refer for satisfaction therein to very long and laborious works, which may well employ the sceptic a twelvemonth or two to digest, before he can possibly be ripe for your conclusion. When he has satisfied himself about the premises, he will concede to you the inference, I dare say, most readily.—But your latter deduction, viz., that because 8 has written a book concerning 9, therefore ro and II was certainly his meaning, is one of the most extraordinary conclusions per saltum, that I have had the good fortune to meet with. As far as io is verbally asserted in the writings, all sects must agree with you; but you cannot be ignorant of the many various ways in which the doctrine of the has been understood, from a low figurative expression (with the Unitarians) up to the most mysterious actuality; in which highest sense alone you and your church take it. And for 11, that there is no other possible conclusion-to hazard this in the face of so many thousands of Arians and Socinians, &c., who have drawn so opposite a one, is such a piece of theological hardihood, as, I think, warrants me in concluding that, when you sit down to pen theology, you do not at all consider your opponents, but have in your eye, merely and exclusively, readers of the same way of thinking with yourself, and therefore have no occasion to trouble yourself with the quality of the logic to which you treat them. Neither can I think, if you had had the welfare of the poor child-over whose hopeless condition you whine so lamentably (and I must think) unseasonably— seriously at heart, that you could have taken the step of sticking him up by name-T. H. is as good as naming him-to perpetuate an outrage upon the parental feelings, as long as the Quarterly Review shall last. Was it necessary to specify an individual case, and give to Christian compassion the appearance of a personal attack? Is this the way to conciliate unbelievers, or not rather to widen the breach irreparably? I own I could never think so considerably of myself as to decline the society of an agreeable or worthy man upon difference of opinion only. The impediments and the facilitations to a sound belief are various and inscrutable as the heart of man. Some believe upon weak principles; others cannot feel the efficacy of the strongest. One of the most candid, most upright, and singlemeaning men I ever knew, was the late Thomas Holcroft. I believe he never said one thing, and meant another, in his life; and, as near as I can guess, he never acted otherwise than with the most scrupulous attention to conscience. Ought we to wish the character false, for the sake of a hollow compliment to Christianity? You Accident introduced me to the acquaintance of Mr. L. H.-and the experience of his many friendly qualities confirmed a friendship between us. who have been misrepresented yourself, I should hope, have not lent an idle ear to the calumnies which have been spread abroad respecting this gentleman. was admitted to his household for some years, and do most solemnly aver that I believe him to be in his domestic relations as correct as any man. He chose an ill-judged subject for a poem, the peccant humours of which have been visited on him tenfold by the artful use, which his adversaries have made, of an equivocal term. The subject itself was started by Dante, but better because brieflier treated of. But the crime of the lovers, in the Italian and the English poet, with its aggravated enormity of circumstance, is not of a kind (as the critics of the latter well knew) with those conjunctions, for which Nature herself has provided no excuse, because no temptation. It has nothing in common with the black horrors, sung by Ford and Massinger. The familiarizing of it in tale and fable may be for that reason incidentally more contagious. In spite of Rimini, I must look upon its author as a man of taste and a poet. He is better than so; he is one of the most cordial-minded men I ever knew, and matchless as a fireside companion. I mean not to affront or wound your feelings when I say that in his more genial moods he has often reminded me of you. There is the same air of mild dogmatism-the same condescending to a boyish sportiveness-in both your conversations. His handwriting is so much the same with your own, that I have opened more than one letter of his, hoping, nay, not doubting, but it was from you, and have been disappointed (he will bear with my saying so) at the discovery of my error. L. H. is unfortunate in holding some loose and not very definite speculations (for at times I think he hardly knows whither his premises would carry him) on marriage-the tenets, I conceive, of the Political Justice" carried a little farther. For anything I could discover in his practice, they have reference, like those, to some future possible condition of society, and not to the present times. But neither for these obliquities of thinking (upon which my own conclusions are as distant as the poles asunder) -nor for his political asperities and petulancies, which are wearing out with the heats and vanities of youth-did I select him for a friend; but for qualities which fitted him for that relation. I do not know whether I flatter myself with being the occasion, but certain it is, that, touched with some misgivings for sundry harsh things which he had written aforetime against our friend C., before he left this country he sought a reconciliation with that gentleman (himself being his own introducer), and found it. L. H. is now in Italy; on his departure to which land, with much regret I took my leave of him and of his little family-seven of them, sir, with their mother--and as kind a set of little people (T. H. and all), as affectionate children as ever blessed a parent. Had you seen them, sir, I think you could not have looked upon them as so many little