ART. II.-1. Brief Notes of several Religious Lectures, with a few occasional Tracts. London: Samuel Holdsworth, Amen Corner, Paternoster Row. 1837. 8vo. pp.

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2. Biographical, Literary, and Philosophical Essays: Contributed to the Eclectic Review. By John Foster, author of Essays on " Decision of Character, Popular Ignorance, and Christian Morals." With an Index of the principal subjects, prepared for this edition. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1844. 12mo. pp. 419.

3. Miscellaneous Essays on Christian Morals, Experimental and Practical, originally delivered as Lectures at Broadmead Chapel, Bristol. By John Foster. D. Appleton & Co. New York. 1844. 18mo.

THERE are certain names which, like those of ancient sages, can stand alone; as not asking the appendage of honorary titles. Such a name is that of John Foster. The judgment of the soundest scholars and theologians at once classes it with those of Hall and Chalmers: and it is no small cause of satisfaction to one of our sister churches, that of this triad two should have been Baptists. But genius knows no sect. All the endowments of Oxford or Cambridge, all the wealth of Durham, could not make a Vice-Chancellor or a prelate a great man; and great as have been some men, many men, within the pale of the Anglican Establishment, it has had no one to show in our age, who, for literary influence on mankind, could even be named in connexion with "the first three." Yet never were three men of learning, piety and genius, more unlike. If we place Chalmers very far above the others, in respect to power over his fellow-men, we find the reason of this, not in any superiority of intellectual vigour, of learning, or of taste, but simply in the greatness of his sympathy with the progress of the common mind; his profound and tender interest in the particular acts and universal happiness of the men about him; and the courage with which he has dared, on politico-economical and ecclesiastical subjects, to avow principles not discovered by the mass of mankind, and not only to avow them, but to act them out. In the very proportion in which a great commander excels a great historian, do we consider Chalmers to excel the recluse philosopher and the meditative divine, however great the latter be. His philosophy,-for he is a

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philosopher-is every day becoming history; for it teaches by example. It becomes actual. It will live in the territorial system of charity, and in the Free Church of Scotland. He has as certainly left his mark upon the age as did Napoleon on the pass of the Simplon. But as books to be pondered and admired, we cannot place any writings of Chalmers as high as one or two of Foster and Hall.

The very secluded life of Mr. Foster has caused him to be known to the public almost entirely by his books, which have been few. His Essays' burst upon the world without a word of premonition, establishing for him a place among authors which has not been raised by any later production of his pen. Few single essays in any language have been more noted than that on Decision of Character.' Men speak of it just as they speak of some one great work of Angelo, Raphael, or Leonardo da Vinci. Hall's Sermon on Modern Infidelity' has a like distinction. Yet we regard the essay on a Man's writing Memoirs of Himself,' as approaching very closely the merit of the other. It would however be presumptuous folly for us to write in reviewal of Foster, after the well-known article of Robert Hall, in the Eclectic. If it did not savour of self-complacency, we should take pains to show how exactly we accord with the great reviewer, even in his censure of his friend. But if we were to cite from the Essays,' we could only make the same extracts, for the most startling passages are all in that review; and in regard to style, though we might amplify, we could not emulate, the judgment. Here it is.

"Mr. F.'s work is rather an example of the power of genius than a specimen of finished composition: it lies open in many points to the censure of those minor critics who, by the observation of a few technical rules, may easily avoid its faults without reaching one of its beauties. The author has paid too little attention to the construction of his sentences. They are for the most part too long, sometimes involved in perplexity, and often loaded with redundances. They have too much of the looseness of an harangue and too little of the compact elegance of regular composition. An occasional obscurity pervades some parts of the work. The mind of the writer seems at times to struggle with conceptions too mighty for his grasp, and to present confused'masses, rather than distinct delineations of thought. This, however, is to be imputed to the originality, not the weakness of his powers. The scale on which he thinks is so vast, and the excursions of his imagination are so extended, that they frequently carry him into the most unbeaten track, and among objects where a ray of light glances in an angle only, without diffusing itself over the whole. On ordinary topics his conceptions are luminous in the highest degree. He places the idea which he wishes to present in

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such a flood of light, that it is not merely visible itself, but it seems to illumine all around it. He paints metaphysics, and has the happy art of arraying what in other hands would appear cold and comfortless abstractions, in the warmest colours of fancy. Without the least affectation of frivolous ornaments, without quitting his argument in pursuit of imagery, his imagination becomes the perfect handmaid of his reason, ready at every moment to spread her canvass and present her pencil. But what pleases us most, and affords us the highest satisfaction, is to find such talents enlisted on the side of true Christianity; nor can we help indulging a benevolent triumph at the accession of powers to the cause of evangelical piety, which its most distinguished opponents would be proud to possess.

No writer of reputation was ever less smitten with the rage of authorship, than Foster. He even speaks himself, of his "miserable slowness in any sort of composition." And though we are far from thinking, with a lively French writer, that a good hand-writing ensures a good style, we we cannot help suspecting that our author's pen moved tardily over the paper. His works have appeared at long intervals. The largest of them, the Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance,' with all the marks of his original mind, bears manifest tokens of a disgust for the petty details of correction. Let us beware of indulging the same turn. He could afford to be great without minute finishing. His poor lame imitators, (for even Foster has been imitated) halted after him in a gait of which every step was premeditated. What acrid scorn would have distilled from his lips, if he could have learned that they sought by elaborate care to produce fac-similes of his rude magnificence! Every period of his bears signs of what painters call the first intention;' that indescribable abandon of manner, which discriminates the rudest original from the most finished copy. "Foster," said Hall, " is a lumbering wagon of gold." The matchless ease of Hall himself was the result of labour. Of his simplest sentences, we may say in terms borrowed by Madame de Sevigné, Ma questo facile è quanto difficile. But no man reads Foster, without knowing, as he goes along, that his great author tramples indignantly on all the arts of sentence-balancing in which we little critics are apt to glory. Many have had the roughnesses of Foster without his solidity, as many have had the melody of Hall, without his logic or his eloquence.

