, nor nations in eternity. God's determination to punish guilty nations, and to bless virtuous ones, is recorded on the pages of scripture, and confirmed by the details of history. Hearken to the awful denunciations of Jehovah. "At what instant, I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up and to pull down and to destroy it, if that nation against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them. And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it, if it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good wherewith I said I would benefit them." And he has most awfully fulfilled these words. Where are Nineveh, and Babylon, and Tyre, and Athens, and Jerusalem, and ancient Rome? Vanished from the earth, except a few melancholy ruins, which lie, like their mouldering bones, around the grave's mouth, while the destroying angel, the spirit of desolation, still lingers on their vast sepulchre, to proclaim for the admonition of the earth-" See, therefore, and know, that it is an evil and a bitter thing to sin against the Lord." Yes, and over other lands still numbered amongst living nations, do we not see the awful "image of jealousy” arising, and do we not hear an awful voice declaring, "Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel, both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate, and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it. For the stars of heaven, and the constellations thereof, shall not give their light; the sun shall be darkened in his going forth: and I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, and I will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible." It is sin, then, that ruins a kingdom, holiness that preserves it. O! my country, mayest thou have wisdom to know and value this true secret of national greatness: and to remember, that there is no kingdom so high, but vice will bring it down and lay it low, even in the dust: none so humble, bat virtue may raise it to the pinnacle of prosperity. Religion is the rock of thy strength, more than commerce or the arts, or martial prowess: and mayest thou never part with this, under the wiles of any seducing spirit, whether of false philosophy, infidelity, or immorality: for then shalt thou be seen, like Samson, when shorn of his hair, a miserable captive in the hands of the Philistines, and an object of sport to those very enemies, who had so often trembled and crouched under the power of his arm. INTERNAL EVIDENCE. A man of subtle reasoning ask'd Where was the internal evidence Had never reach'd his earHe laid his hand upon his heart, And only answered, "HERE." Review. AN ESTIMATE OF THE WRITINGS OF WASHINGTON IRVING. (Concluded from p. 513.) We have spoken thus far, intellectually, of the writings of Irving, but the object of this paper is to adjust their moral worth. If we may judge of the man by the author, Irving is a man remarkably amiable. This is not always a correct standard. It is probable that Sterne was not overstocked with sensibility that Young was not always solemn; and in reading the prudential maxims of Steele we are apt to call to mind, that his dwelling was visited more than once, by the exacters of righteousness. But in this instance the standard will not mislead us. Irving is respectful to serious things. He is attached to the ritual of his church. No page of his works contains a sneer at religion or its followers. He is possessed of a joy ous spirit that revels in much of the good of this world, whilst his views of its evils are dim and refracted. It is natural to remark, that Irving does not seem over anxious to reform the foibles of other men. He rather considers them as constituting a source of amusement; and were they multiplied, they would only make, in his view, a better ground of entertainment for those who possess dignity and genius. Dark crimes he would detest, but simple foibles he would wish unchanged. Were he more in earnest, he would throw more vigour into his satire. All believe Juvenal and Persius to be in earnest, when they attack imperial despotism. Satire may produce good, and its writers ought to look beyond mere display. In the hand of Erasmus it did good. George Buchannan, the elegant poet and proVOL. VII. Ch. Adv. found historian, did not disdain to employ it for the chastisement of friars and monks. Gifford made a lavish use of it; and by it, Witherspoon scourged the drones of the Scottish church into activity. But we are constrained to give Irving the praise of quite as much purity in his productions, as in those of any of his contemporaries. He delights in description, especially when it turns on tranquil scenes, and gentle pursuits. He seems particularly fond of angling, and in this amusement Walton, the associate of some of the best men of the English church, took great pleasure. The best portrait we have of Archdeacon Paley, is the one in which he is taken with his fishing tackle. Boyle, the philosopher of Stalbridge, has given us a narrative of a day spent in angling, which is far before any thing that Irving has written on this favourite theme. Its sweet simplicity, its chastened morality-the quiet brook, the winding river, the dust, the unexpected shower, the farmhouse, the green woods, moralizing on worms-in short, the brief affair is replete with delightfulness. Illustrious man! in thinking of him, we are reminded of the compliment which Ben Jonson paid to Selden The matter of thy prayse Flows in upon me, that I cannot rayse A mound against it; nothing but the large round Claspe of nature, such a wit can bound, As a teacher of morals, Irving cannot