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mark, ‘Bide a wee, Doctor, bide a wee, and ye's be dry eneuch when ye get into the pulpit.'"

and Robert Hall, in whose lofty eloquence
he evidently believes he was perhaps the
example of our seventh style — and of
least is new: —
whom he gives this anecdote, which to us at

Secondly, there is the Biblical-criticism style, growing too common with many among the more scholarly of the clergy, which produces sermons very valuable in "Hall was of an independent spirit, and often type, but not equally valuable in the pulpit; winced under the control exercised, or attempted thirdly, there is the moral or didactic style, to be exercised, by English Dissenters over the which as the audience gets educated tends preaching of their pastors. I had the following to pass away, audiences of to-day not being anecdote from Dr. Chalmers: -- A member of much edified by Sunday essays on life, his flock, presuming on his weight and influence which the Saturday Review or the Spectator in the congregation, had called upon him and can do twice as well; fourthly, the alarmist took him to task for not more frequently or more style, which as universalism spreads becomes fully preaching Predestination, which he hoped of less and less moment, except as it emp-most moderate and cautious of men on this dark would in future be more referred to. Hall, the ties churches; and fifthly, the gentle style question, was very indignant; he looked steadily which urges the promises of the Gospel. at his censor for a time, and replied, Sir, I perDean Ramsay descants on each in a gossipy ceive that you are predestinated to be an ass; but withal serious and gently forbearing and what is more, I see that you are determined way irresistibly attractive; but nevertheless to make your calling and election sure!'" he forgets both the sixth and the seventh styles, which seem to us to be among the effective styles of preaching, namely, the human, in which the preacher talks of religion as a man talks with his brethren of other things of importance, using plain words, and familiar illustrations, and strong appeals, and caring only to convince; and the oratorical, when a man gifted to that end makes ideas which are perhaps old, and thoughts which are perhaps flat, powerful through his faculty at once of delivery and expression. Of all styles, that last is the most common and effective "Sermons will vary much in language, in among the preachers of this world, the least frequentities which should be found in all sermons, and style, and in ability; but there are certain qualamong the preachers of the next. This, certain qualities which should be excluded from we take it, was the main gift of Chrysostom, all in whom the Dean believes so greatly, but simplicity, earnestness, and truth. There never There should always be gravity, sincerity, whose discourses, if badly delivered or so should be affectation, buffoonery, or self-conceit. arranged as to lack some of that external There never should be the vanity which would beauty of which it is so difficult to divest sacrifice propriety to popularity. Men will have them, might seem in a modern pulpit very their favourite preachers- men will have their flat things indeed. No man appears among own ideas of what are the finest sermons. us even now with the fire of the genuine the essential elements of the true Christian ora orator on his lips, the prose poet who can tor have been already drawn by the hand of a stir men, but his church or chapel fills to the roof with men careless of his special dogmatic opinions.

Dean Ramsay passes lightly, but easily, over the historical portion of his subject, interlacing short but pithy accounts of ancient, mediæval, and Reformation preaching with many a quaint or humorous anecdote; outlines Hooker, Barrow, and Jeremy Taylor, of which triad he prefers the last, as the man of genius, "the Shakespeare of the pulpit," mentions, not we think very lovingly, Massillon and Lacordaire, Whitfield, whose sermons, however, he had never seen, John Wesley, of whom he quotes the markedly doctrinal opinion given above,

Mere brutality, most readers will say; but Dean Ramsay has lived among churches where every old woman is a critic, and cannot forbear a certain sympathy, and neither can we. He then glides into an analysis of the power displayed in the pulpit by Chalmers and Irving. an analysis of little originality, and revealing, we think, a somewhat florid taste and ends with this general counsel, at least as much needed in England as in the Dean's own country:

master :

But

“Would I describe a preacher such as Paul, Were he on earth, would hear, approve, and

own,

Paul should himself direct me. I would trace

His master strokes, and draw from his de

sign;

I would express him simple, grave, sincere;
In doctrine uncorrupt; in language plain,
And plain in manner; decent, solemn, chaste,
And natural in gesture; much impressed
Himself, as conscious of his awful charge,
And anxious mainly that the flock he feeds
May feel it too; affectionate in look,
And tender in address, as well becomes
A messenger of grace to guilty man.

