in the foot of the Chief, the pike having run through it and pinned it to the ground! Expressing both his surprise and regret, he asked Fingal, Why he had not informed him of the mistake at first?' the noble Chief answered, I thought, holy father, that this had been a part of the ceremony.' He who could have acted so must have been truly magnanimous, and sincerely desirous of becoming a Christian." pp. 52–55.

Dr. Clarke should have been well assured of the truth of the "tale" before he grounded this last remark upon it. It is not an impossible circumstance; it may even have happened; but no man, who has read the many wonderful stories recorded in the life of St. Patrick, will think it necessary to place much faith in the accuracy of the record.

Dr. Clarke thus completes the picture; adding to the canvas a few touches of his own juvenile portrait.

"When work and tales were ended, the supper was introduced, which was invariably, in the winter evenings, a basket of potatoes, boiled, without being peeled; and either a salt herring, or a little milk, mostly butter-milk. Immediately after this simple repast all went to bed, and generally arose to work a considerable time before day.

"In few parts of the world do the peasantry live a more industrious and harmless life. It should also be stated, that sometimes, instead of tales, they employ themselves with riddles, puzzles, and various trials of wit, sometimes in narrative and national songs, among which are accounts of foreign travels, shipwrecks, the battle of the Boyne, and the siege of Londonderry. They are fond also of blazoning the piety, fortitude, noble descent, and valorous achievements of their forefathers. Feats, requiring either much strength or agility, were frequent exercises for their young men in these social meetings; such as lifting weights; and, in moonlight nights, out of doors, putting the stone, and pitching the bar or iron crow. Balancing was a favourite amusement, but in this very few make much proficiency, because it requires great agility and a very steady eye. Perhaps, few ever carried this to greater perfection than young Clarke; whatever he was able to lift on his chin, that he could balance: iron crows, sledge hammers, ladders, chairs, &c. &c., he could in a great variety of combinations balance to great perfection on chin, nose, and forehead. In short, whatever he saw done in this way he could do; so that many of the common people thought he performed these feats by a supernatural agency. How much more rational and manly are such amusements than cards, dice, or degrading games of hazard of any kind! By these, the mind is debased, and the meanest and vilest passions excited, nourished, and gratified. By those, emulation, corporeal strength, agility, &c. are produced and maintained. The former may make poltroons and assassins, but can never make a man, a friend, or a hero." pp. 55, 56.

Of Dr. Clarke's religious education we have scarcely yet spoken; for the same reason which he himself assigns, namely, to avoid mixing his boyish pursuits with matters of a more severe and spiritual cast. We have already seen, that at a very early age his mind was deeply impressed with subjects of the greatest importance. This was not a transitory impression. His mother was a woman decidedly religious: a Presbyterian of the old Puritanic school. She had been well catechized in her youth, and had read the Scriptures with great care, and to much profit. Her son tells us that she ever placed the fear of God before the eyes of her children, caused them to read and reverence the Scriptures, and endeavoured to impress the most interesting parts on their minds. If they did wrong at any time, she had recourse uniformly to the Bible, to strengthen her reproofs and to deepen conviction. Her own reproofs her children could in some measure bear; but when she had recourse to the Bible, they were greatly terrifiedsuch an awful sense had they of the truth of God's Word and the Majesty of the Author. Adam one day disobeying his mother, she opened Prov. xxx. 17, which she read and commented on in a most awful manner. The culprit, believing that the words had been sent immediately from heaven, went out into the field with a troubled spirit; and was musing on this fearful denunciation of Divine displeasure, when the hoarse croak of a raven sounded to his conscience, he says, an alarm "more terrible than the cry of fire at midnight." He looked up, and, actually supposing it to be the raven of which the text spoke, coming to pick out his eyes, he clapped his hands on them with the utmost trepidation, and ran towards the house, that he might escape the

