the Divine image, for the re-entitling it to the kingdoms of grace and glory, God did a greater work than the creation; He was fain to contract divinity to a span; to send a person to die for us, who of himself could not die, and was constrained to use rare and mysterious arts to make him capable of dying: He prepared a person instrumental to his purpose, by sending his Son from his own bosom-a person both God and man, an enigma to all nations and to all sciences; one that ruled over all the angels, that walked on the pavements of heaven, whose feet were clothed with stars: whose anderstanding is larger than that infinite space which we imagine in the uncircumscribed distance beyond the first orb of heaven; a person to whom felicity was as essential as life to God. This was the only person that was designed in the eternal decrees, to pay the price of a soul-less than this person could not do it. Nothing less than an infinite excellence could satisfy for a soul lost to infinite ages; who was to bear the load of an infinite anger from the provocation of an eternal God. And yet, if it be possible that Infinite can receive degrees, this is but one-half of the abyss, and I think the lesser." "It was a strange variety of natural efficacies, that manna could corrupt in twenty-four hours, if gathered upon Wednesday or Thursday, and that it should last till forty-eight hours, if gathered upon the even of the Sabbath; and that it should last many hundreds of years, when placed in the sanctuary by the ministry of the high-priest. But so it was in the Jews' religion; and manna pleased every palate, and it filled all appetites; and the same measure was a different proportion, it was much, and it was little; as if nature, that it might serve religion, had been taught some measures of infinity, which is every where and no where, filling all things, and circumscribed with nothing, measured by one omer, and doing the work of two; like the crowns of kings, fitting the brows of Nimrod and the most mighty warrior, and vet not too large for the temples of an infant prince." "His mercies are more than we can tell, and they are more than we can feel: for all the world, in the abyss of the Divine mercies, is like a man diving into the bottom of the sea, over whose head the waters run insensibly and unperceived, and yet the weight is vast, and the sum of them is immeasurable: and the man is not pressed with the burden, nor confounded with numbers: and no observation is able to recount, no sense sufficient to perceive, no memory large enough to retain, no understand ing great enough to apprehend this infinity." These passages are not cited, with so vain a purpose as that of furnishing a sea-line for measuring the "soundless deeps," of Jeremy Taylor, but to illustrate that one remarkable characteristic of his style-which we have already noticed-viz. the everlasting strife and fluctuation between his rhetoric and his eloquence, which maintain their alternations with a force and inevitable recurrence, like the systole and diastole-the contraction and expansion-of some living organ. For this charac teristic he was indebted in mixed proportions to his own peculiar style of understanding, and the nature of his subject. Where the understanding is not active and teeming, but poesessed by a few vast and powerful ideas, (which was the case of Milton,) there the funds of a varied rhetoric are wanting. On the other hand, where the understanding is all alive with the subtilty of distinctions, and nourished (as Jeremy Taylor's was) by casuistical divinity, the variety and opulence of the rhetoric is apt to be oppressive. But this tendency, in the case of Taylor, was happily checked and balanced by the commanding passion, intensity, and solemnity of his exalted theme, which gave a final unity to the tumultuous motions of his intellect. The only very obvious defects of J. Taylor were in the mechanical part of his art in the mere technique; he writes like one who never revises, nor tries the effect upon his ear of his periods as musical wholes; and in the syntax and connexion of the parts seems to have been habitually careless of slight blemishes. Jeremy Taylor" died in a few years after the *In retracing the history of English rhetorio, it may strike the reader that we have made some capital omissions. But in these he will find we have been governed by sufficient reasons. Shakspeare is no doubt a rhetorician, majorum gentium; but he is so much moro, that scarcely an instance is to be found of his rhetoric which does not pass by fits into a higher element of eloquence or poetry. The first and the last acts, for instance, of the Two Noble Kinsmen, which, in point of composition, is perhaps the most superb work in the lan guage, and beyond all doubt from the loom of Shakspeare, would have been the most gorgeous rhetoric, had they not happened to be something far better. The supplications of the widowed Queens to Theseus, the invoca tions of their tutelar divinities by Palamon and Arcite, the death of Arcite, &c. are finished in a more elaborate style of excellence than any other almost of Shakspeare's most felicitous scenes. In their first intention, they were per haps merely rhetorical; but the furnace o composition has transmuted their substance