MORAL SKETCHES

OF

PREVAILING OPINIONS AND MANNERS,

Foreign and Domestic:

WITH

REFLECTIONS ON PRAYER.

Let us make a stand on the ancient ways, and then look about us, and discover what is the straight and right way, and walk in it.

Lord BACON on Innovation,

I know not which is the greater wonder, either that prayer, which is a duty so easy and facile, so ready and apted to the powers and skill and opportunities of every man, should have so great effects, and be productive of such mighty blessings; or that we should be so unwilling to use so easy an instrument of producing so much good. Bishop JEREMY TAYLOR.

PREFACE

ΤΟ

THE SIXTH EDITION.

*

In the second and subsequent editions of this little work, a brief reference was made to the character of our late revered Sovereign. Since the publication of the fifth edition, it has pleased Almighty God to exchange his earthly for an imperishable The writer feels a strong desire, though long confined to the bed of sickness, to bear her last testimony, weak and worthless though it be, to the memory of our now beatified Sovereign.

crown.

If there be such a thing as a character formed of the elements of the land which gave it birth, it was realized in the present instance. Our King exhibited the exactest specimen of the genuine English gentleman in its highest and fairest form : he had not only the general stamp and impress, but the minor modes and peculiarities of a Briton. He was also a fair representative of the religion of his country. He was a Protestant, not in name, but in heart and soul.

He began his reign with an act of self-control, which gave a flattering presage of his future mag* Page 216.

nanimity. He sacrificed, in the tenderest point, passion to duty. In the bloom of life, young, ardent, and a king, felt there was something to which even kings must submit, the laws of their country. He made the sacrifice, and, by so doing, was rewarded in his large and lovely family by the long enjoyment of the dearest blessings of domestic life in their highest purity, and in the greatest human perfection.

A strict conscientiousness seems to have pervaded every part of his character; - it appeared in his frequently-repeated solemn reverence for his coronation-oath; in his uniform desire to promote the good of his people; in his zeal for the spiritual welfare of the poor, expressed in a sentiment too notorious to require repetition. The fear of God seems to have been supremely his governing principle; and a deep sense of his own awful responsibility, the corresponding result of that principle.

If, from a too tenacious hold of an opinion once adopted, he might be chargeable with a political error in a persevering contest with the western continent, yet even then his pertinacity was principle; and if he was wrong, it was his judgment which erred, and not his intention: but he knew, even in this case, how to retract gracefully a favourite opinion when the event required concession. In a visit he made from Cheltenham to Dean Tucker, at Gloucester (who had written strongly in favour of a separation), the King had the candour to say, "Mr. Dean, had we followed your