order to excite, not to gratify, the reader's curiosity: but with respect to the parallel case detected by Warburton in the works of Meric Casaubon, it is impossible not to admire those wide and adventurous voyages on the ocean of literature, which could enable him to bring together from the very antipodes of historical knowledge, from the fourth to the seventeenth century, from Jerusalem, and from our own country, facts so strange and yet so nearly identical.

Of all Warburton's works, the Doctrine of Grace is that which does least honour to his heart; and perhaps, though written with all his native spirit, to his head. It was laudably intended to vindicate the reality of spiritual influences enlightening the understanding and purifying the will, against the cavils of sceptics and the abuses of fanatics. In the former part, which was directed with little ceremony against the opinions of Middleton, he has been triumphantly successful; in the latter, of which the principal object were the extravagances of Mr. John Wesley and his early followers, it is impossible to discover the dignity of a bishop, the manners of a gentleman, or the charity of a christian. It seems to have been the fate of Warburton, and perhaps of some other great champions of the evidences of christianity, never to have distinctly understood for what they were contending, the genius and spirit of their own religion. Occupied about the outworks, they had never paid their homage to the great palladium, the tutelary power which presided in the citadel.

Mr. John Wesley was a singular mixture of the fanatic and the reasoner. Capable of being duped by the wildest stories of the wildest of his followers into an implicit belief of visions, voices, miraculous cures, and providential interpositions on the most frivolous and laughable occasions, he had a consummate knowledge of scripture, a logical head, a clear and simple style, and a perfect acquaintance with the tricks of controversy. For the last of these faculties and attainments he had abundant occasion in order to sus'tain himself against the nonsense, the vulgarity, the foolish credulity of his own journals, with which he periodically disgusted all men of sense and sober piety. Against this powerful enemy of order and church discipline, the Bishop of Gloucester directed his theological vengeance, but in a tone and spirit extremely resembling those of another dignitary, employed a short time before for the same purpose, and with little better success. Fanatics, indeed, are scarcely assailable on any side, they can neither be laughed, threatened, nor even reasoned out of their extravagancies.-Methodism however within twenty years of its commencement, attracted the attention of three prelates; of whom the first, Bishop Gibson, in his Pastoral Letters, wrote. with an apostolical gravity, worthy

of

of his station and character. The second, Bishop Lavington, in his Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists compared, has drawn a parallel between two religions, externally dissimilar, but certainly partaking of a quality from which neither churches nor individuals are always secure. Of this work, the methodists, it is said, both felt and feared the power; so that great pains are understood to have been taken in buying up and suppressing the copies. Nor is this to be wondered at; for the bishop's facts are strong,-his reasonings acute, his reading, especially in fanatical popish legends, extensive, and his style classical.-Yet of this work, as of the Doctrine of Grace, every serious mind is offended by the levity, while it would often be delighted with the wit, had its object been legitimate. Warburton, however, far surpasses his brother in brutality of invective, not to mention the peculiar demerit of using the most awful language of scripture with an irreverence approaching to profaneness. It is indeed no easy task to aim the darts of wit and ridicule against the shadows and visions of enthusiasm, without wounding that venerable form, which always lies beyond them. In this controversy, it is the manner only, not the purpose, which we condemn. Enthusiasm is a pernicious spirit, and ought to be exorcised; but it goeth not out' by means of scurrility and abuse.—Always an object of apprehension to the state, it is universally destructive, in its progress, to religion itself. It is either wholly consumed in its own flame, or leaves nothing behind but the smoke and cinders of a spent volcano. The Socinians of the present day, it must be remembered, are the lineal descendants of the fanatics of the seventeenth century.

Passing over, from want of space and not of inclination, the minor works of Warburton, we now take leave of this wonderful man, with sensations, whether of pain or pleasure, not likely to be repeated. In contemplating the productions of such a giant, our scale of human intellect is insensibly extended, and we feel like the artist who had been employed in modelling from the Jupiter of Phidias, when he turned his eyes to the features or the stature of mortals. In the progress of little more than thirty years, what has not literature, and what the church of England lost in Warburton, Lowth, and Horseley and (though he attained not to the first three) in Hurd himself!--Under this melancholy impression, we had almost said 'senescit ecclesia:'-with all our respect for living talent and erudition, we look around in vain for any thing similar or second to these men: their mellow and high flavoured fruits have been gathered, and we feast upon them deliciously; but it is with the regret of those who eat the fruit of an expiring species; for what, alas! is the crop which is now ripening, and where are the blossoms which promise to perpetuate the succession?

ART.

ART. XIII. Descriptive Travels in the Southern and Eastern Parts of Spain and the Balearic Isles, in the Year 1809. By Sir John Carr, K. C. London; Sherwood, Neely and Co.

1811.

FOR many months past the record of the last adventures of this renowned knight-errant has encumbered our table and our conscience. Resolved as we were to pay his 400 pages the reasonable tribute of some notice, we yet from day to day postponed this duty, and are now only driven to it by an alarming rumour that Sir John is about to launch another quarto; to be ready to grapple with which, we must endeavour to dispatch, with all possible expedition, its predecessor: if we were to wait till he had heaped Pelion on Ossa, we doubt whether we should ever be able to free ourselves from the incumbent mass.

