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A third has neither the gift of recollection nor the faculty of composition. Instead of copying piecemeal, he copies wholesale. Is he, therefore, more of a plagiarist than the other two? Who shall venture to affirm it? Let him who would do so first publish to the world one so-called original thought of his own. The chances are it will be found already in print.

But we are told: "At least a man can make the ideas of another his own, assimilate them, give them the stamp of his own personality, and issue them, as it were, fresh from his own mint." So he can, and probably spoil them in the process. Why should he feel constrained to do so? Why should he not select the best and leave them as he found them? Is the butter any the better because you change the stamp of the dairy to that of the retail-dealer? Surely the only important thing is to see that, however stamped, it be genuine butter and not oleomargarine.

What is really wanted is a little more courage on the part of the clergy -courage to give their people always a first-rate article, whether of home or foreign manufacture. By all means let them say whence they derive their inspiration. Prudence would dictate this candour, if it were recommended by no higher motive. To every church comes sooner or later the perambulatory pedant, ever on the scent of plagiarism. One such, coming to a church in days gone by, visibly disconcerted the preacher by muttering audibly at the end of each glowing paragraph the name of its original South," Tillotson," "Barrow," "Hooker," dropping from his lips, revealed to the astonished congregation the sources of their pastor's eloquence. At last the rector's patience was exhausted, and he appealed to the secular arm in the person of the verger. "Jones, turn that man out!" "Your own!" murmured the stranger, still faithful to his principle of giving the authority for every sentence the rector uttered.

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This was a species of marginal reference such as no divine could desire ; but some of those old sermons were graced with marginal notes of their own much on the principle of the verbal directions in a music-score. Looking over such an one, which in its day had been preached before royalty itself, I came across such pencilled memoranda in the margin as these: " Drop voice!" "Drop it!" "Whisper," "Pathetic shake! "Louder !" "Ore rotundo," and so forth. For the rest, a very tame longwinded discourse, with sentences languidly meandering over whole pages, and needing doubtless special management of the voice to convey any meaning at all to the royal listener. Let us hope that these well-modulated prescriptions lent it a little of the life it so sorely needed.

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Nowadays, however, written sermons seem gradually to be falling into something like disrepute, and extemporary discourses are all the rage. Many, alas! only too obviously extemporary -creatures of the moment both in their genesis and their effect. It is perhaps hardly an unmixed advantage that of late years it has dawned upon the consciousness of English ecclesiastics that, after all, there is nothing so very difficult in stringing words together when you are in an erect posture. What some one called "the faculty of thinking on your hind-legs is a widely different matter. Loquacity is the birthright of the many, thought the prerogative of the few. And as long as this is so, have we not a right to shudder at strictly extemporaneous discourse, whether in the pulpit or on the platform? Bishop Wilberforce lived to regard it as a mistake that he had recommended his clergy as a body to acquire the habit of extemporary preaching. He found that such discourses too often come from the heart only, in the sense of not proceeding from the brain. The method of fabricating them is in many cases as strictly mechanical as the knack of making Latin verses. The

memory is stored with scraps and tags which are loosely fitted together into sentences by an ingenious process which devolves all mental labour upon the listener. Talk of the fatal facility of octosyllabic verse-what is that to the fatal facility of the preaching which, unrestrained by manuscript, floods the pews with mere sonorous platitudes?

It is conceivable that a sermon, even a good one, is not an essential part of Christian worship, and that men may, without being ethnics, prefer Robertson in the study to Robinson in the pulpit. Can there be no true devoutness unless the devotee be at all times willing either to act the lotuseater, "falling asleep in a half-dream' under the narcotic influence of the written sermon, or to grow distracted as he tries to follow the kaleidoscope that the extemporaneous orator twirls mechanically before his mental vision -must he be at all times willing, I say, to bear one or other of these, or else be reckoned an outcast from the fold? May he not plead in excuse for his conduct, in the one case,

"By our parson perplext, say, how shall we determine?

'Watch and pray,' says the text: 'Go to sleep,' says the sermon.

And in the other,

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"The clue to their meaning I never have found;

But of this I am certain-the sermons are sound."

Perhaps, on an impartial review of the whole case, the balance of educated opinion will not always be found in favour of the modern extemporaneousness. True, it fascinates the vulgar. To them it savours a little of the supernatural. Their own processes of thought are so laboured, and their delivery of opinions is so slow and slipshod, that the continuous flow of words from a man without a book seems to them little short of miraculous. In their eyes to read is human, to extemporise divine. It matters not that what is read may be a master

piece, and what is said mere sound and fury, signifying nothing save the robust self-possession of the speaker and the fine working condition of his lungs. On the other hand, there have been those who have regarded the use of a written sermon in the pulpit as a matter of positive obligation. Of such sort was the eccentric country gentleman who expressed his astonishment that "any clergyman should venture into the presence of his Maker without a manuscript '-a gentleman who must, one fancies, have been a not very remote kinsman of the northern archdeacon who wrote to a rural vicar to reprove him for "approaching his archdeacon on a postcard!"

