Metternich himself is here without one "Nor was this all my entertainment this evening. As Mille. Common of Two's reserve is a single Trollope to trumpet his whereabouts little subsided, there were other persons present, as or thereabouts. As for the Hannah Mores three foreign ministers, besides Barthelemy, Lord and the Mrs. Frail Piozzis, can we not Carmarthen, Wilkes, and his daughter, and the match-can we not exceed them by the chief of the Moravians. I could not help thinking thousand, whether as regards the benevohow posterity would wish to have been in my sit-lence, the wit, or the learning? But we uation, at once with three such historic personages must return for yet an instant to the Strawas Deon, Wilkes, and Oghinski, who had so great a share in the revolution of Poland, and was king of it for four-and-twenty hours. He is a noble figure, very like the Duke of Northumberland in the face, but stouter and better proportioned.

night, and went to paddle on the terrace over the river, while we ancients, to affect being very hot too, sat with all the windows in the bow open, and might as well have been in Greenland, &c.

meddle with Mrs. Bernard, "the hen quaker," and her cows so much coveted by her gracious and somewhat covetous Majesty, Queen Charlotte,-neither with young You surprise me, madam, by saying the newsMadame de Choiseul," who longed for a papers mention my disappointment of seeing parrot which should be a miracle of elo- Madame de Genlis. How can such arrant trifles quence,"-neither with " our Madame de spread? It is very true that as the hill would not Maintenon," Mrs. Delaney, whose estab-go to Madame de Genlis, she has come to lishment at Windsor by royal command, is the hill. Ten days ago Mrs. Cosway sent me a bitten in with a very strong wash of aqua-Hill. I thought I could do no less than offer her a note that Madame desired a ticket for Strawberry fortis. But here is a sketch of a wandering breakfast, and named yesterday se'nnight. Then educatrix, who, like many other enterprising came a message that she must go to Oxford, and and eccentric persons, seems to have proved take her doctor's degree; and then another, that I far tamer and more like other people, when should see her yesterday, when she did arrive, met face to face, than could have been ex- with Miss Wilkes and Pamela, whom she did not pected: even present to me, and whom she has educated to be very like herself in the face. I told her I could not attribute the honor of her visit but to my late dear friend, Madame Du Deffand. It rained the whole time, and was as dark as midnight, so that she could scarce distinguish a picture: but you will want an account of her, and not of what she saw or could not see. Her person is agreeable, and she seems to have been pretty. Her conversation is natural and reasonable, not precieuse and affected, and searching to be eloquent, as I had expected. I asked her if she had been pleased with Oxford, meaning the buildings,-not the wretched oafs that inhabit it. She said she had had little

"I will read no more of Rousseau," (cries Walpole, indulging in one of those bursts of petulance and prejudice, which are so doubly amusing in one so versatile, so liberal, and so far in advance of his time)," his confessions disgusted me beyond book I ever opened. His hen, the schoolmistress Madame de Genlis, the newspapers say, is arrived in London. I nauseate her too: the eggs of education that both he and she laid could not be hatched till the chickens would be ready to die of old age."

any

Ere half a dozen pages are turned, we find something like a change of note. We must be allowed, too, to transcribe the earlier portion of the letter, for the sake of its sprightliness, though irrelevant to the vivacious French lioness.

July 23d, 1785.

"I am very sorry to hear that the war of bad seasons, which has lasted eight months, has affected your ladyship too. I never knew so much illness; but as our natural season, rain, is returned, I hope you will recover from your complaints. English consumptions are attrituted to our insular damps, but I question whether justly. The air of the sea is an elixir, not a poison; and in the three sultry summers which preceded the three last, it is notorious that our fruits were uncommonly bad, as if they did not know how to behave in hot weather. I hope I shall not be contradicted by the experience of last night. Mrs. Keppel had, or rather was to have had, all London at her beautiful villa at Isleworth. Her grace of Devonshire was to have been there, ay, you may stare, madam! and her grace of Bedford too. The deluge in the morning, the debate in the house of Commons, qualms in the first duchess, and I don't know what, certainly not qualms in the second, detained them, and not a soul came from town but Lady Duncannon, Lady Beauchamp, the two Miss Vernons, the Boltons, the Norths, Lord William Russell, Charles Wyndham, Colonel Gardiner, and Mr. Aston, and none of these arrived till ten at night. Violins were ready but could not play to no dancers; so at eleven the young people said it was a charming

