was yet, in virtue of his total character, and the nature of his lifelong training, emphatically an orator in his intellectual method. This is seen even in his published treatises on various subjects— which, however, were almost always originally prepared in the form of lectures. Take, as an example, the following passage from his Political Economy-a passage worth quoting on its own

account.

'We confess that, on this subject, we have no sympathy with what has been called the spirit of the age. The very worst effects are to be dreaded from it. Everything now is made a question of finance; and science, with all which can grace or dignify a nation, is vulgarized and brought down to a common standard-the standard of the market and of the counting-house. It does look menacing, to take one example out of the thousand which could be specified, that it hinged on one solitary vote, whether the trigonometrical survey of our island should be permitted to go on a work which, like the Doomsday Book of England, might have, after the lapse of a millennium, still survived, as a great national index for the guidance of our most distant posterity. It makes one tremble for some fearful resurrection of the old Gothic spirit amongst us, when one thinks that we were within a hair's-breadth of this noble enterprise being quashed. And this is the spirit of the age!-an age of unsparing retrenchment; a régime of hard and hunger-bitten economy, before whose remorseless pruninghook lie withering and dissevered from their stem the noblest interests of the commonwealth; a vehement, outrageous parsimony which, under the guise of patriotism, so reigns and ravens over the whole length and breadth of the land, and cares not though both religion and philosophy should expire, if but some wretched item of shred and of candle-end should be gained by the sacrifice: this which, though now the ascendant policy of our nation, elevated into power by the decisions of the legislature, and blown into popularity by the hosannahs of the multitude, will be looked back upon by posterity as an inglorious feature of the worst and most inglorious period in the annals of Britain, the befitting policy of an age of little measures and little men.'

By an extension of the usual meaning of the term oratory, we might include under that name a very considerable proportion of all written literature, over and above orations actually delivered to assemblies and then preserved to be read. The Letters of Junius, for example, and all writings of that class, including, as it would, all, or nearly all, the leading articles in newspapers, and all, or nearly all, the pamphlets and tracts produced so abundantly in every society where questions of morals or politics are agitated, may be regarded as so much unspoken oratory, and their writers as generically orators. Nay, more, in every actual book or writing of whatever kind, whether historical, scientific,

Oratorical Literature.

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or poetical, there are passages which are oratorical in their tenor, and belong to the oratorical form of literature. The reason of this lies in a certain definition that may be given of oratory as one of four leading forms into which all literature, spoken or written, may be theoretically distributed. According to this classification, while there is one form of literature called history, the primary business of which it is to narrate facts; another form of literature called exposition, the business of which it is to state and explain human ideas and conclusions respecting phenomena; and a third form of literature, called poetry, the business of which it is to invent beautiful imaginary circumstances, or beautiful imaginary combinations of existing circumstances; there is yet, distinct from either of these forms, though employing them all in turn and melting into them just as they melt into each other, a fourth form of literature, which may be called oratory, and the express function of which it is to stimulate the human will in some particular direction, or towards some particular course of conduct. In this sense, therefore, all writings which have stimulation for their main end, and all those passages in all writings which incidentally aim at stimulation, may be classed as belonging to oratory. According to Aristotle and the ancients, oratory was that art or science which considered all the possible means of persuasion on any subject with a view to influence the hearer in the manner desired; and, though in this definition, spoken oratory is chiefly regarded, the definition will include a large proportion of ordinary literature. Wherever the aim is persuasion, as distinct from or superadded to narration, exposition, or imaginative effort, there we have the orator. The Greeks had a good word for use in this connexion. While the historian deals in facts, the expositor in abstract conclusions, the poet in fancies and images, what the orator deals in is, the Greeks said, TOTES-i.e., inducements, means of persuasion. But as TOTES may be brought forward either in speech or in writing, there may be orators who are writers as well as orators who are speakers. With respect to such orators in writing-i.e., to pamphleteers, journalists, &c., it would not, we think, be difficult to show that the law of oratorical cogitation applies also to them, though with very important modifications.

ART. VIII.-Gott in der Geschicte oder der Fortschritt des Glauben au eine sittliche Weltordnung. Von CHRISTIAN CARL JOSIAS BUNSEN. In sechs Buchern. Erster Theil. Erstes und zweites Buch. (God in History; or, the Progress of the Belief in a Moral Order of the World.' By C. C. J. BUNSEN. In six Books. First Part. Books I. and II.) Leipzig: Brockhaus. London: Williams and Norgate. 1857.

THE Chevalier Bunsen is a riddle to many. That he is a genius of a high order, his bitterest enemies, we imagine, would hardly be disposed to doubt. At least, we have met with only one, an Austrian ex-diplomatist, who seems to call the fact in question. In a pamphlet entitled The Austrian Concordat and the Chevalier Bunsen,* written in answer to that trenchant work, The Signs of the Times, this waspish adversary, whose pen has evidently been dipped in the gall of popish hate intensified by professional spite, denies to him the possession of any talent, save that of ingratiating himself with the Prussian Court and the English Squirearchy. But the very venom of the scurrilous scribe suggests at once the explanation that the creature who voids it has himself been scorched by the Promethean ray he refuses to recognise, and thus his malice defeats itself. Bunsen's other antagonists, political, philosophical, and theological, comprising not a few eminent names in Germany, France, and England, are pretty unanimous in the acknowledgment of his being a man of great parts. These natural gifts, moreover, he has cultivated most assiduously, so that perhaps there is scarcely a man in Europe who has amassed such vast and varied attainments. Of these rich stores of many-sided erudition, gathered from the old East, and from classical Greece and Rome, from Egypt under the Pharaohs, and from the India and China of today, he seems to have gained-which is a much rarer accomplishment-almost perfect control. That with all this there is a spice of vanity in his composition-just as much, perhaps, as may be expressed by the colloquialism, he is a clever fellow, and he knows it-few candid persons, who are acquainted with him either personally or through his writings, would care to deny. In common, however, with all true scholars, he is the farthest remove possible from pedantry; and although in conversation, or rather monologue (like Coleridge's), he talks books, and such books too as he writes, yet he carries you along with him in so familiar a style, that you fancy you understand him exactly, even