No doubt we must all allow that, other things being equal, the spoken sermon sounds fresher than the written. "Which do you prefer?" asked a clergyman once of a famous statesman. "I prefer," said the statesman,

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a written sermon delivered as if it were unwritten." This is an ideal seldom attained it was attained, in a way perhaps, by Bellew; in another way by Chalmers; and, according to some authorities, by Melvill.

Of course sermons are not nowadays so long as they used to be. If you want one an hour long, your only hope is to attend a Bampton Lecture, or to chance on Canon Liddon at his longest. In the latter case you will not, however, be fatigued, but will merely fancy that your watch has played you a trick when you consult it at the end of the discourse.

In fact, in some quarters we have in these latter days gone to the opposite extreme. The age prides itself on its conciseness. Our correspondence is largely conducted in telegrams of twelve words: our news is absorbed through summaries, or even bills of contents. The man of business has no leisure to sit down to lunch; how should he swallow theology by the hour? "Do you think," asked one of the newest patterns in curates of his somewhat older vicar, "do you

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think, if I preached for ten minutes in the morning, I should be toolong?" "Decidedly," answered the vicar, who possessed the priceless quality called presence of mind, decidedly. In a church like ours it is quite sufficient for the preacher to mount the pulpit, and having uttered a fervent Dearly beloved,' to descend again. Brevity is the soul of wit and the essence of preaching." It was fair satire as times go. I have in my possession, as one of the latest products of this lightning age, a volume of sermons actually preached in a church at a fashionable watering-place. Few of these could have taken more than five minutes to deliver. I will not name the church. Why should I aggravate the congestion from which it already suffers? It is not, however, every congregation which, even in these enlightened days, possesses such a treasure. In an average church the sermon still touches, or almost touches, the twentieth minute. What would good Bishop Latimer have said. to this dwindling of the candle he lighted—he, "who, preaching by the measured hour, was oft-times entreated to reverse the hour glass" and to give his enraptured auditors another sixty minutes.

And, as the length of the discourse has been changed, so has been the style. It is true, there is not now quite so much learning or even exactness as formerly. I should never have heard from my old rector what I heard a preacher say not long ago: "God is self-sufficient," meaning, I presume, "self-sufficing." Nor should I have heard, as I did from another preacher, the conduct of God towards Abraham described as "fulsome," meaning possibly full of love and graciousness-who shall say? But at least we have animation and sprightliness. It is surely worth while to have lived in the latter half of the nineteenth century, if only to have heard, as has been heard in a univer

sity pulpit, a bishop talk of the Almighty's raison d'être and his freedom from arrière pensée. And I have myself lived to hear St. Peter denounced in the pulpit by a doctor of divinity as being fond of low society, because, on a memorable occasion, he voluntarily sat with the servants.

In conclusion, there are some who maintain that the day of sermons is already over-that they are even now to be regarded as а mere survival (not the fittest) of a time when they formed the natural and almost exclusive means of conveying religious instruction. Now, however (so it is said) the universal spread of education and the multiplication of popular religious books enable every one who desires it to get a better sermon at home than in his parish church. Thus their function is superseded and their necessity is at an end. It may be so.

The world does move, and the once crawling decades now career like race-horses. But at the moment I do not see that we have reached a stage when the human voice and the human personality have ceased to count as factors in influencing society. The best book is, after all, but the dead deposit of the brain-a wondrous tissue, woven on the loom of molecules, but no longer in vital union with its creator. It can never compete in force and influence with the living impact of an earnest soul. And SO sermons, changing doubtless in their character to suit the mood of changing times, may well have a long and useful future before them. In this paper I have regarded them only in some of their lighter aspects. In their graver they are like the waves that break on the shore and scatter their spray in evidence of the oceandepths behind them. For all earnest words that drop from human lips bear witness to the eternal longings that possess the heart of man.

A. EUBULE EVANS,

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SOME UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF CLAVERHOUSE.

THE list of authorities prefixed to the memoir of Claverhouse lately published in Mr. Longman's series of English Worthies does not include The Red Book Of Menteith.