Indeed, specimens of mere rhetoric would b better sought in some of the other great dra matists, who are under a less fatal necessity o turning every thing they touch into the pur gold of poetry. Two other writers, with grea original capacities for rhetoric, we have omit ted in our list from separate considerationg we mean Sir Walter Raleigh and Lord Baco The first will hardly have been missed by th general reader; for his finest passages a dispersed through the body of his bulky hist ry, and are touched with a sadness too patheti and of too personal a growth, to fulfil the co ditions of a gay rhetoric as an art rejoicing its own energies. With regard to Lord Bace the case is different. He had great advantag for rhetoric, being figurative and sensuous, great thinkers must always be,) and havi no feelings too profound, or of a nature to di turb the balance of a pleasurable activity; yet, if we except a few lettere, and parts of few speeches, he never comes forward as a ri Restoration. Sir Thomas Brown, though at that time nearly thirty years removed from the first surreptitious edition of his Religio Medici, lingered a little longer. But, when both were gone, it may be truly affirmed that the great oracles of rhetoric were finally silenced. South and Barrow, indeed, were brilliant dialecticians in different styles; but, after Tillotson, with his meagre intellect, his low key of feeling, and the smug and scanty draperies of his style, had announced a new era,-English divinity ceased to be the racy vineyard that it had been in ages of ferment and struggle. Like the soil of Sicily, (vide Sir H. Davy's Agricultural Chemistry,) it was exhausted for ever by the tilth and rank fertility of its golden youth. Since then, great passions and high thinking have either disappeared from literature altogether, or thrown themselves into poetic forms which, with the privilege of a masquerade, are allowed to assume the spirit of past ages, and to speak in a key unknown to the general literature. At all events, no pulpit oratory of a rhetorical cast, for upwards of a century, has been able to support itself, when stripped of the aids of voice and action. Robert Hall and Edward Irving, when printed, exhibit only the spasms of weakness. Nor do we remember one memorable burst of rhetoric in the pulpit eloquence of the last 150 years, with the exception of a fine oath ejaculated by a dissenting minister of Cambridge, who, when appealing for the confirmation of his words to the grandeur of man's nature, swore-By this and by the other, and at length, "By the Iliad, by the Odyssey"-as the climax, in a long bead-roll of speciosa miracula, which he had apostrophized as monuments of human power. As to Foster, he has been prevented from preaching by a complaint affecting the throat; but, judging from the quality of his celebrated Essays, he could never have figured as a truly splendid rhetorician; for the imagery and ornamental parts of his Essays have evidently not grown up in the loom, and concurrently with the texture of the thoughts, but have been separately added afterwards, as so much embroidery or fringe. Politics, mean time, however inferior in any shape to religion, as an ally of real eloquence, might yet, either when barbed by an interest of intense personality, or on the very opposite footing of an interest comprehensively national, have irritated the growth of rhetoric such as the spirit of the times allowed. In one conspicuous instance it did so; but generally it torician. The reason is, that being always in quest of absolute truth, he contemplates all subjects-not through the rhetorical fancy, which is most excited by mere seeming resemblances, and such as can only sustain themselves under a single phasis, but through the philosophic fancy, or that which rests upon real analogies. Another unfavourable circumstance, arising in fact out of the plethoric fulness of Lord B.'s mind, is the short-hand style of his composition, in which the connexions are seldom fully developed. It was the lively mot of a great modern poet, speaking of Lord B.'s Essays, "that they are not plants, but seeds." Museum.-VOL. XIV. had little effect, as a cursory glance over the two last centuries will show. In the reign of James I. the House of Commons first became the theatre of struggles truly national. The relations of the people and the crown were then brought to issue; and under shifting names, continued sub judice from that time to 1688; and from that time, in fact, a corresponding interest was directed to the proceedings of Parliament. But it was not until 1642 that any free communication was made of what passed in debate. During the whole of the Civil War, the speeches of the leading members upon all great questions were freely published in occasional pamphlets. Naturally they were very much compressed; but enough survives to show that, from the agitations of the times, and the religious gravity of the House, no rhetoric was sought, or would have been tolerated. In the reign of Charles II., judging from such records as we have of the most critical debates, (that preserved by Locke for instance, through the assistance of his pa tron Lord Shaftesbury,) the general tone and standard of Parliamentary eloquence had taken pretty nearly its present form and