important branch of which we have at the present time so imperfectly discussed; and we are convinced that the more thoroughly the subject is examined in all its bearings and relations, the larger will be the measure, both of pleasure and profit, thence accruing to the student.

J.

ART. VI.-Lyman Beecher, D.D.

Autobiography, Correspondence, &c., of Lyman Beecher, D.D. Edited by his Son, CHARLES BEECHER. With Illustrations. In two volumes. Vol. I. London: Sampson, Low, Son, & Marston. 1863.

THE life of Dr Lyman Beecher spans a great transition season

in the history of his country. His childhood and youth touch the period when America, emerging from her struggle for independence, had given a fresh proof to the world of her legitimate descent from the men that had fought and won for England her battle for constitutional freedom. The institutions of America, the manners of her people, their habits, social and domestic, bore in his earlier days the clear stamp of their puritan origin as obviously as the stern resistance and uncompromising principles which had recently brought his country in triumph through her unequal conflict with Great Britain. His old age witnessed an America, the puritanism of which, like some boulder rock worn down in its mass and sharpness of form by the ceaseless lashing of the sea-wave, was disappearing before the tide of emigration that had borne, and was continuing to bear, a mixed multitude of all nations to her shores; and which carried in its bosom the elements of that unprecedented material prosperity that provoked, whilst it fed, the universal passion for gain, and the phase of life so new to puritan America, a passion for boundless and prodigal expenditure. His memory spanned the gulf between the two Americas -the simple, thrifty, patient, slow-paced, unambitious, puritan America of the past, and the mighty nation ten days' sail from our shores, on which we now gaze as on some work of tragic art with mingled awe and pity. No small part of the interest of his life lies in the extent of view thrown open from the remarkable era of his country through which he lived, and from the scenes it reveals of a religious, social, and domestic state amongst the villagers and farmers of New England which we trust is not yet all a picture of the past.

It is especially necessary at the present moment, when America is chiefly known to us through her public transactions,

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a nation writhing under her first terrible discipline, and tempted and tried by the crisis that has come upon her to guard from misjudging her character by falling back upon the scenes of her private and family life. All is apt to be overlooked in the struggle she is now passing through but the elements that are being thrown on the surface. Her truer and more enduring features of national character are obscured by the birds of ill omen, whose wing for the season darkens the air. The autobiography of Dr Beecher withdraws us from the public stage of America, and the view of her present troubled and perplexing drama, to lay open the home scenes that are the fountainhead of the strength or weakness of every nation. And though the insight he gives us into the God-fearing homes of America of a past generation may be increasingly faintly reflected in its present families, we cannot but gather hope, as we read, for the America of the future. A people who have laid the foundations of their greatness in the religious culture and careful moral discipline of their home circles, and who are still largely leavened with the faith, and proud of their descent from, the puritans of England, warrant the hope of a high future destiny-a destiny to which the stern discipline they are - being subjected to will only more certainly conduct, if they can but read off and profit by its lessons.

It had long been a favourite idea with Dr Lyman Beecher, from the consciousness of the importance of the period through which he had lived, more than from any over-estimate of the part he himself had acted, to write a history of his own life and times. The pressure of parochial duties and a fastidious taste, "the lust of finishing," postponed the work till, at threescore years and ten, his children came to his aid. Seated in his old arm chair, with his children around him, and Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe as his amanuensis-in-chief, he rehearsed the story of his life, was drawn out to an unrestrained communication of himself in the freedom of the family circle, and helped out, as his memory flagged, by the eager questionings of the enthusiastic listening groups. The work now published under the title of his "Autobiography," grew out of these family conversations, and is entitled to the name of an autobiography, as being mainly their reproduction. Letters and other documents, in illustration of the history, were subsequently incorporated with these conversations, and the whole, that it might retain the character of an autobiography, was read over to him in the same social circle and subjected to his revision and comments.

In assuming that the story of their father and his family might prove not unacceptable to a wider than an American circle, the Beechers have judged rightly. They have earned as a family a title to renown. The name of one member has

already been long familiar wherever the art of printing has carried its black letters; and few in Great Britain, or even through Europe, have not heard of Henry Ward Beecher, the orator par excellence of the New York pulpit, and more recently the uncompromising defender of the Northern States in their present conflict. The position of the father as minister of East Hampton, Litchfield, and other charges, or his place in the theological world, and influence on the theological thought of his day, might scarcely have justified a biography of the fulness and detail of that which has now appeared, had not his life acquired an additional and fresh interest from the celebrity of his children. The world will eagerly read the volumes that introduce it into the circle of a family, the name of which has become equally well known on both sides of the Atlantic. It will pardon the magnitude of the paternal portrait from the figures that are grouped around it. In their contributions to that principal figure, the members of the family have inwoven characteristic minatures of little Beechers that have now grown great in the authoress of "Uncle Tom," and in the preacher of New York.

