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and to organize it, in virtue of her position as intellectual precursor of the race. But its advent among us, too, should be hastened beyond the normal order by the singular enormity of the abuses which, as we have seen, it comes to remedy. Accordingly, the practice of reporting our parliamentary speeches, or at least of producing them by other than the official newspapers, is falling into general and very just contempt. Under prestige of the superior importance of the proceedings, it finds an asylum still, indeed, in the federal legislature. But who any longer reads these harangues, even when best and briefest? Only the makers themselves, their printers, and the porterhouse loungers among their constituents. From the awful columns of the Reporter-that Sahara of all sense or significance, that wilderness of type which might breed a doubt whether the press be a blessing or a burden-even the people now turn to the summary of the "Letter-writer." This Letter-writer, then, we conceive to be the American germ of the Synopsist. Very crude, to be sure, as yeta mere thing of shreds, and patches, and personalities; but it will rise with the national intellect-the ocean above the main level of which the literature, and much less the journalism, of no country can ever be naturally elevated.

The best, perhaps, to be done meanwhile is to diffuse adequate conceptions of both its capabilities and requisites. Of the latter, the principal by far, it need hardly be said, is competent talent. The Reporter requires no more than a certain mechanical dexterity of memory and muscle. To the Editor, armed with scissors, and duly initiated in the cant and crotchets of passing politics, all learning and ability beyond would seem to be regarded as disqualification. But the Synopsist will demand the very highest order of analytic and expository talent combined. He should have the comprehensive perspicacity to sift out any particles of useful sense or suggestion from the most tedious and jumbled rhodomantade. He should have the patient penetration to open the disordered folds, and to unwind the flimsy ambages of tawdry ornament and tiresome impertinence. Above all, he should have the practised logic to seize, as they pass on the wing of words, a thousand thread-ends of argument, knotting and conjoining them, so as to afford the utmost force of which they may be collectively capable.

The capabilities and qualities of the art are correspondently rare and important. Besides the special bearing of the several speeches upon the subject of discussion, it should present the general result of a comparison of the opposite sides upon the state of the question in debate. Not only this; but it should preserve the history of the debate itself; and upon each topic, from day to day, from session to session,

or year to year, according to duration-in order that the public may be kept in constant possession of the proper point of view, the effectual progress, and the actual position of each and every subject of parliamentary deliberation. But it seems unnecessary to expatiate on the value, not less obvious than immense, of a system thus calculated to set the popular reader, at once, in this happy point of view, the focal distance, as it were, of parliamentary action, from which he would be enabled to take in, at a glance, the total merits of each special proceeding, and, at the same time, the general course and condition of public affairs.

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Finally as the Reporter (as above remarked) was a provisional expedient, whereby the parliamentary speaker was roughly supplemented, so to say, into the popular orator; even so might the Synopsist be considered, not only a like supplement, disembarrassed of its crudities, but, in some respects, an improvement, perhaps, upon the pristine form itself of eloquence-an improvement, that is, unless when a Demosthenes or a Mirabeau should chance to be the speaker. For the province of the Synopsist does not stop with divesting the orator of all incidental particulars, (not merely the superfluous, but even the local or otherwise circumstantial,) and with fairly representing the essence, both of his statements and reasoning; a principal, and perhaps the most characteristic feature of it consists, besides, in supplying, by explication or comment, that frequently most suggestive and significant portion of every spoken discourse which is apt to escape the generality of readers as well as hearers. In this particular the Synopsist, it may be added, is not without analogy to the chorus of the ancient theatre; criticising and moralizing upon the performance as it passes, in order to render it more intelligible or more edifying to the spectators than the illusory ends of the actors (dramatic or oratorical) would have well permitted.

Somewhat such is, as we at least conceive it, the nature and scope of the Compte-rendu; or, rather, the Synopsis, as we have ventured to render it; how much more expressively, is now submitted to the reader. The appropriateness of the name, it will be remembered, was, at the outset, reserved for the result of the discussion, now terminated, to decide. And meagrely though it represents our conception of the art to be described-at least in its ultimate compass and accomplished character-the sketch will be recognized as in exact conformity with the term, in its correctest acceptation, both etymological* and English. To this complete institution of the Synopsis, to this consummation so patriotically to be desired, we venture to hope the foregoing remarks may prove conducive inchoatively, at least. For * Σúv+ŏñтoμai; said of things so disposed as to be seen all at once and together.

with only an adequate idea of their vocation, to begin with, our newspaper correspondents, or letter-writers, might be expected soon to advance, upon the natural progress of things, in this particular.

There is, moreover, a certain developement, recent and remarkable, of this natural progression, which bids fair to accelerate the consummation in question beyond a thousand dissertations: we allude to the application of the electric telegraph to the transmission The "Letter-writer" had, for some time, been gradually supplanting the Reporter, by filching off the cream of the parliamentary proceedings; leaving the latter to flood, unmitigatedly, the nauseated public with the insipid residuum of the thrice-whipped whey. But scarcely is he himself in possession of his pride of place, than in steps the nimble-fingered and lightning-winged telegraph, and leaves him, in turn, as destitute (id est, as dull) as his elder brother newsmonger.

