existence be yet longer spun, even till intellect and comfort will be its associates no more.

Have you read that sublimely fabulous novel St Leon? My literary correspondent, Mr Fellowes, thus speaks of it:

"I think this work of Godwin's atones for the former paradoxes of his vanity or errors of his heart. Godwin appears to possess a mind open to conviction, and to be in train to be a Christian. His opinions have lately undergone strange changes. He who is so lately become the warm and eloquent panegyrist of connubial love, domestic sympathy, and kindred connections, is likely to feel, at length, the beautiful simplicity of the Christian doctrine, and to enter himself the able champion of revelation; but to return to his novel. What a picture of terrific sublimity is exhibited in the person of Bethlem Gabor! I contemplated it with awe, and my aversion to such utter extinction of sympathy in an human heart was almost subdued by the grandeur which envelopes every lineament of his ferocity. The character of St Leon also is conceived with distinctness, and maintained with consistency. The power of early impressions in weaving the inextricable web of the future character, is marked with great ability, and nice discrimination. The misery associated with the extraordinary powers

possessed by St Leon, must make a highly moral impression on the mind, teaching it that acquiescence in the present state of things, which is essential to happiness. It proves that the greatest curse which could-be inflicted on man, would be the gratification of his boundless wishes; and that while a certain degree of security is necessary to our enjoyments, there is a degree of it which, in the present frame and temper of the human heart, would be the destruction of our happiness." Adieu.

Lichfield, June 23, 1800.

THANK you for your interesting * volume, our attention to my health, your friendly counsel. I was at Buxton when these testimonies of friendship arrived at Lichfield. Your letter followed me

Select Sermons, translated from the French of Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, to which is prefixed an Essay on the Eloquence of the Pulpit in England. Printed for Clark, New Bond Street, 1800.

thither; your book waited my return. I staid to read you in print, in print, ere I answered you in manuscript.

Your prefatory essay on the defects of our pulpit oratory is very ingenious; yet I am inclined to believe it complains of a remediless habit of style; that its so much quieter nature than that of the French prelate, from whom you give specimens of fervent example, is too deeply laid in the more sober tenets of our religion, in national character, and national taste, and in the less secluded lives of our priests, to make it eligible for them to adopt the personal appeals, the familiar pathos, the passionate exhortations, and fulminating threats of the Catholic pulpit.

That our liturgy is more glowing than the sermons which succeed it, I confess; but it should be remembered that prayer is, in its very nature, more fervid than admonition. Then the ascetic lives of the Papal clergy throw a sacredness around them, disposing their auditors to listen more reverently to their persuasions, more submissively to their philippics.

But when we see that man in the pulpit whom we are in the habit of meeting at the festal board, at the card-table, perhaps seen join in the dance, and over whose frailties, in common with our

own, no holy curtain has been drawn, we expect modest exhortation, sober reasoning, chastized denunciation; and I have uniformly seen the congregation more disgusted than touched and alarmed by the bolder style you wish to see prevail, especially where the preacher was young, and not invested with the ensigns of elevated office.

It must be considered also, that superstition is ever more vehement than rational faith; Popery than Protestantism; the fancied immediate inspiration of our Methodists and other sectaries, than the tenets of the Church of England. Popery had to stimulate the mind to immense and unnatural sacrifices, those of the connubial propensities, the attachments, filial, fraternal, and social; and she knew that reason had not competent powers; that, to combat those lightsome passions, it was necessary to call in the aid of the darker. So also the modern Calvinistic school, which inculcates the principles of Methodism, without confessing its name. The English laws allow not monastic seclusion, with its severe corporal penances. Our celebrated essential Methodists invent monasteries for the mind, with all their dismal train of needless renunciations; of that great moral school, the stage; of the innocent delights of the opera, the concert-room, and

the dance; with those rigid and gloomy tenets of hereditary cursedness, and miserable amenability for other sins than our own.

To enforce these dreary precepts, their preachers use the same means the Papal clergy employ ; they combat the gentler by the ungentler passions; and, to excite them, are necessitated to agitate themselves, and their congregation, and their readers, by the ebullition of enthusiasm. It is expected that the pulpit eloquence of the reformed and established church, should, like the spirit and maxims of the Saviour it preaches, be mild and placid; should allure rather than astonish, persuade rather than terrify; that it should be like the serene summer evening, in which the soul aspires, in the influence of hope, and in the contemplation of mercy; that it should leave to superstition her lightnings and her tempests; to say to fear, "be thou my chief and grand ally,

"And men shall know thee by the throbbing heart,
When thy dark power inspires each thrilling line,
Since, though soft pity claim her mingled part,
All, all the thunders of the scene are thine."

I am jealous for the religious honour of the late century, and for England, when I hear you pronouncing the state of Christian oratory at the