level. The religious gravity had then given way; and the pedantic tone, stiffness, and formality of punctual divisions, had been abandoned for the free-. dom of polite conversation. It was not, however, until the reign of Queen Anne that the qualities and style of Parliamentary eloquence were submitted to public judgment; this was on occasion of the trial of Dr. Sacheverel, which was managed by members of the House of Commons. The Whigs, however, of that æra had no distinguished speakers. On the Tory side, St. John (Lord Bolingbroke) was the most accomplished person in the house. His style may be easily collected from his writings, which have all the air of having been dictated without premeditation; and the ef fect of so much showy and fluent declamation, combined with the graces of his manner and person, may be inferred from the deep impression which they seem to have left upon Lord Chesterfield, himself so accomplished a judge, and so familiar with the highest efforts of the age of Mr. Pulteney and Lord Chatham. With two exceptions, indeed, to be noticed presently, Lord Bolingbroke came the nearest of all Parliamentary orators who have been particularly recorded, to the ideal of a fine rhetorician. It was no disadvantage to him that he was shallow, being so luminous and transparent; and the splendour of his periodic diction, with his fine delivery, compensated his defect in imagery. Sir Robert Walpole was another Lord Londonderry; like him, an excellent statesman, and a first-rate leader of the House of Commons, but in other respects a plain unpretending man; and, like Lord Londonderry, he had the reputation of a blockhead with all eminent blockheads, and of a man of talents with those who were themselves truly such. "When I was very young," says Burke, "a general fashion told me I was to admire some of the writings against that minister; a little more maturity taught me as much to despise them." Lord Mansfield, "the fluent Murray," was, or would have been, but for the condensation of law, another Bolingbroke. "How sweet an No. 81.-Z Ovid was in Murray lost!" says Pope; and, if the comparison were suggested with any studied propriety, it ascribes to Lord Mansfield the talents of a first-rate rhetorician. Lord Chatham had no rhetoric at all, any more than Charles Fox of the next generation: both were too fervent, too Demosthenic, and threw themselves too ardently upon the graces of nature. Mr. Pitt came nearer to the idea of a rhetorician, in so far as he seemed to have more artifice; but this was only in the sonorous rotundity of his periods, which were cast in a monotonous mould; for in other respects he would have been keenly alive to the ridicule of rhetoric in a First Lord of the Treasury. All these persons, whatever might be their other differences, agreed in this that they were no jugglers, but really were that which they appeared to be, and never struggled for distinctions which did not naturally belong to them. But next upon the roll comes forward an absolute charlatan-a charlatan the most accomplished that can ever have figured upon so intellectual a stage. This was Sheridan-a mocking-bird through the entire scale, from the highest to the lowest note of the gamut; in fact, to borrow a coarse word, the mere impersonation of humbug. Even as a wit, he has been long known to be a wholesale plagiarist; and the exposures of his kind biographer, Mr. Moore, exhibit him in that line as the most hide-bound and sterile of performers, lying perdue through a whole evening for a casual opportunity, or by miserable stratagem creating an artificial one, for exploding some poor starveling jest; and, in fact, sacrificing to this petty ambition, in a degree never before heard of, the ease and dignity of his life. But it is in the character of a rhetorical orator that he, and his friends in his behalf, have put forward the hollowest pretensions. In the course of the Hastings' trial, upon the concerns of paralytic Begums, and ancient Rannies, hags that, if ever actually existing, were no more to us and our British sympathies, than we to Hecuba, did Mr. Sheridan make his capital exhibition. The real value of his speech was never at any time misappreciated by the judicious; for his attempts at the grand, the pathetic, and the sentimental, had been continually in the same tone of falsetto and horrible fustian. Burke, however, who was the most double-minded person in the world, cloaked his contempt in hyperbolical flattery; and all the unhappy people who have since written lives of Burke, adopt the whole for mere gospel truth. Exactly in the same vein of tumid inanity, is the speech which Mr. Sheridan puts into the mouth of Rolla the Peruvian. This the reader may chance to have heard upon the stage; or, in default of that good luck, we present him with the following fragrant twaddle from one of the Begummiads, which has been enshrined in the praises (si quid sua carmina possunt) of many worthy critics; the subject is Filial Piety. "Filial piety," (Mr. Sheridan said) "it was impossible by words to describe, but description by words was unnecessary. It was that duty which they all felt and understood, and which required not the powers of language to explain. It was in truth more properly to be called a principle than a duty. It