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From The Spectator, 22 Aug. THE LESSON OF THE FRENCH LOAN.

66

circumstances any

with great

going under ease at 4 1-2 per cent. The effort would be great, the burden would be great, the ultiPEOPLE who care to understand Conti-mate suffering might be very great indeed; nental politics, that is, the inter-relation of but still, Napoleon could find in a day the three out of the four active races of man- means of waging a war of the grandest kind, will do well to read, and read with magnitude, the sort of war which extinsome care, M. Magne's report to the Em-guishes States and creates Empires, through peror upon the recent Loan. It is for poli- an entire year. And there is no sufficient ticians a most instructive paper. It is very proof, in fact, no proof at all, that France, easy and quite true to say that it is "lyri- with greater effort, and a heavier burden, cal," and "inflated," and Byzantine," and more ultimate suffering, could not reand no doubt the style of the Second Em-peat the exertion, could not, that is, keep pire is as offensive either to a simple or to up a national war, in the highest, fullest, a cultivated taste as it is well conceivable and most exhausting sense of that phrase, that any system of arranging words should for two full years. Even the first fact, be. That habit of ascribing the earth's mo- which is beyond doubt, is a tremendous tion on its axis to the wisdom of the Em- one, one it is most unwise to forget, one peror, or the Constitution of the United which explains many circumstances otherStates, or to the glorious revolution of wise inexplicable in Continental affairs, one 1688, is, no doubt, extremely wearisome, that fully justifies Continental statesmen in and when the theme is pursued in a quasi-a certain terror, or, as it were, awe of Ossianic dialect, like that of M. Magne, or France which we are apt in our islands someMr. Seward, or the Daily Telegraph, it ex-times to despise. They know better than cites a feeling very hard to be distinguished we do what the resources of France are, from loathing. Nevertheless, truth is how splendidly great are the latent powers truth, however expressed, and the truth on at the disposal of any French ruler once which the French Minister of Finance di- fairly engaged in war. They know, and so lates with such offensive unction is one it is do we, that France is organized permamost inexpedient to forget. Six hundred nently like an army, that the exquisite millions sterling, says M. Magne, thirty-mechanism really works, that the Emperor four times all we asked, have been sub-in Paris cannot breathe without some faint scribed to a loan at three per cent., and film appearing on mirrors in Auxerre and what a magnificence of power is there? Marseilles. They know, and so do we, Well, M. Magne, if judged by arithmeti- that ten words uttered in a little white and cians or financiers who understand what the gold room in the Tuileries would set in resources of nations really are, is, no doubt, motion a machine as strong as a locomotives lending himself to the publication of fibs. and as carefully regulated as a watch. And No nation, not England or the Union, they know, what we sometimes forget, the could subscribe 600,000,0007. in cash to any depth of the mine from which this machine loan, on any terms, in any season, however can be supplied. We English hear of disfavourable. Half the subscriptions to the contents in France, and opposition, and French Loan must be struck away at once conscriptions, and exhaustive administrative as mere figures put down in order to ensure devices, and the petite culture, and peasants' a chance of the premium, with no intention mortgages, and bad farming, and high of actually subscribing anything but the de- taxes, till we are blinded to the grand fact posit, and at least half of the remaining that in one of the richest corners of the moiety as the result of a bold guess that the earth thirty-five millions of the most indusGovernment would not require a fifth or a trious, most inventive, and least wasteful third of the amount nominally subscribed. of mankind are exhausting energy in the Nevertheless, when these allowances are effort to produce. Among countries thormade, the facts remain that 26,000,000l.oughly organized or fairly developed, there were paid as a deposit in hard cash, that is none like France, none with so varied a the tenth which will be allotted to most sub-richness of soil and climate. We are very scribers is less than they hoped for, that, to proud of counties like Essex, where the use conjectural but still obviously trustworthy figures, the Empire could have raised 100,000,000l., rather more than an extra year's revenue, eight years' of the ordinary expenditure on the Army, a year of the highest estimated cost of that Army in full motion two millions a week would keep it