Jonases-but rather as pledges of the vessel's safety, that was to bear such a freight of love. I wish you would read Mr. H.'s lines to that same T. H. "six years old, during a sickness :" 66 Sleep breaks at last from out thee, My little patient boy" (they are to be found on the 47th page of "Foliage")—and ask yourself how far they are out of the spirit of Christianity. I have a letter from Italy, received but the other day, into which L. H. has put as much heart, and as many friendly yearnings after old associates, and native country, as, I think, paper can well hold. It would do you no hurt to give that the perusal also. From the other gentleman I neither expect nor desire (as he is well assured) any such concessions as L. H. made to C. What hath soured him, and made him to suspect his friends of infidelity towards him, when there was no such matter, I know not. I stood well with him for fifteen years (the proudest of my life), and have ever spoken my full mind of him to some, to whom his panegyric must naturally be least tasteful. I never in thought swerved from him, I never betrayed him, I never slackened in my admiration of him; I was the same to him (neither better nor worse), though he could not see it, as in the days when he thought fit to trust me. At this instant he may be preparing for me some compliment, above my deserts, as he has sprinkled many such among his admirable books, for which I rest his debtor; or, for anything I know, or can guess to the contrary, he may be about to read a lecture on my weaknesses. He is welcome to them (as he was to my humble hearth), if they can divert a spleen, or ventilate a fit of sullenness. I wish he would not quarrel with the world at the rate he does; but the reconciliation must be effected by himself, and I despair of living to see that day. But protesting against much that he has written, and some things which he chooses to do; judging him by his conversation which I enjoyed so long, and relished so deeply; or by his books, in those places where no clouding passion intervenes-I should belie my own conscience, if I said less, than that I think W. H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing. So far from being ashamed of that intimacy, which was betwixt us, it is my boast that I was able for so many years to have preserved it entire; and I think I shall go to my [In lieu of the foregoing, which was omitted from the Last Essays of Elia, the opening paragraph of the paper when transformed into an essay ran as follows]: Though in some points of doctrine, and perhaps of discipline, I am diffident of lending a perfect assent to that church which you have so worthily historified, yet may the ill-time never come to me, when with a chilled heart, or a portion of irreverent sentiment, I shall enter her beautiful and time-hallowed edifices. Judge then of my mortification when, after attending the choral anthems of last Wednesday at Westminster, and being desirous of renewing my acquaintance, after lapsed years, with the tombs and antiquities there, I found myself excluded; turned out like a dog, or some profane person, into the common street, with feelings not very congenial to the place, or to the solemn service which I had been listening to. It was a jar after that music. You had your education at Westminster; and doubtless among those dim aisles and cloisters, you must have gathered much of that devotional feeling in those young years, on which your purest mind feeds still- and may it feed! The antiquarian spirit, strong in you, and gracefully blending ever with the religious, may have been sown in you among those wrecks of splendid mortality. You owe it to the place of your education; you owe it to your learned fondness for the architecture of your ancestors; you owe it to the venerableness of your ecclesiastical establishment, which is daily lessened and called in ques tion through these practices--to speak aloud your sense of them; never to desist raising your voice against them, till they be totally done away with and abolished; till the doors of Westminster Abbey be no longer closed against the decent, though low-in-purse enthusiast, or blameless devotee, who must commit an injury against his family economy, if he would be indulged with a bare admission within its walls. You owe it to the decencies, which you wish to see maintained in its impressive services, that our Cathedral be no longer an object of inspection to the poor at those times only, in which they must rob from their attendance on the worship every minute which they can bestow upon the fabric. In vain the public prints have taken up this subject, in vain such poor nameless writers as myself express their indignation. A word from you, sir—a hint in your Journal-would be sufficient to fling open the doors of the Beautiful Temple again, as we can remember them when we were boys. At that time of life, what would the imaginative faculty (such as it is) in both of us, have suffered, if the entrance to so much reflection had been obstructed by the demand of so much silver !-if we had scraped it up to gain an occasional admission (as we certainly should have done) would the sight of those old tombs have been as impressive to us (while we had been weighing anxiously prudence against sentiment) as when the gates stood open as those of the adjacent Park; when we could walk in at any time, as the mood brought us, for a shorter or longer time, as that lasted? Is the being shown over a place the same as silently for ourselves detecting the genius of it? In no part of our beloved Abbey now can a person find entrance (out of service time) under the sum of two shillings. The rich and the great will smile at the anticlimax, presumed to lie in these two short words. But you can tell them, sir, how much quiet worth, how much capacity for enlarged feeling, how much taste and genius, may coexist, especially in youth, with a purse incompetent to this demand.