cast upon this fire, though I had not at hand a | from his more severe pursuits. His faithful silver vessel to carry it in, nor thought it the pen attended Baxter in his pastime as in his most fit. The plainest words are the most studies; and produced an autobiography, which profitable oratory in the weightiest matters. appeared after his death in a large folio voFineness for ornament, and delicacy for delight; lume. Calamy desired to throw these posthubut they answer not necessity, though some- mous sheets into the editorial crucible, and to times they may modestly attend that which reproduce them in the form of a corrected and answers it." He wrote to give utterance to a well-arranged abridgment. Mr. Orme laments full mind and a teeming spirit. Probably he the obstinacy of the author's literary executor, never consumed forty minutes in as many which forbade the execution of this design. years, in the mere selection and adjustment of Few who know the book will agree with him. words. So to have employed his time, would A strange chaos indeed it is. But Grainger in his judgment have been a sinful waste of has well said of the writer, that "men of his that precious gift. "I thought to have ac- size are not to be drawn in miniature." Large quainted the world with nothing but what was as life, and finished to the most minute detail, the work of time and diligence, but my con- his own portrait, from his own hand, exhibits science soon told me that there was too much to the curious in such things a delineation, of of pride and selfishness in this, and that hu- which they would not willingly spare a single mility and self-denial required me to lay by stroke, and which would have lost all its force the affectation of that style, and spare that in- and freedom if reduced and varnished by any dustry which tended but to advance my name other limner, however practised, or however with men, when it hindered the main work and felicitous. There he stands, an intellectual crossed my end." Such is his own account; giant as he was, playing with his quill as Herand, had he consulted Quinctilian, he could cules with the distaff, his very sport a labour, have found no better precept for writing well under which any one but himself would have than that which his conscience gave him for staggered. Towards the close of the first book writing usefully. First of all the requisites for occurs a passage, which, though often repubexcelling in the art of composition, as one of lished, and familiar to most students of Engthe greatest masters of that art in modern lish literature, must yet be noticed as the most times, Sir Walter Scott, informs us, is "to have impressive record in our own language, if not something to say." When there are thoughts in any tongue, of the gradual ripening of a that burn, there never will be wanting words powerful mind, under the culture of incessant that breathe. Baxter's language is plain and study, wide experience, and anxious self-obperspicuous when his object is merely to in-servation. Mental anatomy, conducted by a form; copious and flowing when he exhorts; hand at once so delicate and so firm, and comand when he yields to the current of his feel-parisons so exquisitely just, between the imings, it becomes redundant and impassioned, pressions and impulses of youth, and the tranand occasionally picturesque and graphic. There are innumerable passages of the most touching pathos and unconscious eloquence, but not a single sentence written for effect. His chief merit as an artist is, that he is perfectly artless; and that he employs a style of great compass and flexibility, in such a manner as to demonstrate that he never thought about it, and as to prevent the reader, so long at least as he is reading, from thinking about it either.

quil conclusions of old age, bring his career of strife and trouble to a close of unexpected and welcome serenity. In the full maturity of such knowledge as is to be acquired on earth, of the mysteries of our mortal and of our immortal existence, the old man returns at last for repose to the elementary truths, the simple lessons, and the confiding affections of his childhood; and writes an unintended commentary, of unrivalled force and beauty, on the inspired declaration, that to become as little children is the indispensable, though arduous condition of attaining to true heavenly wisdom.

The canons of criticism, which the great nonconformist drew from his conscience, are however, sadly inapplicable to verse. Mr. To substitute for this self-portraiture, any James Montgomery has given his high suffrage other analysis of Baxter's intellectual and in favour of Baxter's poetical powers, and moral character, would indeed be a vain atjustifies his praise by a few passages selected tempt. If there be any defect or error of which from the rest with equal tenderness and discre- he was unconscious, and which he therefore tion. It is impossible to subscribe to this has not avowed, it was the combination of an heresy even in deference to such an authority; undue reliance on his own powers of investi or to resist the suspicion that the piety of the gating truth, with an undue distrust in the critic has played false with his judgment. No- result of his inquiries. He proposed to himthing short of an actual and plenary inspiration self, and executed, the task of exploring the will enable any man who composes as rapidly whole circle of the moral sciences, logic, ethics, as he writes, to give meet utterance to those divinity, politics, and metaphysics, and this ultimate secretions of the deepest thoughts and toil he accomplished amidst public employthe purest feelings in which the essence of ments of ceaseless importunity, and bodily poetry consists. Baxter's verses, which how-pains almost unintermitted. Intemperance ever are not very numerous, would be decid- never assumed a more venial form; but that edly improved by being shorn of their rhyme this insatiate thirst for knowledge was indulged and rhythm, in which state they would look to a faulty excess, no reader of his life, or of like very devout and judicious prose, as they really are.

