such praise as mine, living as I do where works of imagination are so little understood, that far from having a prompter, I have not even a meet recipient for my observations on this singular work, may perhaps be more genuine than that of the reading multitude of your capital. With all their assumed (one can scarce say allowed) pretensions to attic elegance and acute discrimination, I suspect your town's people are somewhat like Dante's disembodied souls, whose process he illustrates by the famous simile of a flock of sheep standing hesitating before a gap in an inclosure, til at length the wonted leader of the flock makes a sudden leap through the aperture, and is implicitly followed by the rest. There are everywhere so many talkers and proportionally so few thinkers, that it is reasonable to suppose many of the talkers borrow opinions from the few thinkers. In your town, where talking is the avowed occupation of so many, and criticism the general topic of those that do not, as well as those that do know what they are talking about, this, I should suppose, must be pre-eminently prevalent; and I own I am the readier to doubt the originality of the acclamation with which Ivanhoe has been greeted on its first appearance, from considering the nature of the work, entirely distinct from its merits.

It is allowed, I think, that the two great sources of pleasure from which the human mind derives most gratification, are those combined with habitual recollections and associations, and those derived from novelty. With the former the heart has much to do; the latter belongs more to the imagination. Pathos, indeed, may be combined with novelty, and bright gleams of fancy inay mingle their lustre with the soft calm of recollected images. Yet in the general estimate of human minds, the imaginative faculty does not predominate. There are many more persons capable of welcoming a combination of familiar images presented to the mind's eye in connection with a story, than of those who can immediately discriminate and be fully aware of the truth of resemblances to originals, of which they have no distinct idea. Besides the charm of the language, familiar in the fondly remembered nursery, the early school, the cottage, and the rural haunts of youth,

that most emphatic and expressive language in which were clothed the ideas of our early poets, historians, and divines; our national manners, likewise, many peculiar traits of national character, many historical facts and curiously national anecdotes were snatched from oblivion, and made to live and reflourish in these "EVERGREEN" tales, where all feel and acknowledge the distinct features of our general nature; and the natives of Scotland have the peculiar triumph of seeing their resusci tated progenitors pass in clear vision before them, and are each ready to exclaim with Hamlet,

"My father in his habit as he lived." One would have thought no colours, however splendid, in which the battles, the tournaments, and the boisterous unregulated passions of the sturdy Saxon or Norman crusaders of that restless and romantic age could be arranged, would create an equal interest in this ancient kingdom. The truth is, I cannot believe they do, except in a few powerful minds, who, not content with "the ignorant present," or the more lately past, have, by the aid of much black letter learning, and close intimacy with Chaucer and Shakespeare, made themselves familiar with the strange medley of characters, and the ill regulated and inconsistent system of manners which prevailed in the middle-ages, and which we dimly trace through the confusion and inaccuracy of our early history. Such and a few others, whose lively fancy finds aliment in the scene of ever shifting wonder which the age of romance presents to the imagination, may find equal pleasure in the new wonder of the day. But I suspect those leaders of opinion, like the heroes of the tale, have a motley though numerous crowd of followers, many of whom are so devoted, as to be, like the "born thralls" of the Saxon Franklins, obliged to follow where they are led. In short, I am much inclined to suspect, that the burst of applause which has welcomed this new favourite of the Scottish public is more general than genuine.

At the same time, I am well aware that there is as much power of painting, and rather more of invention, displayed in this work than in any of the former. In one respect, it is more

light had already rendered contemptible. Meantime, the cruelties exercised by the Duke of Alvá over the Protestant allies of England were quite sufficient to keep up the flame of Anti-Catholic indignation. If ever an author could plead excuse for conveying to unpractised minds an impression of intolerant scorn and disgust towards all the ministers of a form of religion which, though much corrupted, was still Christian, Shakespeare was that author. When drawing the character of individuals such as history has transmitted them, he spares neither the worldly craft of Pandulph nor the ferocious ambition of the Cardinal of Winchester, yet he takes no wanton delight in confounding a whole order in one indiscriminate censure. On the contrary, instead of gratifying, as he might easily have done, the bitter spirit of the newly reformed and lately oppressed, in the very few appearances which individuals of the religious orders of the Church of Rome make on his theatre, they compose themselves with a modest gravity, and without wantonly quoting and misapplying texts of Scripture, express themselves in the style of men devoted to the concerns of a better life. Witness the friar who is the friend and confidant of the unhappy lovers in Romeo and Juliet, and that other who unites in marriage the Countess Olivia and Sebastian in the comedy of Twelfth Night. When the re gard he pays to historical truth leads him to depict Cardinal Wolsey haughty, ambitious, and voluptuous, as he was, he fails not to do justice to the nobler qualities which were obscured by the predominating love of power and pleasure. Griffith, so often granted as an honest chronicler, when he says that he was

"Lofty and sour to those that lov'd him

not,

But to those men that sought him sweet

as summer;"

and adds his testimony to the Cardinal's liberal patronage of learning, and noble spirit, receives the praise due to his candour even from the injured Queen, now raised by affliction to the still higher dignity of a saintly sufferer."Unhappy Dryden," as Pope truly and tenderly calls him, in reference to the infirmities by which his fine genius was defiled and de