required not the aid of memory; it needed not the exercise of the understanding; it awaited not the slow deliberations of reason; it flowed spontaneously from the fountain of our feelings; it was involuntary in our natures; it was a quality of our being, innate and coeval with life, which, though afterwards cherished as a passion, was independent of our mental powers; it was earlier than all intelligence in our souls; it displayed itself in the earliest impulses of the heart, and was an emotion of fondness that returned in smiles of gratitude the affectionate solicitudes, the tender anxieties, the endearing attentions experienced before memory began, but which were not less dear for not being remembered. It was the sacrament of nature in our hearts, by which the union of the parent and child was seated and rendered perfect in the community of love; and which, strengthening and ripening with life, acquired vigour from the understanding, and was most lively and active when most wanted."-Now we put it to any candid reader, whether the above Birmingham ware might not be vastly improved by one slight alteration, viz. omitting the two first words, and reading it as a conundrum. Considered as rhetoric, it is evidently fitted "to make a horse sick;" but, as a conundrum in the Lady's Magazine, we contend that it would have great success. How it aggravates the disgust with which these paste diamonds are now viewed, to remember that they were paraded in the presence of Edmund Burke-nay, (credite pos teri!) in jealous rivalry of his genuine and priceless jewels. Irresistibly one is reminded of the dancing efforts of Lady Blarney and Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Skeggs, against the native grace of the Vicar of Wakefield's family:"The ladies of the town strove hard to be equally easy, but without success. They swam, sprawled, languished, and frisked; but all would not do. The gazers, indeed, owned that it was fine; but neighbour Flamborough observed, that Miss Livy's feet seemed as pat to the music as its echo." Of Goldsmith it was said in his epitaph,-Nil tetigit quod non ornavit of the Drury-Lane rhetorician it might be said with equal truth. Nil tetigit quod non fuco adulteravit. But avaunt, Birmingham! let us speak of a great man. All hail to Edmund Burke, the supreme writer of his century, the man of the largest and finest understanding! Upon that word, understanding, we lay a stress: for oh! ye immortal donkeys, who have written "about him and about him," with what an obstinate stupidity have ye brayed away for one third of a century about that which ye are pleased to call his "fancy." Fancy in your throats, ye miserable twaddlers! as if Edmund Burke were the man to play with his fancy, for the purpose of separable ornament. He was a man of fancy in no other sense than as Lord Bacon was so, and Jeremy Taylor, and as all large and discursive thinkers are and must be: that is to say, the fancy which he had in common with all mankind, and very probably in no eminent degree, in him was urged into unusual activity under the necessities of his capacious understanding. His great and peculiar distinction was that he viewed all objects of the under aggravated injustice." Then follows the passage in question: standing under more relations than other men, and under more complex relations. According to the multiplicity of these relations, a man is Such are their ideas; such their religion; said to have a large understanding; according and such their law. But as to our country and to their subtlety, a fine one; and in an angelic our race, as long as the well-compacted strucunderstanding, all things would appear to be ture of our church and state, the sanctuary, related to all. Now, to apprehend and detect the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended moral relations, or to pursue them steadily, is by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at a process absolutely impossible without the once and a temple (Templum in modum arcis*), intervention of physical analogies. To say, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British therefore, that a man is a great thinker, or a Sion; as long as the British monarchy, not fine thinker, is but another expression for say- more limited than fenced by the orders of the ing that he has a schematizing (or, to use a state, shall, like the proud keep of Windsor, plainer but less accurate expression, a figu- rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with rative) understanding. In that sense, and for the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, that purpose, Barke is figurative: but under- as long as this awful structure shall oversee and stood, as he has been understood by the long-guard the subjected land-so long the mounds eared race of his critics, not as thinking in and by his figures, but as deliberately laying them on by way of enamel or after ornainent,-not as incarnating, but simply as dressing his thoughts in imagery,-so understood, he is not the Burke of reality, but a poor fictitious Burke, modelled after the poverty of conception which belongs to his critics. It is true, however, that in some rare cases, Burke did indulge himself in a pure rhetori cian's use of fancy; consciously and profusely lavishing