land, if one puts ten pounds an acre into it, can be made to yield ten quarters of good wheat; but there are districts of France as large as Essex which would bear a rental of ten pounds an acre, and then yield a profit to the cultivator of the vine. There are Englands in France as rich as England

that he can even dream of internecine war with a power so terrible, a power which, were the Channel dry land, would make every Englishman a soldier, and then leave him doubtful whether, being a soldier, he was secure in his sleep.

in all but minds, and those Englands are with Europe behind them, were still opnot tilled by slouching hinds with nothing pressed with one sovereign dread, might but the Union before them; but by owners, not France rise to spit them out?-and by men to whose thrift the thrift of Lowland the Allies were right. So far from wonScotchmen is wastefulness, men who dream dering that Bismarck hesitates, we wonder of the spade as they sleep, men who never in life lighted a lamp because the sun costs nothing per hour. There is nothing in the world quite so greedy as the greed of a French peasant, and he expends it first of all upon his land. He has insufficient capital? True, so he makes it up in toil; mortgages? so his wife and children grow old with labour before their time; heavy taxes? so he lives on lentils; a conscription? so women draw as well as guide the plough. We should like to set a few "industrious "British labourers, or artizans either, down in a central district of France, say Auvergne, to get a living out of a handkerchief estate, with the regular mortgages on it, for five years. They would come back with a slightly different notion of what work meant, and what extravagance meant too. With everything against him except his soil, insufficient capital, heavy taxation, a conscription, and no machinery, the French peasant gets wealth out of his sweat of which Englishmen are wholly unaware, wealth which dispenses with the poor law, wealth which, when the nation calls on it, seems practically exhaustless, or if destroyed is, like the wealth of Egypt, renewed in the next overtlooding. Nobody in France is wealthy as in England, but in every one of those eight millions of houses there is cash, cash kept though its owners are driven to lentils without salt-cash which, if they were educated, would be expended in a hundred fruitful enterprises; but which, being as they are, they will trust only to the State, that is, to themselves, and to the land. People talk of repudiation in France. Well, Paris may decree repudiation, if her rulers dare at the same moment wipe out the mortgages on the land, the private as well as the public Rente; but if not, Paris, with all her chequered history, will never have been in such danger yet. And all this, all these hoards, these estates, these people, are at the disposal of the Government for a national war, for any war which seems essential to the honour of the one thing the peasant sets before himself France. After twenty years of battle, after the Emperor had decreed that only sons should enter the ranks, when whole districts were tilled by women, and beasts fit to draw the plough were not in the land, the Allies,

That this power of France, this organized strength, is no protection to the Empire, considered as an alternative form of Government, we may readily admit. A Republic once established could get a loan just as easily as the Empire; Louis Philippe did get loans at a much cheaper rate. M. Grévy's election for the Jura is not the less ominous a sign, because his constituents obtain and hoard more cash than Englishmen suppose. M. Magne's success may, for ought we can prove, be altogether forgotten in the Tuileries, in presence of the fact that an agricultural department without a city has, for the first time since 1848, declared by a vote of two to one that it will none of Bonapartism, that it prefers the man who resisted the establishment of the Presidency, and moved that the Sovereign Assembly elect and remove its own executive when needful, as Premiers are elected in England. All that is proved by M. Magne's report, all that we wish to make clear to our readers, is that the Jura is none the poorer or weaker because M. Grévy is elected, that France is immensely, terribly powerful, whether the Opposition or the Emperor rules. They know quite as well as we do the permanent corollary of that fact, that while the Head of the Administration rules, - be he Napoleon or Cavaignac, worshipped or hated, he can dispose of this strength; that if two hundred and fifty MM. Grévys were elected, they, war once declared, would be for conducting it to victory. If, then, France is so great and her mechanism so absolutely under the control of the engineer, can we wonder that Germany pauses to think out the risk of invasion, that every power on earth, from the Union to Spain, hesitates and delays and negotiates and sometimes succumbs, before it compels the engineer to set in motion such a machine. It is nervous work, cutting the dam of a pond; but cutting the dyke of a reservoir, and that as full as France!

