ART. II.-LYMAN BEECHER.

Autobiography, Correspondence, &c., of Lyman Beecher, D.D. Edited by CHARLES BEECHER. With illustrations. In two volumes. 12mo. pp. 563, 587. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1864. It seems to have been decided that every thing relating to the Beecher family, both in life and in record, should be strikingly characteristic, if not unique. The memorial which the surviving members of it have contributed, to extend more widely and to perpetuate the well-deserved repute of their honored father, is, in some respects, an exaggeration of the peculiarities which distinguish them. As a tribute of their own affection, and as a setting-forth of their own reasons for regarding him as one of the most marked and serviceable men in his time and calling, the volumes before us may be received with entire approbation. We are led to admire the perfect simplicity and frankness of their tone and contents. They are eminently honest and trustworthy; free from all attempts at dressing up, explaining away, or apologizing for either the homely or the grotesque matters which abundantly strew their pages. The whole man whom they portray and disclose to us wins our warm love and our full respect. He was a noble specimen of a man, and would have been such in any sphere or calling in life. Sincere and sound to the very core of his heart; unselfish, devoted, earnest in purpose, and entire in his consecration of heart, time, and ability, to the best service of others in the widest range through which he could exercise great gifts,—he was a model Christian minister and pastor. His home, with his family around him, and such a family, - must have been a scene where enjoyment and improvement wrought the warp and woof of life into the noblest fabric possible, amid the contingencies of an earthly existence. His children would have been justified in contributing to his honored and revered memory the daintiest and most elaborate garland which their gratitude and imagination could fashion. But in perfect har

mony with the almost rude simplicity and the ruggedness of his own development and manifestation, they have dispensed with all art and ingenuity in their portraiture, giving us no polished marble work, but the image of a true and good Christian man.

Yet, by any reasonable standard for the construction of a biographical work, or the fair presentation of a subject of various and many-sided interests, the "Autobiography of Dr. Beecher" is provokingly unsatisfactory. It is a stone wall without pointing or mortar, constructed without the use of plumb or level, and after the most slovenly pattern of NewEngland irregularity and convenience, of materials lying handy and most available. We have fragments; incongruous and undigested materials and incomplete narrations; subjects of intense interest opened, and then shut down; fine pictures partially touched and unframed, and frames sometimes without pictures in them. Under the frequent heading of "Correspondence," the editor gives us often only one side, whether it be the letters from his father, or the letters to him; the whole point and much of the interest of which are lost, just as the utility of one blade of a pair of scissors would be qualified for lack of the other, and of the screw which should unite them. What a confused and incoherent sketch is that given in these pages of Dr. Beecher's trial for heresy, and, in general, of the rupture between the Old-school and the New-school Presbyterians! Personal variances are intimated, and scraps of hard accusation and severe invective between theological opponents are culled out, which the reader might suppose would have required at least an editorial arbitration. But the flash is all we see: the report and the effect of the discharge fail us. If this were the memoir of a politician, there are matters on one page which would give us reasonable expectation of the choice of "seconds," and of arrangements for a duel, as we turned over the leaf. The Doctor is found to threaten certain shakings, knockingsdown, and wringings of the neck, to such as boasted of being better Calvinists than himself; but they all seem to escape unharmed. Meanwhile, the Doctor himself is made

sometimes to appear as an overgrown boy,- and, in some of the finest and most engaging aspects and qualities, he really was that up to the date of his declining vigor,—so defiant is his resolve, so effervescing his pluck. Guileless, singlehearted, self-sacrificing, unwearied, and devoutly trustful of Providence through all his life, we cannot conceive that he could ever have had a real enemy, or that he could have fallen short of being one of the very few of "happy men."

