fered to finish their self-education in solemn and sacred places, in that school where all is silent, save the spheres, and where there is but one gracious and benign Teacher; no fierce and feeble ushers; neither tyrants nor fags; and all the years one holiday. Thus instructed in eye and ear, in sense and in soul, the pupil becomes, in good time, a priest-a poet-and all his songs are true to the shrine at whose altar they were inspired; his words are embodied meanings, spiritualities vocalized; he plays upon the sunbeams as on a many-stringed instrument; the creation is a harp that to his lightest touch gives forth "still sad music," or to the hand of him inspired it responds in a thunder-crash. He remembers not the time when he first learned the gamut; but what glorious solos does he now play! and, when kindred spirits are met together, what celestial concertos! There is " meaning than meets the ear" in that expression of Milton's about Shakspeare

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"Fancy's child, Warbling his native wood-notes wild." That assemblage of words seems simple, but it is at the same time sublime. We hear the song of a solitary nightingale," when all the heavens are mute.' How sweet, yet how strong-how simple, yet how rich how pensive, yet how impassionedhow merry, yet how melancholyhow airy, yet how profound-how like a voice from heaven, yet how cleaving to earth-as it rises and falls, how spiritual, yet how thrilled through a mortal frame: while it breathes life; and as it ceases not, the silence is-death. There seems a struggle between mortality and immortality in that midnight hymn, ascending from terrestrial shades to the eternal skies!

All good poets and painters must thus have communed with their hearts, and been still-or with the still heart of Nature communing with them her humble disciples. Some scholars are allowed to finish their education; but the majority are too soon taken from that school, and sent to far different seminaries, where, too forgetful of the blessed study and play-ground among the woods and by the rivers, they are proud to take their degrees! Others, again, never saw such a school at all-they

know not even of its existence. Yet will they prate and prattle about the lore that could be learned there only; and lead one long life of libels on Nature and her elements, who takes vengeance upon them, by sending sore throats and pulmonary complaints among the poetasters, who go, sooner or later, coughing and wheezing into unhonoured and forgotten graves. On such favourite children as Wordsworth, again, Nature breathes and blows benignly; and we have often seen him walking in a shower without being visibly wet, while coaches have wheeled past with their crew of prosaics all soaked to the skin. If, in a gloomy day, there be a shower of sunshine going, it is sure to settle upon his head; and when the silence is getting too severe, some gloomy but gracious cloud is always at hand with its thunder, to regale the Bard with a flight of echoes.

But to return to Nineveh. We should characterize the languagethe diction of this unhappy bookas a coarse, loosely-woven web of words-warp and woof of whiteybrown wool-tamboured with clusters of fantastic figures and flowers in red and purple silk of the most glaring colours-bad prose embossed with worse poetry. Of all true poets the diction is, by very inspiration, divine. The words seem alive and winged, like bees round the lips of Plato-like birds, many-tongued, yet all harmonious in the grove that rings with linnets in its coppices, thrushes on its tree-tops, and larks far and wide and high up in its cloudless firmament-like the hymns of a hundred flowing and falling waters, rills, streams, rivers, torrents, lakes, and cataracts, each with its several echo, till music seems interfused with all nature. The versification of Milton and Wordsworth, is it not often grand as the music of Handel's Messiah, or Haydn's Creation! For, besides the unconscious inspiration of genius breathing itself forth again in harmonies, in the strains of all poets you feel the meditative mastery of the highest and profoundestart. Exquisite adaptations-finest proportions-risings and fallings graceful and majestic-ebbings and flowings sea-like and sublime-fluctuations of feeling, that in their faintest movements we know will not fail or fade entirely away out

of shadowy being-that in their fullest will, we know, waft our spirits on along with them, as upon winds and waves, far away into the still or stormy heart of the Main of Imagination, bedropt, as with gems from heaven, with a thousand isles. This music is the spiritual life of song; and all life is a mystery-felt, not understood-when it is gone flesh rots, and so do words; people are buried, and so are poems; these in cells, those in shelves; and of both alike the everlasting doom is-dust.

Oh, how could Mr Atherstone ever imagine his versification Miltonic! Readers all! you remember well the glorious passages in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, in which the Blind Bard sweeps the earth with an angel's wing, from the regions of the rising to the regions of the setting sun-shewing you in one panorama, it may almost be said, the whole habitable globe. Mr Atherstone, too, must needs be topographical and geographical; but he has not even the merit of a land-measurer, and merely mouths out so many names from a Gazetteer.