VOL. VI.

graded, he who lived to flatter a grossly licentious court, readily adopted the spirit common to those who live in open defiance of those pure precepts given us in mercy for a rule of life. To them Christian teachers appear as ministers of vengeance rather than heralds of the law of love and peace. To discover that there are transgressors of that holy law clothed in the garb of sanctity, affords them an equivocal comfort. To drag their guilt into open view, gives them a kind of malignant pleasure; and to draw the conclusion from the decency or austerity of others, that all who are not open libertines are hypocrites or narrowminded fanatics, is among the wretched pretexts by which the enemies of religion, in all ages, endeavour to hide, even from themselves, that it is not the religious, but religion itself, they hate. What we greatly fear we cannot much love. Those who daily transgress a law enforced by severe penalties must think with terror of that law, and with a kind of rancorous dislike of those whose duty it is to explain it.

When Dryden seized on every possible occasion to introduce priests into his comedies, that he might show them odious by their vices, or contemptible by their meanness and avarice, he well knew how acceptable such portraits were to a shameless court and a corrupted audience; yet it is remarkable, that, in some of our older plays, where, from the coarse manners of the times, decency was little regarded, the decorum due to this order of men is preserved. In a tragedy of Ford's, of which the subject is very painful, and, indeed, improper, the brother of the heroine confesses to a priest a guilty passion for a near relation. The vered with all the solemn energy of a priest's reproofs and counsels are delipure and lofty spirit, conscious of the mighty responsibility attached to the charge of immortal souls. There is not, perhaps, in the English language a finer specimen of the eloquence of truth flowing from a deep conviction of its importance. Even the first of modern poets, who has of late wantonly sullied a great name by the misapplication of his powers, is free from this reproach. Much as he delights in showing the dark side of our nature under various forms, he has

H

not, that I know of, endeavoured, in his multifarious pictures of life, to make the ministers of religion despicable or ridiculous. Even the lost and wretched Manfred, all hopeless as he is of consolation here or hereafter, receives the counsels of the Abbot with a kind of despairing humility and a decent form of gratitude. Nor does the Abbot, respectable in his good intentions, and mild in his expostulations, make a profane and needless use of Scripture language. Pains are taken, in this work, to include in one general mass of corruption all who serve the altar, and to represent them as profuse in the use of Scripture language, in which, ignorant as he describes them, they could not be at all so well versed as the author. This is a departure from the accuracy with which he on all other occasions adapts the manners of his dramatis person to their habits and characters. He seems to forget that the Scriptures were then locked up in the learned languages, of which he more than insinuates that his monks and friars were grossly ignorant. We readily grant him Friar Tuck, and have no doubt, that, in the times when he lived, there might be such friars as he, and such smooth hypocritical coxcombs as the Prior Aymer, though he, indeed, is both overdone and over dressed. This, and more, we could bear, if the author had treated the order with the same lenity that he does the community of gipsies, vagrants, and all other despised people, by show ing that there were among them some characters possessing energy, fidelity, and benevolence, affording a redeeming compensation for a whole life of error, and even of crime. Even the savage oppressor and profligate Bothwell is not allowed to go to his place without leaving behind such a memento of his better days and better feelings as excites pity not unmingled with tenderness; and while we feel, in this instance, the meltings of humanity, we wonder at the magic spell of genius that has so soon changed abhorrence to compassion.

The sins of this proscribed order were certainly manifold, yet it is wonderful that a mind which, as poor Burns advises,

Gently scans his brother man, More gently sister woman,

should wrap in one black cloud of obloquy the whole of that community to which we all, even in these days of clear and abundant light, are so much indebted. That many monasteries contained such gluttons, drunkards, and cheats as the author describes, we readily allow; but it is equally true that many of these were the sanctuaries of sincere, though extravagant and austere, devotion; that in them learning was preserved, and the useful, and even the fine arts, practised and improved. At the period which the romance includes, the industry of these monks was exercised in preserving all that remains to us, not only of ancient literature, but of the history, poetry, and divinity of their own rude times. They were not paid for being scholars, annalists, or transcribers of the Scriptures, nor did any rule of their order enjoin such tasks; yet, notwithstanding the destruction which time, war, and fire have made among the monuments of their literary labours, there is not a library of any note in Europe that does not contain specimens of their patient industry, which might be truly styled labours of love, as it does not appear that they derived any temporal benefit from them. Nay, we shrewdly suspect that the author of this work owes much of the knowledge he displays of the manners and events of that turbulent period to the annals and other remains of certain learned brethren of the convent, and there still exist numberless Bibles and missals in the black letter, transcribed with infinite care, and illuminated with much labour and some taste by these recluses. Can any one imagine a drunkard, a glutton, or a hypocrite, gratuitously undertaking a task so tedious and la borious?-a task, too, calculated to awake the slumbering conscience of a transgressor to all the terrors of retribution. And shall the young and the idle, who have never approached the genuine sources of knowledge regarding that period, but are glad to take their scanty portion of intelligence in scraps at second-hand-shall this numerous and thoughtless tribe be taught to believe, that all who in those days were set apart for the service of the Deity, and the instruction of their fellow creatures, were sacrilegious wretches? Yet, what other impression can remain on any unin