cub with great tenderness, and would play with it without apprehension of danger, and it was obedient to all her commands, and its tameness, as she used to boast, increased with its growth, so that, like a lap-dog, it would follow her all over the house. But mind what followed: at last, somehow, neglecting to satisfy its hungry maw, or having otherwise disobliged it, on some occasion, it resumed its nature, and on a sudden fell upon her, and tore her in pieces. And who was most to blame, I pray, the brute or the lady? The lady, surely. For what she did was out of nature, out of character, at least; what it did was in its own nature.'

6

As for Mr. Dallas's assumption that Fielding's ridicule of 'Pamela' has permanently damaged Richardson's reputation as a novelist, for,' says he, it is, in fact, owing to the contempt 'thus shown for Richardson's first and feeblest work that he is 'now so little known,'-we do not believe a word of it. He always depended for his readers on a different class from the readers of Fielding; nor would Fielding's ridicule of the work by which Richardson is least known quench the effect of the enthusiasm roused by his two great novels. Great in a double sense; for their prodigious length is enough to account for any amount of neglect; for who will reprint them verbatim? If the Vicar of Wakefield' had been in ten volumes, even set off with all the graces of Goldsmith's exquisite style (which Richardson's certainly is not), would it have been still the German and Swedish text-book for the English language? And they cannot be abridged into modern dimensions. There is a vast deal of reading in these three volumes-more than people will have patience for. Richardson's novels have not been read because they did not fall in people's way to read them, and new editions were out of the question. Wherever they have been within reach they have kept their hold. We have known Sir Charles Grandison' a household-book in more circles than one, and turned to over and over again in preference to new novels; while they have wholly outlived that class of romantic fictions of the Ratcliffe school, for which Miss Austen represents Charles' as originally thrown over, and pronounced' amazingly horrid.' A young woman of sentiment is as much absorbed now as she would have been a hundred years ago in the trials, difficulties, and fine situations of that charming though tedious and infinitely prolix story; and she would be at least as engrossed with Clarissa,' if not warned by the questionable nature of the plot, the tradition of which reached her she knows not when or how. For who is ignorant even now of the characteristic points of both stories? Where is Richardson not still a household word, though the eye may never have counted over and recoiled from those twice ten volumes. Yet even prolixity is a quality not without its attraction in fit time and place. We have known so many readers of Richardson, that we own the anecdote surprises

Sir

us that represents Thackeray as ignorant of him when he and Macaulay, pacing up and down the library of the Athenæum together

'Came to talk of Richardson's masterpiece, the great novelist asked the great historian if he had ever read it. "Not read Clarissa!'" cried out Macaulay. "If you have once thoroughly entered into Clarissa,' and are infected by it, you can't leave it. When I was in India I passed one hot season at the Hills, and there was the GovernorGeneral, the Secretary of Government, and the Commander-in-chief, and their wives. I had 'Clarissa' with me; and as soon as they began to read it the whole station was in a passion of excitement about Miss Harlowe and her misfortunes, and her scoundrelly Lovelace! The Governor's wife seized the book, and the Secretary waited for it, and the Chief Justice could not read it for tears.""

In a position where people had no excitement to fall back upon or look forward to, as was the case here, and as was also the case in many a circle where 'Sir Charles' was read for the first time, there would be no hurry for the ending, for no rival story awaited their attention; there was no Mudie to have recourse to when it was done; only such a blank as here and there a reader can look back upon in his far childhood, when 'Guy Mannering' or 'Ivanhoe came to an end, and he had to return to the commonplace life once more. The system of modern taletelling makes such yearning impossible; a thing of the past. It is hard to move a reader very deeply when his emotions have no future, and something else lies at his elbow to efface every impression of the volume he holds in his hand. He naturally recoils from delay, and desires to extract the sensation with as little dilution and pause of reflection as possible. Our fiction grows lighter and lighter, needing less effort or application. The attempt to revive and popularize a novel weighty and didactic, with an ancient prestige of moral purpose, naturally excites attention: first, how far it will meet with acceptance in an age so different from that for which it was designed; and next, how far that attention would be for good in a generation so much more disposed, as ours is, for the sensational than the moral; and at a time when fashionable society has reached, according to some authorities, to so great a pass of frivolity and recklessness. Clarissa might present a worthy example to the fashionable woman of our day, but her history is too indissolubly linked with a villain, and his part of the story is too much imbued with the grossness of a past age, for us to hope much from the experiment. But what is undesirable reading for the public may yet have its uses as a study, and direct our novelists to some higher aim than to amuse at the least exercise of thought, content if they are but duly read for one half-hour, to be forgotten in another serial the next.

356

ART. VI.-Essays on Church Policy. Edited by the Rev. W. L. CLAY, M.A., Incumbent of Rainhill, Lancashire. London: Macmillan and Co. 1868.

