author's politics, and yet more, his justly censurable heterodoxy, probably blighted its reception on the boards-but it must be good. The characteristic strength, the depth of thought, the heartgrappling interest, and the terrible graces of Caleb Williams, and St Leon, will nobly support the tragic muse. Yes; they will revive her laurels, withered, and in the dust, since Jephson forsook her. Sheridan had restored their vigour and bloom, if, in a fit of idleness, he had not dipt them in the still pool of prose; because it was nearer at hand than the Heliconian fountain. Godwin has not done so."

O, my stars, what short-lived exultation! How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of genius blunted! Is Godwin superannuated, that he could endure such stuff, as he wrote it? Is he mad, to commit, by its publication, this suicide on his fame? Such blank verse, there is no reading it! It halts and hobbles worse than the prose of a cobler, or a tailor, turned Methodist preacher. The plot improbable, extravagant, and without interest;-the monarch a whiffling idiot, who knows not his own mind a single instant. The heroine, a silly inconsistent moppet, who breaks the vow she had made to her dying father, yet does not know she has done wrong; and then suffers herself to be bullied by a swaggering mad

man, into breaking her vows to a faultless and doting husband. A pretty atonement, truly, for her first fault. P eferable, surely, is the meanest sock to such a buskin! Nor is there any redemption for the general worthlessness, in one or two fine passages, which might be selected. Adieu !

LETTER LX.

EDWARD JERNINGHAM, ESQ.

January 17, 1801.

I THANK you for having presented to me the second edition of your Essay on Pulpit Oratory, illustrated by extracts from Bossuet.

I find you not only considerably enlarged, but improved, from having strengthened your arraignment of our British style of sermon-writing, by some striking examples.

The censure passed upon our preachers for neglecting, or but coldly touching the awful themes of public calamity, is too well supported by the instance you give from Sprat; its echo from Calamy; the unimpressive use made by Stillingfleet

of that dreadful conflagration, when it was his appointed subject; and by the comment of South upon the conceited passage in Tillotson. But it is not from any of these first divines that I would wish to see rival passages selected, which might shine, not only with a chaster but with as warm a lustre as those of the French prelate.

I doubt not the justice of Melmoth's censure on the style of Tillotson, since neither my me mory nor my heart ever retained a single impression from the few sermons of his, which have been forced upon my attention, except that of their tedious length and elaborate dulness. Immoderate length in a sermon is a fault which excellence itself cannot expiate.

Our great lyric poet Gray's general censure on the style of our preachers since the revolution, is strong and high corroboration of yours;—but the two stars of pulpit eloquence, Ogden and Blair, had not then appeared in our horizon.

Yet surely the matchless (by Bossuet at least matchless) close of one of Sherlock's Discourses, "Go to your natural religion," &c. is not, as you seem to think it is, a single flash of lightning, which renders the general darkness more visible; since luminous, forcible, and impassioned sentences are many on his pages, though perhaps not equal to that most resplendent passage that

ever adorned sacerdotal oratory in any age or any country.

St Chrysostom's reproach to the nuns of Antioch, for the style of their dress, is surely an exceptionable example of admonition. There appears to me more voluptuousness in his description of their attire, than in their attention to ren der it becoming. The present mode of dress in our young women of fashion, and their imitators, is, from its gross immodesty, a proper subject of grave rebuke from the preacher; but if that rebuke was to consist of description luxuriously minute as that of the Greek saint to his nuns, the audience would depart laughing at the monitor, who had so circumstantially displayed its effect upon his own imagination.

Strange indeed it is, and very amenable to your censure, that the preachers of eminence, whose sermons have gone down to posterity, and who lived at that awful period, when the destroying angel passed over this island, should not have noticed, or so slightly noticed, the anguish and desolations of that pestilential era.

A predecessor of my father's, in the rectory of the village of Eyam in Derbyshire, was worthy to have his name go down to posterity, with that of the Bishop of Marseilles, and the French dramatic poet, whom, to your own honour and his, you here

rescue from the overshadowing pinion of time. The enclosed extract will shew you the ground of Mr Mompessan's rival claim to the palms of Christian fortitude and kindness*.

I beg leave to recommend to your attention the contrast of the happy and unhappy parent, one in the virtue, the other in the vice of his children. It will be found in the close of Dr Ogden's elventh Sermon on the Commandments. Seldom has more touching eloquence met my observation, more calculated to penetrate the heart of youth, and to mould it to filial piety.

Nothing is more disgusting to me, and indeed to the generality of people, than dictatorial egotism from the pulpit. Even in the learned and aged clergyman, it is priestly arrogance. In the young declaimer it is insufferable presumption. There is too much of it in Bossuet. If the preacher censures, he ought to censure in his Master's name and authority, not in his own. Let him involve his own frailty in his charge of general depravity, and let him express a desire of selfamendment when he exhorts his brethren to forsake their sins. We and us, not the priest-proud I, ought to be the sign-personal in his language.

* See the first volume of Mr Scott's edition of Miss Seward's poetical works.