impending vengeance. He states, that the severe creed of his mother led her more frequently to represent the Supreme Being as a God of justice, than as the God of mercy: the consequence of which was, that her children dreaded God, and obeyed only through fear: though he adds, that perhaps this was the only impression that could be made, to awaken conscience and keep it awake. To the religious instructions of his mother he attributed, under God, that fear of the Divine Majesty which ever prevented him from taking pleasure in sin. 'My mother's reproofs and terrors never left me," said he, "till I sought and found the salvation of God. And sin was generally so burthensome to me, that I was glad to hear of deliverance from it. She taught me such reverence for the Bible, that, if I had it in my hand even for the purpose of studying a chapter in order to say it as a lesson, and had been disposed with my class-fellows to sing, whistle a tune, or be facetious, I dared not do either while the book was open in my hands. In such cases I always shut it, and laid it down beside me. Who will dare to lay this to the charge of superstition ?" We need not say that such a mother taught her children to pray. Every night, before they went to bed, they regularly kneeled successively at her knee, and said the Lord's Prayer; and implored a blessing on their relatives and friends: those who were six years old and upwards, said also the Apostles' Creed. She had also a Morning Prayer and an Evening Prayer, which she taught them. Every Lord's-day was strictly sanctified; no manner of work was done in the family and the children were taught from their earliest youth to sanctify the Sabbath. On that day she catechized and instructed her children, read a chapter, sang a portion of a Psalm, and prayed with them. We have been the more particular in detailing these memorials, because they shew that there was no necessity for attributing any part of young Clarke's religious impressions to the books of fiction before alluded to. His early piety was doubtless the promised result of the blessing of God upon his mother's religious nurture; and he himself speaks on the subject in a manner so truly just and scriptural, that we can only wonder that he should have penned the remarks above noticed, and which appear to us inconsistent with his more accurate and sober view of the matter. We have, however, perhaps misunderstood his meaning, and are willing to believe that he did not mean what his statement seemed to us to imply. We may add, that his remarks respecting his mother's religious instructions modify what we elsewhere gather respecting that religious ignorance of his early years which exposed him to believe in magic and other anti-Christian absurdities. It is probable that his mother was a religious but a severe and superstitious woman; and that he learned from her much to be remembered, but some things also to be forgotten. We are unwilling, however, that the promises of God to the sincere and affectionate, even though not wholly judicious, instructions of a Christian parent, should be overlooked, or the effects produced by them be mixed up with the impression made by idle works of romantic fabrication.

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Dr. Clarke, among his other boyish accomplishments, attended a village singing and dancing school. The young musicians had books in which the tunes were noted; and each tune was at first sol fa'd, till it was tolerably well learned, and then sung to some corresponding words. Afterwards, each was obliged to give out some verse of his own; and lastly, as trials of skill, one made a line: by the time that was sung, another was obliged to find a line that would match in measure and meaning, a third did the same, and a fourth in the same way concluded the stanza; neither of these knowing any thing previously of the subject on which he should be obliged to compose his verse. These trials of skill often produced much doggerel; but there were not unfrequently (Dr. Clarke says) some happy

lines and flashes of real wit. The mention of this method of singing and making alternate verses leads the learned author into an investigation of the traces of a similar practice among the ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans; with illustrations from the song of Moses, of Deborah and Barak, the fifth chapter of Isaiah, and Homer, Theocritus, and Virgil.

Of the sacred tunes used among the Protestants in his district, he says that they were few," very flat," and probably of Scottish extraction. The epithet "very" leads us to suppose that he uses the word "flat" as meaning tame, or insipid, and not, in the colloquiality of provincial music, as indicative of the minor key. He might possibly use it incorrectly, as meaning pitched too low, than which nothing tends more to render Psalmody dronish. The tunes entitled French, London, York, Abbey, Elgin (see Burns's Cotter's Saturday Night), Dumfries, Newton, Dublin, and the Old Hundredth Psalm, were chiefly used; and one or other of these might be heard in every church and meeting-house through a whole district or county on the Lord's-day. The Irish Papists used no singing in that part of the country, in their mass-houses. Their singing was chiefly confined to funeral occasions, when they employed the Caoinian, or Irish howl-a species of the alternate music already referred to-which was generally practised among the Papists in Dr. Clarke's youth; but it is now falling into entire disuse, the priests having displaced it, by their strong recommendation of the Gregorian Chaunt.

