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a new-weaned boy," he could at least decorate his subject with exquisite adornments. The passages from his loved Austin and Chrysostom, and not less beloved Seneca and Plutarch, the scholar knows how to pardon. The squirrel is not more tempted to carry nuts to his hoard, than the bookish author is tempted to transfer to his own pages fine passages from his favourite authors. Alas! he little knows how flat and meaningless they are to those who have not traversed the same walks, and shared the delight with which he found great spoil. To him each polished shell recalls its autumnal tale of woods, and groves, and sunshine showering through the yellow leaves; but to the quaint collection "the general public" very much prefer a pint of filberts from a huckster's barrow.

Hitting obliquely at Mr Hallam, Taylor's most enthusiastic and withal tasteful critic, Mr Wilmott, remarks, "It is the custom, even among educated persons, to describe Taylor as a copious and florid writer, in whom the luxuriance and debility of the Asiatic school are conspicuously combined. Thus the affluence of his fancy has helped to impoverish his reputation, and the wing that raised him to the sun furnishes the arrow to bring him to the earth. In every large and fruitful intellect, we undoubtedly trace the predominance of one particular faculty; whether it be sagacity in Thucydides, beauty in Virgil, or harmony in Raffaelle. But this domination of one habit of thought does not imply the extirpation of every other. The historian becomes the rival of Demosthenes, the poet hurls the thunder-cloud over his garden, and the painter towers into the full grandeur and height of passion. We couple Michael Angelo with Eschylus, without remembering that Sophocles may be included in the parallel; or that the pencil which seemed to exult in the creation of magnificent and daring energy, could impart to its design the tranquillity and bloom of Coreggio. And so it is with Taylor. The ruling faculty of his mind was a love of the beautiful, but he possessed, in an

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eminent degree, the element of the terrible." Of these sublimer passages, our readers have a specimen in our extract from the sermon on Christ's advent to judgment.

As we have already stated, we cannot agree with Mr Hallam in pronouncing Taylor's sentences "absolutely unmusical." Owing to their amplitude they often lack the antithetic chime, and, beyond most literature of the period, they are free from the alliterative jingle. But they are often rich in melody— the melody, not of a ballad-tune, however, but the rolling fulness and the frequent burst against a grassy beach of a high and sunny sea. This attribute has been well described by an American critic, whose subsequent writings exhibit not a little of Taylor's mental fertility, with a correctness of taste and a delicacy of feeling entirely his own. Alluding to the wellknown verdict of Dr Parr— Ώκηρον μὲν σεβω, θαυμαζωδε Βαῤῥουον, καὶ φιλῶ Ταιλωρον-Dr Nehemiah Adams remarks, "Barrow and Hooker are like streams-deep, full, sounding streams-rolling right onward to the sea. Taylor is a sunny river, that loves the meadows, and stretches forth its arms into the fields, and laughs while the little streams play into its bosom, and wanders where it will, while its hundred brothers hear the voice of the great deep, and plunge into their home. The writings of Barrow and Hooker are like the measured and more stately strains of an organ, governed by an apparent skill. Taylor heeds not the rules or the proportion of music; but, like a great Æolian harp, when you think that its strains are about to cease, the restless melodies of his soul break out in another strain, and still another, till you are absolutely wearied with delight." *

Like most men who have a peaceful conscience, an exuberant fancy, or a large excess of intellectual power, there are frequent gleams of gaiety and sparklets of wit throughout the pages of Taylor; and in his controversial writings the argument

* "American Quarterly Observer,” vol. i. p. 149.

occasionally sharpens into sarcasm.

In his "Dissuasive from

Popery," Coleridge adduces as "an exquisite specimen of grave and dignified irony," the following paragraph :-"The 'spirit of prophecy' is also a pretty sure sign of the true church. . . . I deny not but there have been some prophets in the Church of Rome-Johannes de Rupe Scissâ, Anselmus, Marsicanus, Robert Grosthead, bishop of Lincoln, St Hildegardis, Abbot Joachim, whose prophecies and pictures prophetical were published by Theophrastus Paracelsus, and John Adrasder, and by Paschalinus Regiselmus, at Venice, 1589; but (as Ahab said, concerning Micaiah) these do not prophesy good concerning Rome, but evil."

