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have been the cause of vice and misery to their fellowcreatures? Could we endure for a moment to think that a spirit, like Bishop Taylor's, burning with Chris tian love; that a man constitutionally overflowing with pleasurable kindliness; who scarcely even in a casual illustration introduces the image of woman, child, or bird, but he embalms the thought with so rich a tenderness, as makes the very words seem beauties and fragments of poetry from a Euripides or Simonides;can we endure to think, that a man so natured and so disciplined, did at the time of composing this horrible picture, attach a sober feeling of reality to the phrases? or that he would have described in the same tone of justification, in the same luxuriant flow of phrases, the tortures about to be inflicted on a living individual by a verdict of the Star-Chamber? or the still more atrocious sentences executed on the Scotch anti-prelatists and schismatics, at the command, and in some instances under the very eye of the Duke of Lauderdale, and of that wretched bigot who afterwards dishonoured and forfeited the throne of Great Britain? Or do we not rather feel and understand, that these violent words were mere bubbles, flashes and electrical apparitions, from the magic cauldron of a fervid and ebullient fancy, constantly fuelled by an unexampled opulence of language?

Ye aiblins might-I dinna ken

Still bae a stake

I'm wae to think upon yon den,
Ev'n for your sake!

I need not say that these thoughts, which are here dilated, were in such a company only rapidly suggested. Our kind host smiled, and with a courteous compliment observed, that the defence was too good for the cause. My voice faultered a little, for I was somewhat agitated; though not so much on my own account as for the uneasiness that so kind and friendly a man would feel from the thought that he had been the occasion of disAt length I brought out these words: « I tressing me. must now confess, Sir! that I am author of that Poem. It was written some years ago. I do not attempt to justify my past self, young as I then was; but as little as I would now write a similar poem, so far was I even then from imagining, that the lines would be taken as more or less than a sport of fancy. At all events, if I know my own heart, there was never a moment in my existence in which I should have been more ready, had Mr Pitt's person been in hazard, to interpose my own body, and defend his life at the risk of my own.>>

I have prefaced the Poem with this anecdote, because to have printed it without any remark might well have been understood as implying an unconditional approWere I now to have read by myself for the first time bation on my part, and this after many years consideration. But if it be asked why I re-published it at all? the Poem in question, my conclusion, I fully believe, would be, that the writer must have been some man of I answer, that the Poem had been attributed at different times to different other persons; and what I had dared warm feelings and active fancy; that he had painted to himself the circumstances that accompany war in so beget, I thought it neither manly nor honourable not to dare farther. From the same motives I should have many vivid and yet fantastic forms, as proved that neither the images nor the feelings were the result of ob- published perfect copies of two Poems, the one entitled The Devil's Thoughts, and the other The Two Round servation, or in any way derived from realities. I should judge, that they were the product of his own seething Spaces on the Tomb-Stone, but that the three first stanzas of the former, which were worth all the rest of the imagination, and therefore impregnated with that pleasurable exultation which is experienced in all energetic poem, and the best stanza of the remainder, were written by a friend of deserved celebrity; and because there exertion of intellectual power; that in the same mood are passages in both, which might have given offence to he had generalized the causes of the war, and then perthe religious feelings of certain readers. I myself insonified the abstract, and christened it by the name deed see no reason why vulgar superstitions, and absurd which he had been accustomed to hear most often asI should conceptions that deform the pure faith of a Christian, sociated with its management and measures. guess that the minister was in the author's mind at the should possess a greater immunity from ridicule than moment of composition, as completely and, avat-stories of witches, or the fables of Greece and Rome. μócaрxos, as Anacreon's grasshopper, and that he had as little notion of a real person of flesh and blood,

Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,

4

as Milton had in the grim and terrible phantoms (half
person, half allegory) which he has placed at the gates
of Hell. I concluded by observing, that the Poem was
not calculated to excite passion in any mind, or to
make any impression except on poetic readers; and that
from the culpable levity, betrayed at the close of the
Eclogue by the grotesque union of epigrammatic wit
with allegoric personification, in the allusion to the
most fearful of thoughts, I should conjecture that the
«rantin' Bardie,» instead of really believing, much less
wishing, the fate spoken of in the last line, in applica-
tion to any human individual, would shrink from pass-
ing the verdict even on the Devil himself, and exclaim
with poor Burns,

But fare ye weel, auld Nickie-ben!.
Oh! wad ye tak a thought an' men'!

