over; and when Horace Walpole was all up to vice and barbarism?" To do

-

characters who pursued their calling untouched by the worldliness and Erastianism of the day what truth and simplicity of faith, what unaffected piety, do we not find blossoming spoutaneously in unexpected places ! It wears indeed a sober livery which, is somewhat out of date; it expresses it, self in more or less sententious language, but it obtains the respect even of those least likely to put it into practice. It may be somewhat ponderous, but it is never contemptible; and we are not at all surprised to be told, for instance, that the Vicar of Wakefield did not preach to his fellow-prisoners in vain, but that "after less than six days some were penitent and all were attentive."

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, i 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,' ," "Black Giles the Poacher," etc., she yet never got out of touch with the culture and society of her day; and though Sydney Smith might find easy subjects for ridicule in many pages of her last secular literary effort of any importance, "Cœlebs in Search of a Wife," it went through no less than thirty editions before her death, and was eagerly read not only by those members of the fashionable world against whose habits of life and modes of thought it was principally directed, but also by influential critics and leaders of public opinion, who, many of them, authoritatively confirmed the popular verdict. That a woman with so many special gifts, and wielding so facile a pen, should give 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 were nity 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

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.

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

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 earnest 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 hearing 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 verdict 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

And though he

may speak of death and hell and judgment, we find it for the most part easy to follow his advice. But though a man of the world, it would not have been possible to Dr. Johnson.

he religiously kept the anniversary of men of the world." his wife's death as a day of self-examination and prayer, and his thoughts and supplications followed her with believing fidelity into another world. This very simplicity of heart forbids the reticence natural to more complex charac- To the last his deepest feelings were ters. It never occurred to him to avoid concerned with things eternal. He an open profession, or to lower his made three requests to Sir Joshua Reystandard, lest it should be the occasion nolds-that he would read the Bible, of surprise or contempt. Though not forgive a debt of thirty pounds, and apt to parade either a weakness or a never paint on Sundays. He met virtue, he was ready enough to acknowl- death, of which he had so often conedge either the one or the other when fessed his fear, with the calmness and opportunity served. When Boswell courage of a Christian. He had delamented that he was troubled by occa- sired the presence of a minister of God, sional inclinations to narrowness, there and with characteristic energy directed came at once the rejoinder, "Why, sir, the form of ministration which he deso am I, but I do not tell it." Nor was sired; a curious sense of his own imhe shy of bringing his religion to bear portance mingling with the reverence openly upon the ordinary transactions with which he approached the gate of of life. When he found it intolerably immortality. "Pray louder, sir,” he irksome to redeem his literary pledges, said to the clergyman "pray louder, he did not hesitate to pray earnestly or you pray in vain ;" and shortly after, against the sin of sloth; and whenever he faintly uttered his last words, "God he received the sacrament, he made a bless you, my dear," to the daughter of fresh resolution against trifling away an old friend who knelt beside his bed. his time. When a deputation of book- They were a touching and appropriate sellers came to treat with him on Easter close to a life based upon religious eve, he confessed to them that he had a principles, and abounding in human scruple about doing business on that sympathies. He may have been, as day. When he left Mrs. Thrales's Boswell says, "a majestick teacher of house at Streatham, of which he had moral and religious wisdom;" but it is been so long an inmate, he read a chap-not from his writings, nor even from ter of the Greek Testament in the library, and in a solemn prayer invoked a blessing upon the house and its inhabitants. There is something in these formal and yet simple acknowledgments of belief and dependence which strikes one as essentially unmodern. It is His religion had been throughout his hardly too much to say that intimate life intensely personal. We may say contact with a person to whom such that he was a Tory and a Churchman, proceedings were so natural as to be but the one assertion would convey matters of course, would be apt to cause about as little definite meaning as the the ordinary Christian of the present other to those who in these days call day some embarrassment. We talk a themselves by the same names. His good deal upon religious subjects, but conceptions of church membership we are careful to discuss them more or would probably shock the modern Anless superficially. We should feel it anglican as much as his charities would indelicacy to disclose our deeper feeling have affronted the notions of the modeven to intimate friends. "Let us talkern philanthropist. To squander undeof these things," says a lawyer upon his deathbed in a work of modern fiction" let us approach the subject as

his authoritative speech upon such subjects, that we have most to learn, but rather from those chance revelations of a true and noble nature which are so thickly scattered upon the pages of his biography.

served benefits upon the drunken and ungrateful has, to our enlightened common sense, a certain flavor of im

