not recall a single man eminently dis- No one would get an adequate intinguished by a judicial type of specu- sight into Bishop Thirlwall's mind who lative intellect on the English bench had not studied the singularly fine essay of bishops between Bishop Butler and to which we have already referred, on Bishop Thirlwall. It is to be regretted "The Irony of Sophocles," an essay in that Dr. Thirlwall never showed his great which he evidently expressed not only intellectual qualities in any field more thoughts which had struck him as a popular than that of the history which he scholar in dwelling on the evolution of wrote in his earlier manhood, and the the literary plans of the greatest of the scattered charges and speeches of his Greek dramatists, but also thoughts later life. But none who read even the which had struck him as an historian in least interesting of these, or who con- dwelling on the evolution of national desversed with him on the most superficial tinies greater than any which human foreof intellectual questions, could doubt for sight had been able to conceive. They a moment the genuinely speculative pow- were thoughts, too, which undoubtedly er of the mind with which they were in entered deeply into his meditations on contact. Such a mind on the episcopal the theological subjects more especially bench was unquestionably a sentinel brought under his consideration as a where a sentinel was wanted. And if, bishop. Dr. Thirlwall held, and his varion the whole, Dr. Thirlwall was some-ous writings illustrate, a very strong view what more cautious than he need have of the appropriateness of the tone of been in warning his brethren against irony to the higher moods of thought and rash and hasty dogmatism, if it might be feeling, - nay, even of its function in the plausibly maintained that in one or two development of all plans which are instances-notably, perhaps, in joining worked out through fragmentary and parin the opposition to Sunday excursions tial instruments, ie., of all great plans, - he found an excuse with which his human and divine. "Where irony," he colleagues would have had but a cold says, "is not merely jocular, it is not simsympathy for joining in a popular move- ply serious, but earnest. With respect ment, the mainspring of which he avow- to opinion, it implies a conviction so edly disapproved, unquestionably on all deep as to disdain a refutation of the great occasions he stood up boldly opposite party. With respect to feelagainst the "half-views of men and ing, it implies an emotion so strong as things," into which so many of his breth- to be able to command itself, and to supren not so much fell as eagerly rushed, press its natural tone in order to vent -defending, for instance, the Bishop of itself with greater force." And there are Natal against the utterly unjudicial and traces of both kinds of irony, the intelunfair treatment of Bishop Gray, boldly lectual and the emotional, in his writings. condemning the "moral torture to But it is the judicial irony, of which he which the clergy were subjected when speaks as the irony natural to a mind they were asked to sign the celebrated commanding both sides of a hotly-con"Oxford Declaration," on pain of having tested question, which was most charimputed to them, if they refused, defi-acteristic of him. "There is always a ciency in "love to God and the souls of slight cast of irony," he says, "in the men," and openly expressing his dissat- grave, calm, respectful attention imparisfaction with the "burial service," not tially bestowed by an intelligent judge on for always dwelling on the hope of resur-two contending parties who are pleading rection to eternal life, but for the appar- their cases before him with all the earent irreverence of urging God "shortly nestness of deep feeling; " and he goes to accomplish the number of his elect" on to explain that the irony of this attiand "to hasten his kingdom." Again, in tude of mind consists in the almost inev the debate on the Irish Church Dr. itable conviction that both antagonists Thirlwall dealt with the argument that are right and both are wrong; that, with the disendowment of a Church was sac- all their warmth, neither can be intellectrilege, in the spirit of a statesman, no ually justified in the passion with which less than in that of a wide-minded divine. he maintains his exclusive point of view, And everything he did in this way had even though it is the very onesidedness the judicial stamp on it. Hardly even of that passion which could alone make the narrowest of his brethren would feel good for him such ground as he eventuas easy in his dogmatism after Bishop ally contrives to hold. This ironic judiThirlwall had been heard in condemna-cial insight into the onesided machinery tion of it, as he was before. of even the best human passion and ac·

THE SWINE-HERD OF GADARA.

