OFF TRIPOLI: THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 1893.
PEACE to the dead! Great organs sound

and swell,

Of the foemen on the left and on the right;

With brave rescue from the wreck,

Thund'ring for us their glorious funeral And wild cheering on the deck,

While their mimic thunder rent

With its roar the firmament,

As they tacked and they manœuvred in

the bay:

For our navy is the pride

Of that sea without a tide,

That Britannia had not parted with her might?

"All then precipitated themselves into the sea, with the exception of Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon, who remained alone on the bridge." — (The Times, June 27.)

And our home is on the deep amid the LET England mourn for him who met his

On the gallant flagship came,

Quick as stroke of lightning-flame

Or the giant rush of tempest, such a blow That, her harness rent, she bowed;

And, a mighty iron shroud,

death

Steadfast to duty, all unconsciously

Grown to a hero, -mourn for him whose

soul,

Shrined in a noble frame, had conquered

fear.

Let England grieve for these her gallant

sons

Untimely gone, and grieve with them who weep

With her admiral and crew she sank be- A loss irreparable with bitter tears.

low!

Do you deem they should have died

On a fierce and reddened tide,

In the fury and the glory of the fight?

With the ensign shot to rags,
And with striking of the flags

From Blackwood's Magazine. THE RELIGION OF LETTERS, 1750-1850.

| and fiction, and selecting some familiar figures from the crowded canvas, let us see what they can tell us of the way in which religion was regarded, since they are to some extent imbued with the same spirit—the spirit of their age. It is not from the professed theologian, as we have before said, that we have most to learn. Seminarists, students, and ministers of religion of whatever or less

WHEN We seek to understand what may be called the spirit of any age in matters of religion, it is not in the sayings and writings of professed theologians and divines, and still less in the utterances of religious disputants and leaders of parties, that we shall most surely discern it, but rather in the attitude of mind of thoughtful men outside creed, must needs be more the arena of controversy men of let-guided by class prejudices and governed ters perhaps, but men of diverse inter- by class interests. They may instruct, ests and varied aims, who have no exhort, and convince, but they cannot personal ends to be served, no waver- give that unconscious impression, that ing disciples to conciliate, no law of casual revelation of a prevalent taste, edification to be observed. which, like some old portrait in an antiquated dress, recalls the manners and transports us into the society of a by

It is true that those who for practical purposes are most opposed to one another have frequently most in common. | gone age. Times of great religious disturbance are fruitful in instances of men who would have sent one another to the stake as the almost necessary expression of an equally fervent faith and an equally deep-seated intolerance conscience striking, as it were, the same note, though on minds of different metal. Nevertheless it is true that the temper of the religious enthusiast is that of a protest and a revolt, and it cannot be regarded as a reliable interpretation of the spirit of his times. If the history of a nation is found in its national songs, the history of its religion is written in no misleading character in dialogue and anecdote, in epistolary literature, in poetry and fiction.

But

In 1760-80 Methodism had not spent its first fervor. Wesley was preaching up and down the country, and Newton and Cowper were writing their hymns at Olney. It was a flame, however, which, like a hearth fire, spread most rapidly in the open; it leapt from hamlet to hamlet, it was kindled in the hearts of cottagers and artisans. though here and there this new religion numbered the rich and influential amongst its converts, it was for the most part despised or distrusted by the more highly educated members of the community; it affronted the orthodoxy of a political episcopate, and scandalized the sober-minded Anglicanism of the day. Evangelicalism within the At this end of the nineteenth cen- Church was as yet confined to a small tury, when religious activities are ab- minority, and the prevalent religion sorbing men's minds, and to some was that of cushioned pews, didactic extent usurping the place of contem- discourses, and comfortable divines; plative piety, it may not be uninterest- for the most part too well content with ing to cast our eyes back to a period this present world to awaken any ennot as yet too far removed from our thusiasm demanding personal and probto the days of Dr. Johnson and ably inconvenient sacrifices. Of many Goldsmith, of the Coleridges and of the parochial clergy Crabbe probaCharles Lamb, of Wordsworth and bly drew a faithful portrait when he Southey, of De Quincey and Miss Aus- wrote of his "vicar : ten,

own'

-a period beginning with the publication of the first portion of "The Rambler" in 1750, and ending in the religious and literary revolutions of the early decades of this present century. Glancing at some pages of biography

:

Mild were his doctrines, and not one dis

It sprang from innovation; it was then
He spake of mischief made by restless men.
Habit with him was all the test of truth:

It must be right; I've done it from my
youth.