Not that we would be understood to insinuate that Sir John's works are heavy ;-far from it.-We should rather describe them to be somewhat like the volcanic showers in the West Indies, of which we have lately heard so much; a heavy fall of the lightest of all natural substances, accompanied with almost total darkness. If Sir John Carr wearied and perplexed us only, we could bear it; but the busy trifling, the dull restlessness, the inaccurate minuteness, and the presumptuous ignorance of such a traveller, are vented not on the reader or reviewer alone; they have before fretted and disgusted the society which he visits, and disparaged the country which sent him forth: Sir John Carr was, to our knowledge, as intolerable, in propriâ personâ, in Sweden and Ireland, as his attempts at describing these countries have proved in England. He is not so much a traveller as a spy and gossip; a great collector of small anecdotes and petty scandal, of bad jokes, of inaccurate moral, and of worse natural history. To say all, in one word, a laborious collector of trash.

Sir John has dropped, on this occasion, his old title of stranger; he was a stranger in Norway, a stranger in France, a stranger in Ireland, and, we believe, in Scotland; but he is no stranger in Spain, and he takes early and frequent opportunities of exhibiting his profound intimacy with the Spanish language, customs, and history.

In the second page he opens his stores of Spanish erudition upon us in a quotation from a worthy Spanish writer,'

6

'Quantos payzes tantos costumbres,'

which, he informs us, means

As many countries, so many customs.'

Aud

And this recondite observation he recommends to be carefully digested by all those who desire to understand the scope and nature of his work.

On his passage to Cadiz in the Falmouth packet, he sees 'some curious natural effects,' which he notices with laudable minuteness. At night he found the air to possess the astonishing qualities of being soft and fragrant.-Nay, when the moon shone, the tops of the waves were illuminated;' and in the morning some flying fish were visible, whose fate it is to be pursued by fishes below and by birds above.' p. 45.

Travels beginning with such extraordinary events excite expectations in the reader, which will not, we assure him, be disappointed. The knight is at first a little disgusted at the dirt and noise which met him on his landing at Cadiz: amidst this confusiou, he is particularly struck with the boatmen going over to port St. Mary's, and bawling out, Puerta! Puerta! which Sir John tells us means Porters! Porters! (p. 6.) Why the boatmen should call for porters, we cannot discover; and if Sir John had not assured us to the contrary, we should have thought that the exclamation of Puerta,' (in our dictionary, the Port,) referred rather to the place to which the boats were going. What would Sir John think of a Spaniard who should say, that being about to take water at London-bridge, the boatmen cried out Greenwich! Greenwich! which means *Ganapan! Ganapan!'

The entrance to the theatre affords Sir John another opportunity of exhibiting his attainments in Spanish; a friar,' he tell us, sits near the door-keeper with a poor box, into which he invites you to put the change, por las almas, for charity.' We, who are less skilled in Spanish, should hardly have ventured on so bold a paraphrase of por las almas.'

Sir John is a great linguist; he tells us that the Spaniards light their pipes with a kind of tinder, which the French call amadon:' we should have suspected this to be an error of the press, but that it is not to be found in the long list of errata subjoined to the work.

Sir John gives us some interesting information on the state of the markets at Cadiz, and the method of killing the ox with a stiletto, which is,' he pronounces, worthy of imitation;' and he adds, that Lord Somerville, to his honour, is endeavouring to introduce the stiletto amongst English butchers.'-p. 23. We hear, also, with great satisfaction, of a new source of trade lately opened to the sister kingdom. Sir John states, (p. 23,) that in some houses, oil is imported from Ireland,' and used instead of butter. We should rather have supposed that butter was the im

* Gauapan, a porter who carries burdens.'- -Dictionary.

ported

ported article; but Sir John's assertion is not, we candidly confess, under any grammatical construction, reconcileable to this notion of

ours.

In the interior of the houses he informs us that a brazen pan of powdered charcoal, called copa, placed on the floor, is, on a cold day in the winter, a substitute,-for what? Our readers will probably say for a hearth, or fire, or grate; but no; it is a substitute for a chimney-piece, which is an article very unusual in Spain.'

Sir John winds up his interesting description of Cadiz by stating that the people of Cadiz have been always particularly attached to the English, and he seems to account for this partiality from their having seen so much of the Scotch and Irish. We could hardly have expected that the Stranger in Ireland, and the author of Caledonian Sketches, would have ventured upon so equivocal a compliment to those two countries.

Nor is Sir John more distinguished for his tasteful selection of modern anecdote, than for his allusions to antiquity, and the use of his classical and biblical learning. He acquaints us that the mode of thrashing (still practised in Spain) by treading out the corn, is, as he is informed by the scriptures, coeval with the time of Moses;' p. 72. that bull-fighting owed its origin to a violent plague, which raged chiefly amongst pregnant women, many of whom procured abortions by eating bulls' flesh;' p. 65. and that Spain was by the ancients determined to have been the garden of the Hesperides.' p. 74.

The profundity of some of his observations can only be equalled by the apt and lucid arrangement in which he disposes them.

'At Libraxa, (he states,) I observed that our calesa (the carriage in which he had been some days travelling, though till now he had taken, it seems, too little notice of it) was decorated on all sides with rude paintings of Virgins and apostles, and that the following motto was inscribed on the back, " Viva la Virgin del Carmen;" and also that the pigs of the town were remarkably fat and beautiful.' p. 72.

At Seville he notices a most surprising fashion, and a very pleasant jest which it produced; many of the pretty women wore when dressed, natural flowers, tastefully fixed upon the upper braid of their hair: a cruel wag observed that this was necessary to counteract the atmosphere of some of them, who were more than moderately fond of garlick.' p.90. We vehemently suspect that it was no other than the knight himself, who was on this occasion so cruel waggish.

In the table of contents of the seventh chapter we find the following strange association of topics. Velez Malaga-Pride of the Muleteers-Lord Edward Fitzgerald-Albama-Travelling

'Information.'