tion, Bishop Thirlwall evidently attrib-| passages of these writings there runs a uted, with Sophocles, to the Divine Mind, tone of speculative reserve and reveras a necessary incident of its omnis- en tial liberalism which seems to be as cience. Perhaps we have an instance of much afraid of either presumptuous asthis irony in our Lord's sorrowful prom- sertion or denial, as a nation ought to be ise to his two ambitious apostles, that of assuming that its prosperity is sound or they should indeed drink of the cup that a man that his happiness will be lasting. he would drink of, and be baptised with In Dr. Thirlwall there was an habitual dethe baptism with which he was baptised, sire to catch the judicial view even of though that would issue in a destiny very faith and ecclesiastical history, a dedifferent from that which they craved for sire which is as rare in English bishops, themselves. But it was in the destinies as it should be useful to the English of cities, and of nations, and of empires, episcopate when in exceptional cases it that Dr. Thirlwall saw, with a mixture be- is found. Dr. Thirlwall's was not the tween reverential awe and intellectual ad- mind to lead men to believe, but to warn miration, the most striking illustrations of men against undue belief or undue doubt. this irony of Providence who sows the And since it is even easier to be arrogant seeds of ruin in the very acts which seem about divine things than about human, it to consummate success, and moulds the will probably be long before such an inelements of a fresh career in the very fluence as Dr. Thirlwall's shall be reheart of seeming failure. And the same placed among the higher authorities of thought evidently penetrated the bishop's the English Church. The glimmer of his theology. He was never severer than he judicial irony in dealing with over-confiwas on the attempt to brand with hetero-dent spirits was always a beneficial infludoxy the Bishop of Natal's criticisms ence, though it was not one of a kind on the finite and human elements in which theologians particularly affect. Christ's earthly life. How the divine and human could be blended in any life Dr. Thirlwall maintained to be a mystery which no one could fathom; but the way to fathom it was certainly not to deny Christ's true humanity, or to throw doubt over all statements which assume it. saw clearly the irony of destiny which No morsel in the wallet, and no drop drives such orthodox excesses of zeal as I' the bottle, - pleasant! - and five hours to these into inevitable heresies of denial, as he saw also the irony of destiny which drives almost as surely the excesses on the side of denial back into superstition. To Dr. Thirlwall, theology was a line of thought marking very inadequately a thread of practical divine guidance of which it was hardly possible to exaggerate the importance, but most easy to misunderstand the drift; and the history of Christian theology seemed to him full of the irony of providence, showing how error led to the assumption of infallibility, and dogmatism to the glorification of ignorance; how the neglect of the human side of Christianity issued in the degeneration of theology, and the neglect of the divine side, in the degeneration of man. We deduce these inferences as to Dr. Thirlwall's theology from hints scattered through several of the Bishop of St. David's charges during the last ten years; and certainly his general theologic conclusions corresponded strikingly with this fear of incurring the ironic nemesis which follows human dog. matism, for throughout the theological

He

come

(A FANCY.)

of pitiless August sunshine, ere I turn
That leads them home to John ben Ezra's sty.
My hogs along the weary sweltering league
Home?-aye, the brutes are happier than the

man!

I would I were a swine too, hoof and snout,
So might I share that bestial sense of home,
And seek my straw contented. I am baked,
Broiled, dried-up, juiceless as the dusty bones
In the old tombs that honey-comb these hills
There's drink enough
From base to crown.

below,

Lies all ablaze i' the sun.
If one could reach it, where Gennesareth
How pleasant 't were
To plunge one's parching palate and hot skin
A minute in its waves! But I'm no goat:
One might as well, descended, try to tread
Its waters and keep footing, as essay
Descent adown this slope precipitous
That walls their flood.

Ah me! the old home-days
That once I knew the life that once I led!
Hath all he would, and more: and I, the fool,
The meanest hireling in my father's fields
The peevish, fractious idiot, that must fret
And sicken of mere fulness of content-
That must forestall his heritage that needs
Must fling to losel, pander, parasite,
In revel and in riot, what by this

They're off the old boar the foremost ! Sheva! ho!

Had grown the princeliest having of our tribe,, Visible to them, I see not. How they start,
And all to reap ingratitude, contempt,
And leap, and whine, and squeal! why,
And penury, turned eyes, and giftless hands,
God's my life!
Sheer-starving here on half a drachm a day,
And self-detested in the loathsome trade
That earns the niggard pittance, must be fain
To grovel with the filthy brutes I guard,
And cheat my gnawing belly with the husks
They hardly care to crunch.

A score of Herod's stoutest men-at-arms,
And scatter them in panic; and lo! here
He nears those pilgrims, cringing, like a slave
Before an angry master; or a hound
That eyes the lifted lash, nor dares to bite,
Nor dares to fly. I cannot catch his words,
The distance blurs them; but his gesture owns
Some power his devil does not dare gainsay,
Some fascination that, despite himself,
Attracts and spells him. He's a proper man
That seems their chief, a marvellous proper

man !