From Temple Bar.
SAMUEL LOVER.
HIS LIFE, GENIUS, AND WRITINGS: WITH SOME-
THING ABOUT SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

BY THE KNIGHT OF INNISHOWEN.

Miscellany," in the days when Dickens came out in that periodical with his " Oliver Twist," Harrison Ainsworth with his "Jack Sheppard" and “ Guy Fawkes," and Albert Smith with his "Ledbury Family" and "Marchioness of Brinvilliers." Lov

66

the end

THE grave has just closed over the most er's Irish novel had some capital scenes, popular of Ireland's song-writers since the full of rich humour here and there, but it days of Moore; and although his sweet pa- failed in sustainment and artistic treatment thos and genuine native humour are undoubted, he cannot be ranked anything like and test of such works are their sale; and generally. Finis coronat opus· second to the noblest of her lyric writers. the sale of " Handy Andy,” when repubLover died at the ripe age of seventy-two, lished from the Miscellany" in the usual after having enjoyed life peacefully and three-volume novel, was anything but a pleasantly enough, and fulfilled a destiny crowning success. The fortunate writer of which, estimating his genius and education short and racy episodes in the history of the at their true worth, was quite as fortunate Irish national character, such as those which as he or his warmest admirers had a right introduced him at his first going off to Dubto expect. Some perhaps who, remember-lin notice, and which he rendered additioning his earlier productions, which were by ally attractive by his accompanying pencil far his best, and disappointed at the falling sketches, as well as by reciting them at off he displayed in his subsequent efforts, the best evening parties and convivial meetwould rank him amongst ings of the Irish capital, completely failed when he came to make a longer and more laborious, in other words, a more complilit-cated effort.

"The inheritors of unfulfill'd renown;"

whilst others look upon his merits, in a erary point of view, as overrated, and the renown he attained, if the term can be applied to such literary achievements as his, in a great measure unmerited. The truth lies mid-way between, as in similar cases of exaggeration on both sides. At his period of middle age (in his younger days he was a miniature-painter), he achieved very considerable, indeed high fame, as having written about a dozen very pretty some of them pathetic, some of them humourous songs, all of them on Irish subjects, and placed a successful Irish comedy ("The White Horse of the Peppards") on the stage, the chief character in which latter production drew out the best powers of the most popular Irish actor of our time, the late lamented Tyrone Power. This was something for an Irishman, and an unlettered one, conventionally speaking, to achieve, when Moore was yet alive, and we were still reminded of Sheridan in the presence of his beautiful and gifted granddaugh

ters.

"Rory O'More," which as a ballad, and a first-rate one it is, was sung in every direction, from the drawing-room to the street, and played by the band of every regiment throughout the United Kingdom - even the Temperance Bands of Hope used to play it -was raised, after some by no means unskilful manipulations on the part of its author, to the dignity of an operetta, and had no inconsiderable success. It lived its little day, and shared the fate of much higher productions of our lyric stage at the hands of a people who never will have a native school of music, because they will not steadily encourage one by whom Barnet, Balfe, Loder, Macfarlane, and Wallace, were praised, patronised for a little season, neglected, and forgotten!

It was upwards of thirty years ago, when I was a student of Trinity College, and a scribbler in one or other of the Dublin publications, that I met, for the first time, Mr. Lover, then approaching his fortieth year, on the occasion of both of us paying a mornFortunate would it have been for Lover ing visit to an English prima donna who if, instead of abandoning his portrait-paint- was then starring it on the Dublin boards. ing, he had followed it as his chief support, This lady's musical knowledge and judgment and made his literary realisations a second- as well—and they do not always go toary consideration to his original and legiti-gether-were superior to her voice, which mate profession. But he had thrown himself was of a high range, but not of the highest. upon the world of literature, and he must fag on.

