per perception of their nature, and no heart for the duties of the office. A regard for consistency, and a respect for public opinion, may restrain such from flagrant irregularities, and secure the punctilious performance of their stated services; a natural esprit du corps may inflame their zeal even to intense bigotry, and render them willing to compass sea and land in the process of proselyting. And all this without one particle of the true spirit of an evangelist, or effecting any additions but such as are deeply to be deprecated. These are the clergy --some with more and some with less of professional propriety, and intellectual vigor and cultivation, who have hindered instead of helping the Church of England; prejudicing multitudes against her ministry, increasing their dissatisfaction with their teachings, and thus contributing to crowd the chapels of dissent. This great evil, than which nothing is more detrimental to the purity and progress of the Gospel, seems peculiarly inseparable from an ecclesiastical establishment. It has, however, of late years, been largely abated, and in proportion to its diminution, we may expect a continued increase in the spirituality and efficiency of our Mother Church.

Sidney Smith was far from affiliating with that class of the English clergy who are devoted to the sports of the field. For these he had neither taste nor capability. When he first settled in the country, he made the resolution never to shoot, for which he humorously assigns the following reasons: "First, because I found, on trying at Lord Grey's, that the birds seemed to consider the muzzle of my gun as their safest position; secondly, because I never could help shutting my eyes when I fired my gun, so was not likely to improve; and thirdly, because, if you do shoot, the squire and the poacher both consider you as their natural enemy, and I thought it more clerical to be at peace with both." His equestrian performances were equally ludicrous. "I used to think a fall from a horse dangerous, but much experience has convinced me to the contrary. I have had six falls in two years, and just behave like the three per cents when they fall-I get up again, and am not a bit the worse for it, any more than the stock in question." He adds: "I left off riding, for the good of my VOL. III.-2

parish and the peace of my family; for, some how or other, my horse and I had a habit of parting company."

When circumstances required, he could content himself with plain fare, and accommodate himself to the simplest society; yet, without being intemperate in the ordinary sense of the word, he had a strong gust for the luxuries of the table and its convivialities, for which his peculiar talents were so well adapted. The volumes before us exhibit his minute attention to the things which minister to the appetite, and the almost professional skill with which he complicated the choicest condiments. When we meet in the Memoir with his formal directions for making "a salad," which had gained much notoriety among his friends, and are also informed that, on his visit to Paris, the only volume which he purchased was a cookerybook, we can understand how his family became so imbued with his culinary taste as not to perceive that the publication of the receipt and the purchase could not contribute to the reputation of a clergyman. The fact is, that, in the choice of a profession, Sidney made a grand mistake, which placed him all his life in a false position. His ungovernable constitutional hilarity could not abide within the limits of sobriety properly imposed by his sacred office. In speaking of himself, he says: "I am sometimes mad with spirits, and must talk, laugh, or burst." A fine flow of animal spirits is a blessing to any one, especially to a minister of the Gospel; but it needs to be carefully and prayerfully guarded, or it will betray into unseasonable and unseemly levities, which can not but injure personal piety, impair official usefulness, and offend even a refined natural taste. Of all this the Memoir furnishe; ja nful proof. Sidney's mirthful and humorous temperament too often enticed him to trifle with truth merely to accomplish a joke; and, although there was no malicious intent in the falsehood, the indulgence must have diminished that regard for strict veracity which every Christian is bound to cherish. Another evil to which it led is seen in the irreverence with which he occasionally allowed himself to allude to the sacred services of the ministry. We shall be pardoned, if we cite in illustration an instance which Lady Holland might well have omitted out of filial respect for her father's reputation. "He was sitting at

breakfast, in the library, when a poor woman came, begging him to christen a new-born infant, without loss of time, as she thought it was dying. Mr. Smith instantly quitted the table for this purpose, and went off to her cottage. On his return, we inquired in what state he had left the poor babe? Why, said he, I first gave it a dose of castor oil, and then I christened it; so now the poor child is ready for either world." A reply which, to our taste, savors more of vulgar irreverence than of real wit. The third evil was felt in connection with the services of the sanctuary, when those who had laughed to tears at his witticisms during the week came to listen to his Sundayinstructions from the pulpit. Gown and bands could not make them forget the humorist, when they looked at the preacher; and his sage sayings would be largely neutralized by the involuntary recurrence of the convulsing jokes of a few hours before. Mrs. Austin, the lady who edited these volumes, and who was surpassed by no one in her admiration of Mr. Smith, writes: "I must confess that I went to hear Mr. Smith preach with some misgiving as to the effect which that well-known face and voice, ever associated with wit and mirth, might have upon me, even in the sacred place." She adds, indeed, that "her misgivings were quickly and entirely dissipated." It may have been so. Nevertheless, the apprehension was natural, and in most persons would irresistibly be realized; for such associations are irrepressible. Contrast is one of their well-known laws, and, under the circumstances alluded to, it often operates greatly to the annoyance of the hearer, and to the very decided disadvantage of the preacher. To be more celebrated for "cracking jokes" than commending Christ is no enviable reputation for a minister; and the more it is deserved, the less must his official influence be felt. We are not advocates for moroseness, nor enemies to salutary mirth; but when exuberance of spirits betrays a minister into habitual and notorious levity of speech, so that his witticisms are more talked of than his sermons, we fear he is out of place, and can not anticipate much fruit from his clerical services.

