tian Pentecost," he says of those who loved preaching better than any other part of the church service, (a remnant of Presbyterianism,) and which he stigmatises as a sort of itch: "I cannot see but the itch in the ear is as bad a distemper as in any other part of the body, and perhaps worse." In the same sermon he has a cutting tirade on the Independents: "But amongst those of the late reforming age, all learning was utterly cried down. So that with them, the best preachers were such as could not read, and the ablest divines such as could not write. In all their preachments, they so highly pretended to the spirit, that they could hardly as much as spell the letter. To be blind was to be with them the proper qualification of a spiritual guide, and to be book-learned, as they called it, and to be irreligious, were almost terms convertible. None were thought fit for the ministry but tradesmen and mechanics, because none else were thought to have the spirit. Those only were accounted like St. Paul, who could work with their hands, and in a literal sense, drive the nail home, and be able to make a pulpit before they preached in it." This is almost as good as Butler in Hudibras, on the sa me worthies, and as pointed as any thing in the "Tale of a Tub." In the sermon on the text-" Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace," occurs this strong contrast: "How vastly disproportionate are the pleasures of the eating and the thinking man! Indeed, as different as the silence of an Archimedes in the study of a problem, and the stillness of a sow at her wash." Farther on he speaks of "the absurd austerities, so much prized and exercised by some of the Romish profession : Pilgrimages, going barefoot, hair white, and whips with all such Gospel artillery, are their only helps to devotion It seems that, with them, a man sometimes cannot be a penitent, unless he also turns vagabond, and roots it to Jerusalem. T'hus, what was Cain's curse becomes their religion.” In ridiculing their senseless scourgings, he infers that they regarded such self-punishments to be means of grace; adding, with fine irony,The truth is, if men's religion lies no deeper than their skin, it is possible they may scourge themselves into

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very great improvements." In the preface to a sermon preached at the consecration of a chapel, 1667, he has another hit at his quandam friends, and refers to "a miraculous revolution reducing many from the head of a triumphant rebellion to their old condition of masons, smiths and carpenters, that in this capacity they might repair what, as colonels and captains, they had ruined and defaced.”

South was unquestionably the wit of the English church before Swift. Dr. Eachard, in his book on the causes of the contempt into which the clergy had fallen, and Earle, in his characters, had displayed admirable satirical powers. But among the preachers, this quality had not yet become conspicuous. Perhaps the propriety of a professed wit in the pulpit may be doubted; not that a very good man may not be a shining wit, but the presumption is, that he who indulges a comic fancy on sacred themes, who (unnecessarily) jeers at the follies of mankind, not their vices, is hardly the proper guide and director of his people. Earnestness and sincerity are the peculiar traits of the good divine, and these may be sacrificed to the love of display, and the applause of a crowd.

We have spoken of South in the same sentence with Swift. There was nothing of a moral likeness between them; as men, they were both worldly and ambitious; though South had far more of the time-server in him than the manly Dean of St. Patrick. They were both men of genuine wit,-that which delighted in sharp, pungent satire. They were both smart and neat, even in their ordinary style of composition. South had an eloquence to which Swift could offer no pretensions; yet Swift had invention and creative humor. South was more fortunate in his patrons; Swift happier in his friendships. Of the private life of South we know little; of the domestic history of Swift we know too much to his disadvantage. But when we speak of them as wits and great writers, we have nothing to add but unqualified praise.

In a succeeding paper we hope to continue this noble list, including certain of the earlier divines we have omitted to mention, down to the time of the philosophical Queen Caroline.

In general, our first impressions are the true ones the chief difficulty is in making sure which are the first. In early youth we read a poem, for instance, and are enraptured with it. At manhood we are assured by our reason that we had no reason to be enraptured. But some years elapse, and we return to our primitive admiration, just as a matured judgment enables us precisely to see what and why we admired. Thus, as individuals, we think in cycles, and may, from the frequency or infrequency of our revolutions about the various thought-centres, form an accurate estimate of the advance of our thought toward maturity. It is really wonderful to observe how closely, in all the essentials of truth, the child-opinion coincides with that of the man proper-of the man at his best.

And as with individuals, so, perhaps, with mankind. When the world begins to return, frequently, to its first impressions, we shall then be warranted in looking for the millennium-or whatever it is: we may safely take it for granted that we are attaining our maximum of wit, and of the happiness which is thence to ensue. The indications of such a return are, at present, like the visits of angels-but we have them now and then-in the case, for example, of credulity. The philosophic, of late days, are distinguished by that very facility in belief which was the characteristic of the illiterate half a century ago. Skepticism, in regard to apparent miracles, is not, as formerly, an evidence either of superior wisdom or knowledge. In a word, the wise now believe-yesterday they would not believe-and day before yesterday (in the time of Strabo for example) they believed, exclusively, anything and everything-here, then, is one of the indicative cycles completed-indicative of the world's approach to years of discretion. I mention Strabo merely as an exception to the rule of his epoch(just as one, in a hurry for an illustra

tion, might describe Mr. So and So to be as witty or as amiable as Mr. This and That is not-for so rarely did men reject in Strabo's time, and so much more rarely did they err by rejection, that the skepticism of this philosopher must be regarded as one of the most remarkable anomalies on record.