be considered as profound. But in his Sketch Book, the moral of a number of his papers is good. The graves of distinguished men may be frequented long after death; but in his Funeral Rites, we have a statement of the claims of private friendship, long after the object of that friendship is mouldering in the dust, when 4 B With garlands grey and true love knots In the paper entitled the Wife, though not the most felicitous in its execution, the moral is excellent. In a commercial country, especially where fluctuations in fortune are daily taking place, we can readily suppose that such a paper would be useful. In his pieces on Christmas, the writer not only amplifies too much, but the company keep up their revels too long, tempted no doubt by that season which inspires the Norwegian in his sledge, as well as the English gentleman in his Norman hall. Corregio was remarkable for his Christmas Night-but it is more than Irving will be for his Christmas Days. In May Day Rites, we have no antiquarian knowledge. Judging from Baxter's history of ..his own times, they must have degenerated in his day, though there must have been something quite intellectual in them, when the Troubadours convened, and the golden violet was adjudged. We can easily conceive how publick rural ceremonies might be attended with good effects. The Old Testament is full of this doctrine; and if in the harvest or the vintage, the thanks of the heathen to their gods broke out into open expression, it is a pity that Christian feelings should lie all tame at such seasons. The moral of Bracebridge Hall is delightful. A man of letters from a distant country sojourns with an opulent family, he describes daily occurrences, associates himself with all the enjoyments of retired life, haunts the green lanes, prunes and grafts trees, and alternately interchanges kind speech with the mower or the hedger, the gardener, the herb woman, or the shepherd boy. The retreat of Sir Thomas Abney was honoured by the presence, and is now interwoven with the memory of Watts. Hagley Park, though its proprietor was a scholar and a Christian, derives many pleasing associations from the remembrance of Thomson; and Eastham draws its deepest interest from the writer of the Task, though Hayley, its owner, was thought a poet in his day. In Bracebridge Hall, its author has turned a mirror upon every part of the domain, in which we may see reflected, parks with their sauntering herds, glossy woodlands, orchards bending with fruitage, rivulets gliding through fluted marble, and Irving himself, with his sylvan Druidical hatchet, or his pruning hook, pulling the purple grape, watching the goldfinch in its flight, or clasping the lawn dove in his hand. It would not be right in this connexion, to withhold from Irving, due praise for the reverent use he has made of the scriptures. A perversion or two of scriptural passages may be found in his works, but we do not believe that he clearly saw them to be perversions. The habit of introducing the scriptures into ordinary writing, is becoming increasingly common, and custom, so far from reconciling us to it, only renders it the more obnoxious. When we meet with passages of the sacred word, violently rent from their original connexions and transplanted into tales and remances, or profane ballads, or accommodated to passing political events, or used to adorn some effusion of a thoughtless festivity, to say the least, it is a violation of good taste, and at the same time awfully irreverent. We are sustained in these remarks, by the judicious biographer of Dennie, in reference to the use he made of the scriptures in his Lay Preacher. Of the Lay Preacher we can never speak save with affection. Those papers are associated with the recollections of youth, when we reclined near the twisted roots of the oak and the elm tree. Irving has fallen into several common-place phrases, such as "the natural religion of the heart-and time alone being able to cure our sorrows." We regret too, that he should have soiled his Stratford on Avon, by copying the profane epitaph from Shakspeare's tomb. We lean to the belief, however, that this piece of awful levity has of late been dropped out of that otherwise interesting paper. Though not free from blemishes, we should still hope that the works of Irving place him at a vast remove from the deism of Walpole, the impurity of Montaigne, the levity of Voltaire, the incongruities of Rousseau, the bold profanity of the younger Lyttleton, and the atheism of Bolingbroke. Still, he belongs to a class of writers who seem afraid of deep and serious piety, lest it should spoil their minds or vitiate their taste. One knows not whether to weep or smile, at the apprehensions indulged by the friends of Mrs. Carter (some of them clerical friends too) lest she should become as religious as Mrs. Rowe. Mrs. Barbauld expresses her sage as tonishment, that Dr. Price should ever look to the Divine mercy, seeing he had merit enough to look to the Divine justice. Southey tells us that Wesley's eloquence opened the living spring of piety, pent up in the hearts of thousands. It is rumoured, since the publication of the Epicurean, that Moore has become religious-that is, he has become an Arian and a Universalist. St. Pierre too, no doubt, thought himself abundantly stocked with his theistical religion. But how little do we hear of the holiness of the Creator, what feeble views of him as a Lawgiver, what distant hints of the mediatorial system, what a confused recognition of our accountability to the Judge of all. But we still live in hopes that the time will quickly pass