the rights, the privileges, the revenues, of each church were equally - ratified and secured by law. Each church was authoritatively recognized, and pronounced to be a true and genuine Protestant Church of Christ. The two churches, however, display on the Calvinistic points a marked diversity of sentiment. The Church of England, by her articles, to use the representation least favourable to Anticalvinism, admits that doctrine into her communion. Her northern sister, by her Confession of Faith, excludes it from her creed. Every door, every window, every loophole, every crevice, appears to be barricaded against the intrusion of Anticalvinistic tenets. How unbecoming then must it be in a Calvinist bitterly to declaim against the Anticalvinistic system as heretical, when the Imperial Parliament of Great Britain solemnly declares the national Church of England, which comprehends that system, to be a true Church of Christ! Even more unbecoming, if it be possible, must be the conduct of the Anticalvinist, who should furiously inveigh against Calvinism as heresy; when the same Imperial Legislature of his country avers the national Church of Scotland, founded on a basis exclusively Calvinistic, to be a true Church of Christ!

Throughout the whole of the preceding part of this chapter, my purpose has been to lead the Calvinistic and the Anticalvinistic members of the Church of England, severally, to understand the tenets and proceedings, each of the other, with distinctness; to regard one another, amidst all their discrepances and reciprocally discerned or imputed errors, with brotherly love; and to oppose each other, when need may require, in the spirit of Christians. It may be well for all of us habitually to remember, how much more venial it may prove at the great day of account, to have held, through prepossession, very considerable errors, than to have known and defended the truth in an unchristian spirit.'

Art IV. Bracebridge Hall; or, the Humorists. By Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 798. Price 11. 4s. London, 1822.

I

F we have been somewhat tardy in noticing this last, and, we are sorry to learn, farewell production of the Author of the Sketch Book, we may take to ourselves the credit of having been the first to welcome him to England. Before any one of his volumes had received the Imprimatur of Albemarle-street, we were fortunate in obtaining a copy of the modest brochure which let us into the secret that America had at length produced a genuine fine writer. We had the pleasure of anticipating all the incredulity and amazement with which the announcement of such a fact was likely to be received by our literary aristocracy North and South; and though the circumstance itself did not appear to us prodigious, though we were inclined rather to feel surprise that nothing of the kind had fallen out before, we were aware that to many of the arbiters

of taste and monopolists of wisdom in this country, Geoffrey Crayon would appear a sort of lusus naturæ. The event corresponded to this anticipation. It has been a matter of marvel,' says the Author of himself, that a man from the wilds of America should express himself in tolerable English. I was looked upon as something new and strange in literature; a kind of demi-savage, with a feather in his hand, instead of on his head; and there was a curiosity to hear what such a being had to say about civilized society."

That surprise has passed, and our wiseacres are beginning to be ashamed of having felt any. Stranger things still have sprung up in the literary world since Geoffrey Crayon began his career. We have seen Frenchmen writing good English, Quakerism sending forth her poets, and Russia furnishing an anthology; marvels quite as strange and unlooked for as the appearance of an American Addison. But, though the public has ceased to wonder after the Author of the Sketch Book, the interest excited by his works has suffered no abatement. The volumes have fairly taken root in our literature; and of all the publications which have made their appearance, within the last few years, under the same Bibliopolistical auspices, these simple delightful sketches seem to bid fairest for longevity.

The effect produced by the Sketch Book, will be permanently beneficial. England and America seem to be brought nearer to each other by this identification of their literature. To this, the spirit of the work itself has powerfully contributed.

• When I first published my former writings,' says Mr. Irvine, it was with no hope of gaining favour in English eyes, for I little thought they were to become current out of my own country; and had I merely sought popularity among my own countrymen, I should have taken a more direct and obvious way by gratifying, rather than rebuking the angry feelings that were then prevalent against England.

