Her and all the attributes of royalty. majesty the queen is blessed with a daughter called the Princess Victoria, after our own queen, and there are several princes of the royal blood. The chiefs are perfect aristocrats, and boast of their unpolluted descent for many generations. The nobility are very fine well1-grown men, and the difference of their appearance and that of the lower orders indicates a decided superiority of breeding." His testimony to the importance and value of Honolulu and the islands generally, is emphatic. "I never saw," says he, "in the Pacific such splendid facilities for obtaining supplies for ships. Of course the arrival of our large squadron (three English and four French ships of war) raised the price of the market considerably-more than double; but every thing can be procured--water in abundance, coal, bullocks much finer than the English, sheep and cattle of all kinds, vegetables, fruits, and almost every thing can be obtained, either produced on the islands, or brought from San Francisco, which is only about ten or twelve days' sail. About 300 whalers come to Honolulu every year to refit, and its central position makes it invaluable. It is a sad pity our government has not possession -a more glorious depôt for the spuadron and merchantmen could not be found." This writer alludes to the probability that the United States will ere long obtain possession of the Hawaiian group; and if newspaper statements are to be relied on, there is great likelihood that such will be the case. A New York paper positively states, that the Hawaiian government, some time ago, made overtures to the United States' government to "accept the cession of the islands." A favorable answer was returned, which "was submitted to the council, in which body it was approved by all the members, except Prince Alexander, the heir-apparent, and Paki, a high chief. The majority, however, decided in favor of annexation; and the treaty to that effect was brought over to San Francisco in the Restless, in time to be despatched to Washington by the steamer of the 1st of August.' It is possible that this statement is substantially correct; and should the presumption of the annexation of the islands to the United States be realized, that power will thereby obtain a splendid and incalculably valuable acquisition. Even apart from the commercial importance of the islands, it is hardly possible to overrate their immense value to any great maritime power. To quote the opinion of Mr. Jarves: "If the ports of this group were closed to neutral commerce, many thousand miles of ocean would have to be traversed before havens possessing the requisite conveniences for recruiting or repairing shipping could be reached. This fact illustrates their great importance in a naval point. Should any one of the great nations seize upon them, it might be considered as holding the key of the North Pacific; for no trade could prosper in their vicinity, or even exist, while a hostile power, possessing an active and powerful marine, should send forth its cruisers to prey upon the neighboring commerce." Well for us, we may add, that Russia is not in possession of these islands! Without entering into any political considerations, we may safely conclude, that whether the Hawaiian group continues an independent state, or whether it is annexed to some powerful country, a great future is certain to open on the history of these islands. Their trade, and the number of foreign settlers upon their shores, must inevitably increase yearly at an accelerated rate; and no limit can be assigned to their progress in commercial and political importance. At present, the Hawaiian is perhaps the most interesting and promising minor kingdom in the world. From the Eclectic Review. DR. JOHNSON AS A CHRISTIAN AND A CRITIC.* very being so shadowy as temperament holds the scales, it is difficult to strike the balance between the bright and the dark view of things. But we suspect that Johnson and John Foster arrived, by different roads, to a tolerably correct conception of the truth. Happiness exists here only in dim embryo and half-developed bud. Our pleasures are often felt, at the very moment of their enjoyment, to be delusions; our sorrows, seldom. Life in all cases begins with the wail of a mother's and a child's anguish, and ends in the apparent defeat of death. Many hours. want their pleasures; scarce one is free from its anxieties. Most of our misery springs, it may be said, from ignorance. Be it so. But since our ignorance is so great, how great must be our misery. And even when our knowledge is increased, how true the words of the wise man, "He that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow." WHILE most people in the present day admit Dr. Johnson's power as a whole, and grant him to be an honest, fearless and warmhearted man, much prejudice exists against his peculiar notions and feelings in reference to Christianity, as well as against his critical character and achievements. We propose trying to set the public mind right, so far as our power extends, upon both these topics. And first, as to his Christianity, it is called "gloomy," "bigoted." "morose," "superstitious," and so forth. Now, it is singular that no one says that he himself was morose. He was, on the contrary, a "fine old fellow," very irritable, very pompous, and at times very savage; but full of kindness, of jocularity, of sociality, a warm friend, and a pleasant companion, whose great delight was in clubs; in short, as he said himself, a clubable man." He had, indeed, his gloomy hours; but that these sprang principally from his religion we do not believe. They sprang Johnson set himself most determinedly from his temperament, and from the deep against all cant; and one cant he found esviews his intellect took of the miseries of pecially prevalent, and with it he fiercely human life. He saw and felt more thoroughly warred, the cant of happiness, or to express than most, even of wise men, the unsatisfac- it more accurately in one of his own Brobtoriness of earthly enjoyments-the empti- dignagian words, the cant of "felicitation." ness of earthly honors-the shortness of Many people he found perpetually shouting earthly life the insincerity and deceit. "Optime !"