away, when enlightened men will cease to display ignorance of the fundamental truths of the scriptures. When Collins was dying he had but one book, and that he pronounced to be the best of all books-it was the New Testament. It is indeed a sentiment too common, that errors, both in life and opinion, are sanctified by genius. Dr. Channing has lately forbidden us to speak lightly of papal errors, because the church of Rome has been upheld by men of great intellectual eminence. He gives us a proud array of men who figured in the revival of Italian literature. We are perfectly aware that men of talents have upheld the stately structure of papal delusion, but we never supposed that from this circumstance we were to look with less aversion on the use of holy water, or the smoking incense, the worship of the Virgin Mary, the rosary, and crucifix. Dr. Channing often smiles at the vast multiplication of Greek and Roman gods. But this system was supported by greater men than Boccacio and Petrarch, Ariosto and Dante; yet Dr. Channing will not in consequence become a worshipper in the Pantheon, or an inquirer at the oracle of Dodona. The system of infidelity has been countenanced by great men, but we never believed that high intellectual endowments rendered their possessors less culpable, or less responsible for depravity of heart. Many smile at the astronomy of Tycho Brahe, who still believe him to have been a man of genius. It would not be difficult to show that the prophets employ irony and satire against image worship, and we can see no good reason why the same weapons should not be employed at this day. The scriptures have foretold the rise of papal delusion, and have used awful comminations against its abettors. The Papists have employed satire against the Protestants; and perhaps Dr. Channing forgot that one of their genealogical church trees is fuller of saints considerably, than of birds; and that they have shown one Arius falling out of the tree, like a criminal from the Tarpeian rock. Some of Dr. Channing's own list of great men poured out on the papacy the vials of their indignation. He cannot deny that in some of the stories of the Decameron, Boccacio has evinced no great respect for the monks, and other appendages of this tremendous system of error. Religion cannot sanctify errors, because they happen to be the errors of genius. But though she cannot approve of error, there is nothing in religion that seeks to narrow the human mind, or so to fix it on the supreme pursuit, as to prevent just attention to inferior objects. He must have been at pains to acquire a taste fastidious indeed, who could turn away from such productions of the muse as the Palestine of Heber-Montgomery's World before the Flood Hannah More's Sacred DramasDale's Widow of Nain, or his Outlaw of Taurus. In reading them, we feel that there is consistency between the sentiments and lives. of the writers; and though these poems do not belong to the first class of compositions, yet all through, our hearts confess the influence of a deep moral enchantment. The piety of that man is fast becoming morbid, who repudiates all the embellishments of taste. It is a pleasing and instructive fact, in the biography of Dr. Thomas Scott, that though he had filled the church with the incense of his fragrant deeds, and stood quite on the verge of heaven, he spent some of his last days in the study of the Greek tragedians. It appears to have formed one of the designs of Pollok, to trace, in a prose work, the connexions of Christianity with literature in all ages." This was not a design entirely novel, for Chateaubriand long since suggested it in his "Beauties of Christianity." But his mind is too erratick, and his false brilliancy is always overpowering his common sense. The sub ject, as stated by Pollok, is too vast and undefined, and for its execution would have called for the stores of Sir William Jones, to be deposited within the circle of Milton's comprehensive genius. But with all Christian submission to the Divine will, we may be permitted to regret that this gifted youth did not live to fulfil his design. We should then have probably seen literature traced to its elements. He would have found her in Egyptian grottoes, and in Hebrew cells, in the mountains of Greece, and the villas and shrines of Italy. He would have tracked her with a gazelle like swiftness to her Persian haunts, or to the green house which her warm hand has built on Russian snows. He would have searched her out in the castles and forests of the Rhine, or he could have climbed into her alpine retreats with a chamois-like step. He could have detected her footprints along Iberian rivers, or in the burns and braes of his native land-by the banks of Mulla or the stream of Avon. And when he came to state the superior claims of that system, which divine benevolence revealed to man, he would have worshipped in a shrine whose pavement is made up of stars, mingled with the blue skies. Into those urns of light he would have crushed the incense of his genius, whilst his temples would have leaned in meditation, long and sweet, on the throne of his Maker. When Jubal struck the chorded shell, His list'ning brethren stood aroundAnd wond'ring, on their faces fell To worship that celestial sound. There is something, however, better than fame and sweeter than praise. Though literature be a fountain, it may be a fountain rising only in the vernal months of life, and having its course among a few fleeting flowers. In other seasons sands, or useless pebbles, or a rock, it may show nothing but white that refuses to send out more sup |