'infidels,' atheists."* Yet no one now doubts the pastoral goodness of Burnet, the blameless sanctity of Cudworth or of Whichcote, the loving orthodoxy of Tillotson, the indomitable vigour of Barrow. And in our own time it would be easy to point either to those who are recently departed from us, or to those who still live amongst us, of whom it may be truly said that the zeal of God's house has eaten them up,' and who yet have all their life long laboured under the cruel imputations of heresy which men, immeasurably their inferiors in power and in holiness, have ventured to cast against them. There may be troubled times before us. We know not what trials are in store for the Church or for Religion. But if the Church of England is to hold its place as a national institution,-if Christianity is to hold its place as the religion of the world,—it must be by the fulfilment of hopes such as that which breathes through the chief Essay in this now celebrated volume, and with which we gladly conclude.

'Time was when the Gospel was before the age; when it breathed a new life into a decaying world, when the difficulties of Christianity were difficulties of the heart only, and the highest minds found in its truths not only the rule of their lives, but a wellspring of intellectual delight. Is it to be held a thing impossible that the Christian Religion, instead of shrinking into itself, may again embrace the thoughts of men upon the earth? Those who hold the possibility of such a reconcilement or restoration of belief are

See the attacks of the Nonjurors on Archbishop Tillotson. 'His ' religion is latitudinarian, which is none; that is, nothing that is posi'tive, but against everything that is positive in other religions. He 'is owned by the atheistical wits of all England as their true primate 'and apostle. They glory and rejoice in him, and make their public boasts of him. He leads them not only the length of Socinianism, 'but to call in question all Revelation, turn Genesis into a romance,' &c. (Birch's Life of Tillotson,' p. 297.) A considerable cause of our divisions hath been the broaching scandalous names and em'ploying them to blast the reputation of worthy men; bespattering and aspersing them with insinuations and injuries devised by spiteful and applied by simple people; latitudinarians, rationalists, and I 'know not what other names, intended for reproach, although im'parting better signification than those dull detractors can, it seems, 'discern.' (Sermons and Fragments of Barrow, p. 245., published in 1834, by the present Bishop of Manchester.) It is to be regretted that the learned editor did not recall this warning of Barrow before he lent his name to the approval of similar attacks on the reputations ' of worthy men' in our own day.

anxious to disengage Christianity from all suspicion of disguise or unfairness. They wish to preserve the historical use of Scripture as the continuous witness in all ages of the higher things in the heart of man, as the inspired source of truth, and the way to the better life. They are willing to take away some of the external supports, because they are not needed and do harm; also because they interfere with the meaning. They have a faith, not that after a period of transition all things will remain just as they were before, but that they will all come round again to the use of man and to the glory of God. When interpreted like any other book, by the same rules of evidence and by the same canons of criticism, the Bible will still remain unlike any other book; its beauty will be freshly seen, as of a picture which is restored after many ages to its original state; it will create a new interest, and make for itself a new kind of authority by the life which is in it. It will be a spirit and not a letter; as it was in the beginning, having an influence like that of the spoken word, or the book newly found. The purer the light in the human heart, the more it will have an expression of itself in the mind of Christ; the greater the knowledge of the development of man, the truer will be the insight gained into "the increasing purpose" of Revelation. In which also the individual soul has a practical part, finding a sympathy with its own imperfect feelings in the broken utterance of the Psalmist or the Prophet, as well as in the fulness of Christ. The harmony between Scripture and the life of man in all its stages, may be far greater than appears at present. No one can form any notion, from what we see around us, of the power which Christianity might have if it were at one with the conscience of man, and not at variance with his intellectual convictions. There a world, weary of the heat and dust of controversy, of speculations about God and man, weary too of the rapidity of its own motion, would return home and find rest.' (Essay on the Interpretation of Scrip ture, p. 375.)

ART. VII.-Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale). Edited, with notes and an introductory account of her Life and Writings, by A. HAYWARD, Esq., Q.C. 2 vols. London: 1861.

THE

HESE volumes (if we may judge of them by our own impressions) belong to that class of which the attraction appears to grow on the reader as he peruses them. We took them up with but a languid feeling of interest, and that arising merely from the collateral circumstance of the large space filled by the lady who forms their subject in the history of Dr. Johnson and his circle. We lay them down, not only with a lively impression of the dramatic character of their contents, but already imbued with something of a spirit of partisanship. We enter with all our hearts into the important biographical controversies: - how far Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi was justified in the very uncompromising language which she uses respecting her first husband the brewer, and the equally unsparing eulogies which she bestows on her second husband the fiddler;-whether her children were heartless as King Lear's, or righteously indignant as Queen Gertrude's of Denmark; — whether the great moralist was actuated, in snubbing the lady as severely as he did, by a just sense of the fitness of things, or by regrets for the fleshpots of Streatham. We fancy ourselves admitted to her drawing-room, mixing familiarly with its members, and taking our part in the gossip and scandal concerning its mistress and her affairs, in which they all so profusely indulged.