But there are those who deem it profaneness and irreverence to call an ape an ape, if it but wear a monk's cowl on its head; and I would rather reason with this weakness than offend it.

The passage from Jeremy Taylor to which I referred,. is found in his second Sermon on Christ's Advent to Judgment; which is likewise the second in his year's course of sermons. Among many remarkable passages of the same character in those discourses, I have selected this as the most so. But when this Lion of the tribe of Judah shall appear, then Justice shall strike and Mercy shall not hold her hands; she shall strike sore strokes, and Pity shall not break the blow. As there are treasures of good things, so hath God a treasure of wrath and fury, and scourges and scorpions; and then shall be produced the shame of Lust and the malice of Envy, and the groans of the oppressed and the persecn-s tions of the saints, and the cares of Covetousness and the troubles of Ambition, and the indolence of traitors and the 'violences of rebels, and the rage of anger and the uneasiness of impatience, and the restlessness of un

lawful desires; and by this time the monsters and diseases will be numerous and intolerable, when God's heavy hand shall press the sanies and the intolerableness, the obliquity and the unreasonableness, the amazement and the disorder, the smart and the sorrow, the guilt and the punishment, out from all our sins, and pour them into one chalice, and mingle them with an infinite wrath, and make the wicked drink of all the vengeance, and force it down their unwilling throats with the violence of devils and accursed spirits.»>

careful re-perusal could discover, any other meaning, either in Milton or Taylor, but that good men will be rewarded, and the impenitent wicked punished, in proportion to their dispositions and intentional acts in this life; and that if the punishment of the least wicked be fearful beyond conception, all words and descriptions must be so far true, that they must fall short of the punishment that awaits the transcendently wicked. Had Milton stated either his ideal of virtue, or of depravity, as an individual or individuals actually existing? Cerfainly not! Is this representation worded historically, or only hypothetically? Assuredly the latter! Does he express it as his own wish, that after death they should suffer these tortures? or as a general consequence, deduced from reason and revelation, that such will be their fate? Again, the latter only! His wish is expressly confined to a speedy stop being put by Providence to their power of inflicting misery on others! But did he name or refer to any persons, living or dead? No! But the calumniators of Milton dare say (for what will calumny not dare say?) that he had LAUD and STAFFORD in his mind, while writing of remorseless persecution, and the enslavement of a free country, from motives of selfish ambition. Now, what if a stern anti-prelatist should dare say, that in speaking of the insolencies of traitors and the violences of rebels, Bishop Taylor must have individualised in his mind, HAMPden, Hollis, Pym, FAIRFAX, IRETON, and MILTON? And what if he should take the liberty of concluding, that, in the after description, the Bishop was feeding and feasting his party-hatred, and with those individuals before the eyes of his ima gination enjoying, trait by trait, horror after horror, the picture of their intolerable agonies? Yet this bigot would have an equal right thus to criminate the one good and great man, as these men have to criminate the other. Milton has said, and I doubt not but that Taylor with equal truth could have said it, that in his whole