Sir Walter Scott, that magician of the past, was indeed, at the opening of the nineteenth century, to fire the imagination of the young by his vivid presentations of a bygone faith; but though no writer has more forcibly portrayed the temper of the religious enthusiast, and the powerful influence which passionate self-sacrificing devotion to a creed may exercise upon the minds and fortunes of men, he was averse (almost to the point of intolerance) to any strong manifestation of religious feeling. "I have been always careful," he writes in his diary, "to place my mind in the most tranquil posture it can assume during my private exercises of devotion." He purposely refrained from indulging his imagination on spiritual subjects, and his religion has been described as cold and conventional, but it was of a nature which could well withstand the repeated strokes of adversity. It triumphed alike over bodily weakness and failing mental powers, and found its truest expression in his last conscious words of leave-taking to Lockhart. 66 'My dear, be a good man, be virtuous, be religious,- be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here."

land went so far as to wish to discover painted glass and cobwebs; but such anticipations were naturally doomed to disappointment at a time when an old oak chest was the only relic of autiquity allowed within the house, and that had been put away in a corner of the spare bedroom. Medievalism, whether in architecture or religion, had given way to a desire for utility and convenience. Whitewash had done its work both literally and metaphorically. A sense of propriety restrained religious impulses, and the Methodist revival was condemned by contemporary divines writing from the precincts of rectories and orthodoxy, as a "spiritual influenza" which could not but be repugnant to all reasonable persons. We may well feel sure, as we turn over the voluminous pages of these longforgotten sermons, that they were in no danger of catching the complaint. It was a common belief, not uncharac teristic of the times, that poor Cowper was driven mad by too much religion; whereas, to those who knew him best, it was evident that it was to the consolations of religion alone he owed his intervals of peace and sanity. But a life spent in good works, in prayer and psalm-singing, would not improbably strike an unawakened conscience as inconsistent with the rational occupations of an educated man.

Hannah More, whom we are perhaps In his romances he had painted rather too apt to think of merely as a Catholicism in some of its attractive writer of tracts and a Sunday-school aspects, but it was with the pencil of teacher, was at first almost as much the artist, not the pen of the disciple, afraid of Methodism as if she had been and in his diary he expresses a hope a bishop. She was naturally fond of that " unopposed the Catholic super- society, an agreeable woman, the friend stition may sink into dust." In Great of Johnson, Garrick, Horace Walpole, Britain, at least, it would have seemed and Sir Joshua Reynolds; and she benot impossible that his wish might began her literary career by writing vers fulfilled; so far as practical use was de société and dramas, brought out with concerned, it was as yet as much a success upon the stage under Garrick's thing of the past as the ruined abbeys supervision. It is true that, even in scattered about the country, or the those days, she had scruples as to foldiscarded suits of armor which had lowing some of the customs of the fashhung upon their walls. We find, it is ionable world. When there was to be true, that General Tilney talked of music on Sunday evening, Garrick preserving the Gothic forms of the called her "a Sunday woman," and windows in Northanger Abbey with advised her to retire to her room-he reverential care, and Catherine Mor- would recall her when the music was

over; and when Horace Walpole was all up to vice and barbarism?" To do ill he sent her a book as a peace-offer- him justice, the bishop appears to have ing, and said, "I am sorry I scolded been able to contemplate the dangerous poor Hannah More for being so reli- possibility which she feels honestly gious; I hope she will forgive me." obliged to put before him, without But it is clear that her religion was not alarm. Indeed, at a time when many of a character to cause any constraint parishes had no resident curate (though, between herself and her friends from as Hannah remarks, the livings were whom she differed. She could bear to worth nearly £50 a year), one would be scolded and laughed at, and could have imagined that the bishops might lightly wrest her critics' weapons from have had greater difficulties to contend them in self-defence. Though so often with than a superabundance of zeal. deprived of the social life and surround- Clerical activity was, generally speak; ings most congenial to her, passing her ing, at a low ebb. And yet when we summers amongst the rough miners of go outside what may be called the Cheddar and stocking-makers of Ax-"profession"— leaving out of account bridge, writing tracts with unprepos- also those many devoted and saintly sessing titles, "The Two Shoemakers," characters who pursued their calling "Black Giles the Poacher," etc., she untouched by the worldliness and Erasyet never got out of touch with the cul- tianism of the day what truth and ture and society of her day; and though simplicity of faith, what unaffected Sydney Smith might find easy subjects piety, do we not find blossoming sponfor ridicule in many pages of her last taneously in unexpected places! It secular literary effort of any impor- wears indeed a sober livery which is tance, "Celebs in Search of a Wife," somewhat out of date; it expresses it, it went through no less than thirty edi- self in more or less sententious lantions before her death, and was eagerly guage, but it obtains the respect even read not only by those members of the of those least likely to put it into pracfashionable world against whose habits tice. It may be somewhat ponderous, of life and modes of thought it was but it is never contemptible; and we principally directed, but also by influen- are not at all surprised to be told, for tial critics and leaders of public opin- instance, that the Vicar of Wakefield ion, who, many of them, authoritatively did not preach to his fellow-prisoners confirmed the popular verdict. That a in vain, but that "after less than six woman with so many special gifts, and days some were penitent and all were wielding so facile a pen, should give attentive.' herself up to the work of reclaiming Religion was not, in fact, treated the vicious and teaching the ignorant, even by worldly people with superficial is a strong testimony to the force of levity; it was not lightly attacked or religious principle, all the more remark-defended, and with a certain quiet digable since Hannah and her sisters werenity it took the first place, as of right, neither fanatics nor enthusiasts. Inde-in the minds of serious men. Not of fatigable workers, they took up the those only especially dedicated to its task which was being left undone with service (such dedication, as we shall relentless energy, and they carried it see further on, was often of but little on with unabated zeal and persever-account), but rather as the supreme ance. They defended the excesses of principle acknowledged if not obeyed their followers without acrimony, even by "those ingenious persons and blamed, without exaggeration, the called wits," in which, as Vaughan apathy of those who should have been says in his day, the kingdom "did their chief supporters. "Can the pos- abound." To take one familiar examsibility that a few should become en- ple: Dr. Johnson as we know him, thusiastic," Hannah writes to the bishop says one of his biographers, was a man in defence of her converts, "be justly of the world, though a religious man of pleaded as an argument for giving them the world. His feelings, at once deep

