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The headlong current flies,

As do the sparkling rays of two fair eyes.

IV.

Do not thyself betray
With wantonizing years;
O beauty, traitor gay!
Thy melting life that wears,
Appearing, disappears;
And with thy flying days

Ends all thy good of price, thy fair of praise.

V.

Trust not, vain creditor,

Thy apt-deceived view,
In thy false counsellor,
That never tells thee true.
Thy form and flatter'd hue,
Which shall so soon transpass,

Is far more fair than is thy looking-glass.

Enjoy thy April now,

VI.

Whilst it doth freely shine;

This lightning flash and show,

With that clear spirit of thine,

Will suddenly decline;

And you fair murth'ring eyes

Shall be love's tombs, where now his cradle lies.

VII.

Old trembling age will come

With wrinkl'd cheeks and stains,

With motion troublesome;

With skin and bloodless veins,

That lively visage reaven,

And made deform'd and old,

Hates sight of glass it lov'd so to behold.

VIII.

Thy gold and scarlet shall

Pale silver-colour be,

Thy row of pearls shall fall

Like wither'd leaves from tree;

And thou shalt shortly see

Thy face and hair to grow

All plough'd with furrows, over-swol'n with snow.

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The rose, of flowers the eye!

Both wither in the air,

Their beauteous colours die;

And so at length shall lie,

Depriv'd of former grace,

The lillies of thy breasts, the roses of thy face.

XI.

What then will it avail,

O youth advised ill!

In lap of beauty frail

To nurse a wayward will,

Like snake in sun-warm hill?

Pluck, pluck betime thy flow'r,

That springs, and parcheth in one short hour."

ART. III.-God's Plea for Nineveh; or, London's Precedent for Mercy. Delivered in certain Sermons within the City of London. By Thomas Reeve, Bachelor in Divinity.

Woe unto thee, oh Jerusalem, wilt thou not be made clean? when shall it once be? Jer. 13. 27.

Return, return, oh Shulamite: Return, return, that we may look upon thee. Cant. 6. 13.

Then said he to the dresser of the vineyard, behold this three years I come seeking for fruit on this fig-tree, and find none; cut it down,

why cumbreth it the ground? And he answering said unto him, Lord let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it and dung it; and if it bear fruit, well; and if not, then thou shalt after that cut it down. Luke 13. 7, 8, 9.

Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the Lord. Let us lift our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens. Lament.

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3. 40, 41.

Noli negligere, quòd vos prius Dominus peccantes sustinet; quia quantò diutius exspectat, ut emenderis, tantò graviùs judicabit si neglexeris. Aug. de util. Pan. ag. Quot habuit in se oblectamenta, tot habuit holocausta; convertit in numerum virtutum, numerum criminum. Jeron. hom. 33 in Evang.

London: Printed by William Wilson, for Thomas Reeve, living at the Bunch of Grapes, in Chancery Lane, near Lincoln's Inn. 1657.

This is a singular theological plant which flourished in the city during the time of the Commonwealth, and partakes a little of the gloominess of the atmosphere in which it vegetated. The author, an apprentice in divinity, a slip of one of the universities, and a preacher of repentance, was a man of great tenacity of purpose and invincible perseverance in action-qualities highly necessary for the production of a work like this. It is dedicated to one Thomas Rich, Esquire, whom Reeve calls his honoured friend, and a very eminent citizen of London. We shall endeavour to give an account of this book, so far as it is possible to describe what is so strange and so irregular. Although we learn from the title page, that the Plea was delivered in certain sermons, it is impossible to find any convenient divisions, or stages in it; it is, in fact, a huge discourse, one enormous lecture-the very Leviathan of sermons, on the repentance of Nineveh, as described in the book of Jonah.

"And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?" Jonah 4. 11. The design is to make London, which is described as a Nineveh in corruption, a Nineveh in repentance: the author has adopted the following ingenious mode of treating his subject.

1. A digging for water, and should not

2. A spring-head, I

3. The stream which should flow from it, spare
4. The channel in which it should run,

Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot,

&c.

The last part is, at page 61, subdivided thus:

"Now let us come to the channel; Nineveh, that great city, &c." in which words there are three things considerable, 1. The name of a place, Nineveh,

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2. The nature of the place, that great city,
3. The description of it, wherein are more, &c.