That this Tartarean drench displays the imagination rather than the discretion of the compounder; that, in short, this passage and others of the kind are in a bad taste, few will deny at the present day. It would doubt-❘ less have more behoved the good bishop not to be wise beyond what is written, on a subject in which Eternity is opposed to Time, and a death threatened, not the negative, but the positive Oppositive of Life; a subject, therefore, which must of necessity be indescribable to the human understanding in our present state. But I can neither find nor believe, that it ever occurred to any reader to ground on such passages a charge against BISHOP TAYLOR'S humanity, or goodness of heart. I was not a little surprised therefore to find, in the Pursuits of Literature and other works, so horrible a sentence passed on MILTON's moral character, for a passage in his prose writings, as nearly parallel to this of Taylor's as two passages can well be conceived to be. All his merits, as a poet forsooth-all the glory of having written the PARADISE LOST, are light in the scale, nay, kick the beam, compared with the atrocious malignity of heart expressed in the offensive paragraph. I remembered, in general, that Milton had concluded one of his works on Reformation, written in the fervour of his youthful imagination, in a high poetic strain, that wanted metre only to become a lyrical poem. I remembered that in the former part he had formed to himself a perfect ideal of human virtue, a character of heroic, disin-life he never spake against a man even that his skin terested zeal and devotion for Truth, Religion, and public Liberty, in Act and in Suffering, in the day of Triumph and in the hour of Martyrdom. Such spirits, as more excellent than others, he describes as having a more excellent reward, and as distinguished by a tran-repeatedly used his interest to protect the royalists; but scendent glory: and this reward and this glory he displays and particularises with an energy and brilliance that announced the Paradise Lost as plainly, as ever the bright purple clouds in the east announced the coming Milton then passes to the gloomy contrast, to such men as from motives of selfish ambition and the lust of personal aggrandisement should, against their own light, persecute truth and the true religion, and wilfully abuse the powers and gifts entrusted to them, to bring vice, blindness, misery and slavery, on their native country, on the very country that had trusted, enriched and honoured them. Such beings, after that speedy and appropriate removal from their sphere of mischief which all good and humane men must of course desire, will, he takes for granted by parity of reason, meet with a punishment, an ignominy, and a retaliation, as much severer than other wicked men, as their guilt and its consequences were more enormous. His description of this imaginary punishment presents more distinct pictures to the fancy than the extract from Jeremy Taylor; but the thoughts in the latter are incomparably more exaggerated and horrific. All this I knew; but I neither remembered, nor by reference and

of the sun.

should be grazed.» He asserted this when one of his opponents (either Bishop Hall or his nephew) had called upon the women and children in the streets to take up stones and stone him (Milton). It is known that Milton

even at a time when all lies would have been meritorious against him, no charge was made, no story pretended, that he had ever directly or indirectly engaged or assisted in their persecution. Oh! methinks there are other and far better feelings, which should be acquired by the perusal of our great elder writers. When I have before me on the same table, the works of Hammond and Baxter: when I reflect with what joy and dearness their blessed spirits are now loving each other: it seems a mournful thing that their names should be perverted to an occasion of bitterness among us, who are enjoying that happy mean which the human TooMUCH on both sides was perhaps necessary to produce. The tangle of delusions which stifled and distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away! the parasite weeds that fed on its very roots have been plucked up with a salutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant care, the gradual improvement, the cautious unhazardous labours of the industrious though contented gardener- to prune, to strengthen, to engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the slug and the caterpillar. But far be it from us to undervalue with light and sense

less detraction the conscientious hardihood of our predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence, to which the blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation or pretext. We ante-date the feelings, in order to criminate the authors, of our present Liberty, Light and Toleration.» (THE FRIEND, p. 54.)

and logic wit, and unrivalled by the most rhetorical of
the fathers in the copiousness and vividness of his ex-
pressions and illustrations,
Here words that convey
feelings, and words that flash images, and words of ab-
stract notion, flow together, and at once whirl and rush
onward like a stream, at once rapid and full of eddies;
and yet still interfused here and there, we see a tongue
or isle of smooth water, with some picture in it of earth
or sky, landscape or living group of quiet beauty.