-if we are not happy, we should fulness of the human heart - and the be; all is for the best; and after all drawreality, the uniform pressure, and the terbacks and deductions are made, is not this rible mysteriousness of the woes of the a very comfortable little world on the whole, world. He "sate in the centre," and how if not exactly as Leibnitz asserts, "the best could he "enjoy bright day"? He spake as of all possible worlds"? Johnson says, emhe saw. His temperament did, indeed, phatically, No; this world is not happy. what discolor his perceptions; but it did not We are not happy. It is, indeed, in a measalter or impair them. It was not his faulture, our own blame; but still, there is the that made to his view "The sun like blood, the earth a tomb, some The tomb a hell, and hell itself a murkier gloom." Nor is this estimate altogether untrue, although it be partial. Of course, when a *Boswell's Life of Johnson, together with Tour to the Hebrides. Edited by the Right Honorable John Wilson Croker. London: J. Murray. fact, account for it as you may. Man is far · tianity by his profound feeling of human woes, and of the wants of his own nature and heart. He had tried every thing else ;-study, and found it a weariness, when not a burden and a woe; fame, and found it the dream of a bubble; wine, and found it a raging and mocking madness; woman, too, and found her help, indeed, invaluable, but her love, as men are wont to idealize it, a delusion; society, and found it a restless arena, fitted to excite, but unable to satisfy; and he came at last to the conclusion, that there was nothing in this world worth living for, but the promise of, and the preparation for, another; and that all the lights of science, literature, and philosophy were darkness compared to the red hues shed over the Judean hills by the parting steps of Christ, as the prophecy and promise of his coming again. He did not, indeed (and here lay his wisdom, and this showed his want of fanaticism), abandon the use of the pleasures which Providence allotted him, and become an austere anchorite. He continued, and with all his might, too, to try and wring out of all lawful pleasures what good there was in them. But this he did with no expectation of complete or ultimate satisfaction, for that he knew it was not in their power to give, but solely that they might strengthen or amuse him in his progress toward that grand and only fountain of peace and soul-security which rises in another world. It has been often said, that Dr. Johnson, as well as Foster, failed to see life in its beauty, its nice arrangements, its poetry, and its hopeful tendencies. Had this been said to the former, he would have gruffly replied, "All canting absurdity. There is beauty, indeed, in nature, although my dim eyes can not see it very clearly, and although I hate to hear poetasters whining about purling streams and pastoral crooks; but I can admire better than they the solemn magnificence of forests, the outspread expanse and booming thunders of ocean, and the dread glories of the midnight sky. But I know that this is a life compounded of mistakes and miseries, of delusive pleasures and real wretchedness, of vice, terror, and uncertainty, a life which the most of men spend in estrangement from God, and in enmity with one another, and which the best have ever felt to be a weariness and a heavy load, and cried out, We loathe it; we would not live always.' The only real good on earth is virtue, and that is not the result of life, but a communication from on high, and a pledge and foretaste of a better existence." The sun Foster felt far more forcibly than Johnson the glories of nature and the beauties of art. Inferior in learning, in critical acumen, and in dictatorial power over thought and language, he had a subtler, a more poetical, a more enthusiastic genius; this taught him to admire nature in all its forms with a deeper, although a pensive, admiration. He believed, with trembling, in the universe, on which he saw a shade resting like that of the morning of the first day of the Deluge. The ocean's voice seemed in his ear a wild wail, as if some maniac-god were imprisoned in its dreary caves, and were proclaiming his eternal wrongs to earth and the stars. seemed looking on earth from his lofty car with an air of supreme scorn and haughty reserve, and crying out, "What care I for that petty planet, and the reptile race my beams have generated in its mud-with their animalcular loves, hatreds, wars, fortunes,and faiths ?" The moon seemed (as he describes her in a passage of his journal) to be contemplating our world with a melancholy interest, but the interest of one who had long given up the hope of doing any good to man, or of ever seeing him becoming better. And the stars appeared like the fiery