been typified by the Old, is not built as a city that is at unity with itself; and, if it be a house having many mansions, it is a pity that the quarrelsome children are not sorted off into separate nurseries, that "Whatever brawls disturb the street, and that the plain, pious, straightforward, believing church-goers, who hope to meet their forefathers in heaven, and are content to make the best of their way thither, by the same road as their forefathers went before them, may not be disturbed by the pugnacious colloquies of high-Churchmen and liberals, nor scandalised by the impertinence, the yawning, and shuffling, and tittering of the indifferents: "Birds in their little nests agree," an example, I am afraid, more poetical than ornithological, "And 'tis a shocking sight, When children of one family how much more shocking, when the children are grown men and women, and the family is the Church! It is a stupid and mischievous mistake, which many of us, who ought to know better, are perpetually making, that all the human creatures, who fear God and honour the King, all who are anywise interested in the welfare of their country or their souls, must be of some faction or some sect; for sorry I am to say, that the term "faction" applies to almost every political colour; and that sect may be predicated no less of the divisions within the Church, than of the separatists from it. Of the busy, bustling self-seekers, who assume to be the public, and the religious public, every clique maintains its own fraction of truth to be the whole, and seasons it with falsehood ad libitum. The leaders are dogmatical in proportion to their insincerity, and the followers are bigoted and clamorous in proportion as they have taken their opinions on trust, and in the gross; for a man who loves the truth, and thinks for himself, is a very bad partisan. In early youth he may be enthusiastic, hut he is never positive. Thank Heaven, however, these agitators and their tails are neither the nation nor the Church. There are still thousands of true Englishmen, loyal lovers of liberty, who are neither whigs nor tories, conservatives nor destructives, ultras, liberals, nor moderates, but good citizens and good subjects, content to render just obedience to any government, to do their duty and hope for the best. Such, at least, is the disposition of their hearts; for at the present juncture it is hardly possible to avoid practically taking a side, in word and act. The time is gone by when an honest man could say conscientiously, I am no politician. I fear, lest the Church should fall into the same predicament; that there will no longer be such a thing as a pure churchman, who is neither high-Church, low-Church, nor evangelical; but holds in implicit sincerity, and peace of mind, the Faith delivered down from the Fathers. In mere politics, the spirit of party should not be rashly condemned. It is, in fact, a necessary setoff against inevitable selfishness. A man of no party is, nine times out of ten, a man of no party but his own; or, in other words, a man who cares for no one but himself. Few, very few, can comprehend the whole truth; and it much concerns the general interest that every portion of that truth should have interested and passionate advocates. CETERA DESUNT. SHAKSPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. From a Review of Hunt's (Sir Aubrey de Vere) "Julian the Apostate." OF alarms, there are some which justify themselves, by producing the very state of things which they anticipate. Others, which induce a general propension to the opposite extreme. Of the latter kind, is the complaint so widely sounded, of the decay of British dramatic talent. Young authors, giving credit to the daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly assertions of periodical critics, have entered boldly upon tragedy as an open field; and writers of established popularity have listened to the flattering exhortations of their admirers, who fail not to commend to their compassion the prostrate drama of their country. Thus, like those mendicant monks who acquired boundless riches by the reputation of their poverty, English literature has been enlarged with copious dramatic acquisitions, through the common belief that the vein from which it derived them was altogether exhausted. Nevertheless, we can scarcely congratulate our contemporaries on the production of a genuine dramatic work, fitted alike to the stage and the closet. Modern writers seem aware, that in England the VOL. I. A A reading public is not identified with the seeing and hearing public, and have generally adapted their labours exclusively to the one or the other. We are even afraid that the few attempts that have been made to accommodate both at once put us rather unpleasantly in mind of the coarse but venerable adage respecting two stools. Authors, of late, have fallen under a desperate apprehension of being too good for the public. If they would but take as much pains to arrive at excellence, as they are at to avoid it, they might do something. The unfortunate public is burdened with all the literary sins of successive generations. The quibbles and clownery of the Elizabethan writers, the rant and bombast of Dryden and Lee, the obscenity of Wycherly and Congreve, the personalities of some current publications, yea, the very blackguardism of Tom and Jerry, are all, forsooth, so many compliments to the taste of the public. The pretence is not confined to the stage ;-politicians, philosophers, paragraph-writers, and fiddlers, all are ready to impute their mobsycophancy, their superficiality, their malice, their ear-tickling farrago of odds and ends, to the bad taste of the public. Never was popish father-confessor at Lent more oppressed with the misdeeds of others, surely not so unprofitably oppressed, as that anomalous personification of everybody and nobody— that everything composed of heterogeneous nothings, the public. To borrow a phrase from one of its greatest favourites, "whose name is hidden, but his fame divulged," it seems indeed to hold the same |