There is scarcely any sketch of a real human life so dull or so trifling and this, though assuredly not dull, is trifling enough which is not a text for endless meditation. It stirs the imagination to fill up the deficient details, and add appendices of our own composing. And herein lies a distinction between real and fictitious narrative, rather in favour of the former. Novel-reading, in one shape or another, has been the passion of all ages, and in its present shape it has almost superseded the kindred attractions of the drama, and greatly weakened the taste for poetry. But absorbing as are the charms of romance, it lacks, on the whole, this peculiar advantage. It is deficient in suggestiveness. Of course every one will remember plenty of exceptions to so comprehensive a rule. But on the whole, the more high wrought the fiction, the more powerfully it may address itself to the sympathies and the sentiments, the more strongly it may occupy the memory, the less it calls on imagi

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nation to eke it out. We can add but very little, from our own stores, to Jane Eyre,' or to Adam Bede.' The train of thought which such pages produce does not wander far beyond those pages themselves, while even the most indifferent memoir excites the imaginative faculty to fill up its meagre outlines. A good novel, like a good dinner, affords a pleasure doubtless high, but complete in itself; a good biography leaves the reader with an inexhaustible appetite for a further acquaintance with the subject of it.

It is plain, from the manner in which Mr. Hayward has performed his editorial labour, that he partakes with us in this peculiar zest for the details of biography; by no means despising its trivialities, which are often the most captivating and sometimes the most instructive parts of it. He entirely realizes to himself the incidents of the little domestic epic contained in these fragmentary remnants. He warms with the subject, and is easily converted from the impartial editor into the eager advocate. Scarcely could Fanny Burney or Sir John Hawkins, or the great Boswell himself, have entered with keener spirit into the quarrels, and jealousies, and recriminations of that clever coterie to which they belonged, but which lives for us in their records only. It is needless to say how much additional enjoyment it gives to travel along the road with an editorial companion of this description, who stops you at every turn to give his own opinion on the prospect, instead of the ordinary guide who simply shows the way, and leaves you to your meditation. It provokes discussion. We fancy ourselves to have very considerable ground of controversy with Mr. Hayward, as we shall presently have to show. But whether he be right or wrong, he has at all events very good reasons to give for the judgments which he forms: they are the judgments of a critic applying his knowledge of human nature as modified by the habits of modern social life, to problems arising out of the same human nature moulded by the habits of a time recent in point of years, but already distant in many of its usages.

Mrs. Thrale during her long life contributed largely to the amusement and edification of her contemporaries by publications concerning herself and her family affairs. It is but just to add that this liberality of exposure was in some degree authorised by the gross personalities of which she was made the victim. Her Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson,' her Correspondence' with him, her two volumes of travels in Italy, abound with confidences of this description. But, in addition, she had the habit of scribbling every thought that came uppermost concerning the same deeply interesting subject, in diaries, in me

moranda, and on the margins of books. Many of these have been preserved. The raw materials which Mr. Hayward has made use of, and which form indeed the groundwork of his publication, consist of Autobiographical Memoirs' of a fragmentary kind, marginal notes on books, letters, and, last not least, an extract in his second volume from Thraliana,' a miscellaneous storehouse of manuscript anecdotes to which she seems to have resorted whenever pique, or self-defence, or love of scandal, or any kindred feeling, required a vent through the pen. If this last relic of the lady's talents, contained, as we are here informed, in six books of about 300 pages each, and extending over thirty-two years and a half, answers in any degree to the single example which Mr. Hayward has been allowed to give us, its contents must possess a piquancy far exceeding anything we have yet obtained on the subject. But we are not told whether there is any probability of its ever seeing the light; and judging by the fragment now produced, we have doubts whether it ought to do so.

We must pass over many an amusing anecdote of the early history of Hester Lynch Salusbury, her high Cambro-British lineage (she boasts somewhere of a descent from Charles the Sixth of France and Isabella of Bavaria), her good looks-which induced Hogarth to take her likeness, at fourteen, in the 'Lady's Last Stake' and only dwell a moment on her singular, masculine education; a less uncommon exception, in those days, to the conventional dreariness of feminine tuition, than in our more monotonous society. Her first instruction was that of the stablekicking her heels on a corn-bin, and learning to drive of the old coachman'; then came a thorough training in Latin, with some smattering of Greek and Hebrew, and very considerable acquaintance with French and Italian literature. It was a mind thus disciplined which both attracted her in the first instance towards Dr. Johnson, and led his attention towards herself. Her writings show the extreme readiness with which she used the knowledge thus obtained, and prove thereby that it was by no means that of a schoolboy of the lowest form,' as Johnson is reported to have said in one of his fits of contradiction. Far from being pretentious or pedantic, she seems to us to have rather depreciated her own acquirements, and neglected the display of them; her extreme versatility of tastes, and disengaged mind, carrying her off from literary occupation to livelier employment so rapidly that the traces of blue disappear, almost as soon as developed, in the rainbow hues of her variety. In truth, and to say it once for all, while we have not found our estimate of Mrs. Piozzi's heart, or of her judgment, raised by the con