"Lo! from Bithynia, Lydia, Phrygia,
From Cappadocia and Iberia,
Armenia, ancient Syria, Babylon,
From Media, Persia, and Arabia,
Chorasmia, Hyrcania, Asia,

Past the Salt Desert, past Gedrosia's

wave,

On to the banks of Indus!!!!" &c.

How ignorant of the very elements of his art must the man be, who, in writing thus, imagines himself to be imitating Milton!

It is always your most ignorant people who think themselves the most knowing-the dullest the most acute-and in their own belief none so bright as the opaque. Mr Atherstone, who is unacquainted with the easiest rules of blank verse, aims in the above passage at one of its greatest difficulties; and in the following stoiter, (see Dr Jamieson,) he is equally ambitious of science. Was there ever such an attempt at accommodation of sound to sense-as this sudden violation of measure!

"But, at a bound, he sprang, From the path of the horses aside; their breath

Blew hot in his ear; his shoulder with

foam

Was white; like the sweep of the storm they passed,"

our

Mr Atherstone here reminds us of a skater, who cannot do outside, attempting the figure of eight, or spread-eagle. Down comes friend with a cloit (see Dr Jamieson again) on his posteriors-the most painful fall within the whole range of the ludicrous.

We conclude our critique, then, for the present, with this summary sentence of condemnation,—that Mr Atherstone knows not what the language of poetry is that he has but a feeble fancy, and no imagination— that all his characters are borrowed, either directly or indirectly, from Byron-that he has no intellect to form and mould a plan-and that he has no knowledge, deserving the name, of human nature. In striving to write poetry, he is fighting against the stars. Apollo shines not for himnor yet Diana; the sun and moon are in league against him; the moment he takes up his pen, day's king retires behind a cloud, or night's queen

is

age,

"Hid in her vacant interlunar cave." Mr Atherstone dedicates his dullness to Sir Walter Scott, thus"To the Master-spirit of the To the living Shakspeare, TO SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART." That is fulsome. But supposing Scott to be Shakspeare, why dedicate to him the Fall of Nineveh? Not a line in it that shews Mr Atherstone ever to have read one word either of the dead or living Shakspeare. He has drunk neither of the waters of the Avon nor of the Tweed. Why then select Scott, the living Shakspeare, for Dedicatee? He might as appropriately have inscribed the Fall of Nineveh to Mr Telford the civil engineer, or to Monsieur Jarrin the pastry-cook. There is puppyism in this; as if only the Master-spirit of the age were worthy of such an honour-as if the livingShakspeare were a counterpart to the dead Atherstone. There is no meaning-quite the contrary-in such juxtaposition. Had Mr Atherstone lighted his taper at the sun, he might have been allowed, if he chose it, to hold it up in the eye of day; but 'tis only a brimstone match or spunk, with a small dim tip-spark from the expiring embers of a turf fire, and to thrust it into the nose of the living Shakspeare, is at once presumptuous and offensive,

SIR,-Though the most unlookedfor controversy, in which the Bishop of Ferns has judged it necessary to engage with the Earl of Mountcashel, is perhaps not yet concluded, the time seems to have arrived, in which it should be noticed in a periodical miscellany which so ably advocates the interests of our civil and ecclesiastical constitution. The main topics of that controversy have been sufficiently discussed, and a judgment may even now, I conceive, be satisfactorily formed concerning the expediency of the interposition by which it has been provoked. I am accordingly induced to offer to you such reflections as it has suggested to one sufficiently acquainted with the state of the Established Church in Ireland, sincerely attached to its true interest, and truly solicitous for its utmost attainable efficiency. That at such a time, and from such a quarter, a vehement attack should be made on the actual administration of our part of the Established Church of England and Ireland, is, indeed, fitted to suggest reflections, extending far beyond the topics immediately agitated in the controversy.