ungainly boyhood to the seat of the social lawgiver and moralist.

and fervid, were wholly penetrated by almost at once from the season of raw, a sense of awe and reverence which forbade any suspicion of levity, even when his mode of approaching religious subjects may strike the modern reader as somewhat grotesque. His profound constitutional melancholy was mitigated but hardly lightened by a piety which quickened his affections, regulated in some important particulars his manner of life, and brought into active operation all the latent tenderness of his nature.

For any religious sentiment degenerating into sentimentality he had indeed, even in his youth, an especial abhorrence. He viewed it with somewhat of the same spirit in which he heard Boswell describe his sensibility to certain strains of music, as being so great as to make him ready to shed tears. "Sir," he replied, "I should never hear it if it made me such a fool." It was at Oxford that, after reading Indeed, unless his own heart were Law's "Serious Call," he wrote in his touched, he was intolerant of what he diary: This was the first occasion of was inclined to consider an affectamy thinking in carnest of religion after tion of feeling in others. When Miss I became capable of rational inquiry." Monkton, for instance, declared herself But doubtless the soil was well pre-affected by the pathos of Sterne's writpared; he had a devout nature and a ings, he made the well-known rejoinder, religious mother, and the impressions" Why, that is because, dearest, you which precede rational inquiry have are a dunce.' Yet his personal piety, not infrequently a more tenacious hold and the tenderness of his nature, break upon the character than those which through the laws of self-restraint, and come after. Dr. Johnson, we may well give a pathetic and individual character believe, might have moralized in the not only to his many acts of charity, nursery, and to the end of his life he but to his private meditations and deretained more of the heart of the child votions. than the spirit of youth. Indeed the period between boyhood and manhood was so clouded by misfortune and embittered by privation that he was from the first a stranger and a pilgrim, ever reaching forward to the point upon which his ambitions were centred, with no inclination to snatch at legitimate distractions or dally by the way. “Ah, sir, I was mad and violent," he said of himself, referring to his college days. "It was bitterness which they mistook for frolick. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my literature and wit; so I disregarded all power and all authority." And

when, after leaving Oxford, he sought to earn his bread by the drudgery of teaching, during the period of precarious and apparently hopeless struggle for a modest competency in Birmingham and in London, he had little opportunity to indulge in the lighter amusements or pleasures of youth. Looking back, we catch but casual glimpses of his individuality at this time, and he seems to us to have passed

His strong prejudices, indeed, were vented in many outbursts of religious intolerance, of which one of the most characteristic is reported by Mrs. Knowles, who declares that, on hear ing a certain young lady had become a Quaker, he exclaimed, “Madam, she is an odious wench." And when a hope was expressed that he would meet with her in another world, he replied that he was not fond of meeting fools any where. But the outward asperities of speech could not disguise the goodness of his heart, and Edmund Burke's ver dict upon him finds a ready echo in the minds of those who knew him best. "It is well if, when a man comes to die, he has nothing heavier upon his conscience than having been a little rough in his conversation.”

In his writings upon religious subjects he is often didactic and commonplace, but he is never otherwise than earnest and sincere. The adjuncts of a hardly won celebrity had endangered neither the purity of his motives nor the simplicity of his faith. To the last