This

book, which was privately printed at Edinburgh in 1880, contains ten letters from Dundee discovered by its editor, Sir William (then Mr.) Fraser, Deputy Keeper of the Records of Scotland, among the papers in the Montrose Charter-room at Buchanan. Those papers had been previously examined by Mark Napier, the biographer of both of the two great heroes of the House of Graham, James, Marquis of Montrose, and John, Viscount of Dundee; but they had not been set in the fair order of the Queensberry archives, which yielded him such rich spoil for the latter's life, and Napier somehow managed to miss these letters, though he was a patient searcher and rarely failed to find what he looked for. The Red Book and its precious contents, having been only put in private circulation, remained unknown to the writer of the aforesaid memoir till too late for him to make

use of them. This was one of those misfortunes which every biographer must be content to accept as a fault. The letters are of no great historical importance they do not in any way affect the course of Claverhouse's life, nor throw any fresh light, as the phrase goes, on his public actions; but they undoubtedly help to give some more assurance of a man whom all who have handled his story have evidently found great difficulty in making anything more than a mere lay-figure of history. However, his latest biographer must try to console himself with the reflection that his ignorance of these letters has been shared by many others. Even that accomplished writer in the Athenæum who, entangled, no doubt,

in the meshes of his own vast learning, appears to have confounded the Cameronians of Richard Cameron with the Cameronians of William Cleland, and the John Brown, who was shot at Priesthill by order of Captain Graham, with the John Brown who was buried at Crathie by order of Queen Victoria,-even this high historical authority will have to add to his slender stock of ignorance The Red Book Of Menteith.

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These ten letters cover a period of three years, from 1679 to 1682, a period in the writer's life which, save for the battles of Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge in the summer of the former year, has hitherto mained almost blank. Five are written from London, the others from Edinburgh and elsewhere in Scotland. All are addressed to the same person, to William, eighth and last Earl of Menteith, and all are more or less directly concerned with the same subject, the marriage of the writer with Helen Graham, cousin and heiress of the Earl.

The varied beauties of the ancient province of Menteith, which lay in the counties of Perth and Stirling, have been celebrated in the poetry of The Lady Of The Lake and in the prose of Rob Roy. The first Earl of the name comes into Scottish history in a charter of Malcolm the Fourth's: the last passes out of it in 1694, since when the title has lain dormant, while the lands, sadly shorn of their once fair proportions by attainder in the fifteenth century, now form part of the heritage of the dukedom of Montrose. But in those five centuries the line had suffered many a shock and wrench. The direct male branch ended with Maurice, third Earl, who died about 1230, leaving two daughters, Isabella and Mary, who had married

respectively into the great Houses of Comyn and Stewart. In the latter the earldom remained till 1425, when Murdoch, second Duke of Albany, Earl of Fife,and eleventh Earl of Menteith (son of that Albany who figures in The Fair Maid Of Perth) after having gov erned the country for five years, was beheaded at Stirling, together with his two sons, by his cousin, James the First, apparently to mark that sovereign's accession to power after eighteen years' confinement in an English prison. Both the earldoms of Fife and Menteith then passed to the Crown; but two years later, in 1427, James revived the latter, considerably shorn of its ancestral appanages, in the person of Malise Graham, a branch of the same stock, as some recompense for the earldom of Strathern, of which he had previously despoiled him. With the Grahams it remained till the death of William, eighth Earl of the new line, to whom the letters in question were written by his kinsman, Captain John Graham of Claverhouse.

This William was the son of a distinguished man, at one time in great favour with Charles the First, and fast rising to be one of the richest and most powerful lords in Scotland. But jealous men gathered about the King's ear, and the Earl fell faster than he rose. He died in 1661, leaving his affairs in sad confusion; and, as his son Lord Kilpont had been killed in a quarrel, by his friend James Stewart of Ardvoirlich, in Montrose's camp at Collace after the victory of Tippermuir, he was succeeded by his grandson William. The last Earl of Menteith was twice married: first to Anna Hewes, an English woman, from whom he was divorced in 1684, and next to Katherine, daughter of Bruce of Blairhall, with whom also he appears to have had occasional misunderstandings, at one time even resulting in a temporary separation, the lady vowing she would live no longer in the ancestral, and probably somewhat damp, home in the Isle of Talla, with no company but that of the unceasing No. 337-Vol. LVII.

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Lord Menteith's health had never been good, and his prospects of an heir were now so slender, that about 1679 he began to think seriously of settling the estate. If he could find among the Grahams a good husband for his cousin Helen, he would convey his lands, and if possible his title also, to the young people, and so vicariously provide that heir to the old House of Menteith which fate seemed determined to deny himself. It happened that there was at that very time a Graham quite willing, and indeed eager to take a wife on these terms. He was head of his own branch of the family, in the prime of life, remarkably handsome, not indeed very rich, but still with some small patrimony of his own, and likely to rise, for he was in favour at Court and in the good graces of his powerful kinsman Montrose. This was Captain John Graham of Claverhouse, who had lately returned from the Low Countries where, as was the fashion in those days, he had been learning the art of war He had brought a good name back with him for courage and skill, and had been warmly recommended by the Duke of York to the notice of Montrose, who had responded by giving his kinsman a commission in his regiment of Life Guards. A few months later he was promoted, at the express desire of the King, to the command of a troop in the new regiment of cavalry raised in the autumn of 1678 to keep order among the Wild Western Whigs.

It is not clear when Claverhouse and his cousin of Menteith first met, nor whether it was the former who

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