Two years only have passed away since the religious public was gratified with a quick succession of reports, announcing numerous instances of persons who had become sensible of the duty of throwing off a mass of superstitious idolatry, and attaching themselves to the genuine truths of Christianity. Some spell, by which the moral genius of Ireland had been bound, seemed to have been suddenly broken, and the stupor which it had created to be rapidly yielding to the animating influences of religious freedom. A talisman had indeed been found; and that talisman was the written word of God, Some local circumstances rendered this important movement first conspicuous, and, throughout, more considerable in Cavan; but the agency by which it was effected appeared to have been spread through almost every part of Ireland, and especially through those in which the religion

of Rome had exercised its benumbing and degrading influences with the least control. Among the mountains of Leitrim, a Roman Catholic peasantry was found to be eager in attendance on expositions of the saered writings, and open to the conviction which they offered to their minds. In various other parts of Connaught, the peculiar region of Irish popery, the announcement of the existence of a written word, which seemed to have been carefully withheld from the knowledge of the people, was hailed with an admiring curiosity. In Munster, besides many scattered instances of conversion occurring in various places, one parish, that of Askeaton, in the diocese of Limerick, exhibited an almost uncontested triumph of religious liberty. If the capital and its vicinity exhibited less decisive indications of the influence of religious truth, it should be recollected, that in the capital all the violence of political and ecclesiastical faction had been concentrated. If the Protestant counties of Ulster could not boast of as much success in enlightening the minds of Roman Catholics as the almost Popish counties of Connaught, it should be remembered, that there the congregations of Protestants were sufficiently numerous to occupy a large share of the attention of the clergy; that in those counties the abuses of Popery were much checked and restrained by the predominance of the Protestant population; and that Protestants, where they were strong in number, felt themselves disposed to array themselves in opposition to a party, elsewhere overwhelming. To every reflecting mind, however, it was apparent that a time had at length arrived, in which it might be reasonably hoped that the truth of religion should spread its salutary influence over the land.

These most important occurrences* were traced to their principle; and it was ascertained that they received an adequate and satisfactory explanation from the natural operation of societies, which had been, during

many years, actively employed in diffusing a religious education among the lower classes of the people. But where had these religious societies themselves their origin? In that association, one of the original triumvirate of which was an old and steady member of the Established Church, and the measures of which have been, from its commencement to the present day, constantly directed and supported by the clergy of the Establishment. The formation and success of such a society naturally gave occasion to the formation of others, in which laymen exercised a predominating influence; but the parent society, the Association for Discountenancing Vice, was the creature of the Established Clergy; and this society, aided at length by the liberality of the government, has embraced all the various objects of education, and of the diffusion of the sacred writings and of religious tracts, which its off spring have variously pursued. To the clergy of the Establishment, then, may this fair promise of religious improvement be most justly ascribed. They gave the original impulse, and they have, from the beginning, continued their best exertions, being at the same time active in conducting, within their respective parishes, the operations of the other societies. To realize the promised reformation, it was contended by worldly politicians that all political disqualifications should be removed from Roman Catholics, that they might not be retained in their present communion by a proud punctilio. These disqualifications have since been removed; and, though we trust that the good seed of the word of truth has been too widely, and too carefully sown, to be now destroyed by the blighting influence of political excitement, yet to a superficial observer, the religious reformation of Ireland is effectually restrained. But whatever may be the religious result of the great change, which has been recently made in the government, whether it shall indeed remove out of the way the impediment of worldly pride, or, as seems much more probable, oppose to religion the additional impediment of worldly policy; to the Established Church, it must yet

be acknowledged, is the cause of the Protestant religion in Ireland primarily indebted for all which has been effected for its advancement, and for all the good which may yet be effected, when the unfavourable influences at present operating shall have lost their power.

A church, which, within the last thirty years of its existence, had so unequivocally demonstrated its efficiency, might well be supposed to be secure from the animadversions of persons professing to be its sincere friends. Could that establishment be justly described as inefficient, which had so surprised the world by the successful issue of its long-continued exertions, that the worldly and incredulous politician represented as a chimera fit only to amuse a dreaming visionary, an expectation of final success authorized by actual occurrences as apparent as the sun at noon-day? Abuses it must have, because it is composed of fallible and erring men; but that, whatever these abuses may have been, they have not destroyed or considerably weakened its efficiency, has been recently proved to the world with an evidence, which those only who close their minds against conviction can fail to perceive. In truth, every man who has had an opportunity of comparing the present character of the Established Church in Ireland, with that which belonged to it thirty years from the present time, must be sensible of a most important improvement, which within that interval has been silently and spontaneously accomplished. The young clergyman of the present day is avowedly zealous in the cause of that religion, of which he has become a minister, and familiarly acquainted with its various topics of discussion; he devotes himself to the discharge of the duties of his sacred office,regarding them, not as burdens attached to a profession, which he had chosen as genteel, but as objects worthy of engrossing his attention, and constituting his best and surest gratification. The aged, too, have caught from the young an ardour which, in their earlier days, might have been characterized as belonging only to enthusiasts. The language of the pulpit has ac