spires and watch towers of the walls of hell, surrounding the miseries of earth with an aspect of fixed and far-off indifference. And yet, notwithstanding the gloomy discoloration in which he saw all these objects, he continued to admire them to enthusiasm. He sometimes reminds us of that band of fallen angels whom Milton describes exploring the distant regions of their place of pain, and imbibing a certain deep, though sullen joy, as they pass "O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp." So, Foster, deeming this universe little better than a vast hell, yet admitted it to be a most splendid one-all deluged and shining with a dreadful glory, which at once fascinated and terrified his soul. As bis religious views were of a sterner cast than Johnson's, so his views of man and of life were even darker than his. He also fell at times into deep abysses of doubt, from which, in general, Johnson kept free; and, unlike Johnson, he did not seek to snatch his share of the passing pleasures of the world, but held them in a scorn too deep even to taste their flavor as they hurried by. Both, however, seem to have come to the same conclusion on one momentous question-we mean the restoration of the lost. Foster has expressly defended this; and Johnson, in | gles, trials, temptations, and sources of spir one of his conversations with Boswell, intimates a leaning towards it. We stay not to expose what we deem the fallacy of this hope. It seems far too good news to be true, as well as rendered excessively improbable by the aspects and phenomena of the present world. But when contemplating the massive gloom which lay upon two such minds as Foster's and Johnson's, we are glad to find them getting partial relief even from a false dawning, although it only reminds us of the poet's words: "As northen lights the sky adorn, itual sadness, peculiar to himself. His life is compared to a birth, to warfare, to an agony. He is the special mark of many obloquies from men and many secret assaults by invisible enemies; and has often to be contented with no other reward than is implied in the consciousness of integrity and of brave struggle, and in the hope of eternal life. He is promised "not happiness, but only blessedness." Finally. He has often, like his fellows, to contend with afflictive providences, with poverty, and with the infirmities of his own temper or body. Nay, he may be more pressed by these than other men, and may thus seem more miserable than they, notwithstanding the secret solaces welling up within, and the glimpses of a glorious destiny seen hovering above him. We have at present two private Christians in view as illustrating the principles we have thus stated. Both belong to the excellent of the earth, and find the religion of Jesus dearer to them than their necessary food. But the one has been blessed with a benignant temper, an undisturbed serenity, been visited by few trials, and enjoyed an equable flow of health all his life. Hence he has been as happy as this state of being will permit; has been troubled with no doubts or misgivings, and hardly had his temper ruffled for a moment. The other has had a tone of health less firm, a nervous system more excitable, a temper more imperfect, an education more neglected, and a career more checkered; and has, therefore, been, on the whole, unhappy, morbid and while his excellence is admitted by all who know him, he is evidently far from the possession of that blessed peace and calm which are possessed by the other, and seems never likely to reach them till recast in another mould, and admitted to a serener region. This is not the place for going at great length into the question as to the connection of religion with melancholy; yet we must be permitted a few remarks, as they are appropriate to Dr. Johnson's case. And we think the whole truth may be summed up succinctly in a very few sentences. First. Religion is not necessarily connected with a more than ordinary degree of gloom. There have been, and are Christians habitually cheerful; that is, many persons inclined originally to look at the bright side of things have become Christians, and their piety has not lessened but increased their pleasures; for, although it may have given them new sorrows, it has also multiplied and intensified their joys. But secondly, there are many whose temperament, naturally bilious or nervous, when pervaded by Christian ideas, seems to become a shade darker; the thoughts of God's holiness, of the strictness of his law, of their own unworthiness, of the state of the world, and of the doom of sinners in a future state, press on them with awful force, and render them all their lifetime subject to bondage. Thirdly. Not a few Christians are exceedingly fluctuating in their emotions; their life is a balance, now sinking to the depths, and now soaring to the sun; and this is in them partly the result of temperament and partly of their oscillations of religious feeling. Fourthly. If a Christian, as too many Christians do, neglect the natu-way, and sent back from the first slough they ral conditions of cheerfulness, seclude himself from society, pay no attention to his health, and deny himself those innocent gratifications which fill agreeably up the intervals of duty, it is not his Christianity that will save him from inequality of spirits, or from fits of deep depression. Fifthly. It can not be denied that a Christian has strug Those entertain very false notions of Christianity who dream that as soon as it is believed it always