sceptre. His conversion of the fairest and most celebrated part of Italy, into a French province; and his barbarous order, that the French language should be officially employed at Florence and Rome, are enough to consign his name to execration, so far as it will be connected with Italian history; nothing can excuse, or even extenuate, those gothic acts: but his raising up the name of the kingdom of Italy; his providing for frequent and intimate communication between its provinces; his rekindling the fire of military ardour amongst its fallen people; his public improvements, calculated to rouse their pride and better their condition, were all working together, to produce a spirit of national union and enterprize, which tended to speedy liberation from the yoke of France. He was training the Italians to arms, and awakening them from sloth, to a sense of glory: the consequence would soon have been, that they would have rescued their independence from his hands; or, at least, made so desperate a struggle for it, that the contest in Spain would have been thought of as nothing, in comparison with the insurrection in Italy. ON PULPIT ORATORY. INTRODUCTION; WITH REMARKS ON THE REVEREND ROBERT HALL. THE decline of eloquence in the Senate and at the Bar is no matter of surprise. In the freshness of its youth, it was the only medium by which the knowledge and energy of a single heart could be communicated to thousands. It supplied the place, not only of the press, but of that general communication between the different classes of the state, which the intercourses of modern society supply. Then the passions of men, unchilled by the frigid customs of later days, left them open to be inflamed or enraptured by the bursts of an enthusiasm, which would now be met only with scorn. In our courts of law occasions rarely arise for animated addresses to the heart; and even when these occur, the barrister is fettered by technical rules, and yet more by the technical habits and feelings, of those by whom he is encircled. A comparatively small degree of fancy, and a glow of social feeling, directed by a tact which will enable a man to proceed with a constant appearance of directing his course within legal confines, are now the best qualifications of a forensic orator. They were exhibited by Lord Erskine in the highest perfection, and attended with the most splendid success. Had he been greater than he was, he had been nothing. He ever seemed to cherish an affection for the techni calities of his art, which won the confidence of his duller associates. He appeared to lean on these as his stays and resting places, even when he ventured to look into the depth of human nature, or to catch a momentary glimpse of the regions of fantasy. When these were taken from him, his powers fascinated no longer. He was exactly adapted to the sphere of a court of law-above his fellows, but not beyond their gage--and giving to the forms which he could not forsake, an air of venerableness and grandeur. Any thing more full of beauty and wisdom than his speeches, would be heard only with cold and bitter scorn in an English court of justice. In the houses of parliament, mightier questions are debated; but no speaker hopes to influence the decision. Indeed the members of opposition scarcely pretend to struggle against the "dead eloquence of votes," but speak with a view to an influence on the public mind, which is a remote and chilling aim. Were it otherwise, the academic education of the membersthe prevalent disposition to ridicule, rather than to admire-and the sensitiveness which resents a burst of enthusiasm as an offence against the decorum of polished society-would effectually repress any attempt to display an eloquence in which intense passion should impel the ima But the causes which have opposed the excellence of pulpit oratory in modern times, are not so obvious. Its subjects have never varied, from the day when the Holy Spirit visibly descended on the first advocates of the Gospel, in tongues of fire. They are in no danger of being exhausted by frequency, or changed with the vicissitudes of mortal fortune. They have immediate relation to that eternity, the idea of which is the living soul of all poetry and art. It is the province of the preachers of Christianity to develope the connection between this world and the next-to watch over the beginnings of a course which will endure for ever-and to trace the broad shadows cast from imperishable realities on the shifting scenery of earth. This sublunary sphere does not seem to them as trifling or mean, in proportion as they extend their views onward; but assumes a new grandeur and sanctity, as the vestibule of a statelier and an eternal region. The mysteries of our being life and death-both in their strange essences, and in their sublimer relations, are topics of their ministry. There is nothing affecting in the human condition, nothing majestic or sweet in the affections, nothing touching in the instability of human dignities, the fragility of loveliness, or the heroism of self-sacrifice-which is not a theme suited to their high purposes. It is theirs to dwell on the eldest history of the world-on the beautiful simplicities