Every man must and will have some relief

his works, can doubt. In one of his most remarkable treatises "On Falsely Pretended Knowledge," the dangerous result of indulging

this omnivorous appetite is peculiarly remark-
able. Probabilities, the only objects of such
studies, will at length become evanescent, or
scarcely perceptible, when he who holds the
scales refuses to adjust the balance, until satis-
fied that he has laden each with every sugges-
tion and every argument which can be derived,
from every author who has preceded him in
the same inquiries. Yet more hopeless is the
search for truth, when this adjustment, once
made, is again to be verified as often as any
new speculations are discovered; and when
the very faculty of human understanding, and
the laws of reasoning, are themselves to be
questioned and examined anew as frequently
as doubts can be raised of their adaptation to
their appointed ends. Busied with this im-
mense apparatus, and applying it to this bound-
less field of inquiry, Baxter would have been
bewildered by his own efforts, and lost in the
mazes of a universal skepticism, but for the
ardent piety which possessed his soul, and the
ever recurring expectation of approaching
death, which dissipated his ontological dreams,
and roused him to the active duties, and the
instant realities of life. Even as it is, he has
left behind him much, which, in direct opposi-
tion to his own purposes, might cherish the
belief that human existence was some strange
chimera, and human knowledge an illusion,
did it not fortunately happen that he is te-
dious in proportion as he is mystical. Had he
possessed and employed the wit and gayety of
Boyle, there are some of his writings to which
a place must have been assigned in the Index
Expurgatorius of Protestantism.

Amongst his contemporaries, Baxter appears to have been the object of general reverence, and of as general unpopularity. His temper was austere and irritable, his address ungracious and uncouth. While cordially admitting the merits of each rival sect, he concurred with none, but was the common censor and opponent of all. His own opinions on church government coincided with the later judgment, or, as it should rather be said, with the concessions of Archbishop Usher. They adjusted the whole of that interminable dispute to their mutual satisfaction at a conference which did not last above half an hour; for each of them was too devoutly intent on the great objects of Christianity to differ with each other very widely as to mere ritual observances. The contentions by which our forefathers were agitated on these subjects, have now happily subsided into a speculative and comparatively uninteresting debate. They produced their best, and perhaps their only desirable result, in diffusing through the Church, and amongst the people of England, an indestructible conviction of the folly of attempting to coerce the human mind into a servitude to any system or profession of belief; or of endeavouring to produce amongst men any real uniformity of

opinion on subjects beyond the cognisance of the bodily senses, and of daily observation. They have taught us all to acknowledge in practice, though some may yet deny in theory, that as long as men are permitted to avow the truth, the inherent diversities of their understandings, and of their circumstances, must impel them to the acknowledgment of corresponding variations of judgment, on all questions which touch the mysteries of the present or of the future life. If no man laboured more, or with less success, to induce mankind to think alike on these topics, no one ever exerted himself more zealously, or more effectually, than did Richard Baxter, both by his life and his writings, to divert the world from those petty disputes which falsely assume the garb of religious zeal, to those eternal and momentous truths, in the knowledge, the love, and the practice of which, the essence of religion consists.

One word respecting the edition of his works, to which we referred in the outset. For the reason already mentioned, we have stuck to our long-revered folios, without reading so much as a page of their diminutive representatives, and can therefore report nothing about them. But after diligently and repeatedly reading the two introductory volumes by Mr. Orme, we rejoice in the opportunity of bearing testimony to the merits of a learned, modest, and laborious writer, who is now, however, beyond the reach of human praise or censure. He has done every thing for Baxter's memory which could be accomplished by a skilful abridgment of his autobiography, and a careful analysis of the theological library of which he was the author; aided by an acquaintance with the theological literature of the seventeenth century, such as no man but himself has exhibited, and which it may safely be conjectured no other man possesses. Had Mr. Orme been a member of the Established Church, and had he chosen a topic more in harmony with the studies of that learned body, his literary abilities would have been far more correctly estimated, and more widely celebrated. We fear that they who dissent from her communion, and who are therefore excluded from her universities and her literary circles, are not to expect for their writings the same toleration which is so firmly secured for their persons and their ministry. Let them not, however, be dejected. Let them take for examples those whom they have selected as teachers; and learning from Richard Baxter to live and to write, they will either achieve his celebrity, or will be content, as he was, to labour without any other recompense than the tranquillity of his own conscience, the love of the people among whom he dwelt, and the approbation of the Master to whom every hour of his life, and every page of his books, were alike devoted.