And here let me acknowledge my warm, my thankful feelings, at the effect produced by one of my trivial lucubrations. I allude to the essay in the Sketch-Book, on the subject of the literary feuds between England and America. I cannot express the heartfelt delight I have experienced, at the unexpected sympathy and approbation with which those remarks have been received on both sides of the Atlantic. I speak this not from any paltry feelings of gratified vanity; for I attribute the effect to no merit of my pen. The paper in question was brief and casual, and the ideas it conveyed were simple and obvious. "It was the cause; it was the cause" alone. There was a predisposition on the part of my readers to be favourably affected. My countrymen responded in heart to the filial feelings I had avowed in their name towards the parent country; and there was a generous sympathy in every English bosom towards a solitary indi

vidual, lifting up his voice in a strange land, to vindicate the injured character of his nation. There are some causes so sacred as to carry with them an irresistible appeal to every virtuous bosom; and he needs but little power of eloquence, who defends the honour of his wife, his mother, or his country.

'I hail, therefore, the success of that brief paper, as shewing how much good may be done by a kind word, however feeble, when spoken in season-as shewing how much dormant good feeling actually exists in each country, towards the other, which only wants the slightest spark to kindle it into a genial flame-as shewing, in fact, what I have all along believed and asserted, that the two nations would grow together in esteem and amity, if meddling and malignant spirits would but throw by their mischievous pens, and leave kindred hearts to the kindly impulses of nature.

To the magnanimous spirits of both countries must we trust to carry such a natural alliance of affection into full effect. To pens more powerful than mine I leave the noble task of promoting the cause of national amity. To the intelligent and enlightened of my own country, I address my parting voice, entreating them to shew themselves superior to the petty attacks of the ignorant and the worthless, and still to look with dispassionate and philosophic eye to the moral character of England, as the intellectual source of our rising greatness; while I appeal to every generous-minded Englishman from the slanders which disgrace the press, insult the understanding, and belie the magnanimity of his country and I invite him to look to America, as to a kindred nation, worthy of its origin; giving, in the healthy vigour of its growth, the best of comments on its parent stock; and reflecting, in the dawning brightness of its fame, the moral effulgence of British glory.

I am sure that such appeal will not be made in vain. Indeed I have noticed, for some time past, an essential change in English sentiment with regard to America. In parliament, that fountain-head of public opinion, there seems to be an emulation, on both sides of the house, in holding the language of courtesy and friendship. The same spirit is daily becoming more and more prevalent in good society. There is a growing curiosity concerning my country; a craving desire for correct information, that cannot fail to lead to a favourable understanding. The scoffer, I trust, has had his day; the time of the slanderer is gone by. The ribald jokes, the stale commonplaces, which have so long passed current when America was the theme, are now banished to the ignorant and the vulgar, or only perpetuated by the hireling scribblers and traditional jesters of the press. The intelligent and high-minded now pride themselves upon making America a study.

But however my feelings may be understood or reciprocated on either side of the Atlantic, I utter them without reserve, for I have ever found that to speak frankly is to speak safely. I am not so sanguine as to believe that the two nations are ever to be bound together by any romantic ties of feeling; but I believe that much may be done towards keeping alive cordial sentiments, were every well disposed

mind occasionally to throw in a simple word of kindness. If I have, indeed, produced any such effect by my writings, it will be a soothing reflection to me, that for once, in the course of a rather negligent life, I have been useful; that for once, by the casual exercise of a pen which has been in general but too unprofitably employed, I have awakened a chord of sympathy between the land of my fathers and the dear land that gave me birth.

In the spirit of these sentiments I now take my farewell of the paternal soil. With anxious eye do I behold the clouds of doubt and difficulty that are lowering over it, and earnestly do I hope that they may all clear up into serene and settled sunshine. In bidding this last adieu, my heart is filled with fond, yet melancholy emotions; and still I linger, and still, like a child, leaving the venerable abodes of his forefathers, I turn to breathe forth a filial benediction: "Peace be within thy walls, oh England! and plenteousness within thy palaces; for my brethren and my companions' sake I will now say, Peace be within thee!" Vol. II. pp. 396–404.