The New England ancestor of the Beechers, though not amongst the illustrious of the pilgrim fathers, was amongst one of the earlier transatlantic settlers. The roots of the family lie amongst the oldest in the New England soil. Eighteen years after the memorable voyage of the Mayflower, Davenport, a celebrated London clergyman, led a new band of settlers into the wilderness, accompanied with "servants and an abundance of household stuff." Amongst the humble members of this band were the ancestors of the Beechers. The purpose of the emigrants was to have cast in their lot with the first pilgrim fathers, but an antinomian controversy raging hotly in the settlement on their arrival, induced them to alter their design and to found the independent colony of New Haven. Then every thing was consecrated by the word of God and prayer. Ön founding the new colony, Davenport preached from a text that indicated either his plain speaking or his disappointed expectations-"Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil"-a text not the most encouraging to exiles who had to face the perils and toils of the wilderness, and make a home out of its solitudes But these hardy pioneers were too sternly truthful to conceal from themselves the worst. They drew their strength from what would have cast feebler minds into despair.

Of John Beecher, the ancestor of the family, we learn nothing more than that he shared in these wilderness temptations, and in such consolations as the sermons or texts of Davenport could yield. When he reappears in the person of his grandson

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Nathaniel, it is as a brawny blacksmith, six feet high, working at an anvil which surmounted the stump of the old oak under which the said sermon was preached. He was a man to strike powerfully when the iron was hot, with strength to clear the wilderness of its gloom and barrenness. Amongst the family papers is a journal of the "experiences" of the wife of this Nathaniel, in which she records that she was "born of parents who, by instruction and example, taught her to serve God." The father of Dr Lyman Beecher was the son of this couple in whom the qualities of both worlds were so happily united. He followed the paternal profession, and wrought on the anvil on the old oak stump. American families were then conservative of the past, patient of labour like their Anglo-Saxon sires, and had not yet grown to the pride of scorning honest manual work, or holding it to be the badge of the slave or of the newly alighted Irish serf. The height of the ambition of the blacksmith of New Haven was to make the best hoes in New England, and by his summer work on his small farm to raise the "nicest rye, white as wheat." Yet though Beecher's father was a man of handicraft and hard labour, he sustained in his person the character for intelligence of the New England settlers, but not without his paying at times the penalty of a student's forgetfulness of common things. One of his daughters tells of her having known him, at least twelve times, come in from the barn and sit down on a coat pocket full of eggs, and, when too late, jump up crying, “O, wife!” "Why, my dear," she would reprovingly respond to the exclamation, "I do wonder you can put eggs in your pocket after you have broken them so once." "Well, I thought I should have remembered this time," was his usual penitential reply. Notwithstanding this infirmity, with its consequent domestic infelicities, he was honoured in succession with the hand of five of the fair daughters of New England. Dr Beecher's mother was the third and best beloved of the five, Esther Lyman, a woman of a joyous, sparkling, hopeful temperament, partly of Welsh and partly of Scotch extraction, her grandfather being a stalwart Scot, a marked man in his district for strength of mind and integrity of character. But notwithstanding the physical vigour of her ancestors, she died of consumption two days after the birth of her only child, a puny infant so weak and sickly, and all but dying, that the woman who attended on the mother, seeing that death was in her cup, and hopeless of keeping the babe alive, wrapped it up and laid it aside as if no more thought were to be given to it. An eye more considerate having looked into the wrappings and marked that the babe still lived, washed and dressed it, but added in the operation, "It's a pity he had'nt died with his mother." "So you see it was but by a

hair's-breadth," says Dr Beecher, "I got a foothold in this world."

When Lyman Beecher was born (1775), America preserved sharply, with few features of change, the mould into which it had been cast by the first pilgrim fathers. The flood of immigrants of alien character and discordant principles had not begun to sap the civil and ecclesiastical institutions by which the pilgrim fathers hoped to have embodied their ideal of a free Christian commonwealth. A religious profession and character were still the indispensables to political influence, strictness of morals to official position. The most exact rules of respectful observance continued to mark the relation of the lower to the higher classes of society. Old England was never more punctilious in rendering honour to whom honour is due, than were her New England children at that period in their intercourse with each other. The time had not yet passed away when the clergy, the graduates of colleges, planters of good family, and members of the General Court were alone styled gentlemen, and addressed by the term Mr, while a yeoman was spoken to as Goodman, and his wife as Good wife or Goody. An old lady in Beecher's early days, tenacious of the distinctions of rank, hearing a grandchild speak to a common labourer as Mr, instantly corrected her in his presence, No, child, not Mr; Gaffer is for such as he; Mr is for gentlemen."

Another characteristic of American society, which the tide of immigration had not then obliterated, was the number of men of high education that was to be found even in the most inconsiderable villages. Of this the village of Guilford, where Beecher's childhood and youth were spent, offers a striking illustration. Though a small village, in addition to two clergymen, there was a wealthy farmer, his son, a physician, a merchant, a lawyer, and a farmer of more moderate means, all of whom had received a collegiate education, besides others who, amidst farming and mechanical pursuits, found time for intellectual and literary culture. Without adverting to the general high culture of the New England men, it is impossible to understand or adequately account for the subsequent unprecedented rapidity of the development of the States. When the season of America's opportunity came, and scope was given to her race for improvement, she had within herself, to an extent rarely equalled and never supassed, a population with mental resources and intellectual energy to turn her advantages to the highest profit, and who were possessed of economical, prudential, and moral habits to capitalise their fruits. She needed but the first impulse from favourable circumstances to distance in the rapidity of her progress all comparison with other