It must not be supposed that Mr. Smith had any doubts as to the Divine origin of the Scriptures. His conviction of their truth was honest and decided. Any thing which seemed to

justify such a surmise, called forth his prompt and earnest protest. When some articles of an irreligious tendency appeared in the Edinburgh Review, with which he was intimately connected, and of which he had, hitherto, felt justly proud, he wrote to Jeffrey: "I hear with sorrow from Elmsley, that a very anti-christian article has crept into the last number of the E. Review. You must be thoroughly aware that the rumor of infidelity decides, not only the reputation, but the existence of the Review. I am extremely sorry too on my own account, because those who wish it to have been written by me, will say it was so." And again, in another letter: “I must beg the favor of you to be explicit on one point. Do you mean to take care that the Review shall not profess infidel principles? Unless this is the case, I must absolutely give up all connection with it." To a London publisher who occasionally presented him with books, and who presumed to send him a work of irreligious tendency, he wrote, saying that "he could not be aware that he had sent him a work unfit to be sent to a clergyman of the Church of England, or indeed of any church ;" and adding, "I hate the insolence, persecution, and intolerance which so often pass under the name of religion, and as you know, have fought against them; but I have an unaffected horror of irreligion and impiety, and every suspicion and fear would be excited in me by a man who professed himself an infidel."

Mr. Smith's natural endowments and mental cultivation were well calculated to render him an interesting and impressive speaker. His personal appearance was much in his favor. His voice and action were fine. And his style most appropriate to his subject. Nothing about him was languid, and nothing he wrote or uttered was ever prosy. His ardent temperament made him the life of every company, and imparted animation and energy to his pulpit services. The unimpassioned manner which the English clergy seem scrupulously to maintain, found no favor and received no countenance from him. In the preface to his Sermons, which he published in 1801, he mentions among other causes of the unpopularity of sermons, "the extremely ungraceful manner in which they are

delivered," and then proceeds with a series of observations from which we make the following extract.

"The English, generally remarkable for doing very good things in a very bad manner, seem to have reserved the maturity and plenitude of their awkwardness for the pulpit. A clergyman clings to his velvet cushion with either hand, keeps his eye riveted upon his book, speaks of the ecstasies of joy and fear with a voice and a face which indicate neither, and pinions his body and soul into the same attitude of limb and thought, for fear of being called theatrical and affected. The most intrepid veteran of us all dares no more than wipe his face with his cambric sudarium; if, by mischance, his hand slip from its orthodox gripe of the velvet, he draws it back as from liquid brimstone, or the caustic iron of the law, and atones for this indecorum by fresh insensibility, and rigorous sameness. Is it a wonder, then, that every semi-delirious sectary who pours forth his animated nonsense with the genuine look and voice of passion, should gesticulate away the congregation of the most profound and learned divine of the Established Church, and in two Sundays preach him bare to the very sexton? Why are we natural everywhere but in the pulpit? No man expresses warm and animated feelings anywhere else, with his mouth alone, but with his whole body; he articulates with every limb, and talks from head to foot with a thousand voices. Why this holoplexia on sacred occasions alone? Why call in the aid of paralysis to piety? Is it a rule of oratory to balance the style against the subject, and to handle the most sublime truths in the dullest language and driest manner? Is sin to be taken from men, as Eve was from Adam, by casting them into a deep slumber? Or from what possible perversion of common-sense are we all to look like field-preachers in Zembla, holy lumps of ice numbed into quiescence, and stagnation, and mumbling!

"It is theatrical to use action, and it is Methodistical to use action.

"But we have cherished contempt for sectaries and persevered in dignified tameness so long, that while we are freezing common-sense for large salaries in stately churches, amidst whole acres and furlongs of empty pews, the crowd are feasting on ungrammatical fervor and illiterate animation in the crumbling hovels of Methodists. If influence over the imagination can produce these powerful effects; if this be the chain by which the people are dragged captive at the wheel of enthusiasm, why are we, who are rocked in the cradle of ancient genius, who hold in one hand the book of the wisdom of God, and in the other grasp that eloquence which ruled the Pagan world, why are we never to rouse, to appeal, to inflame, to break through every barrier, up to the very haunts and chambers of the soul? If the vilest interests upon earth can daily call forth all the powers of the mind, are we to harangue on public order, and public happiness, to picture a reüniting world, a resurrection of souls, a rekindling of ancient affections, the dying day of heaven and earth, and to unveil the throne of God, with a wretched apathy which we neither feel nor show in the most trifling concerns of life? This surely can be neither decency nor piety, but ignorant sham, boyish bashfulness, luxurious indolence, or any thing but propriety and sense. There is, I grant, something discouraging at present to a man of sense in the sarcastical phrase of popular preacher; but I am not entirely without hope that the time may come when energy in the pulpit will be no longer considered as a mark of superficial understanding; when animation and affectation will be separated; when churches will cease (as Swift says) to be public dormito