Of his dancing, Dr. Clarke tells us that he at first disliked it; but that he soon imbibed new feelings, and became the best dancer in the school. His deliberate opinion of the practice he has recorded as follows:

"Mala Ave, when about 12 or 13 years of age I learned to dance. I long resisted all solicitations to this employment, but at last I suffered myself to be overcome; and learnt, and profited beyond most of my fellows. I grew passionately fond of it, would scarcely walk but in measured time, and was constantly tripping, moving, and shuffling, in all times and places. I began now to value myself, which, as far as I can recollect, I had never thought of before; I grew impatient of controul, was fond of company, wished to mingle more than I had ever done with young people; I got also a passion for better clothing than that which fell to my lot in life; was discontented when I found a neighbour's son dressed better than myself. I lost the spirit of subordination, did not love work, imbibed a spirit of idleness, and, in short, drunk in all the brainsickening effluvia of pleasure; dancing and company took the place of reading and study; and the authority of my parents was feared indeed, but not respected; and few serious impressions could prevail in a mind imbued now with frivolity and the love of pleasure; yet I entered into no disreputable assembly, and in no one case ever kept any improper company; I formed no illegal connection, nor associated with any whose characters were either tarnished or suspicious. Nevertheless, dancing was to me a perverting influence, an unmixed moral evil: for although, by the mercy of God, it led me not to depravity of manners, it greatly weakened the moral principle, drowned the voice of a well-instructed conscience, and was the first cause of impelling me to seek my happiness in this life. Every thing yielded to the disposition it had produced, and every thing was absorbed by it. I have it justly in abhorrence for the moral injury it did me; and I can testify (as far as my own observations have extended, and they have had a very wide range), I have known it to produce the same evil in others that it produced in me. I consider it, therefore, as a branch of that worldly education which leads from heaven to earth, from things spiritual to things sensual, and from God to Satan. Let them plead for it who will; I know it to be evil, and that only. They who bring up their children in this way, or send them to those schools where dancing is taught, are consecrating them to the service of Moloch.'" pp. 65, 66.

This is certainly a strong opinion, and might require some limitations to bring it within those strict bounds of sober truth which are necessary to be observed if we expect that good advice should be duly weighed and acted upon. We are no advocates for dancing; but, like a hundred other litigated practices, it has its modes and phases; its alleged advantages as well as its admitted evils. The worst of its modifications we believe to CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 383. 4 S

be precisely that with which alone young Clarke was likely to be familiar— namely, a village wake or "alehouse hop." The next worst we should consider to be public assemblies for persons in the middle and higher ranks of life; though it is but justice to add, that the well-observed proprieties of what is considered good society, tend to prevent some of those obvious evils which Dr. Clarke doubtless found connected with rustic revels. In the case of a peasant's son, whose occupation was to work in the fields from morning to night, the preparation for a village dance, and all its exciting accompaniments, would form a much more prominent and distracting episode in the business of life, than an evening spent by a gentleman or nobleman in a similar manner, and which is scarcely remembered the next day, amidst a succession of new objects of pursuit. The young ladies and young gentlemen with whom Dr. Clarke danced, very probably complimented each other with beer or whisky, and relaxed into a grossness of conversation and boisterousness of deportment which are never heard of in well-ordered intercourse; and the familiarity of habits which prevails among the less refined classes of society is itself the parent of much evil, whether the occasion of it be a dance or any thing else: but it might be urged, that mischief of the same kind, and to the same extent, is not found in the ordinary intercourse of polished life, under the restraints imposed by good education and mutual respect, even where there is no direct check from religious principle. A similar distinction certainly prevails in those scenes which are innocently resorted to for beauty of landscape or other rational objects of attraction. In these places, parties of well-educated persons, including the younger members and friends of families, may be seen walking, riding, sketching, botanizing, geologizing, or cheerfully conversing on the beauties or the curiosities of the scene, with as little perhaps of direct evil as is usually to be found in a sinful world; while in the very same spot, and surrounded by the same objects of lawful attraction, are seen groups of persons in a different class of life, who, having no mental sources of pleasure, make up for the loss in rioting, drunkenness, and indecency; converting the most lovely scenes of nature into an arena for all the evils of a fair or revel.

