quite clean dirty antagonist had come off? On the contrary, my dear fellow,' said he, every one around me is declaring that it is the first time they ever saw him so well dressed.' So, Sir, you see, that, to try the bird, the spur must touch his blood. Yet, after all, if it had not been for the inspiration of the punch, I might have continued a mute to this hour; so, for the honour of the art, let us have another glass.'

The speech which Mr Curran made upon this occasion was immediately followed by a more substantial reward than the applauses of his hearers; the debate was no sooner closed, than the president of the society dispatched his secretary to the eloquent stranger, to solicit the honour of his company to partake of a cold collation, which proved to consist of bread and cheese and porter; but the public motives of the invitation rendered it to the guest the most delicious supper that he had ever tasted.

"From this time till his final departure from London, he was a regular attendant and speaker at debating clubs,—an exercise which he always strongly recommended to every student of eloquence, and to which he attributed much of his own skill and facility in extemporaneous debate. He never adopted or approved of the practice of committing to memory intended speeches, but he was in the habit of assisting his mind with ample notes of the leading topics, and trusted to the occasion for expression.

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He reviewed the history of the world, and, pausing over the institutions which had affected its destiny, reverenced them for the greatness of their effects. Mr Curran looked at institutions as connected with freedom; and, where he found a tendency in them to enslave the human mind, forgot all their imposing grandeur in that single evil. Thus, Burke's imagination contemplated, with an awful gravity,' the age of chivalry (the times of our canonized forefathers') as a splendid array of pageantry, gallantry, and deeds of arms, with its proud bearings and ensigns armorial,' and all those images of power which carry an imposing and majestic aspect.' The other remembered its oppressions, and was never heard to lament that the age of chivalry was gone.' The same leaning to power may be observed in Burke's pathetical effusions. His most affecting lamentations are over fallen Mr Curran's pathos was less greatness. ambitious, but more social and extensive, embracing the sufferings of every rank. The pathos of the one was more that of the schools-the sublime epic pathos of antiquity. He was most touched by historical vicissitudes. He hung over the royal corse and wept from the recollection that the head, now prostrate in the dust, The other's had lately worn a crown. tears were not reserved for the misfortunes of the great-he did not disdain to shift

the scene of distress from the palace to the cottage or the dungeon, and to sympathize with those obscure afflictions which history does not condescend to record, but which man is destined hourly to endure.

"Burke's acquired knowledge was more extensive, and his mind more scientific and discursive. He looked upon the great scene of human affairs as a problem for a philo sopher to resolve, and delighted in those wide comprehensive views where much intermediate balancing and combination must precede the final result. No one could better describe the spirit of a particular age, or the condition and resources of a powerful empire. Mr Curran's genius was less philosophic, but more popular. He had more confined his studies to the human passions and feelings, as he observed them in active operation before him. His general views were derived from his own experience rather than from historical instruction. He had witnessed so much of the abuses of power, that he acquired a hatred of and contempt for it; and his chief skill lay in exposing those abuses. He could best describe a scene of local or individual oppression, and lay bare, for public execration, the infernal workings of the hearts of the malignant slaves' who were its instruments.

"Many particulars in which they differed may be attributed to their respective situations. They were contemporaries; but they lived in such different countries, that they might be said to have lived in a different age. Burke's life was passed under a political system, which (whatever might be its theoretic imperfections) was diffusing real blessings all around; and to leave it as he found it was the wise end of all his efforts. The other lived under a system, which, with many shows of seeming pure,' was an actual curse: and his life was a long struggle to inspire his country with the spirit to reform it. These different objects of each of the one to preserve freedom, of the other to obtain it-gave a different character to their oratory. Burke's wisdom had taught him the dangers of popular innovation; and he would have protected, even under the shield of superstition, the institutions over which he watched: There is a certain oracular pride and pomp in his manner of announcing important political truths, as if they were awful mysteries which the uninitiated crowd were to reverence from afar. Like the high priest of old, he would have inspired a sacred dread of approaching the inmost temple, lest some profane intruder should discover and proclaim that the god was not there. The spectacle of misrule in Ireland had, on the contrary, impressed upon Mr Curran's mind the necessity of animating the people with a spirit of fearless inquiry. To do this he had to awaken them to a

sense of their importance and their claims, by gratifying their self-love, and filling them with the persuasion, that there was no truth which they were not fitted to examine and comprehend.

"Burke is more instructive and commanding than persuasive. He looked upon the people from an eminence, from which he saw them under their diminished forms, and betrayed a consciousness that he was above them. The other remained below

threw himself among them—and, persuading them that they were equals, by that means became the master of their movements.