-A respected friend of ours, during his late visit to the metropolis, presented himself for admission to St. Paul's. At the same time a decently clothed man, with as decent a wife, and child, were bargaining for the same indulgence. The price was only two-pence each person. The poor but decent man hesitated, desirous to go in; but there were three of them, and he turned away reluctantly. Perhaps he wished to have seen the tomb of Nelson. Perhaps the interior of the Cathedral was his object. But in the state of his finances, even sixpence might reasonably seem. too much. Tell the Aristocracy of the country (no man can do it more impressively); instruct them of what value these insignificant pieces of money, these minims to their sight, may be to their humbler brethren. Shame these Sellers out of the Temple. Stifle not the suggestions of your better nature with the pretext, that an indiscriminate admission would expose the Tombs to violation. Remember your boy-days. Did you ever see, or hear, of a mob in the Abbey, while it was free to all? Do the rabble come there, or trouble their heads about such speculations? It is all that you can do to drive them into your churches; they do not voluntarily offer themselves. They have, alas! no passion for antiquities; for tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet. If they had, they would be no longer the rabble. For forty years that I have known the Fabric, the only well-attested charge of violation adduced, has been-a ridiculous dismemberment committed upon the effigy of that amiable spy Major Andre. And is it for this-the wanton mişchief of some schoolboy, fired perhaps with raw notions of Transatlantic Freedom-or the remote possibility of such a mischief occurring again, so easily to be prevented by stationing a constable within the walls, if the vergers are incompetent to the duty-is it upon such wretched pretences, that the people of England are made to pay a new Peter's Pence, so long abrogated; or must content themselves with contemplating the ragged exterior of thei Cathedral? The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar there. Do you know anything about the unfortunate relic? Can you help us in this emergency to find the nose? or can you give Chantrey a notion (from memory) of its pristine life and vigour? I am willing for peace's sake to subscribe my guinea towards the restoration of the lamented feature. I am, Sir, your humble servant,-ELIA.] Amicus Redivivus. (The London Magazine, December, 1823.) ["G. D." whose escape from drowning is here commemorated, was George Dyer, formerly a student of Christ's Hospital, an old bookworm, who in later life eked out his income as a Reader for the press. Barry Cornwall describes him as the simplest and most inoffensive of men. William Hazlitt speaks of him as browsing on the husks and leaves of books and following learning as its shadow. Charles Lamb declared in his regard that the gods by denying him the very faculty of discrimination, had effectually cut off every seed of envy in his bosom. Extremely near-sighted, wonderfully absent, and, in his very gait spasmodic, he was visibly an oddity. Spare and diminutive in stature, this was the eccentric, who at broad noonday, as Elia here relates, marched straight into "the New River (by this rather elderly)" running immediately in front of Elia's then home, Colebrook Cottage.] Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep I Do not know when I have experienced a stranger sensation, than on seeing my old friend G. D., who had been paying me a morning visit a few Sundays back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, instead of turning down the right-hand path by which he had entered with staff in hand, and at noonday, deliberately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that runs by us, and totally disappear.* A spectacle like this at dusk would have been appalling enough; but, in the broad open daylight, to witness such an unreserved motion towards selfdestruction in a valued friend, took from me all power of speculation. How I found my feet, I know not. Consciousness was quite gone. Some spirit, not my own, whirled me to the spot. I remember nothing but the silvery apparition of a good white head emerging; nigh which a staff (the hand unseen that wielded it) pointed upwards, as feeling for the skies. In a moment (if time was in that time) he was on my shoulders, and I-freighted with a load more precious than he who bore Anchises. And here I cannot but do justice to the officious zeal of sundry passers-by, who albeit arriving a little too late to participate in the honours of the rescue, in philanthropic shoals came thronging to communicate their advice as to the recovery; prescribing variously the application, or non-application of salt, &c, to the person of the patient. Life meantime was ebbing fast away, amidst the stifle of conflicting judgments, when one, more sagacious than the rest by a bright thought, proposed sending for the doctor. Trite as the counsel was, and impossible as one should think, to be missed on, -shall I confess?-in this emergency, it was to me as if an Angel had spoken. Great previous exertions- and mine had not been inconsiderable-are commonly followed by a debility of purpose. This was a moment of irresolution. MONOCULUS-for so, in default of catching his true name, nate the medical gentleman who now appeared-is a grave middle-aged person, * [The topography of my cottage and its relation to the river will explain this, as I have been at some cost to have the whole engraved (in time, I hope, for our next number), as well for the satisfaction of the reader as to commemorate so signal a deliverance.] choose to desig |