Having no personal acquaintance, or but the slightest, with this grand specimen of the old-fashioned New-England Orthodox minister, who was old when we were young, we still have a few memories of him, which are in keeping with what has charmed us most in the delineations drawn of him by his children. His son describes, of course from his own point of view, the phenomena of his appearance and his work, when, in Boston, and in the neighboring towns, he undertook his crusade against Unitarianism. The report of him in the circle around us was that of a preacher who said strong and funny things; and whose audiences might be divided into a portion agonized by intense inward alarms, and a portion who were on the watch for the amusing or the ludicrous. One of his daughters, in a charming chapter of reminiscences of him at this period, revives and justifies our imperfect conception of him. He would pour forth at times the most terrific and harrowing extempore expositions of doctrine, and doubtless sent hundreds of his more susceptible hearers to sleepless pillows, to agonize over the terrors of hell. Mrs. Stowe now lifts the curtain on his own home scene, where, in order to work off through his muscles his nervous excitement before going to bed, he would put his own children into a roar of glee, by scraping some old tune with its ditty on his fiddle, as, for instance, "Go to the devil, and shake yourself," varied by a snatch, as a rare treat for the youngsters, at the doubleshuffle, danced with "stocking feet," as once barefooted on the barn floor of his childhood. Would that we could have a good engraving of that scene in this illustrated Autobiography! It would be a fit companion for another that might be drawn from Dr. Channing's account in his Newport ser

mon, of his unsophisticated surprise at the excellent appetite for a good dinner which followed, in the good old time, the delivering and the listening to a high-flavored Calvinistic discourse. If some of those convicted by Dr. Beecher's stern preaching or exhorting could have peeped out from their direful chambers into that home scene, they might at least have shortened the period of their deliverance into a state of grace. We can readily call back the wiry, firm-set preacher, as, with a roguish or mirthful glistening in one side of his eye, he threw up his spectacles, and launched some sly stroke. Yet he was, eminently, one of the most sincere of men, and never trespassed, in his most jocose moods, on the regions of excess of any sort; least of all, in a way to bring under doubt his profound and habitual spirit of reverence, or his hearty conviction of the truth of what he taught.

We have a delightful reminiscence of him in a most genial mood at the commencement at Amherst College, in 1843. Among the "parts," or exercises of members of the graduating class, was one in which some half-dozen youths, dressed in character, and with a lively dialogue, appeared as antediluvians, restored to the light of modern days. Noah himself was among them, in soiled and antiquated clothing, with a most venerable hat stuck over with dried beetles and bugs, and acting out and talking out to perfection the character of a sort of human troglodyte disentombed from the rocks. There was rich humor in the matter, and certain broad, almost irreverent joking, which might seem hardly acceptable to the prevailing tone of the company, or consistent with the spirit of the place. Nevertheless, while there were a few grave faces among the dignitaries, the audience generally smiled or roared with delight. Yet the most rollicking and entranced of the listening spectators, evidently entering with his whole heart and soul into the funny travesty, was the good Dr. Beecher. Sitting near to him on the platform, it was a perfect feast to us to watch his entire giving-up of himself to a real boyish merriment. He laughed all over, even down to his boots; and no one could look at him without a sure inference that he was a man of a sunny soul and

of a pure heart. No hard sinner, no real bigot, could possibly have laughed as he did.

Soon afterwards, a very trivial incident presented him to us as a man of a shrewd caution, and of a certain Franklinian discretion learned by the practice of a rigid economy. We happened to be passing together on board a steamboat at noonday, bound to New York. The officious colored waiters. accosted the passengers, as usual, with offers to take and look after their articles of luggage, coats, umbrellas, &c., with a view to the fee which would accompany a re-delivery. One of them importunately made up to the good doctor, with the proffer, "Mister, shall I look after your baggage?" The doctor, looking calmly set upon his purpose and ability to take care of himself and what little belonged to him, holding firmly in his grasp a small valise, replied, "No, no: I have nothing but this valise to look after now. If I let you have it, I shall have to look after you too."

Our last sight and hearing of the doctor was at a funeral service in a private house, where he attended as a friend of the family, and where it was our duty to officiate. The service was a reading of a few passages of Scripture from a small pocket volume, and an extempore prayer. The doctor's deafness prevented his hearing a single word: but the sight of the little book, evidently not the Bible, misled him into imagining that it was some sort of a liturgical device; and, knowing the minister to be of "the standing Congregational order," though of the heretical wing, at the close of the service he abruptly asked, "What do you use that Episcopal stuff for?"

The ill-digested and fragmentary, but still very interesting and instructive matter, expanded over the pages of the volumes before us, does but fill out and fill up the outline conceptions which we had formed of Dr. Beecher from these chance exhibitions of his personality. Though his life was varied in scene and companionship, it was all spent within a limited range of thought and interests. Notwithstanding these were of the highest concern, it is easy to see how his restriction to them repressed the development of his full

nature.