time; that she had wished to learn their plan of
education, which, as she said sensibly, she sup-
have told her that it is directly repugnant to our
posed was adapted to our constitution. I could
constitution, that nothing is taught there but drunk-
enness and prerogative, or, in their language,
church and king. I asked if it is true that the new
edition of Voltaire's works is prohibited.
replied, Severely,' and then condemned those
who write against religion and government, which,
was a little unlucky before her friend, Miss Wilkes.
She stayed two hours, and returns to France
to day to her duty."-Vol. ii. pp, 231-2-3.

She

The above are but mere average specimens of the matter and manner of these delightful letters: to talk about which, with annotations, comparisons, elucidations, &c., as we could like, would furnish us with pleasant subject matter to the end of the year, making the widest miscellany too narrow for the publication of our gossip. And, not only does the variety of topics embraced, ranging from "predestination to slea silk" engage us; and not only are the notes on the great events of the time (from which we have reluctantly refrained) full of suggestion, because pregnant with interest, shrewd mother-wit, and widelynurtured experience;-and not only are the glimpses at contemporary literature and art curious (though these, being taken through Claude Lorraine glasses tinged with a

thousand modish dyes, demand some Horace Walpole. Latterly, however, the knowledge of the writer, his sympathies, mistake has been gradually rectified. His and his associates, ere we can translate clear head, his kind heart, his gay spirits, them into the natural and trustworthy tes- his amazing memory, have come to be adtimony), but the character of the man, mitted. His works are no longer treated too, brightens, deepens, and widens, as we as trifles by "a person of quality," but read them, in conjunction with the former valued as substantial and classical contriseries of letters from the same prolific butions to English literature. And it may source. On this it is a pleasure to dwell-be questioned whether such as desire to nay more, and a duty. know how the world was really going on,

It was for some years a fashion to treat when the Philosophe upset France and the Walpole as a trifling Macaroni, to accept Blues dispensed literary immortality in the disclaimers he was somewhat too fond England, can find a work more valuable for of tendering when accused of sound sense, the purposes of study, apart from its admilearning, genius, or philosophy, as so many rable fascination and entertainment, than truths beyond dispute. All the world the letters, thoughts, and anecdotes of knows how hard it is for the mediocre, the Conway's cousin, and Du Deffand's friend, dull, and the ill-mannered, to forgive wit and Lady Ossory's cicisbè,-the gay, gifted, and high-breeding; and this difficulty, also, graceful architect, antiquarian, and Amphihad its part in the popular judgment of try on of Strawberry Hill !

From the English Review.

EDWARD IRVING AND IRVINGISM.

1. Substance of Lectures delivered in the Churches. By HENRY DRUMMOND. London,

1847.

2. A Discourse on the Office of Apostle. London, 1848. 3. The Liturgy and other Divine Offices of the Church.

No date.

FUTURE Church historians—if the world fit of the writer of some future "Natural last long enough-may possibly be as much History of Heresy and Schism," an expuzzled by the rival developments of New-ceedingly curious and instructive book, we man and Newman-street, in the nineteenth, venture to predict, if ever it should be writas former Church historians have been by the ten,-we now turn into the straight path of rival schisms of Novatus and Novatian, in the our present duty, by placing within the fothird century. In both cases, too, there cus of the hydro-oxygen microscope of truth happens to be innovation in the name as the strange theological infusoria, the best well as in the thing; but the credit of that description of whose whereabout is,-da pun belongs to fate: all we have to do with veniam, lector,-turning out, not of Oxford, it is to point it out. Of old Carthage and but of Oxford-street. They are, as is mostRome, of late Oxford and London, have ly the case with animalcules, the offspring furnished their contingents of unsoundness of troubled waters. It was during that in the faith; and of late, as of old, the si- heavy gale of European politics, which milarity, not of name only, but of error, in divergent lines of separation, is sufficiently strong to induce in the minds of distant observers a danger of confusion, and to sug- at the period when, in France, a mighty gest the propriety of adhering to the most revolutionary wave deposited on the rock tangible point of difference, that of locali- of power an ambitious prince, whom anoty, by distinguishing, as formerly between ther and mightier wave has just swept down African and Roman Novatians, so now be- again, and washed upon the shore of "pertween Oxford and London Newmanites. fidious," yet ever hospitable Albion,-then Having thrown out this hint for the bene-it was that one of the most powerful minds