his ornaments for mere purposes of effect. Such a case occurs, for instance, in that admirable picture of the degradation of Europe, where he represents the different crowned heads as bidding against each other at Basle for the favour and countenance of Regicide. Others of the same kind there are in his brilliant letter on the Duke of Bedford's attack upon him in the House of Lords: and one of these we shall here cite, disregarding its greater chance for being already familiar to the reader, upon two considerations; first, that it has all the appearance of being finished with the most studied regard to effect; and secondly, for an interesting anecdote connected with it, which we have never seen in print, but for which we have better authority than could be produced perhaps for most of those which are. The anecdote is, that Burke, conversing with Dr. Lawrence and another gentleman on the literary value of his own writings, declared that the particular passage in the entire range of his works which had cost him the most labour, and upon which, as tried by a certain canon of his own, his labour seemed to himself to have been the most successful, was the following: After an introductory paragraph which may be thus abridged-"The crown has considered me after long service. The crown has paid the Duke of Bedford by advance. He has had a long credit for any service which he may perform hereafter. He is secure, and long may he be secure, in his advance, whether he performs any services or not. His grants are engrafted on the public law of Europe, covered with the awful hoar of innumerable ages. They are guarded by the sacred rule of prescription. The learned professors of the Rights of Man, however, regard prescription not as a title to bar all other claim-but as a bar against the possessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession to be no more than an and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford levelt will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France. As long as our sovereign lord the king, and his faithful subjects the lords and commons of this realm, the triple cord which no man can break; the solemn sworn constitutional frank-pledge of this nation; the firm guarantees of each other's being, and each other's rights; the joint and several securities, each in its place and order for every kind and every quality of property and of dignity, as long as these endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is safe; and we are all safe together;-the high from the blights of envy and the spoliation of rapacity; the low from the iron hand of oppression, and the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen! and so be it: and so it will be, "Dum domus Æneæ Capitoli immobile saxum Accolet; imperiumque pater Romanus habebit." This was the sounding passage which Burke alleged as the chef-d'œuvre of his rhetoric; and the argument, upon which he justified his choice, is specious-if not convincing. He laid it down as a maxim of composition, that every passage in a rhetorical performance, which was brought forward prominently, and relied upon as a key (to use the language of war) in sustaining the main position of the writer, ought to involve a thought, an image, and a sentiment: and such a synthesis he found in the passage which we have quoted.This criticism, over and above the pleasure which it always gives to hear a great man's opinion of himself, is valuable, as showing that Burke, because negligent of trivial inaccuracies, was not at all the less anxious about the larger proprieties and decorums; [for this passage, confessedly so laboured, has several instances of slovenliness in trifles;] and that, in the midst of his apparent hurry, he carried out a jealous vigilance upon what he wrote, and the eye of a person practised in artificial effects. An ally of Burke's upon East Indian politics, ought to have a few words of notice, not so much for any power that he actually had as a rhetorician, but because he is sometimes re * Tacitus of the Temple of Jerusalem. + Bedford level, a rich tract of land so called in Bedfordshire. In fact, upon any other principle, the continued triumph of Junius, and his establishment as a classical author, is a standing enig ma. One talent, undoubtedly, he had in a rare perfection-the talent of sarcasm. He puted such. This was Sir Philip Francis, who, under his early disguise of Junius, had such a success as no writer of libels ever will have again. It is our private opinion, that this success rested upon a great delusion which has never been exposed. The general belief is-stung like a scorpion. But, besides that such that Junius was read for his elegance; we believe no such thing. The pen of an angel would not, upon such a theme as personal politics, have upheld the interest attached to Junius, had there been no other cause in co-operation. Language, after all, is a limited instrument: and it must be remembered that Junius, by the extreme narrowness of his range, which went entirely upon matters of fact, and personal interests, still further limited the compass of that limited instrument. For it is only in the expression and management of general ideas, that any room arises for conspicuous elegance. The real truth is this: the interest in