66

Handy Andy," a rollicking sort of novel, immeasurably inferior to any of the Harry Lorrequer" set, appeared at irregular intervals in the pages of "Bentley's

The little pet of the Dublin drawing-room, for he had come out successfully in the leading society of the Irish capital a season or two previously, with his droll native stories and recitations, had come to submit a song for her opinion, which, although it was

when he wrote everything short; when he conceived a happy thought or seized on some one else's, packed it up into a little casket or cadre of a dozen or score of pretty lines, and made the most of it. Like Moore, he sang his songs to his own accompaniment, and quite as judiciously did he manage (in private, but not on the stage) to let you hear his words distinctly. The same method may be observed with many accomplished Irishmen, some of them of long standing, who sing with the sweetness and enjoyment of their younger days; for as Lover himself said:

one of his first efforts* at song-writing, he sat down to the pianoforte and threw off for us without any mauvaise honte or hesitation. His voice, if not like the great poet's * still small voice of conscience," was still a small one enough, in all conscience. Like Tom Moore's, however, it was sweetly modulated, and had not a false note in it. The song he sung, if not equal in simple beauty and originality to the best of his songs of the Irish Superstitions," was not far below them, and may be ranked amongst his happiest efforts. It was "The Secret," sometimes called " Under the Rose," a chanson d'amour, full of playful point and beauty, and set to a graceful and appropriate air of his own composition. As it may have been long since forgotten by most of They read their songs well, and make use the generation who first heard it- and not of the instrument not to drown, but to susone out of five hundred of the younger gen-tain their voice. Generally speaking noeration may have heard it at all-it may not be inappropriate to recall it to the one class of our readers and to introduce it to the other:

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To tell of the passion she dares not to breathe; Thus in many bright flowers her flame she'll disclose,

But in one she finds secresy-under the rose."

"We sometimes get young, but we never grow old."

body can sing their native songs like this class of Irishmen, not even the Irish ladies themselves, who for the most part, like most ladies whom I have heard, especially in England, overwhelm their voices with the instrument, and make the song subservient to the accompaniment.

Although Dublin was at the time when Lover first came out upon the drawing-room stage full of clever dröles who figured on the same miniature boards, such as Brophy, the vice-regal dentist, Butler, the architect, and Jones, the sculptor, who had each of them a hearty welcome wherever they went, through the noblest and then really hospitable country mansions of Ireland, none of them could get through that sort of work so neatly and off-hand, with such a seeming want of effort, and with such little chance of boring you, as Lover. Brophy, Butler and Jones have all three, within the last ten years or so, gone to that bourne from which the drollest and the saddest never return,

every one who had listened to them when they set the table in a roar, crying out, as each of them dropped under it, goblet in hand, into the tomb, "Alas poor Yorick!"

Brophy's "Blind Beggar of Carlisle Bridge" was one of the most amusing and The fourth stanza was an after-thought of successful performances of its kind ever witlong after years, and, although not un-nessed on or off the stage. The old mendiworthy of the other three, I have often cant was known by the name of Zosimus, thought the song would do well enough from the hero of his chief metrical recitation, without it. The happiest hits are the short- one of the early monks of the desert, who est; and a pretty thought is often spoiled had a great throw off in politics and polemics when too much time is taken in the tell- with no less a personage in the martyrology ing of it. The epigrammatic felicity was than St. Mary of Egypt. Another of the Laver's most peculiar one in his best days, blind man's ballads, Moses in the BulThe Dark-haired Girl, a simple and tender little rushes," was equally popular; and the state love song to the air of Bonny Mary Haye was, I be- dentist was equally at home in it. In the lieve, his first; and was as universally sung at Irish course of a speech in court one day, in a parties in its day as Annie Laurie was throughout the United Kingdom in after years. case where the name and evidence of this

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