operates as a charm, and creates around the believer a clear and constant heaven on earth. This idea has, we think, done much injury to the cause, disheartened many at the difficulties of the encountered not a few pliables who otherwise might have struggled on to glory. Preachers have dealt too much in rose-colors while painting the Christian life. They should remember, as Croly says in the preface to his sermons, "that our religion is a manly religion;" that it is to men emphatically that it calls. ("To you, O men, I call, Johnson had fallen into occasional errors of life, hinted at rather than disclosed by Boswell, which prevent him from being proposed as a model. His physical system it should be remembered was radically diseased, his passions were excessively strong, and nothing but his own-acquired self-command, and the grace of God, prevented him from becoming a moral wreck, as conspicuous and lamentable as Savage, Burns, or Byron. But he was nevertheless, and the more from the struggle which he had to maintain with his temperament, one of the noblest of human beings, and in nothing so much so as in his deference to the claims of Christianity. If any man of that age might, strong in the pride of intellectual power, have refused to bend and become as a little child, it might have been this sturdy Titan, and yet he not only knelt himself but taught thousands to kneel beside him, who, but for the example of so great a man, would have disdained the homage. and my voice is to the sons of men ;") and I seemed to bear inscribed above the head of that it never promises an uninterrupted its bleeding victim the words, "What thou course of happiness either within or without. knowest not now thou shalt know hereafter." Dr. Johnson's religion, after subtracting a And as it rose in its clear command above good deal of superstitious nonsense, was- earth and death and hell, his dreams about and latterly especially-a true although a the efficacy of fastings and the other superstigloomy faith. His very terrors proved his tions he had imbibed in his childhood faded greatness, and seemed, as Keats has it, away; a portion of his fears vanished with portioned to a giant nerve." His fear of them, and he fell asleep at last a forgiven and ghosts, for instance, sprung from his intense accepted child, perfect through suffering, in belief in a spiritual world, and from his feel- the arms of his Redeemer. ing of his own unworthiness to meet a purely spiritual nature. His fear of death arose from his profound and solemn conceptions of that immense Being he expected to see after it. The higher a mind rises it has a wider view of the Great Supreme, and a proportionate feeling of awe towards him. A Lilliputian mind worships a comparatively Lilliputian Deity; a mind of giant stature has its idea of Deity prodigiously magnified, and its fear accordingly enhanced. Hence Johnson on his death-bed cried out, "I will take any thing but inebriating substance, for I wish to present my soul to God unclouded." | There is something sublime in the sight of this autocrat of letters, of one who, like John Knox, never feared the face of man, bowed in terror before the powers of the world to come, and you think of that being in Milton (in this point we alone compare them) who feared no power in earth, hell, or heaven, except Death and Deity. When you see this powerful nature agitated by his peculiar fears you are reminded of the The name of Johnson as a critic has had a Psalmist's words, "He toucheth the moun- somewhat fluctuating history. Once rated tains and they smoke." They stand in their too high, it is now, we think, pushed far granite strength umovable by all the efforts below its level. The true way to describe of all mankind; but whenever their Creator his criticism is to say it is the criticism of lays his lightest finger on them they recognize gigantic but cramped common sense. his hand and begin to tremble and to smoke. lacks that subtler instinct which detects Yet Johnson, while keenly alive to the minute beauties, and that recherché taste terrors of the law, and too much attached to which distinguishes the secret flavors of exoutward forms, was not altogether ignorant cellence. Nor has he any principles of of the consolations of the Gospel of Jesus criticism entitled to the praise of depth, Christ. The peculiarities of that Gospel comprehensiveness, or originality. He takes became dearer to him as his life advanced. up a book with a feeling compounded of On his death-bed he recommended to a friend eagerness and reluctance; devours it in hasty a volume of sermons because it dwelt most gulps; becomes aware of all its principal fully on the doctrine of a propitiation. The faults, and its broader beauties; throws it Cross shone out at last amid the vapors down to lift it up no more; and proceeds, which had laid on him, and he saw in it the some twenty years perhaps afterwards, to pillar of the divine government, the mirror daguerreotype the results of the one hasty of the divine character, the finger pointing and hungry perusal. That is generally faithup to a father's house, and the mighty mag-ful to his original feelings, for his memory is net drawing men home there from their vain and various wanderings. It did not, indeed, remove all his darkness, or that of this system, but it allured to brighter worlds," and " He a vice (in both senses of the word shall we say?) but it is not always, any more than these, just to the book. One reading, and Johnson rarely honored a book by reading it |