Even our favourite writers may mislead us: and the most striking are sometimes the most dangerous. If Gibbon, as in his latter volumes, is more French than English, the reader goes off rabid with Gallomania of style. If Car

lyle says a good thing, here and there, amidst the paroxysms of a style and dialect of which he is the inventor, there are a hundred youth who seem to themselves to write with power, because they do not write English. If Coleridge, steeped in German lore, vents a Teutonic idiom, his unwise admirers, though scarce out of their 'Lesebuch,' obtund our ears with the reiteration of their antinomies,' 'stand-points,' and 'aesthetics.' What a pity that our authors will not learn of Southey, whose prose is always as simple as his verse is sometimes fantastic. "Crowd your ideas as you will," says he to William Taylor, who was German-mad, "but let us have them in English-plain, perspicuous English-such as mere English readers can understand. Ours is a beautiful language. I can tolerate a Germanism for family sake; but he who uses a Latin or a French phrase, when a pure old English word does as well, ought to be hung, drawn and quartered, for high treason against his mother tongue." Harsh judgment, it may be, but true, even though ourselves should smart for it: against Foster it bears no edge. His very thoughts are of sturdy English growth. Never, for a sentence even, does he fall into a tune. See his remarks on Blair, below. His paragraphs swell and grow and burst like a luxuriant tree. There is no formula for his thoughts; there is no recipe for rounding off the corners of his phrase. Our readers know that as men who strut in walking sometimes find it difficult to get out of this pace; so in writing, authors assume a measured, rhythmical flow of diction, and find it hard, even when the subject demands it, to come down to the pedestrian style. Even Voltaire, simple as his structure of sentence always is, has a mannerism: so has Macaulay. The reader comes to look for a certain pungent apodosis. It is the characteristic charm of Goethe, that nothing ever leads you to expect any particular bringing up of the period, or antithesis of the thought. In Hall the exquisite art conceals the plan of the period: in Foster, there is no approach to such a plan. As a specimen, germane to our topic, take some parts of his 'Observations on Mr. Hall's character as a Preacher,' which we place among his greatest productions:

"In the most admired of his sermons, and invariably in all his preaching, there was one excellence, of a moral kind, in which few eloquent preachers have ever equalled, and none ever did or will surpass him. It was so remarkable and obvious, that the reader (if having been also a hearer of Mr. Hall) will have gone before me

when I name--oblivion of self. The preacher appeared wholly absorbed in his subject, given up to its possession, as the single actuating principle and impulse of the mental achievement which he was as if unconsciously performing: as if unconsciously; for it is impossible it could be literally so; yet his absorption was so evident, there was so clear an absence of every betraying sign of vanity, as to leave no doubt that reflection on himself, the tacit thought,It is I that am displaying this excellence of speech,' was the faintest action of his mind. His auditory were sure that it was as in relation to his subject, and not to himself, that he regarded the feelings with which they might hear him.

"What a contrast to divers showy and admired orators, whom the reader will remember to have seen in the pulpit and elsewhere! For who has not witnessed, perhaps more times than a few, a pulpit exhibition, which unwittingly told that the speaker was to be himself as prominent, at the least, as his sacred theme? Who has not observed the glimmer of a self-complacent smile, partly reflected, as it were, on his visage, from the plausive visages confronting him, and partly lighted from within, by the blandishment of a still warmer admirer? Who has not seen him swelling with a tone and air of conscious importance in some specially fine passage; prolonging it, holding it up, spreading out another and yet another scarlet fold, with at last a temporary stop to survey the assembly, as challenging their tributary looks of admiration, radiating on himself, or interchanging among sympathetic individuals of the congregation? Such a preacher might have done well to become a hearer for a while; if indeed capable of receiving any corrective instruction from an example of his reverse; for there have been instances of preachers actually spoiling themselves still worse in consequence of hearing some of Mr. Hall's eloquent effusions; assuming beyond their previous sufficiency of graces a vociferous declamation, a forced look of force, and a tumour of verbiage, from unaccountable failure to perceive, or to make a right use of the perception, that his sometimes impetuous delivery, ardent aspect, and occasionally magnificent diction were all purely spontaneous from the strong excitement of the subject.

Under that excitement, when it was the greatest, he did unconsciously acquire a corresponding elation of attitude and expression; would turn, though not with frequent change, towards the different parts of the assembly, and as almost his only peculiarity of action, would make one step back from his position (which, however, was instantly resumed) at the last word of a climax; an action which inevitably suggested the idea of the recoil of heavy ordnance. I mention so inconsiderable a circumstance, because I think it has somewhere lately been noticed with a hinted imputation of vanity. But to the feeling of his constant hearers, the cool and hypercritical equally with the rest, it was merely one of those effects which emotion always produces in the exterior in one mode or another, and was accidentally become associated with the rising of his excitement to its highest pitch, just at the sentence which decisively clenched an argument, or gave the last strongest emphasis to an enforcement. This action never occurred but when there was a special emphasis in what he said."