capa

If ever two great men might seem, during their whole lives, to have moved in direct opposition, though neither of them has at any time introduced the name of the other, Milton and Jeremy Taylor were they. The former Differing, then, so widely, and almost contrariantly, commenced his career by attacking the Church-Liturgy wherein did these great men agree? wherein did they and all set forms of prayer. The latter, but far more resemble each other? In Genius, in Learning, in unsuccessfully, by defending both. Milton's next work feigned Piety, in blameless Purity of Life, and in benewas then against the Prelacy and the then existing volent aspirations and purposes for the moral and Church-Government-Taylor's in vindication and sup- temporal improvement of their fellow-creatures! Both port of them. Milton became more and more a stern of them wrote a Latin Accidence, to render education republican, or rather an advocate for that religious and more easy and less painful to children; both of them moral aristocracy which, in his day, was called repub-composed hymns and psalms proportioned to the licanism, and which, even more than royalism itself, is city of common congregations; both, nearly at the same the direct antipode of modern jacobinism. Taylor, as time, set the glorious example of publicly recommendmore and more sceptical concerning the fitness of mening and supporting general Toleration, and the Liberty in general for power, became more and more attached to the prerogatives of monarchy. From Calvinism, with a still decreasing respect for Fathers, Councils, and for Church-Antiquity in general, Milton seems to have ended in an indifference, if not a dislike, to all forms of ecclesiastic government, and to have retreated wholly into the inward and spiritual church-communion of his own spirit with the Light, that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. Taylor, with a growing reverence for authority, an increasing sense of the insufficiency of the Scriptures without the aids of tradition and the consent of authorized interpreters, advanced as far in his approaches (not indeed to Popery, but) to Catholicism, as a conscientious minister of the English Church could well venture. Milton would be, and would utter the same, to all, on all occasions: he would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Taylor would become all things to all men, if by any means he might benefit any; hence he availed himself, in his popular writings, of opinions and representations which stand often in striking contrast with the doubts and convictions expressed in his more philosophical works. He appears indeed, not too severely to have blamed that management of truth (istam falsitatem dispensativam) authorized and exemplified by almost all the fathers: Integrum omnino Doctoribus et cœtus Christiani Antistitibus esse, ut dolos versent, falsa veris intermisceant et imprimis religionis hostes fallant, dum- | modo veritatis commodis et utilitati inserviant.

The same antithesis might be carried on with the elements of their several intellectual powers. Milton, austere, condensed, imaginative, supporting his truth by direct enunciation of lofty moral sentiment and by distinct visual representations, and in the same spirit overwhelming what he deemed falsehood by moral denunciation and a succession of pictures appalling or repulsive. In his prose, so many metaphors, so many allegorical miniatures. Taylor, eminently discursive, accumulative, and (to use one of his own words) agglomerative; still more rich in images than Milton himself, but images of Fancy, and presented to the common and passive eye, rather than to the eye of the imagination. Whether supporting or assailing, he makes his way either by argument or by appeals to the affections, unsurpassed even by the Schoolmen in subtlety, agility

both of the Pulpit and the Press! In the writings of neither shall we find a single sentence, like those meek deliverances to God's mercy, with which LAUD accompanied his votes for the mutilations and loathsome dungeoning of Leighton and others!-no where such a pious prayer as we find in Bishop Hall's memoranda of his own Life, concerning the subtle and witty Atheist that so grievously perplexed and gravelled him at Sir Robert Drury's, till he prayed to the Lord to remove him, and behold! his prayers were heard; for shortly afterward this philistine combatant went to London, and there perished of the plague in great misery! In short, no where shall we find the least approach, in the lives and writings of John Milton or Jeremy Taylor to that guarded gentleness, to that sighing reluctance, with which the holy Brethren of the Inquisition deliver over a condemned heretic to the civil magistrate, recommending him to mercy, and hoping that the magistrate will treat the erring brother with all possible mildness! -the magistrate, who too well knows what would be his own fate, if he dared offend them by acting on their recommendation.

The opportunity of diverting the reader from myself to characters more worthy of his attention, has led me far beyond my first intention; but it is not unimportant to expose the false zeal which has occasioned these attacks on our elder patriots. It has been too much the fashion, first to personify the Church of England, and then to speak of different individuals, who in different ages have been rulers in that church, as if in some strange way they constituted its personal identity. Why should a clergyman of the present day feel interested in the defence of Laud or Sheldon? Surely it is sufficient for the warmest partizan of our establishment, that he can assert with truth,-when our Church persecuted, it was on mistaken principles held in common by all Christendom; and at all events, far less culpable was this intolerance in the Bishops, who were maintaining the existing laws, than the persecuting spirit afterwards shown by their successful opponents, who had no such excuse, and who should have been taught mercy by their own sufferings, and wisdom by the utter failure of the experiment in their own case. We can say, that our Church, apostolical in its faith, primitive in its ceremonies, unequalled in its liturgical forms; that out