Here is, we cannot forbear remarking, a striking instance of the mode of operation of that great law of progression which has been exemplified systematically, and illustrated variously, in the preceding pages. But this use of the telegraph is suggestive of a still grander order of reflection. It is, in fact, a case-the most refined, because the latest, not to say the last, in this direction-of the old encroachment of machinery upon labour; that is to say, the supersedure, by the mechanical forces of inert, of certain forces, no less mechanical, of animate, nature. The obvious and necessary effect of this progressive limitation of the sphere of voluntary action in the mechanical arts, of this retrusion of mind by the advancing dominion of scientific laws, will be to throw the pure intellect back upon itself, and into its proper atmosphere; to confine its range, to compress its energies, and thus drive it to draw from its own spiritual evolution new modes of activity, more and more purely mental, by unimagined resources of power over the physical forces of nature. It is also curious to note, that this grand tendency affords a scale whereby to estimate the degree in which the several occupations of life should be considered as mechanical or as mental. But far more valuable is the assurance and consolation which it gives, that Intellect—after having so long been scoffed, scorned, and subjected, by the brute material powers, successively, of superstition, wealth, number-will end in being the monarch, the engineer, of the mechanized world.

But to return to the encroachment of the telegraph upon the "occupation" of our Synopsist. It must have the consequence of forcing him to seek such materials of interest as the telegraph cannot supply; to turn from mere facts and bare repetition, (which a parrot can do as well as he,) and embark his labour somewhat more deeply

in the mine of science and analysis, where he is sure to be supplanted by no merely mechanical agency. A necessity, too, so pressing must be of rapid, as well as powerful efficiency in promoting the perfection of this new department of journalism. When it shall have attained this destined perfection, the Press, we may predict, will have made its best, as probably its last contribution to the support of popular liberty and the conduct of representative government.

ART. IV.-CHANNING.

Memoir of William Ellery Channing; with Extracts from his Correspondence and Manuscripts. 3 vols., pp. 427, 459, 494. Boston: Crosby & Nichols. 1848.

"I AM sick of opinions. I am weary to hear them; my soul loathes this frothy food. Give me solid and substantial religion; give me an humble, gentle lover of God and man; a man full of mercy and good faith, without partiality and without hypocrisy; a man laying himself out in the work of faith, the patience of hope, the labour of love. Let my soul be with these Christians, wheresoever they are, and whatsoever opinion they are of." Let not the scrupulous reader be alarmed at this liberalism; these are not the words of the heresiarch William Ellery Channing. They were written by one "John Wesley, late fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford." But we venture the opinion, that, had John Wesley known personally William Ellery Channing, he would have drawn his portrait with about such lines. Southey has a paragraph on what he calls "Wesley's perfect charity;" in which the poet affirms that Wesley "judged kindly of the Romanists, and of heretics of every description, wherever a Christian disposition and a virtuous life were found;" and that "he published the lives of several Catholics and one Socinian, for the edification of his followers." This Socinian was the "good man," Thomas Firmin. Wesley, in his prefatory remarks to the memoir, says: “I was exceedingly struck at reading the following life, having long settled it in my mind that the entertaining wrong notions concerning the Trinity was inconsistent with real piety. But I cannot argue against matter of fact. I dare not deny that Mr. Firmin was a pious man, although his notions of the Trinity were quite erroneous.'

This "pious man," Thomas Firmin, was a Socinian; William Ellery Channing was what all orthodox believers will admit to be much better: he was an Arian, and a very high one; but, more than this, he was a man of purest sincerity, of profound humility, and universal charity. Channing must in fact be admitted to have been

either a saint or a hypocrite; and the man who, after a personal acquaintance with him, or the reading of his works and biography, is prepared to say he was a hypocrite, may be assured that he is not much unfitted to be one himself. We have not the slightest sympathy with Dr. Channing's heterodoxy; we lament, deeply lament, that his otherwise radiant character is marred by any such important defect; and that the reproach of heresy is to counteract, to a great extent, the due influence of his noble writings-writings which, notwithstanding his dogmatic errors, exhibit powerfully the real genius of Christianity, and, in their application of its great ethical principles to the social progress of man, anticipate the better ages to come more than any other productions of our century. It is a delicate task, then, to which we sit down: that of drawing honestly the portrait of a great and good man, against whom the theological opinions of our readers and ourself so strongly predispose us; but we shall proceed in the attempt with determined frankness.

The events worthy of chronological note in Channing's life are few; and it is not important to our present design to narrate them fully. He was born at Newport, Rhode Island, April 7, 1780; entered Harvard University in his fourteenth year; graduated at the age of eighteen; spent a part of the ensuing two years as a private tutor in Richmond, Virginia; returned to Cambridge as Regent (a subordinate office) in 1801; was settled as pastor of Federal-street Church, Boston, in June, 1803; visited Europe in 1822; began his celebrated essays on Milton, Napoleon, and Fenelon, which distinguish the commencement of his literary career, proper, in 1826; visited the West Indies in 1830; commenced his anti-slavery labours in 1835; and died Oct. 2, 1842.

To the American community in general Channing is chiefly known as a theologian; while, on the other side of the Atlantic, where his writings are more current, and better appreciated, his fame is chiefly that of a literary man and a philanthropist. The common impression, that he was the leader of the Unitarian movement in this country, is false. By the publication of his celebrated sermon at the ordination of Mr. Sparks, in Baltimore, in 1819, the doctrinal position of Unitarianism was more generally made known in the American community than at any former date. By this accident, and still more, perhaps, by the fact that his literary reputation elevated him above all others engaged in the movement, he became recognized as its head, although it could boast of earlier advocates and abler polemics.

"It [the Baltimore discourse] gave its author the name of leader and head of the Unitarian denomination in this country, although we had far more ac

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