of the patriarchal age-on the stern and awful religion, and marvellous story of the Hebrews-on the glorious visions of the prophets, and their fulfilment on the character, miracles, and death of the Saviour-on all the wonders, and all the sweetness of the Scriptures. It is theirs to trace the spirit of the boundless and the eternal, faintly breathing in every part of the mystic circle of superstition, unquenched even amidst the most barbarous rites of savage tribes, and all the cold and beautiful shapes of Grecian mould. The inward soul of every religious system-the philosophical spirit of all history-the deep secrets of the human heart, when grandest or most wayward-are theirs to search and to develope. Even those speculations which do not immediately affect man's conduct and his hopes are theirs, with all their high casuistry; for in these, at least, they discern the beatings of the soul against the bars of its earthly tabernacle, which prove the immortality of its essence, and its destiny to move in freedom through the vast etherial circle to which it thus vainly aspires. In all the intensities of feeling, and all the regalities of imagination, they may find fitting materials for their passionate expostulations with their fellow men to turn their hearts to those objects which will endure for ever. It appears, therefore, at first observation, strange, that in this country, where an irreligious spirit has never become general, the oratory of the pulpit has made so little progress. The ministers of the Established Church have not, on the whole, fulfilled the promise given in the days of its early zeal. The noble enthusiasm of Hooker-the pregnant wit of South-the genial and tolerant warmth of Tillotson-the vast power of reasoning and observation of Barrow-have rarely been copied, even feebly, by their successors. Jeremy Taylor stands altogether alone among churchmen. Who has ever manifested any portion of that exquisite intermixture of a yearning love with a heavenly fancy, which enabled him to embody and render palpable the holy charities of his religion in the loveliest and most delicate images? Who has ever so encrusted his subjects with candied words; or has seemed, like him, to take away the sting of death with "rich conceit;" or has, like him, half persuaded his hearers to believe that they heard the voice of pitying angels? Few, indeed, of the ministers of the church have been endued with the divine imagination which might combine, enlarge, and vivify the objects of sense, so as, by stately pictures, to present us with symbols of that uncreated beauty and grandeur in which hereafter we shall ex patiate. The most celebrated of them have been little more than students of vast learning and research, unless, with Warburton and Horseley, they have aspired at once boldly to speculate, and imperiously to dogmatise. It cannot be doubted, that the species of patronage, by which the honours and emoluments of the Establishment are distributed, has tended to prevent the developement of genius within its pale. But, perhaps, we may find a more adequate cause for the low state of its preaching in the very beauty and impressiveness of its rites and appointed services. The tendency of religious ceremonies, of the recurrence of old festivals, and of a solemn and dignified form of worship, is, doubtless, to keep alive tender associations in the heart, and to preserve the flame of devotion steady and pure, but not to incite men to look abroad into their nature, or to prompt any lofty excursions of religious fancy. There have, doubtless, been eloquent preachers in the church of Rome,-because in her communion the ceremonies themselves are august and fearful, and because her proselyting zeal inspired her sons with peculiar energy. But episcopacy in England is by far the most tolerant of systems ever associated with worldly power. ministers, until the claim of some of them, to the exclusive title of evangelical, created dissensions, breathed almost uniformly a spirit of mildness and peace. Within its sacred boundaries, all was order, repose, and charity. Its rites and observances were the helps and leaning-places of the soul, on which it delighted to rest amidst the vicissitudes of the world, and in its approach to its final change. The fulness, the majesty, and the dignified benignities of the Liturgy sunk deep into the heart, and prevented the devout worshipper from feeling the want of strength or variety in the discourses of the preacher. The churchyard, with its gentle risings, and pensive memorials of affection, was a silent teacher, both of vigilance and love. And the village spire, whose "silent finger points to heaven," has supplied the place of loftiest imaginings of celestial glory. Its Obstacles of a far different kind long prevented the advancement of pulpit eloquence among Protestant Dissenters. The ministers first ejected for non-conformity were men of rigid honesty and virtue, but their intellectual sphere was little extended beyond that of their fellows. There cannot be a greater mistake than to suppose that they sacrificed their worldly interests from any regard to the principles of free enquiry, which have since almost become axioms. They