The two last divisions are again subdivided, the second into three and the third into six more divisions. Indeed this part of his text affords him great scope, and he dilates upon it with infinite satisfaction and amazing perseverance through nearly three hundred pages more, dwelling with all possible minuteness upon every topic which is, or can be, in any sort of way connected with the subject. Happy man he is! full of his subject, and his subject full of matter, and his matter full of importance; but how he could contrive, with all these appliances and means to boot," to spin out his sermon to such an enormous length is truly surprising. Dr. Isaac Barrow pressed hard against the patience of the citizens of London, when he once preached a sermon of three hours long; but Thomas Reeve must have preached for three weeks together, before he could have bestowed the full benefit of his text on his auditors; and the most assiduous, patient, and practised saint or sinner must have been parched up in his Lecture solstice. A sermon is in general but a very dry affair, but we entreat our readers not to. alarm themselves at the threatening aspect of worthy Thomas Reeve's title page; the lambent flame of dulness plays not around his head, and flatness and insipidity are strangers to his pages. God's Plea for Nineveh is any thing but dull; it is full of spirit, though of an extravagant kind, and is occasionally, if not eloquent, something very much like it, and would have really been so, if it had been chastened by a better taste. There was a sort of eloquence amongst our nonconforming preachers (and it still prevails in certain classes of them) which may be called physical, arising more from a passionate and vehement temperament than from intellectual power, and which, although despised by the educated and refined, yet produced considerable effect on the persons to whom it was more especially addressed. It is fervid, earnest, and above all, has the appearance of sincerity, of being the result of heart-felt conviction. It abounds generally with imagery; is garnished with flowers of rhetoric, hastily collected and rudely thrown together; its passionate tone is made more solemn, and its denunciations more awful, by frequent quotations from holy writ. This species of eloquence, to the uninformed and moody votary, is deeply impressive, overwhelming by its paroxysms and convincing by its vehemence; it vanquishes the feelings,

but has little to do with the reasoning faculty. To the vehement declamation of this class, Reeve bears a nearer resemblance, than to that bold, rich, and manly eloquence, at once addressed to the heart and the understanding, which distinguishes some of our ancient theologians, and one or two that we could name of our modern preachers. Reeve possessed an ardent disposition, a volubility of language, and a vehemence of expression, which, in conjunction with great information and a tinge of the gloomy spirit of religion, has produced a singular combination both of matter and style. His mode of teaching is more common than eligible; he would lash us into repentance and crush us into goodness. He seems to think the work but half done if he only annihilate sin; there must be some " spiritual contusion." The peni tent," says he, "must be as it were for a while in hell, and feel, though not specifically, yet analogically, some of the torments of the damned, before he can have a sense of inward satisfaction!" Thus he would rather anoint and irritate the wound with caustic, than pour into it balm or soothing oil. Fear, and not reason, is his instrument of conversion, and he uses it like a scalping knife, to revenge and disfigure, rather than to reclaim and amend. He is not the man to entice children from play and old men from the chimney corner, with the sweet food of sweetly uttered knowledge, with words of hope and promises of love; he would drive them into the sanctuary, terrify them with his theological trumpet, blast them with his pulpit lightning. "If people would be saved," says he, "they must sit out a threatning sermon, and hear a rebuking priest with patience, saying, with Boniface, to Saint Augustine, I receive thy words full of truth with trembling, though every sentence doth seem to scourge me:'" and, indeed, he speaks loud enough and long enough to exercise the patience of the best disposed auditory. "The lion hath roared, who can but fear?" He scatters his denunciations with a prodigal hand, without order or selection, at one time terrible, at another extravagant or puerile; he sometimes startles us with a rapid succession of interrogations, and at others with his quick transition from allusion to allusion-from story to story; his similitudes and illustrations are drawn from homely, and, not unfrequently, striking objects, but then they are ordinarily without justness or propriety in the situations in which they are placed. Reeve's diction is florid and wordy, coarse and indelicate, but occasionally strong and manly; and we sometimes meet with new expressions (for he has a mint in which he can coin words at his own sovereign pleasure) and new combinations of old ones. But he never appears to be satisfied until he has exhausted his epithets, being chiefly solicitous to

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