Church, which has kindled and displayed more bright and burning lights of Genius and Learning, than all other protestant churches since the Reformation, was (with the single exception of the times of Laud and Sheldon) least intolerant, when all Christians unhappily deemed a species of intolerance their religious duty; that Bishops of our church were among the first that contended against this error; and finally, that since the reformation, when tolerance became a fashion, the Church of England, in a tolerating age, has shown her

self eminently tolerant, and far more so, both in Spirit and in fact, than many of her most bitter opponents, who profess to deem toleration itself an insult on the rights of mankind! As to myself, who not only know the Church-Establishment to be tolerant, but who see in it the greatest, if not the sole safe bulwark of Toleration, I feel no necessity of defending or palliating oppressions under the two Charleses, in order to exclaim with a full and fervent heart, ESTO PERPETUA !

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

IN SEVEN PARTS.

Facile credo, plures esse Naturas Invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit? et gradus et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera? Quid agunt? quæ loca habitant? Harum rerum notitiam semper ambivit ingenium humanum, nunquam attigit. Juvat, interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in animo, tanquam in tabula, majoris et melioris mundi imaginem contemplari: ne mens assuefacta hodiernæ vitæ minutiis se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat in pusillas cogitationes. Sed veritati interea invigilandum est, modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distinguamus.-T. BURNET: Archeol. Phil. p.

68.

An ancient Mari

ner meeteth three

gallants bidden to

a wedding - feast, and detaiueth

one.

The weddingGuest is spellbound by the eye of the old seafaring man, and constrained to hear his tale.

The Mariner tells how the ship sailed south-ward

with a good wind

and fair weather, till it reached the line.

PART I.

IT is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three:

By the long grey beard and glittering

eye,

Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

The Bridegroom's doors are open'd wide,

And I am next of kin ;

The guests are met, the feast is set:
Mayst hear the merry din..

He holds him with his skinny hand: << There was a ship,» quoth he.

The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.

The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot chuse but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:

He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon! With sloping masts and dripping prow,
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

He holds him with his glittering eyeThe wedding-guest stood still,

And listens like a three-years' child; The Mariner hath his will.

The wedding-guest sat on a stone,
He cannot chuse but hear;

And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed mariner.

As who pursued with yell and blow

Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roar'd the blast,
And southward aye we tled.

And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold;

And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As

green as emerald.

And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen:

The ship was cheer'd, the harbour clear'd, Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken

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The weddingguest heareth the bridal music; but the Mariner continueth his tale.

The ship drawn by a storm toward the south pole.

The land of ice, and of fearful sounds, where no living thing was to be seen.

Till a great seabird, called the Albatross, came through the snowfog, and was received with great joy and hospitality.

And lo! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and followeth the ship as it returued northward through fog and floating ice.

The ancient Mari

ner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good om

en.

His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for killing the bird of goodJuck.

But when the fog cleared off, they

justify the same, and thus make themselves ac

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THE Sun now rose upon the right:
Out of the sea came he,

Still hid in mist, and on the left
Went down into the sea.

And all the boards did shrink:
Water, water, every where,

Nor

The

any drop to drink.

very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.

And some in dreams assured were
Of the spirit that plagued us so ;
Nine fathom deep he had follow'd us
From the land of mist and snow.

And the Albatross begins to be avenged.

A spirit had fol lowed them: one of the invisiblein. habitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; con

cerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.

And every tongue, thro' utter drought,

And the good south wind still blew be- Was wither'd at the root;

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And I had done an hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe:

For all averr'd, I had kill'd the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!

Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,
The glorious Sun uprist:

Then all averr'd, I had kill'd the bird

complices in the That brought the fog and mist.

crime.

The fair breeze

continues; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean and sails northward, even till it reaches

the Line.

The ship hath been suddenly becalmed.

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THERE pass'd a weary time. Each throat
Was parch'd, and glazed each
weary time! a weary
time!
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld

'T was right, said they, such birds to A something in the sky.

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The shipmates, in their sore distress would fain throw

the whole guilt on the ancient Marineria sign whereofthey hang. the dead sea-bird round his neck.

The arcient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off.

At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a

ship; and at a

dear ransom he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst.

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