If, by his first works, the Author won his way into the good graces of his readers, these volumes will, we think, give him a firm hold of English hearts. There were some persons who, on the appearance of the present work, were not tardy in announcing its decided inferiority to the Sketch Book. It contains less variety, we admit, and something of the novelty of course. has evaporated; but, had it appeared first, Bracebridge Hall would have been thought the cleverer book of the two. In point of literary merit, it is fully equal to its predecessors, while there is discovered, in many parts, a deeper vein of thought, a wider range of reflection than characterized the earlier sketches. Where the nature of his subject calls for nothing beyond that pensive or playful toying with grave thoughts which delights the fancy in her philosophic moods, by the side of a trout stream, or under the shadow of a Gothic ruin,-the Author is always an elegant expositor of natural sentiments. He has evidently drunk deep into the spirit of English scenery, and his writings reflect its genuine character. I thought,' he says, 'I never could be sated with the sweetness and freshness of a country so completely carpeted with verdure; where every air breathed of the balmy pasture and the honeysuckled hedge. I was continually coming upon some little 'document of poetry in the blossomed hawthorn, the daisy, the cowslip, the primrose, or some other simple object that. has received a supernatural value from the muse.' And under this impression he has written. His pages breathe the quiet, gentle enthusiasm inspired by the modest English landscape in a genuine lover of nature. A holiday feeling pervades the work, answering to the aspect every subject assumes in it, for all things here appear in their Sunday dress. But

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Mr. Irvine, in his chapter on English Country Gentlemen, and elsewhere, has shewn us that he can, when he pleases, put forth a manly energy of thought and feeling much above that tone of a mere good-humoured, quiet observer of customs and manners, which it suits him generally to observe. We are happy to think that the admirable sentiments contained in that chapter, will, by favour of the Squire, the Stout Gentleman, and other strong points of the book, find their way into circles where any more formal appeal would be very unlikely to succeed. Coming from Mr. Irvine, they will be received without any possible suspicion of their being dictated by party prejudice.

Whatever may be said of English mobs and English demagogues, I have never met with a people more open to reason, more considerate in their tempers, more tractable by argument in the roughest times, than the English. They are remarkably quick at discerning and appreciating whatever is manly and honourable. They are by nature and habit methodical and orderly; and they feel the value of all that is regular and respectable. They may occasionally be deceived by sophistry, and excited into turbulence by public distresses and the misrepresentations of designing men; but open their eyes, and they will eventually rally round the land-marks of steady truth and deliberate good sense. They are fond of established customs, they are fond of long established names; and that love of order and quiet which characterizes the nation, gives a vast influence to the descendants of the old families, whose forefathers have been lords of the soil from time immemorial.

It is when the rich and well-educated and highly privileged classes neglect their duties, when they neglect to study the interests, and conciliate the affections, and instruct the opinions, and champion the rights of the people, that the latter become discontented and turbulent, and fall into the hands of demagogues: the demagogue always steps in where the patriot is wanting. There is a common high-handed cant among the high-feeding, and, as they fancy themselves, high-minded men, about putting down the mob; but all true physicians know that it is better to sweeten the blood than attack the tumour, to apply the emollient rather than the cautery. It is absurd in a country like England, where there is so much freedom, and such a jealousy of right, for any man to assume an aristocratical tone, and to talk superciliously of the common people. There is no rank that makes him independent of the opinions and affections of his fellow-men; there is no rank nor distinction that severs him from his fellow subject; and if, by any gradual neglect or assumption on the one side, and discontent and jealousy on the other, the orders of society should really separate, let those who stand on the eminence beware that the chasm is not mining at their feet. The orders of society in all well constituted governments are mutually bound together, and important to each other; there can be no such thing in