"maria omnia cælo

miscuit,"

that ever descended from the bleak hills of lian's Montanist compositions, the sovereign the lawless North, into the cheery levels of contempt which he deals to those who, in the tamer South, prepared, with the rich his vocabulary, rejoice in the appellation of compost of his imaginative thoughts and Psychics, as distinguished from those that racy rantings, the mushroom-bed, justly de- have the Spirit, is admirably reproduced signated by the addition of an ism to his by the oracle of the modern Montanist patronymic. A veritable son of Boreas was sect. "The knowledge and defence of he-the wildness and obliquity of his men- Paraclete," says Tertullian, adverting to tal vision strangely and strikingly portray- the difference between himself and the ored in the cast of his outer eye and counte- thodox Church, "separated us, subsequentnance; a giant among dwarfs, he stood ly, from the Psychics."* "There is," among the men of his generation-a Her- says Mr. Drummond (p. 342), in speaking cules among the pigmies of his kirk-a man of every denomination of Christians, except whom none that ever knew him could forget his own sect, "an universal despising of -whom none ever can remember without the Holy Ghost, as the Spirit of the body reverence and love, without a tear of pity of Christ ;" and this he accounts (p. 341) and a smile of ineffable reminiscence. In one of the points on which "all Christenthe very height of his too conscious strength, dom is equally infidel," so that in this reone came upon him stronger than himself, spect "there is no essential difference in and overcame him. The defeat was regis- error between Roman and Protestant.” tered on high, and the decree went forth- The principle on which the whole work is "He that gathereth not with me, scatter-composed, namely, that all the world is eth."

wrong, and no one knows or understands it, except Mr. Drummond and those who have the advantage of his instruction, is laid down at the outset, with a distinctness which does more credit to the candor than to the modesty of the writer.

"Whoever speaks, either upon religious or political subjects, must espouse the cause of one sect or another, unless he is prepared to submit to be afford to be just towards a rival party, without charged with inconsistency. A partisan cannot becoming liable to an accusation of treachery. The Sovereign alone, because he is above all political factions, can avail himself of the powers of all, for the purposes to which each is severally competent; and, for the same reason, can the true CaHigh Church and Low Church disputants, accordtholic alone look upon Romanist and Protestant, ing to their real values, and award to each the merit and the blame they deserve."-Drummond, Substance of Lectures, p. 1.

Such was the origin of the sect which seems destined, in these latter days of the Christian dispensation, to fill the place occupied, in its first age, after the time of the Apostles, by the Montanists. The parallel is striking in more than one respect, as the sequel will show; and, among others, in the very personnel of the chief actors. Of the modern Montanus, the man from the northern hills, we have already spoken; whose snare was, like that of his prototype, "love of eminence," whereby, as the ancient author, quoted by Eusebius, affirms of the latter, "he gave place to the devil." To say nothing of the Priscillas and Maximillas which this modern Montanism has, in common with the Cataphrygian heresy, no one that has taken the trouble of perusing the work No. 1, at the head of this article, will refuse to acknowledge that it has also found its Tertullian. For if it must We will do Mr. Drummond the justice be admitted that the modern Tertullian is to say, that from a due regard, no doubt, not altogether as well-informed a man as to the benefit of those who are the melanhis African original, it cannot be denied, on choly theme of his discourse, and rememthe other hand, that he is more than his bering how much more salutary censure is equal in saturnine humor, in terseness and to most men than praise, he has been as abruptness of style, in quaintness and oc- chary of the latter as he is lavish of the casional coarseness of thought, and in that former. A cynical discursive humor runs curious, and sometimes frivolous play of all through the book, which, if you are the imagination, which not only sees in above getting angry, is rather entertaining everything a type and a sacramentum, but than otherwise. If we had met with the builds upon the most fanciful analogies and volume without its title-page, and we had interpretations the ponderous structures of been asked to write one for it, without knowa theology, as deficient in soundness as it is ing anything about the authorship, we should abounding in ingenuity. But above all, that *Nos postea agnitio Paracleti, atque defensio, diswhich is the chief characteristie of Tertul-junxit a Psychicis. Tertull. adv. Prax. c. 1.

writings, a key to the positive tenets of his "Church."