WE are told in the six lines which stand as a preface to this volume of essays that its purpose is to discuss the principles on which the Church of England may be sustained as a National Church, as well as the mode in which the characteristic of nationality may be developed, and that with special reference to the circumstances of the present time. And, undoubtedly, no charge can be brought against the seven writers who have contributed their respective essays, whilst one of them has furnished two,—of either going beside the point which they have undertaken to illustrate or of clashing with each other, much less of coming into anything like collision or antagonism. So striking is this that, after reading through the eight essays and returning to the preface, it seems to us quite unnecessary to insert the caution which the editor has printed, informing us that each of the writers is responsible for his own essay only. So complete is the unity of the production that, if we had not been informed of the fact, we should never have guessed that they had been written by different hands; and we venture to think that any one of the writers, though perhaps he would not have expressed his meaning in precisely the same terms as have been adopted by his coadjutors, would be willing to endorse, not only the general tone, but almost every individual sentiment presented in each of the essays contributed by his colleagues.

Union is strength, and unity and consistency are bonds of union, and this is the strong point of the volume before us. The authors are afraid that the Establishment is in danger, and they would avert the catastrophe if they could; and the enlargement of its boundaries is the only method of saving it which seems to them feasible. A question might be asked, indeed, which is the end and which the means? Is comprehensiveness advocated with a view to preserving the Establishment, or is the Established Church to be made an engine for diffusing a comprehensive form of belief or unbelief over the nation? And we think the proper answer to this question is as follows: that the argument is so managed as to work upon people's fears of losing an establishment by inducing them to acquiesce in very enlarged formularies of doctrine, whilst the writers themselves ar

anxious to uphold the Establishment as the best means of securing the expulsion of all theological dogma from its forms of worship. We have one other meed of praise to bestow on these essayists they are plain-spoken and intelligible; they do not mince matters. So plain-spoken, indeed, are their proposals and their statements, that if the volume had only proceeded from leaders of the sceptical school, instead of unknown alumni, if, that is, it had not been so very insignificant,-it would probably have done much to defeat its own object. As it is, we think it probable that its appearance may cause considerable irritation in the ranks of the Latitudinarian party. Many of that party seriously_regretted the appearance of the celebrated volume called Essays and Reviews,' as being premature. We have no doubt that publication alienated many to whom open questions offer considerable attractions, and who are averse to dogmatic definitions, though they do not wish to abolish them altogether. And the present volume may be regarded as a sequel to Essays and Reviews,' written by far inferior hands, though for the most part advocating views much in advance of those for which that publication gained its unenviable notoriety.

In

It will, perhaps, be supposed from our description that the volume must at least contain something striking or startling, on the score of novelty. This, however, is not the case. Seldom has it been our lot to wade through a duller or more dreary work. Indeed, it is difficult to say whether the predominant feature of the volume is its arrogance or its dulness. speaking of it as being far in advance of previous publications of the school, we do not at all mean that it propounds any startling novelties of doctrine, but only that it endorses the whole series of denials of doctrine which have recently become so famous. And this the authors do in terms which plainly show the profound conviction that they and their small school are of course right and all the rest of the Christian world wrong. This, indeed, is one of the tricks adopted by the whole school to which these writers belong. They take every opportunity of implying that people in general agree with them, or at least are tending to agreement with them. They find it convenient to ignore the strength of the schools that are opposed to them. They like to speak of doctrines, which are as living and as productive of fruit as ever they have been, as the tolerable errors of a phase of society which has for ever passed away, and speak with a confidence of the future as if they alone were endowed with prophetic powers; whilst to others who take a more comprehensive survey of things, the current of thought amongst the religious seems running strongly in the opposite

direction to what they suppose. And these writers either take it for granted, or, at least, wish to appear entirely persuaded, that in the next generation nobody in his senses will believe doctrines which have been believed by nearly the whole Christian Church throughout the world for above eighteen centuries.

It would not be easy to say in what these seven essayists would avow their common belief, or whether there is any distinctly Christian doctrine which they all hold; but nothing is easier than to draw out a catalogue of what they do not believe. In enumerating these points, we may possibly be doing injustice to some one or more of their number, who may, perhaps, still retain something like a belief in doctrines which the others have thrown overboard. But, as we have observed, there is such an amount of unity of purpose, and, we may add, apparent unity of disbelief, about the writers, that we think we shall not be far wrong in attributing to the whole seven any renunciation of dogma that appears in any part of the work.

In the first place, the whole scheme of the volume proceeds upon the hypothesis of the non-existence of the Eastern and Western divisions of the Holy Catholic Church. Of course, it will be said, that the writers confine their remarks to the Anglican Establishment, which is their proper and exclusive subject: but even in this country, after allowing that it was natural, and what might have been expected in such a set of writers, to ignore the character of the Church of England as a branch of the one Holy Catholic Apostolic Church, we should at least have expected some recognition of the growing power of the Roman Communion, if only in the disturbing relations which they must admit it will be sure to exercise upon their Church of the future; for they will scarcely be sanguine enough to suppose that any amount of toleration of Roman doctrines-if such a thing had ever been contemplated-would form an attraction to members of that Communion. We may, indeed, pity them for their entire ignorance of their own proceedings and the sure consequences of them, in strengthening the hold which Rome will have when they have succeeded in ejecting dogma from the Establishment; but it is quite as pitiable a sight to see the confidence with which they speak of the future position of affairs in their ideal Church, which, before it can be made anything of, has to encounter all the resistance which will be offered to it by a number of sects quite as dogmatic, after their own fashion, as the Church is. There is, after all, a religious sense amongst people which will never be content without dogma, whether they believe that doctrines can be proved from Scripture or not. The body of people who