Das östreichische Concordat und der Ritter Bunsen.' Regensburg. 1856.

Bunsen's Religious Stand-point hard to define.

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when he is most transcendent and misty. Men who are themselves no dunces are astonished at him as a prodigy,

' and still the wonder grows,

How one small head should carry all he knows.'

But it was not so much to his truly marvellous genius and learning we referred when we spoke of Bunsen as an enigma. It is his religious stand-point which is seemingly so hard to determine; his whereabouts as a Christian philosopher, that one is so strangely puzzled to find. For that is the dignity to which his highest aspirations point, and of which, in all his varied studies, he never loses sight. It is greatly to his honour that in none of his numerous works, even though treating of subjects so purely secular, at first sight, as comparative philology for instance, Roman topography, and Egyptian archæology, does he forget to interweave the golden thread which links all science with the Bible. If we are often startled at the liberties he allows himself to take with the sacred book, at least he never ignores it; and in this respect he may fairly be held up as an example to classical scholars at large, who, as a body, too much need reminding that the heathen writers may be studied in other than a heathenish spirit. We are glad to find, from an advertisement on the cover of the work before us, that its author has identified himself with the German translation of Mr. Caird's admirable sermon on Religion in Common Life, by writing a commendatory preface. This is quite in keeping with his praiseworthy efforts as a man of letters, to give to the religious element its due place in all his voluminous productions. An earnest moral purpose is evident in all that he writes; and this ethical robustness he himself would indignantly refuse to trace to any other well-spring than the Gospel. The Austrian ex-diplomatist, indeed, does not scruple to charge him with a sin against veracity, only second in heinousness to that of Ananias and Sapphira. He affirms that Bunsen on one occasion lied, if not to the Holy Ghost, yet to his representative on earth, the Pope, by denying to His Holiness the existence of a certain convention between the Crown of Prussia and the Catholic episcopate of that kingdom, although he had himself signed it with his own hand on the part of his sovereign. As the Chevalier is still alive nearly a quarter of a century* after the alleged piece of impiety-we must conclude, either that Peter's powers have not been transmitted to his

* The date assigned to the convention is the 19th of May, 1834. It related to the question of mixed marriages, and the subscribing persons are said to have been the Archbishop of Cologne, and Bunsen, at that time Prussian ambassador at Rome, who was summoned back to the Rhine for the purpose.

successor, or that the charge is a wanton calumny. The thing is quite unlike the man as he appears in his works, and as all England knew and admired him when, just before the outbreak of the late war, he threw up his post as Ambassador at our Court, rather than lend himself to the Russian policy of his royal master. Without, therefore, calling in question the fact of this irregular concordat, some miserable misunderstanding, like that which lately took place between Lord Palmerston and Mr. D'Israeli, is doubtless at the bottom of the story, which the putrid breath of slander has corrupted into the above piece of scandal. The Chevalier has lived amongst us for many years with his estimable English wife, and in such a way as to command the universal respect of the nation, to a degree never attained by foreign Ambassador before. Seldom, indeed, has a stranger evinced such an undisguised sympathy with English life, social, political, and religious.

Least of all can the last particular be passed over, although it is precisely here that his epicene character, almost reminding us of another very celebrated Chevalier of doubtful sex, presents so puzzling a problem. The son of a pious Lutheran clergyman, he had scarcely finished his university course when he took a leading part in the ecclesiastical counsels of the late King of Prussia, who owed to this young man of five-andtwenty much of the success of that great Church revolution which illustrates his reign, the Union between the Lutheran and Reformed Christians in his dominions, inaugurated at the tercentenary of the Reformation in 1817. When he came amongst us the interest which he took in the religious affairs of this country was no less warm. He encouraged his son to take orders in the Established Church, and sought and obtained the friendship of leading men attached to each of its various sections, High, Low, and Broad, displaying, however, for the last a peculiar predilection. Non-Episcopalian Christians, too, were honoured with a share of his regards; for he was an uncompromising foe to bigotry, and even at the risk of alienating one so dear to him as Gladstone, never concealed his contempt for hierarchical and sacramental religion. As became the representative of the second Protestant power in Europe, he took his place gladly on the platform of the Bible Society, and ever professed himself an ardent friend of Christian missions. In short, every philanthropic and Christian movement of our times found in him an earnest and eloquent advocate. Now the difficulty is-and it is no small one-how to reconcile all this with the manifest laxity of his religious opinions. It would be very unfair to lay any very great stress on the accusations of a heated personal oppo