believed that their compliance with the requisitions of the monarch, would be offensive to God, and that in refusing to yield it they were doing his will; but they were prepared in their turn to assume the right of interpreting the Bible for others, and of condemning them for a more extended application of their example. Harassed, ridiculed, and afflicted, they naturally contracted an air of rigidity, and refused in their turn, with horror, an extensive sympathy with the world. The controversies in which the learned men among the Dissenters were long occupied, having respect, not to grand and universal principles, but to petty questions of ceremony and minor points of faith, tended yet further to confine and depress their genius. Their families were not the less scenes of love, because they preserved parental authority in its state; but the austerity of their manner tended to repress the imaginative faculties of the young. If they indulged themselves in any relaxation of manner, it was not with flowing eloquence, but with the quaint conceit and grave jest that they garnished their conversation or their discourses. Their religion wore a dark and uncouth garb; but to this we are indebted, in no small degree, for its preservation through times of demoralizing luxury. A great change has taken place, of late years, in the literature and eloquence of Protestant Dissenters. As they ceased to be objects of persecution or of scorn, they insensibly lost the austerity and exclusiveness of their character. They descended from their dusty retirements to share in the pursuits and innocent enjoyments of "this bright and breathing world." Their honest bigotries gave way at the warm touch of social intercourse with those from whom they dissented. Meanwhile, the exertions of Whitfield, his glowing, passionate, and awful eloquence;-his daring and quenchless enthusiasm,—and the deep and extensive impression which he made throughout the kingdom, necessarily aroused those, who received his essential doctrines, into new zeal. The impulse thus given was happily refined by a taste for classical learning, and for the arts and embellishments of life, which was then gradually insinuating itself into their churches. Some of the new converts who forsook the establishment, not from repugnance to its constitution, but to its preachers, maintained, in the first eagerness of their faith, the barbarous notion that human knowledge was useless, and even dangerous, to the Christian minister. The absurdity of this position, however strikingly exemplified in the advantages gained by the enemies of those who acted on it, served only to increase the desire of the more enlightened and liberal among the non-conformists to emulate the church in the intellectual qualification of their preachers. They speedily enlarged the means of education among them for the sacred office, and encouraged those habits of study, which promote a refinement and delicacy of feeling in the minds which they enlighten. Meanwhile, their active participation in the noblest schemes of benevolence tended yet further to expand their moral horizon. Youths were found among them prepared to sacrifice all the enjoyments of civilized life, and at the peril of their lives to traverse the remotest and the wildest regions, that they might diffuse that religion which is every where the parent of arts, charities, and peace. It is not the least benefit of their Missionary exertions, that they have given a romantic tinge to the feelings of men "in populous city pent, and engrossed with the petty and distracting cares of commerce. These form the true Evangelical chivalry, supplying to their promoters no small measure of that mental refinement and elevation, which the far less noble འ endeavours to recover the holy Sepulchre shed on Europe in the middle ages. It is not easy to estimate the advantages which spring from the extension of the imagination into the grandest regions of the earth, and from the excitement of sympathies for the condition of the most distant and degraded of the species. The merchant, whose thoughts would else rarely travel beyond his desk and his fire-side, is thus busied with high musings on the progress of the Gospel in the deserts of Africa-skims with the lonely bark over tropical seas-and sends his wishes and his prayers over deserts which human footstep has rarely trodden. Missionary zeal thus diffused among the people, has necessarily operated yet more strongly on the minds of the ministers, who have leisure to indulge in these delicious dreamings which such a cause may sanction. These excellent men are now, for the most part, not only the instructors, but the ornaments of the circles in which they move. The time which they are able to give to literature is well employed for the benefit of their flocks. In the country, more especially, their gentle manners, their extended information, and their pure and blameless lives, do incalculable good to the hearts of their ruder hearers, independant of their public services. Not only in the more solemn of their duties,-in admonishing the guilty, comforting the afflicted, and chearing the dying-do they bless those around them; but by their