"This is the most striking distinction in the impressions which they make upon us

that we feel the one to be our superior, and imagine the other to be only a companion. In Burke's most exalting conceptions there is a gorgeous display of knowledge and intellect, which reminds us of our inferiority and our incapacity to ascend without his aid. The popular charm of the other's eloquence is, that it makes us only feel more intensely what we have felt before. In his loftiest flights, we are conscious of being elevated with him, and for the moment forget that we soar upon another's wing; for the elements of his sublimity are the passions in which we all partake; and, when he wakes the living chords to their highest extacy, it is not that he strikes one which was never touched before, but that he gives a longer and louder vibration to the chords which are never still.

"The history of each exemplifies their characters. Burke was a philosopher, and could transplant his sympathies. He went abroad, and passed his life admiring and enjoying the benefits of his adopted, and dearer, and more comprehensive country,' Mr Curran was a patriot, whose affections, could he have torn them from their native bed, would have drooped in another soil. He staid at home, and closed his days in deploring the calamities which he had vainly laboured to avert."

Vol. II. pp. 437-443.

THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY DR CHAL MERS'S LATE PAMPHLET.

WE have no intention to enter into the consideration of the practicability of those measures which Dr Chalmers proposes in this pamphlet (the beginning only of a greater work, in which they will be much more fully unfold

*The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns. No. I. Remarks applicable to the outset of Dr Chalmers's connection with the Parish of St John's.

teach, for experience has already taught it, and that is, the kindly influence which the mere presence of a human being has upon his fellows. Let the attention you bestow upon another be the genuine emanation of good will-and there is only one thing

more to make it irresistible. The readiest

way of finding access to a man's heart, is to go to his house and there to perform the deed of kindness, or to acquit yourself of the wonted and the looked-for acknowledgment. By putting yourself under the roof of a poor neighbour, you in a manner put yourself under his protection,-you render him for the time your superior,-you throw your reception on his generosity;

and be assured that it is a confidence which

will almost never fail you. If Christianity be the errand on which you move, it will open for you the door of every family; and even the profane and the profligate will come to recognise the worth of that principle which prompts the unwearied assiduity of your services. By every circuit which you make amongst them, you will attain a higher vantage ground of moral and spiritual influence and, in spite of all that has been said of the ferocity of a city population, be assured that, in your rounds of visitation, you will meet with none of it, even among the lowest receptacles of human worthlessness. This is the home walk in which you earn, if not a proud, at least a peaceful popularity-the popularity of the heart-the greetings of men who, touched even by your cheapest and easiest services of kindness, have nothing to give but their wishes of kindness back again; but in giving these have crowned your pious attentions with the only popularity that is worth the aspiring after-the popularity that is won in the bosom of families, and at the side of death-beds." pp. 7—12.

We have been accused, we believe, of injustice to Dr Chalmers, and of a false representation of some of his opinions. It was more, however, to a certain harshness and air of presumption in the exposition of his doctrines, than to the doctrines themselves, that we made any objection, and we never for a moment were blind to his great eloquence and to the evident sincerity which forms one of its principal charms. We are willing, however, to admit, that we may have been precipitate in our strictures; but the admirers of Dr Chalmers may, in their turn, admit, that he has still something to learn, and that the tone of his theology may yet come to vibrate to a more harmonious and equable key. Any thing peculiar in it, we have ever ascribed, in a good measure, to the rapidity of a powerful

mind grasping at a subject in some degree new to it, and we believe if he were to study with attention the writings of the older English divines, while he would find in them faculties which he would readily grant to be equal to his own, and learning much superior to that of any modern theologian, he would, at the same time, perceive that, in the management of their most unearthly doctrines, they can yet wield them with a calmness and an equipoise which, while they preserve them in all their purity, only add irresistibly to their power.

But, in the splendid course of Christian activity, which is now before this remarkable man, we lose all sight and all concern, as to any of his supposed or real deficiencies as a divine; and still less can we indulge any regret that he has not been translated into a Professor's chair, where we do not imagine his exertions would have been equally serviceable to society or honourable to himself. We certainly, without the slightest disparagement to the great and eminent men of science of the age, can form to ourselves an idea of a Professor of Natural Philosophy, which, in these degenerate days, it may not be quite easy to realize. We could find it, perhaps, in such a man as Barrow, who would have Christianized a Professorship (to use Dr Chalmers's singular and somewhat uncourteous expression) in the manner in which that operation ought to be perform ed; but we are doubtful whether Dr Chalmers himself would have been equally judicious in his mode of interweaving Physics with Faith. An academic philosopher of the present day (the only person, by the way, of learning and respectability now alive, who still advocates the vulgar and worn-out cause of infidelity, and he has accordingly met with the appropriate distinction of having his works quoted with approbation by Mr Carlisle) has endeavoured to prove, in a fanciful book on the Mosaic history, that the twelve sons of Jacob mean nothing more than the twelve signs of the zodiac. Is it quite certain that Dr Chalmers might not have taken up the contrary position, and attempted to shew that the twelve signs of the zodiac were a mere figure of speech for the twelve tribes of Israel or the twelve Apostles? At least he leads us to sus