In the delineation of human character and experience as it is, Shakspeare occupies the first place in the Christian school. Shakspeare wrote no fiction. No uninspired writings have more of truth than his master-works. He anatomizes human life and character, and follows out the human heart into its most minute and complex modes of experience. Many of his sayings have therefore passed into popular proverbs, and that too among people who never read a word that he wrote. How often do we find in his writings long passages which paint our own emotions and experience far more accurately than we could have written them out. But Shakspeare wrote objectively, with but little sympathy, with keen observation and vast self-knowledge, but not with love. His head was more Christian than his heart. He therefore satisfies the judgment more than he touches the feelings, instructs more than he edifies. Mackenzie, though in so different a department of literature, and at so long an interval of time, may well be cited in this connexion for the broad contrast in all these points between him and Shakspeare. Mackenzie wrote with sympathy and love, wrote subjectively. He is always true to the heart. Yet, from lack of just observation, he wrote fiction. He meant to describe man as he is; but, over an eccentric and chaotic mass of generosity and meanness, virtue and crime, success and agony, he has painted but one distinct and speaking likeness, that of his own warm and philanthropic heart, beating in unison with all that is noble and good, and in pitying deprecation of everything base, vile, and cruel. We know of no recent author, who has better illustrated the truth-telling power of an imagination inspired by Christian ideas, than our countryman Hawthorne. We have already spoken of his Twice Told Tales, in this point of view, in a former number.* We hoped to have received his second series, announced as in press, early enough to have noticed it in the present article. The length to which we have extended our remarks, leaves us less space than we would willingly occupy, for the author, whose latest works are the text of this article. We will not call Dickens a novelist, for it is too low a title. And yet we know not how to designate his works otherwise than by that indefinite name of story; and long may it be, before they will * Christian Examiner, Third Series, Vol. vii. p. 128. so far cease to be spoken of individually, as to need a collective appellation! Though Dickens sometimes overdoes the grotesque in life and character, we cannot style him a writer of fiction, but of truth, and the most momentous and thrilling truth. He has a deep sympathy with humanity as such, in all its forms, however lowly or degraded. He sees the divine image, where others behold only squalidness and rags. He picks up a jewel among the cinders of the forge, or the rubbish of the city, and it is one on which angels might gaze with rapture. He has nobly stepped in as the mediator between man and his brother. He brings forth the unpitied and the forgotten, yea, the erring and sin-stricken, and forces them upon the sympathy of those, who till now had passed by them on the other side. How lovingly he enters into the slender joys and brief amusements of the poor! Who can read without emotion the account of Kit's and Barbara's holiday in the Old Curiosity Shop, or the scene ensuing upon Kit's liberation from the cruel snare that had been laid for him? We should be glad to convey to our readers a tithe of the delight with which we have read, perhaps for the twentieth time, the following passage from the chapter where Kit goes to live with the Garland family. "If my words convey any notion that Kit, in the plentiful board and comfortable lodging of his new abode, began to think slightingly of the poor fare and furniture of his old dwelling, they do their office badly, and commit injustice. Who so mindful of those he left at home, albeit they were but a mother and two young babies, as Kit? What boastful father, in the fulness of his heart, ever related such wonders of his infant progeny, as Kit never wearied of telling Barbara, in the evening time, concerning little Jacob? Was there ever such a mother as Kit's mother, on her son's showing? or was there ever such comfort in poverty as in the poverty of Kit's family, if any correct judgment might be arrived at from his own glowing account? "And let us linger in this place, for an instant, to remark, that if ever household affections and loves are graceful things, they are graceful in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy and the proud to home, may be forged on earth; but those which link the poor man to his humble hearth, are of the true metal, and bear the stamp of heaven. The man of high descent may love the halls and lands of his inheritance as a part of himself, as trophies of his birth and power; his associations with them are associations of pride and wealth and triumph; the poor man's attachment to the tenement he holds, which strangers have held before, and may to-morrow occupy again, has a worthier root, struck deep into a purer soil. His household gods are of flesh and blood, with no alloy of silver, gold, or precious stone; he has no property but in the affections of his own heart; and when they endear bare floors and walls, despite of rags, and toil, and scanty meals, that man has his love of home from God, and his rude hut becomes a solemn place. "Oh! if those who rule the destinies of nations would but remember this, if they would but think how hard it is for the very poor to have engendered in their hearts that love of home from which all domestic virtues spring, when they live in dense and squalid masses, where social decency is lost, or rather never found, if they would but turn aside from the wide thoroughfares and great houses, and strive to improve the wretched dwellings in bye-ways, where only poverty may walk, many low roofs would point more truly to the