which in many respects so chimes with his own humour as the 'Liberty of Prophesying.' Taylor seems to show an acquaintance with one at least of Milton's early works, when, speaking of the triumphs of Christianity, he says that the holy Jesus made invisible powers to do him visible honours,' and that His apostles hunted demons from their tripods, their navels, their dens, their hollow pipes, their altars,' and that he made their oracles silent ;* words in which we trace an echo of the wellknown lines of the 'Ode on the Nativity':

'The oracles are dumb,

No voice nor hideous hum

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving,'

And Heber would fain persuade us that Milton had Taylor in his eye when he spoke of

Men, whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent
Would have been held in high esteem by Paul,'

who yet had been 'branded heretics' by such as Edwards; and certainly we can hardly help supposing that Taylor's eloquent treatise would be more attractive to Milton than those of Goodwin and Peters, which shared the wrath of Rutherford and Scotch What-d'ye-call.'

In respect of his similes Taylor is the very Homer of preachers. His style is commonly metaphorical and allusive, but here and there, when he hits upon an image of unusual beauty, he seems unwilling to leave it with a mere touch, and elaborates it into a distinct and glowing picture. Sometimes his similes are wrought out from an anecdote in some recondite book, and these certainly, however they may adorn, do not render the subject more easy of apprehension to an ordinary intelligence; but the most beautiful are those which are drawn from natural objects. He evidently delighted in the varied beauty of country scenes; the sky and the clouds, the woods and vales and streams, the ever-new phenomena of the growth and decay of plants filled his soul with admiration and love. With the example of Thomson before us, who is said to have written in bed his famous description of morning, we hesitate to infer a man's habits from his imaginative writings; yet it is difficult not to believe that Taylor delighted in the dewy freshness of sunrise and the song of the early lark. His comparison of the ascent of the Christian's prayer to the rising of the lark-sometimes soaring, sometimes beaten back by rough winds-is too well known for quotation. He more than once

'Duct. Dubit.,' Book I., c. iv. s. 22. The coincidence is noted by Mr. Willmott.

uses

uses the sunrise as an illustration, and manages it with great felicity. In the Holy Dying,' he says that reason gradually dawns on the soul,

'As when the sun approaching towards the gates of the morning first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to mattins, and by-andby gilds the fringes of a cloud and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns like those which decked the brows of Moses when he was forced to wear a veil because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets quickly.'

The same simile is again used, with excellent effect, to illustrate the gradual spread of Christianity over the world :—

'I have seen the sun with a little ray of distant light challenge all the powers of darkness, and, without violence and noise climbing up the hill, hath made night so to retire, that its memory was lost in the joys and sprightfulness of the morning: and Christianity, without violence or armies. . . . with obedience and charity, with praying and dying, did insensibly turn the world into Christian and persecution into victory.' †

A good instance of Taylor's strength and weakness in the management of comparisons is found in the very beautiful simile by which he illustrates the calm, sweet life of Lady Carbery :

'In all her religion, and in all her actions of relation towards God, she had a strange evenness and untroubled passage, sliding toward her ocean of God and of infinity with a certain and silent motion. So have I seen a river deep and smooth passing with a still foot and a sober face, and paying to the Fiscus, the great exchequer of the sea, the prince of all watery bodies, a tribute large and full; and hard by it a little brook skipping and making a noise upon its unequal and neighbour bottom; and after all its talking and bragged motion, it paid to its common audit no more than the revenues of a little cloud or a contemptible vessel. So have I sometimes compared the issues of her religion to the solemnities and famed outsides of another's piety.'

The first clause of this passage is contrasted by Keble § with Burke's famous description of Marie Antoinette, in the first freshness of her queenly beauty, rising like the morning-star above the horizon. He quotes it as an instance of the poetical as opposed to the rhetorical treatment of imagery. And it serves that pur

Ch. I, sec. iii. s. 2.

Sermon on the Faith and Patience of the Saints,' Pt. i. s. 1.
In the Funeral Sermon on Lady Carbery.

Prælectiones Academicæ,' i. 39.

pose

pose admirably; the image is beautiful in itself, well adapted to illustrate the thought, and sufficiently suggested by the mere use of the words 'sliding toward her ocean.' More than this offends our modern sense; but if we concede to the florid taste of the preacher's age that he was justified in expanding his beautiful metaphor into a simile, we must still protest against the introduction of another figure within it; the words 'fiscus,' 'exchequer,' 'prince,' 'tribute,' 'audit,' though quite of the kind which even Milton himself might have used upon fit occasion, must surely be felt as jarring notes here. In a word, the passage suffers, like many others, from Taylor's unpruned exuberance; he is not content to suggest an image, he must give it in detail; he gives us so fully the work of his own imagination that he leaves nothing for ours, which is always a mistake in art. He wanted, in a far greater degree than Shakspeare, 'the art to blot," and few men needed it more.

端

The following comparison, illustrating the blessing of God's chastisements, which seems to us nearly perfect in all its parts, is besides worthy of note from the fact that Southey transferred it entire to 'Thalaba' :—

'I have known a luxuriant vine swell into irregular twigs and bold excrescences, and spend itself in leaves and little rings, and afford but trifling clusters to the wine-press, and a faint return to his heart which longed to be refreshed with a full vintage; but when the Lord of the vineyard had caused the dressers to cut the wilder plant and make it bleed, it grew temperate in its vain expense of useless leaves, and knotted into fair and juicy branches, and made account of the loss of blood by return of fruit.'