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Chequered, and prevailingly mournful, as was Taylor's personal history, within the homestead of his rich and imperial fancy he possessed joys with which no stranger could intermeddle. Perhaps there never was a mind to which the beauties of holiness shone forth so bright and alluring, nor one to which the things "honest" stood out so "lovely." And although he may not have always succeeded in conveying to others his own composite feeling, there can be no doubt that in his own palatial intellect, the Good, the True, the Beautiful, reigned together in trinal harmony; and his works will do us the highest service, if in ourselves they enkindle corresponding tastes and aspirations. It is surely possible to be classical without being pagan, and a fine fancy need not involve its possessor in religious error. And if genius cannot go on a nobler errand than that which allured the wise men from the East, nor follow a safer guide than the Star of Bethlehem, there is no better use which can be made of its treasures than to leave them in a shrine which consecrates the gift, and which sheds over the spoils of earth the loveliness of heaven.

* Philippians iv. 8.

THE ADVENT TO JUDGMENT.

299

Christ's Advent to Judgment.

[Our first specimens are from the sermons preached at Golden Grove. To the admirers of Taylor's genius they are abundantly familiar; but we cannot withhold them. They are amongst his happiest and most characteristic efforts.]

Even you and I, and all the world, kings and priests, nobles and learned, the crafty and the easy, the wise and the foolish, the rich and the poor, the prevailing tyrant and the oppressed party, shall all appear to receive their symbol; and this is so far from abating anything of its terror and our dear concernment, that it much increases it: for although concerning precepts and discourses we are apt to neglect in particular what is recommended in general, and in incidences of mortality and sad events, the singularity of the chance heightens the apprehension of the evil; yet it is so by accident, and only in regard of our imperfection; it being an effect of self-love, or some little creeping envy, which adheres too often to the unfortunate and miserable; or being apprehended to be in a rare case, and a singular unworthiness in him who is afflicted otherwise than is common to the sons of men, companions of his sin, and brethren of his nature, and partners of his usual accidents; yet in final and extreme events, the multitude of sufferers does not lessen, but increase the sufferings; and when the first day of judgment happened, that (I mean) of the universal deluge of waters upon the old world, the calamity swelled like the flood, and every man saw his friend perish, and the neighbours of his dwelling, and the relatives of his house, and the sharers of his joys, and yesterday's bride, and the newborn heir, the priest of the family, and the honour of the kindred, all dying or dead, drenched in water and the Divine vengeance; and then they had no place to flee unto, no man

cared for their souls; they had none to go unto for counsel, no sanctuary high enough to keep them from the vengeance that rained down from heaven; and so it shall be at the day of judgment, when that world and this, and all that shall be born hereafter, shall pass through the same Red Sea, and be all baptized with the same fire, and be involved in the same cloud, in which shall be thunderings and terrors infinite. Every man's fear shall be increased by his neighbour's shrieks, and the amazement that all the world shall be in, shall unite as the sparks of a raging furnace into a globe of fire, and roll upon its own principle, and increase by direct appearances and intolerable reflections. He that stands in a churchyard in the time of a great plague, and hears the passing bell perpetually telling the sad stories of death, and sees crowds of infected bodies pressing to their graves, and others sick and tremulous, and death dressed up in all the images of sorrow round about him, is not supported in his spirit by the variety of his sorrow; and at doomsday, when the terrors are universal, besides that it is in itself so much greater, because it can affright the whole world, it is also made greater by communication and a sorrowful influence; grief being then strongly infectious, when there is no variety of state, but an entire kingdom of fear; and amazement is the king of all our passions, and all the world its subjects. And that shriek must needs be terrible, when millions of men and women, at the same instant, shall fearfully cry out, and the noise shall mingle with the trumpet of the archangel, with the thunders of the dying and groaning heavens, and the crack of the dissolving world, when the whole fabric of nature shall shake into dissolution and eternal ashes!

Consider what an infinite multitude of angels, and men, and women, shall then appear! It is a huge assembly when the men of one kingdom, the men of one age in a single province are gathered together into heaps and confusion of disorder; but then, all kingdoms of all ages, all the armies that ever

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