I cannot help believing, with Gosselin, that Hanno proceeded only so far as Cape Nun.

The drugging system, in medical practice, seems to me but a modification of the idea of penance, which has haunted the world since its infancy-the idea that the voluntary endurance of pain is atonement for sin. In this, the primary phase of the folly, there is at least a show of rationality. Man offends the Deity; thus appears to arise a necessity for retribution, or, more strictly, a desire, on the part of Deity, to punish. The self-infliction of punishment, then, seemed to include at once an acknowledgment of error, zeal in anticipating the will of God, and expiation of the wrong. The thought, thus stated, however absurd, is not unnatural; but the principle being gradually left out of sight, mankind at length found itself possessed of the naked idea that, in general, the suffering of mankind is grateful to the Creator :--hence the Dervishes, the Simeons, the monastic hair-cloths and shoe-peas, the present Puritanism and cant about the "mortification of the flesh." From this point the conceit makes another lapse; the fancy took root, that in the voluntary endurance of ill there isted, in the abstract, a tendency to good; and it was but in pursuance of this fancy, that, in sickness, remedies were selected in the ratio of their repulsiveness. How else shall we account for the fact, that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the articles of the Materia Medica are distasteful?

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Mr. Henry Cary is introduced to us, in the Appendix to The Poets and Poetry of America," as "Mr. Henry Carey, author of Poems by John Waters,' originally printed in the New York American' and the Knickerbocker Magazine.' Mr. Cary's works have appeared only in the periodicals mentioned that is, I believe they have not yet been collected in volume form. His poems (not so good as his prose by any means) are easily and pointedly written, neatly versified, and full of life and fancy. Doctor Griswold has made a mistake in attributing to our Mr. Cary the Anacreontic entitled "Old Wine to

Drink," quoted in the Appendix of the "large book."

It is as an essayist that Mr. C. is best entitled to distinction. He has written some of the happiest Magazine papers, of the Spectator class, in the language. All that he does, evinces a keen relish for old English literature, and a scholastic taste. His style is pure, correct, and vigorous-a judicious mixture of the Swift and Addison manners-although he is by no means either Swift or Addison. In a well-written memoir of him furnished for "The Broadway Journal," the writer says:

"His essays are all short, as essays should be, of the Addisonian dimensions and density of expression. His sentences are the most perfect in the language; it would be a vain task to hunt through them all for a superfluous conjunction. They are too perfect to be peculiar, for writers are distinguished from each other more by their faults than their excellences..... He can endure nothing that wears a slovenly aspect. His lawns must be neatly trimmed and his gardens weeded. . . . . He has not written much about flowers, but we should think that his favorite was a Camelia. He is in some sort a Sam. Rogers, but more particular... His descriptions have a delicacy of finish like the carvings of Grinling Gibbons. They remind you as forcibly of Nature as anything short of Nature can; but they never deceive you; you know all the while that it is not a reality that affects you."

Of course in all this there is exaggeration. The commentator seems to have had in view the twofold object of writing, himself, a John Waterish essay, and doing full justice to his personal friend. The only trouble is, that the justice is a little too full. It will

not quite do to say that Mr. Cary's sentences are the "most perfect" in the language-first, because "perfect" admits of no degrees of comparison, and secondly, because the sentences in question are perfect by no means. For example" It would be in vain," says the critic, "to hunt through them all for a superfluous conjunction"-immediately afterwards quoting from Mr. C. the following words:

"We paid our visit to the incomparable ruins of the castle, and then proceeded to retrace our steps, and examining our wheels at every post-house, reached the filled, and yet the number," etc. Hotel D'Angleterre. . . It was well

Now the conjunctions which I have italicized are pleonastic. These things, however, are trifles; John Waters deserves all the spirit if not the whole letter of his friend's commendation.

England, that I was assured by several "So violent was the state of parties in that the Duke of Marlborough was a coward and Pope a fool."-Voltaire.

Both propositions have since been very seriously entertained, quite independently of all party-feeling. That Pope was a fool, indeed, seems to be an established point, at present, with the Crazy-ites-what else shall I call them?"

Not long ago I pointed out in "The New-York Mirror," and more fully, since, in "The Broadway Journal," a very decided case of similarity between "A Death-Bed," by Mr. Aldrich, and "The Death-Bed," by Thomas Hood. The fact is, I thought, and still think, that, in this instance, Mr. A. has been guilty of plagiarism in the first degree. A short piece of his headed" Lines," is not demonstrably a plagiarism-because there seems scarcely any design of concealing the source-but I quote the poem as evidence of Mr. A's aptitude at imitation. Leaving the original out of sight, every one would admit the beauty of the parallel:

LINES.

Underneath this marble cold, Lies a fair girl turned to mould; One whose life was like a star, Without toil or rest to mar