demeanour, usually dignified, yet chearful, and their conversation decorous, yet lively; they raise incalculably the tone of social intercourse, and heighten the innocent enjoyment of their friends. Some of them are, at the present day, exhibiting no ordinary gifts and energies;—and to the most distinguished of these, we propose to direct the attention of our readers. Mr. HALL, though perhaps the most distinguished ornament of the Calvinistic Dissenters, does not afford the best opportunity for criticism. His excellence does not consist in We use this epithet merely as that which will most distinctively characterize the extensive class to which it is applied-well aware that there are shades of difference among them and that many of them would decline to call themselves after any name but that of Christ. the predominance of one of his powers, but in the exquisite proportion and harmony of all. The richness, variety, and extent of his knowledge, are not so remarkable as his absolute mastery over it. He moves about in the loftiest sphere of contemplation, as though he were "native and endued to its element." He uses the finest classical allusions, the noblest images, and the most exquisite words, as though they were those which came first to his mind, and which formed his natural dialect. There is not the least appearance of straining after greatness in his most magnificent excursions, but he rises to the loftiest heights with a childlike ease. His style is one of the clearest and simplest the least encumbered with its own beauty-of any which ever has been written. It is bright and lucid as a mirror, and its most highly-wrought and sparkling embellishments are like ornaments of crystal, which, even in their brilliant inequalities of surface, give back to the eye little pieces of true imagery set before them. The works of this great preacher are, in the highest sense of the term, imaginative, as distinguished not only from the didactic, but from the fanciful. He possesses "the vision and the faculty divine," in as high a degree as any of our writers in prose. His noblest passages do but make truth visible in the form of beauty, and "clothe upon" abstract ideas, till they become palpable in exquisite shapes. The dullest writer would not convey the same meaning in so few words, as he has done in the most sublime of his illustrations. Imagination, when like his of the purest water, is so far from being improperly employed on divine subjects, that it only finds its real objects in the true and the eternal. This power it is which disdains the scattered elements of beauty, as they appear distinctly in an imperfect world, and strives by accumulation, and by rejecting the alloy cast on all things, to embody to the mind that ideal beauty which shall be realized hereafter. This, by shedding a consecrating light on all it touches, and "bringing them into one," anticipates the future harmony of creation. This already sees the "soul of goodness in things evil," which shall one day change the evil into its likeness. This already begins the triumph over the separating powers of death and time, and renders their victory doubtful, by making us feel the immortality of the affections. Such is the faculty which is employed by Mr. Hall to its noblest uses. There is no rhetorical flourish-no mere pomp of words-in his most eloquent discourses. With vast excursive power, indeed, he can range through all the glories of the Pagan world, and seizing those traits of beauty, which they derived from primæval revelation, restore them to the system of truth. But he is ever best when he is intensest--when he unveils the mighty foundations of the rock of ages-or makes the hearts of his hearers vibrate with a strange joy, which they will recognize in more exalted stages of their being. Mr. Hall has, unfortunately, committed but few of his discourses to the press. His Sermon on the tendencies of Modern Infidelity, is one of the noblest specimens of his genius. Nothing can be more fearfully sublime, than the picture which he gives of the desolate state, to which Atheism would reduce the world; or more beautiful and triumphant, than his vindication of the social affections. His Sermon on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, contains a philosophical and eloquent developement of the causes which make the sorrows of those who are encircled by the brightest appearances of happiness, peculiarly affecting; and gives an exquisite picture of the gentle victim adorned with sacrificial glories. His discourses on War-on the Discouragements and Supports of the Christian Ministry—and on the Work of the Holy Spirit-are of great and various excellence. But, as our limits will allow only a single extract, we prefer giving the close of a Sermon preached in the prospect of the invasion of England by Napoleon, in which he blends the finest remembrance of the antique world-the dearest associations of British patriotism-and the pure spirit of the Gospel-in a strain as noble as could have been poured out by Tyrtæus. To form an adequate idea of the duties of this crisis, it will be necessary to raise your minds to a level with your station, to extend your views to a distant futurity, |