Junius travelled downwards; he was read in the lower ranks, because in London it speedily became known that he was read with peculiar interest in the highest. This was already a marvel; for newspaper patriots, under the signatures of Publicola, Brutus, and so forth, had become a jest and a by-word to the real, practical statesman; and any man at leisure to write for so disinterested a purpose as "his country's good," was presumed, of course, to write in a garret. But here for the first time a pretended patriot, a Junius Brutus, was anticipated with anxiety, and read with agitation. Is any man simple enough to believe that such a contagion could extend to cabinet ministers, and official persons overladen with public business, on so feeble an excitement as a little reputation in the art of constructing sentences with elegance; an elegance which, after all, excluded eloquence and every other positive quality of excellence? That this can have been believed, shows the readiness with which men swallow marvels. The real secret was this:-Junius was read with the profoundest interest by members of the cabinet, who would not have paid half-acrown for all the wit and elegance of this world, simply because it was most evident that some traitor was amongst them; and that either directly by one of themselves, or through some abuse of his confidence by a servant, the secrets of office were betrayed. The circumstances of this breach of trust are now fully known; and it is readily understood why letters, which were the channel for those perfidies, should interest the ministry of that day in the deepest degree. The existence of such an interest, but not its cause, had immediately become known it descended, as might be expected, amongst all classes: once excited, it seemed to be justified by the real merits of the letters; which merit again, illustrated by its effects, appeared a thousand times greater than it was; and finally, this interest was heightened and sustained by the mystery which invested the author. How much that mystery availed in keeping alive the reputation of Junius, is clear from this fact, that, since the detection of Junius, the Letters have much declined in popularity; and ornamented editions of them are no longer the saleable article which they were some years ago. a talent has a narrow application, an interest of personality cannot be other than fugitive, take what direction it may: and malignity cannot embalm itself in materials that are themselves perishable. Such were the materials of Junius. His vaunted elegance was, in a great measure, the gift of his subject: general terseness, short sentences, and a careful avoiding of all awkwardness of construction-these were his advantages. And from these he would have been dislodged by a higher subject, or one that would have forced him out into a wider compass of thought. Rhetorician he was none, though he has often been treated as such; for, without sentiment, without imagery, without generalization, how should it be possible for rhetoric to subsist? It is an absolute fact, that Junius has not one principle, aphorism, or remark of a general nature in his whole armoury -not in a solitary instance did his barren understanding ascend to an abstraction, or general idea, but lingered for ever in the dust and rubbish of individuality, amongst the tangible realities of things and persons. Hence, the peculiar absurdity of that hypothesis which discovered Junius in the person of Burke. The opposition was here too pointedly ludicrous between Burke, who exalted the merest personal themes into the dignity of philosophic speculations, and Junius, in whose hands the very loftiest dwindled into questions of person and party. Last of the family of rhetoricians, and in a form of rhetoric as florid as the age could bear, came Mr. Canning. "Sufficit," says a Roman author, "in una civitate esse unum rhetorem." But, if more were in his age unnecessary, in ours they would have been intolerable. Three or four Mr. Cannings would have been found a nuisance: indeed, the very admiration which crowned his great displays, manifested of itself the unsuitableness of his style to the atmosphere of public affairs; for it was of that kind which is offered to a young lady rising from a brilliant performance on the piano-forte. Something, undoubtedly, there was of too juvenile an air, too gaudy a flutter of plumage, in Mr. Canning's more solemn exhibitions; but much indulgence was reasonably extended to a man, who, in his class, was so complete. He was formed for winning a favourable attention by every species of popular fascination: to the eye he recommended himself almost as much as the Bolingbroke of a century before: his voice, and his management of it, were no less pleasing: and upon him, as upon St. John, the air of a gentleman sate with a native grace. Scholarship and literature, as far as they be long to the accomplishments of a gentleman, he too brought forward in the most graceful manner and, above all, there was an impression of honour, generosity, and candour, stamped upon his manner, agreeable rather to his original character, than to the wrench which it had received from an ambition resting too much on mere personal merits. What a pity that this " gay creature of the elements" had |