PHYSICAL THEORY OF ANOTHER LIFE.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1840.]

In a series of volumes of later birth than | fashioned meeting-house, coeval with the acthat from which the author of the "Natural cession of the House of Hanover-and near History of Enthusiasm" takes the title of his it the decent residence, in which, since that literary peerage, he has bent his strength to auspicious era, have dwelt the successive pasthe task of revealing to itself the generation to tors of that wandering flock-fanning a genewhich he belongs. A thankless office that of rous spirit of resistance to tyrants, now happily the censorship! A formidable enterprise this, to be encountered only in imagination, or in to rebuke the errors of a contentious age, the records of times long since passed away. while repelling the support of each of the con- Towards the close of the last century, a mild tending parties! To appease the outraged and venerable man ruled his household in that self-complacency of mankind, such a monitor modest but not unornamented abode; for there will be cited before a tribunal far more relent- might be seen the solemn portraits of the oriless than his own. Heedless both of con- ginal confessors of nonconformity, with many tumely and of neglect, he must pursue his a relic commemorative of their sufferings and labours in reliance on himself and on his their worth. Contrasted with these were the cause; or, if fame be the reward to which he lighter and varied embellishments which beaspires, he must content himself with the anti- speak the presence of refined habits, female cipation of posthumous renown. It is not, taste, and domestic concord. There also were however, easy for the aspirant himself to find drawn up, in deep files, the works and the biothe necessary aliment for such hopes. The graphies of the Puritan divines, from Thomas writer of these works will therefore indulge us Cartwright, the great antagonist of Whitgift, in a theory invented for the aid of his and our to Matthew Pool, who, in his Synopsis Criticoown imagination. Let it be supposed, that, rum, vindicated the claims of the rejected miinstead of yet living to instruct the world, he nisters to profound Biblical learning. This was now engaged in bringing to the test of veteran battalion was flanked by a company experiment his own speculations as to the of recruits drafted from the polite literature of condition of mankind in the future state. He a more frivolous age. Rich in these treasures, reappears amongst sublunary men under the and in the happy family with whom he shared auspices of some not unfriendly editor; who, them, the good man would chide or smile away however, being without any other sources of such clouds as checkered his habitual sereintelligence respecting his course of life and nity, when those little nameless courtesies, so studies, has diligently searched his books for pleasantly interchanged between equals, were such intimations as may furnish the materials declined by the orthodox incumbent, or acfor a short "Introductory Notice" of him and cepted with elaborate condescension by the of them. The compiler is one of those who wealthy squire. The democratic sway of the prefer the positive to the conjectural style of ruling elders, supreme over the finances and recounting matters of fact; and has assumed the doctrines of the chapel, failed to draw an the freedom of throwing into the form of un-audible sigh from his resolute spirit, even when qualified assertion the inferences he had gleaned from detached passages of the volumes he is about to republish. With the help of this slight and not very improbable hypothesis, the author of these works, while still remaining amongst us, may suppose himself to be reading, in some such lines as the following, the sentence which the critic of a future day will pass on his literary character.

his more delicate sense was writhing under wounds imperceptible to their coarser vision. He had deliberately made his choice, and was content to pay the accustomed penalties. A sectarian in name, he was at heart a Catholic, generous enough to feel that the insolence of some of his neighbours, and the vulgarity of others, were rather the accidents of their position than the vices of their character. VexaOne of those seemingly motionless rivers tions such as these were beneath the regard of which wind their way through the undulating him who maintained in the village the sacred surface of England, creeps round the outskirts cause for which martyrs had sacrificed life of a long succession of buildings, half town, with all its enjoyments; and who aspired to half village, where the monotony of the wat- train up his son to the same honourable sertled cottage is relieved by the usual neigh-vice, ill requited as it was by the glory or the bourhood of structures of greater dignity; riches of this transitory world. the moated grange-the mansion-house, pierced by lines of high narrow windows-the square tower of the church,struggling through a copse of lime trees-the gray parsonage, where the conservative rector meditates his daily newspaper and his weekly discourse-the barn

That hope, however, was not to be fulfilled. The youth had inherited his father's magnanimity, his profound devotion, his freedom of thought, and his thirst for knowledge. But he disclaimed the patrimony of his father's ecclesiastical opinions. His was not one of those minds which adjust themselves to whatever mould early habits may have prepared for them. It was compounded of elements, be