If we except the few pages containing in twenty articles the minimum of faith which we are told must be common to all bodies of Christians" in union with the one Catholic Church," with bracketed glosses annexed to the several articles, and elsewhere an occasional allusion to certain "visions and revelations," the purport of which is not, however, suffered to transpire, or an allegorical delineation of the character of "the fourfold ministry," of all which more hereafter, there is literally nothing in Mr. Drummond's book to enlighten the reader as to the nature of Irvingism. This is the more surprising, as the Churches over which he presides are, in his opinion (p.70), "places of refuge provided for the faithful,-who, like Lot of old, are dwelling in the mystic Sodom"-during the impending destruction of all "the false systems," that is, of all the Churches and other Christian communions which were in the world before the rise of this modern Montanism.

undoubtedly have written: "Mephistophe les his Walk through the Church Militant;" and possibly we might not have been far out. As it is, we would venture to suggest to Mr. Drummond, that, in a future edition, the title should be altered, as thus: "Substance of Lectures fired off at the Churches; for we have met with little in them that might serve for edification to those that are within," while there is more than enough of castigation for " them that are without." We have some respect for a preacher who will take the bull of iniquity by the horns, and tell a sufficiency of unpalatable home truths concerning their own Church to his audience; but to descant upon the stupidity and the deadness of every other communion, upon an implied understanding that those whom he addresses have risen superior to all these defects and shortcomings, is to our apprehension not very profitable, though it is the most approved system of sectarian preaching. Nevertheless, let us not be ungrateful; fas est et ab hoste doceri. Much as we mislike the spirit of Mr. Drummond's book, and sorry as we should be to rely on such food for "These Churches," we read in another place, our edification, there are many things in his volume which are exceedingly true, and have it; the cisterns, the pipes, and the vessels "are necessarily without the oil, and never can vastly well put; and for all that we have are all equally empty. Those churches which said, we are ready to admit this further hold the true hope, are still no better than unwise point of resemblance between the two Ter- virgins, and must speedily go to them who have the tullians, him of Carthage and him of New-oil to sell, or share their predicted fate. Now is man-street, that, as of the former old Cyprian used to say, "Da magistrum," so the of the latter might furnish profitable pages "aids to reflection "" even to a bishop. There is another point of view, however, in which the book of Mr. Drummond is more instructive than he himself intended. When we had a large octavo volume brought under our notice, bearing the title, "Substance of Lectures delivered in the Churches," from the pen of him who, in those "Churches," occupies the high position of an" apostle," and more than an apostle, "the pillar of the apostles," we naturally supposed that it would contain a full development, if not of their discipline and worship, at least of their faith; and with that view we procured and perused it. But in this, as in many other respects, the "apostleship" of Newman-street bears witness against itself as an exceedingly bad imitation; and no mistake could be more grievous than that of supposing, as we confess we did in our simplicity, that in the pages of Mr. Drummond is to be found, after the manner of other " apostolic "

the time of the end, when all these sayings of our

Lord are fulfilled; now is the time for the lesson good tree, with healthy leaves, and in otherwise to be learned from the parable of the fig-tree,-a vigorous health, perhaps unusually productive of wood and leaves, but lacking the peculiar thing that was needed at the time. In the last days, when Christendom is rent into a thousand schisms, can be seen the union of all the different forms of outward Christianity, hitherto discordant, and still waging upon each other war to the knife, uniting, thing which God is doing, as a climax to all his as in the eighty third Psalm, against the single former works."-Substance of Lectures, pp. 108, 109.

The abstract truth of the proposition that such will be the aspect of Christendom in the last days, we are, of course, far from denying; seeing it is written, "When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?" What we call in question is, the assumption that the sect of which Mr. Drummond is "the pillar," is "the single thing which God is doing;" and although we can discern it to be a climax,' " we have serious doubts of its being "the

* Luke xviii. 8.