Our reason for penning these remarks is not to defend or apologize for balls or assemblies, either of a more refined or a more rustic character: far otherwise but only to notice a distinction, the omission of which, combined with an unmodified strength of denunciation, might, we fear, lead to a recoil, and impede the very object which Dr. Clarke had at heart. The manner in which some religious persons, whose early years were passed in the ruder circles of life, speak of worldly habits, from the aspect in which alone they themselves saw them, often revolts persons of more refined education, who consider the picture utterly unjust in reference to themselves and their pursuits. When a young person, whose education and habits have preserved her even from a knowledge of those scenes of vice with which the children of the poor, crowded together in their wretched abodes, are too generally familiar, after passing an evening with her parents and friends in the captivating gaieties of music and dancing, is told, in language which has been employed on such an occasion, but which we reluctantly transcribe, that she has been frequenting a scene of " moral debauchery," may she not naturally feel herself injured and insulted by such a denunciation? She will allege, that in her quiet ride to the scene of festivity with her relatives, her two or three hours' dancing, her unenebriating glass of lemonade, and her return home, with an ear uninjured by any thing more grossly exceptionable than the ordinary frivolities of polished intercourse, she can see nothing that resembles those disgusting descrip

tions which are modelled upon the conduct of a party of villagers romping over styles and in ditches to the ale-house ball, drinking as they dance, and revelling as they drink, till they return home prepared for all that is vicious and revolting. The picture, in order to be recognised by her, must be more accurately sketched; and sketched upon the very principle pointed out by Dr. Clarke, that these things, even when not attended by gross depravity of manners," are inconsistent with the feelings and habits of a true Christian: they are at once the enjoyments and the snares of those who "seek their happiness in this life," and not in the life to come; who live only for earth, and are not citizens of heaven; in one word, "these things are not of the Father, but of the world."

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But for a person to feel this, there must be a spiritual taste, a newness of character, a transformation in the spirit of the mind after the image of Christ Jesus. To those who are thus endowed, there is little need to point out the sinfulness of dancing, or of any other vanity, because they will have lost the relish for it, and will decide rightly, from their renovation of feeling, even independently of the exercise of their judgment. To those who are not thus divinely taught, we fear that it is impossible to shew in a satisfactory manner the evil of any pursuit which is not obviously vicious. If we describe a dance merely as what they would consider an elegant recreation, they see no harm in it: if we describe it with those revolting accompaniments which some of those who reprobate the practice dwell upon, they will reply that they never witnessed any thing of the kind, and they will wonder what society any man or woman could have frequented to pervert an innocent amusement, as they think it, into "an unmixed moral evil." We feel assured that in all such matters there is but one effectual way-to begin with the heart. Make the tree good, and the fruit will be good also; but a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit.

But do our readers, we again ask, suppose; from what we have said of the obvious distinction to be made between the habits of different classes of society, that we are of the opinion of Mr. Burke, that vice loses half, or any portion, of its deformity—or at least that it loses any portion of its sinfulness-by losing its grossness? So far from it, we believe that refined ungodliness is more ensnaring than open profligacy; and that the veil which conceals its hideousness, intercepts also the light of truth, which would display its corruption. In the best-regulated assembly for dancing there must inevitably be such a scene of evil, so much to minister to pride and vanity and passion, that we wonder that any person, who professes to have a high moral feeling, can vindicate the practice. Our only object, therefore, in the preceding remarks, is to shew, that, in remonstrating with those who are addicted to worldly pleasures, we must go deeper than the surface; that we cannot hope to convince them by representations which they consider exaggerated, but that we must pass from the glossy exterior to the inward deformity, and shew them at once that it is not merely finding pleasure in gross vice that is offensive to their Creator, but that every form of worldly preference is sinful, and that while they "seek their happiness in this life" they are equally far from God and from true repose.

But then comes another distinction also-namely, that between learning to dance, and frequenting balls and assemblies, whether for the rich or the poor. Many religious parents teach their children the exercise of dancing, for the sake of their health and convenient carriage, who certainly have no intention of " consecrating them to the service of Moloch." They teach them to dance, just as they teach them to sing, or to play upon a musical instrument; not wishing or intending in the former case that they should