morality; whilst we may well believe | was reluctantly compelled to interrupt that the sight of the uncouth figure his courtship to pass a Sunday at his wandering about London streets to living, we are not surprised to find that thrust pennies into the hands of sleep- the old frontispiece to "Northauger ing vagrant children, would have roused Abbey" represents him as rushing up the righteous indignation of the Charity the stairs brandishing a riding-whip, in Organization Society had it been in a costume which is a mixture of the existence. But philanthropy had not brigand and the jockey. Miss Austen, as yet been systematized. Think of again, would seem to have had no fault the excellent Vicar of Wakefield, for to find with the way in which Mr. Elinstance, as he describes in a few lines ton passed his mornings in a lady's the daily life of an exemplary country drawing-room, reading poetry and makclergyman: "The year was spent in ing charades, provided only he had moral or rural amusement; in visiting been in love with the right young our rich neighbors and relieving such lady. as were poor. We had no revolutions Yet though the clerical standard was to fear, no fatigues to undergo! All in many instances so low, the general our adventures were by the fireside, tone in regard to the highest subjects and all our migrations from the blue was one of grave responsibility and unbed to the brown." What a placid and impassioned but serious interest. It peaceful existence ! Undisturbed by was the key-note both of Coleridge's religious controversy; without any pa- mysticism and Wordsworth's philosorochial machinery needing to be di-phy. And without entering into those rected; with no temperance societies wide subjects, which are both above and soup-kitchens, no mothers' meet- and beyond our scope, let us take at ings and men's clubs, which now break in upon the leisure of the most phlegmatic parish priest. Incidentally, what a curious insight do we also obtain of the same clerical and rural life in later times from Miss Austen, herself a rector's daughter! Take the description, for example, of Charles Hayter's living in "Persuasion:" "In the centre of some of the best preserves in the kingdom, surrounded by three great proprietors, each more careful and jealous than the other; and to two of the three, at least, Charles Hayter might get a special recommendation. Not that he will value it as he ought; Charles is too cool about sporting. That's the worst of him." It is true that the clergy could not always avoid professional calls, for "even the clergyman," says Mrs. Clay -"even the clergyman, you know, is obliged to go into infected rooms, and expose his health and looks to all the injury of a poisonous atmosphere;" but it would appear as if such unpleasant avocations occupied but a small portion of their time. Henry Tilney certainly did not let them stand in the way of more agreeable engagements, and though he

hazard one or two indications of a like spirit animating a brother poet. Think of Southey with his vivid imagination and all the visions of youth before him, and the fever of authorship working in his brain; Southey, who already as a schoolboy had some idea of continuing Ovid's "Metamorphoses," and planned six books to complete the "Faery Queen;" Southey, already at nineteen the author of elegies and heroic epistles, and of "Joan of Arc," an epic in twelve books, written in six weeks; with a high and yet withal modest conviction of his poetic mission and literary gifts; and still, when there is a question of his entering the Church of England ministry, he cries, “God knows, I would exchange every intellectual gift which he has blessed me with, for implicit faith to have been able to do this." There is an impressive deliberation about such faithful utterances which one would rather have supposed to be the result of a judgment sobered by experience, a fancy chastened by disappointment. When Coleridge, writing a little later of a friend's death, observes that in consequence, "We are all more reli

gious than we were. praised for all things,"

God be ever as with those infant twins of whom he we feel as if afterwards wrote:

the presence of death were hardly needed to deepen the spiritual influ

ences which made the unseen world to them an ever-present reality. Wordsworth's "We are Seven" was but a familiar illustration of their creed. "I have five children," Southey wrote in 1809, "three of them at home, and two of them under my mother's care in heaven." And already at thirty-five he could write, "No man can be better contented with his lot. My paths are paths of pleasantness. Still the instability of human happiness is ever before my eyes; I long for the certain and the permanent." And at forty, "I doubt whether the strictest Carthusian has the thought of death more habitually in his mind.”

God only made them for his Christ to save.
Their very cradle was the hopeful grave,

Poor Hartley! with his unstable will,
his recurrent and unavailing remorse,
perhaps because of his very imperfec-
tions, he lets us, more intimately than
a wiser or a better man might have
done, into the secrets of his spiritual
life. What a pathetic interest attaches
to his hopes and his failures! Wasted
by disease, pursued by remorse, at last
relinquishing the faith with which it is
perhaps most dangerous to part
belief in his own possibilities for good

the

how vividly he paints his own sense of unworthiness in the well-known lines on the fly-leaf of one of the books of his boyhood :—

When I received this volume small,

My years were barely seventeen,
When it was hoped I should be all
Which once, alas! I might have been.
And now my years are thirty-five,

And every mother hopes her lamb
And every happy child alive,

We might indeed say that these are merely the expressions of a mind as unusually rich in pure spiritual perceptions as in high poetic gifts; nevertheless there is an atmosphere, moral and religious, which insensibly affects persons of very different orders and diverse or inferior gifts. It is not in the May never be what now I am. nature of a violent revolutionary awakening, and it has a more limited influ- There is no trace of the popular selfence, but within a slowly widening delusion of the morbid penitent. His circle it does a work of a deeper and life is, in his own eyes, an unsightly more permanent character. When we ruin of "things incomplete and purread of little Hartley Coleridge, for in- poses betrayed;" he can see no beauty stance, calling himself, whilst still in in the wild flowers which have sprung the nursery, "a boy of a very religious up about it. In his boyhood he had turn," we feel as if there must have already written of himself as fearing to been some unseen springs at work, or nourish "a self-love already too strong, some hereditary predisposition, to ac- and the worst of self-love, a respect for count for this unusual precocity; espe- the faults of self;" but we may truly cially when we hear that with his say it was an error into which he never nurse by his side he prayed extempore fell among all the melancholy failings every night—not, we may observe, of later years. Indeed, even in his until he was safely and comfortably youth he seemed occasionally to reach tucked up in his bed, thus curiously a vantage-ground, some spot of solid foreshadowing at once the piety and the self-indulgence of his later years. What unfulfilled promises cluster about his life from the moment of his birth, when, though his mother called him "an ugly red thing," his father took him in his arms and said, "There is no sweeter baby anywhere than this!" Happy perhaps if it had been with him

earth on which to plant his wavering feet, from whence he could look down upon the temptations and lapses of his past with a severe but dispassionate judgment. "You must be aware," he writes to his father upon one of these occasions, "that the pain arising from the contemplation of a life misspent is often the cause of continuance in mis