sky, than the loftiest steeple that now rears proudly up from the midst of guilt, and crime, and horrible disease, to mock them by its contrast." Old Curiosity Shop, pp. 213, 214. How full are all Dickens's works of those traits of brotherly feeling, which go right to the heart, and appeal to whatever of good there is in us. How does he multiply illustrations of that true-hearted kindness, which can make the humblest gift or least office of love worth infinitely more, than the most bountiful hand-offering of the unloving heart! Perhaps there is no more touching example of this, than where the poor fireman at the forge lodges Nell and her grandfather on a heap of warm ashes, and then, in the morning, "Before they had reached the corner of the lane, the man came running after them, and pressing her hand, left something in it, two old, battered, smoke-encrusted penny pieces. Who knows but they shone as brightly in the eyes of angels as golden gifts that have been chronicled on tombs?" p. 241. We know of no author, who handles the pathetic with more art, or rather with less art, and more truth to nature, than Dickens. There is pathos even in his comedy; and with his sensitive reader smiles and tears chase each other, as showers and sunshine on an April day. And in this he gives us the true picture of human life; for in the most trivial incidents or in the gayest scenes, there is always an under current of the VOL. XXXII. 3D S. VOL. XIV. NO. I. 3 plaintive and the sad. But how powerfully does he move the feelings in those portions of his narrative, where scenes or events of deep solemnity or sadness are portrayed! How full of the most thrilling pathos is the account of little Nell's life about the old church, her sittings in the antique chapel, and her labors on the children's graves in the churchyard. Whoever has suffered by the early removal of the innocent and lovely will feel the blended truth and beauty of the following touching passage, that closes the account of little Nell's funeral. "They saw the vault covered and the stone fixed down. Then, when the dusk of evening had come on, and not a sound disturbed the sacred stillness of the place, when the bright moon poured in her light on tomb and monument, on pillar, wall, and arch, and most of all (it seemed to them) upon her quiet grave, in that calm time, when all outward things and inward thoughts teem with assurances of immortality, and worldly hopes and fears are humbled in the dust before them, then, with tranquil and submissive hearts, they turned away, and left the child with God. "Oh! it is hard to take to heart the lesson that such deaths' will teach; but let no man reject it, for it is one that all must learn, and is a mighty, universal truth. When death strikes down the innocent and young, for every fragile form from which he lets the parting spirit free, a hundred virtues rise, in shapes of mercy, charity, and love, to walk the world, and bless it with their light. Of every tear that sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves, some good is born, some gentler nature comes. In the destroyer's steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path becomes a way of light to heaven." - pp. 352, 353. Who can doubt that a writer so thoroughly imbued with the true spirit of humanity, so full of sympathy with every form of grief and of gladness, so susceptible to every shade and hue of kindness and of virtue, so tenderly compassionate towards the desolate, the lowly, the guilty, has formed his spirit in the school of him, who said, "All ye are brethren "?" He shows us more clearly than any other author whom we can name, what Fancy, baptized into a truly Christian spirit, may achieve towards reconciling man to man, and, through love of the brother whom we have seen, towards leading us to the purer love of the Father, whom we have not seen. We close with an an extract from his beautiful apostrophe to St. Paul's Clock in the story from which all our quotations have been made, extract, which, we trust, expresses his own settled aim and purpose in his writing, as it most happily does their tendency and result. "Heart of London, there is a moral in thy every stroke! as I look on at thy indomitable working, which neither death, nor press of life, nor grief, nor gladness out of doors will influence one jot, I seem to hear a voice within thee which sinks into my heart, bidding me, as I elbow my way among the crowd, have some thought for the meanest wretch that passes, and, being a man, to turn away with scorn and pride from none that bear the human shape." p. 361. - A. P. P. History of the Great Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Germany, Switzerland, &c. By J. H. MERLE, D'AUBIGNÉ, President of the Theological School of Geneva, and Member of the "Societé Evangeliqué." London. 1841. 8vo. pp. 653. Vol. III. THREE years have elapsed since the publication of this work was cominenced, and two, since the second volume was issued. The third volume now in our hands has long been expected, and a perusal of it has satisfied us that the author sustains the intense interest, so characteristic of the earlier portions of his work. We know of no history, and certainly no ecclesiastical history, whose pages are so inviting as these. Instead of inflicting weariness upon the reader, it even revives the exhaustion brought on by much study. Its graphic and spirited descriptions, its perpetual variety of subjects, and its numerous choice morsels of quotation from works of the age, which it delineates, have afforded us so much pleasure, that we would advise any one, who has it in his power, rather to read the book than our further remarks upon it. The success it has met with justifies our praise The French original has been put into two, if not three, rival translations in England, several editions of which have been issued there, and one of which is now in the press in this country. Still another volume is needed to com |