Here is Southey's version:

Repine not, O my son, the old man replied,

That Heaven hath chastened thee. Behold this vine!

I found it a wild tree, whose wanton strength

Had swoln into irregular twigs

And bold excrescences,

And spent itself in leaves and little rings;
So in the flourish of its wantonness

Wasting the sap and strength

It is interesting to compare the use of the same figure by another great master of imagination, Walter Scott. "Murmurer that thou art," said Morton, in the enthusiasm of his reverie, "why chafe with the rocks that stop thy course for a moment? There is a sea to receive thee in its bosom, and there is an eternity for man, when his fretful and hasty course through the vale of time shall be ceased and over. What thy petty fumings are to the deep and vast billows of a shoreless ocean, are our cares, hopes, fears, joys, and sorrows to the objects which must occupy us through the awful and boundless succession of ages."-Old Mortality.'

That

That should have given forth fruit.
But when I pruned the plant,

Then it grew temperate in its vain expense
Of useless leaves, and knotted as thou seest,
Into those full clear clusters, to repay

The hand that wisely wounded it.' *

The laureate, who fully acknowledged his appropriation of the image, altered as little as possible what he himself called Taylor's 'unimprovable' language; yet the whole passage has in Southey a heaviness which it has not in Taylor: Taylor was, in truth, much the better poet of the two.

Such beauties as those which we have quoted meet us everywhere in Taylor's sermons and practical works: his fancy always glows; yet it must needs be confessed that his superabundant illustrations, especially those which are drawn from books, very much detract from the impression of earnestness which a sermon ought to produce. They give to his discourses the appearance of emideigeis, or show-speeches, rather than of the didactic and persuasive oratory which ought to characterize the utterances of a Christian preacher. After making all possible allowance for the florid and learned style of the seventeenth century, we cannot but feel that the preacher is rather amusing than persuading or instructing us when, inveighing against luxury, he tells us that there are in the shades below no numbering of healths by the numeral letters of Philenium's name, no fat mullets, no oysters of Lucrinus, no Lesbian or Chian wines,' and bids us now enjoy the delicacies of nature, and feel the descending wines distilled through the limbeck of thy tongue and larynx, and seek the delicious juices of fishes, the marrow of the laborious ox, the tender lard of Apulian swine, and the condited bellies of the scarus,' and speaks of desiring to have the wealth of Susa, or garments stained with the blood of the Tyrian fish, or to feed like Philoxenus, or to have tables loaden like the boards of Vitellius.' It is not to much purpose that he tells an English congregation, speaking of the somewhat more delicate food which is necessary for the mental activity of the student, that neither will the pulse and the leeks, Lavinian sausages and the Cisalpine suckets or gobbets of condited bull's flesh, minister such delicate spirits to the thinking man.' In a very remarkable description of the Last Judgment, there shall come together, he

says,

all kingdoms of all ages, all the armies that ever mustered, all the world that Augustus Cæsar taxed, all those hundreds of

Thalaba,' Book viii. st. 17.

millions

millions that were slain in all the Roman wars, from Numa's time till Italy was broken into principalities and small exarchates. It seems to us a perversity to spoil a striking passage with those 'principalities and small exarchates:' they add nothing to the picture; on the contrary, they draw off the attention from the thronging multitudes to the curious nicety of the describer. And such instances as these are not isolated; we can hardly read a discourse without finding its solemnity marred here and there by illustrations which remind us rather too forcibly of the ingenuity and learning of the preacher.

The truth is, we are afraid we must needs confess it, that Taylor's linked sweetness long drawn out' tends here and there to mawkishness: the banquet of sweets is too much for us; we long for plain wholesome fare. And this tendency is very much increased by the preacher's singular want of humour. We may perhaps do him injustice: his face might perhaps have suggested his perception of the ludicrous side of some passages in his sermons, if we could have seen him deliver them; but whatever the subject, he never smiles at us from the printed page. In the peroration of the Holy Dying,' where he is dissuading us from excessive grief at the death of friends, he does not seem to perceive the exquisite incongruity of that choice story from Petronius about the Ephesian widow who was so remarkably consoled, though he tells it in a manner not unworthy of Boccaccio. He illustrates the folly of a rash marriage by the following apologue:

'The stags in the Greek Epigram, whose knees were clogged with frozen snow upon the mountains, came down to the brooks of the valleys, hoping to thaw their joints with the waters of the stream; but there the frost overtook them, and bound them fast in ice, till the yound herdsmen took them in their stranger snare. It is the unhappy chance of many men, finding many inconveniences upon the mountains of single life, they descend into the valleys of marriage to refresh their troubles; and there they enter into fetters, and are bound to sorrow by the cords of a man's or woman's peevishness.'

His manner betrays here no sense of drollery; and yet his audience must have been made of sterner stuff than we are if they did not smile at this quaint description of the unfortunate case of those who rush from the ills of celibacy to others that they know not of."' Yet this want of humour was not incompatible with a great power of sarcasm; in the Dissuasive from Popery,' in particular, he directs against certain practices of the Roman Church and its

''Christ's Advent,' Serm. I. s. 1. He was fond of these 'exarchates.' In the 'Holy Dying' (ch. i. sec. iv. s. 4) he speaks of the ants dividing their little molehills into provinces and exarchates. Here, however, the big word contrasts well

with the little subject; we feel the ants' assumption of dignity.

various