To one worthy of the much prostituted name of poet, no forms of society are without their interest and their charm. But he whom the gods have not made poetical may be kindhearted and wise, and even possessed by many a brilliant fancy, and by many a noble aspiration; and so it fared with this scion of a non

spiritual democracy, from the parsimonious simplicity of their sacred edifices, from the obtrusive prominence of the leaders of their worship, and from their seeming isolation in the midst of the great Christian commonwealth, his thoughts turned to those more august communions, where the splendours of earth symbolize the hierarchies of heavenwhere the successors in an unbroken lineage of apostles and martyrs are yet ministering at the altar-where that consecrated shrine echoes to the creeds and the supplications of the first converts to the faith-and where alone can flourish those arduous but unobtrusive virtues, of which an exact subordination of ranks forms the indispensable basis. Already halfdiverted by such yearnings as these from his hereditary standard, his return to the embrace of the Episcopal Church was further aided by a morbid dislike, unworthy of his powerful intellect, of falling into common-place trains of thought or language. Educated in a body through which religious opinions and pious phrases but too lightly circulate, his instinctive dread of vulgarity led him into speculations where such associates would be shaken off, and to the use of a style such as was never employed by the dwellers in tabernacles. Of a nature the most unaffected, and irreproachably upright in the search of truth, he conducted his inquiries with such elaborate fineness of speech, and with such a fear of acquiescing in the bare creed of the school in which he had been bred, that his fellow-scholars must have formed an unjust estimate of their companion, had he not been withdrawn in early life to other associations, and to far different studies from those which they had pursued in common. From his parental village, the future author was transferred to the remote and busy world in which our English youth are instructed in the unjoyous science of special pleading, and trained for the dignities of the coif.

tween which there are no apparent affinities, but the reverse; and which, for that reason, produce in their occasional and unfrequent combination, a character substantive, individual, and strongly discriminated from that of other men. Shrinking from the coarse familiarities of the world, he thirsted for the world's applause at once a very libertine in the un-conformist race. From the coarseness of a fettered exercise of his own judgment, and a very worshipper of all legitimate authorityalternately bracing his nerves for theological strife, and dissolving them in romantic dreams -now buried in the depths of retirement, that he might plunge deeper still into the solitudes of his own nature; and then revealing his discoveries in a style copied from the fashionable models of philosophical oratory;-the young man of whom we tell might be described as a sensitive plant grafted on a Norwegian pine, as a Spartan soldier enamoured of the Idylls of Theocritus, or as an anchorite studious of the precepts of the cosmetic earl of ChesterGeld. Nature and accident combined to produce this contrast; integrity and truth gradually blended it into one harmonious, though singular whole. The robust structure of his understanding might have rendered him a rude dogmatist, if the delicate texture of his sensitive or spiritual frame had not forbidden every approach of arrogance. Exploring with intrepid diligence the great questions debated amongst men regarding their internal interests, he recoiled with disgust from the unmannerly habits, the sordid passions, and the petty jealousies which proclaim, but too loudly, that while we dispute about the path to heaven, we are still treading the miry ways of this uncelestial world. Angelic abodes, and holy abstractions, and universal love, were the alluring themes; but, handled as they were by polemics in the language of Dennis, and in the spirit of the Dunciad, our theological student was sometimes tempted to wish that the day on which he was initiated into the mysteries of the hornbook might be blotted from the calendar. Thrown into early association with the depressed and less prosperous party in the ecclesiastical quarrels of his native land, the asperities of the contest presented themselves to his inquisitive and too susceptible eye, unmitigated by the graceful and well-woven veil, beneath which sophistry and rancour can find a specious disguise when allied to rank and fortune and other social distinctions. Episcopal charges and congregational pamphlets might vie with each other in bitterness and wrong; but there rested with the mitred disputant an unquestionable advantage in the grace and dignity and seeming composure with which he inflicted pain and quickened the appetite for revenge. By the unsullied moral sense of the young divine, either form of malevolence might be equally condemned; but to his fastidious taste the ruder aspect which it bore amongst the advocates of dissent was by far the more offensive.

By the unlearned in such matters, more distinct evidence of this passage in his life may perhaps be demanded than the indications which his writings afford of a technical acquaintance with the law. But every “free and accepted brother" of the craft will recognise, in his frequent and curiously exact use of forensic language, a confidence and a skill which belong only to the acolite in those studies. That the Term Reports would be searched in vain for the specimens of his dialectic powers may, however, be readily believed. Thurlow had as little to fear from the rivalry of the author of the "Task," as Lord CottenFeelings painfully alive to the ungraceful ham from that of the author of the “Natural and the homely in human character, invariably History of Enthusiasm." Westminster Hall indicate an absence of the higher powers of is no theatre to be trodden by men of pensive imagination. To a great painter the counte- spirits, delicate nerves, and high-wrought sennance of no man is entirely devoid of beauty.sibilities. It is to England what the plain of