The lubber does not hear me; fast asleep,
I dare be sworn, beneath the sycamores,
Quick! to the cliff and head them back!
too late!

There's a black torrent pouring down its side
That never will flow back! an avalanche
Of pork, boar, sow, and pig and pigling, -
bent

To perish! pell-mell, helter-skelter, down They blunder headlong, shrieking, jostling, each

Borne down by the other, conscious of the plunge

To come, yet mad to take it. Souse! the
lake

Is seething, foaming, round a hundred specks
Of struggling, floundering blackness!
Gone! all gone!

He made a gallant fight though, at the last,
For life, my tough old boar. Ha ha! all
sunk!
Drowned dead as Pharaoh and his char-

ioteers

In the red gulf! The unclean are cleaner

now!

Old John ben Ezra drove a sinful trade
In curing hams: Moses! thou art avenged!
A judgment! yea, a judgment! Ha! ha! ha!
Who laughed beside? methought strange
voices pealed

Derisive echo. Sheva's fled; there rests
No creature else that breathes - yet I could

swear

I heard it. There's a something in the air,
The place, this sudden, silent solitude,
This wholesale monstrous bestial suicide,
That's weird and awful. Did I mock? God

wot,

'Twas scarce a chance for mocking! Let me think

IA moment, I am sped! I dare not face
My master with a tale that whoso hears
Will deem me madder than the madman was,
Cured by the pilgrim, cured, if I may trust
These eyes that saw him emptied of the fiend
That held him thralled.

Clasps suppliant hands,
catch
No glint of arms, no sign of force to quell
The fiend that dwells in him, yet - manifest
The maniac owns his Master; seems to wait
Command, submissive, rises, bows the head
Of reverence, takes the hindmost place i' the
troop,

Meek as an infant, follows like a sheep
The pilgrims on their path,

most wonder-His

ful! Pray heaven he come not back more mad than

erst!

devil parted? Hah! and towards my
swine?

No; 'tis not possible! The Sadducee
That taught my boyhood used to laugh to scorn
The creed of angel, devil, and all forms
Of super-mortal essence: else indeed
'Twould seem — What matter? what is done
is done.

Bear he who will this news to Gadara
And Rabbi John ben Ezra. I not grudge
Sheva that errand, or the stripes he'll earn
For bearing it. I shall not claim from John
My last week's wage. My path must lie else.
where

Henceforth, yet where I know not. On what He called them

road

I faint, what matter? or what ditch I choose
To die in ?

Life is sweet, though-body and soul,
However oft they quarrel, yet are friends,
And loth to part. Existence may be nursed
On locusts, or the treasure of wild bees
Filched from the baffled bear: what hinders
yet

To live so, free o' the desert, like that grim
Half-naked preacher that, two years agone,
Down south by Jordan in Bethabara,
Thundered "Repent!" in the astonished

ears

Of both the jangling self-sufficient sects,
Watching in scornful pity while he cleansed
The simpler multitude. A viperous brood

bade

be formed in the place of the present gigantic one. Mr. Prestoe found no bottom with a line of 195 feet, ten feet from the water's edge. One great result of the action of solfataras is the decomposition of the volcanic rock and the development therefrom of various kinds of gypsum. Some blocks met with have a very strong resemblance to the Tuscany or Volterra marble. Mr. Prestoe thinks that these large solfataras have had much to do in bringing about the present conformation of the district.

THE Trinidad Chronicle of May 21 contains | cent hillsides, and innumerable solfataras will an account of a visit to the spring by Mr. H. Prestoe, superintendent of the Trinidad Botanic Gardens. The lake lies in the mountains behind Roseau, and in the valleys around many souffrières, or solfataras, are to be met with. The boiling lake is a gigantic solfatara, with an excess of water-volume over the ejective power exerted by its gases and heat. It is affected by a very considerable volume of water derived from two converging ravines which meet just on its north-west corner, and owing to the existence of a small hill immediately opposite (which has had the effect of diverting the course of the ravine-water into its present channel), the action of the solfatara has caused the formation of a crater-like cavity, which is now the boiling lake with its SEWERAGE IN THE GOOD OLD TIMES. - In precipitous and ever-wasting banks on its North's "Life of the Lord Keeper Guildford," north and south sides, of some sixty feet we are told some curious facts about the sewdepth. The temperature of the lake ranges erage of Chancery Lane, where was his lordfrom 180° to 190° F. The point of ebullition ship's residence. A well in the cellar received seems to vary its position somewhat; the all the waste water of the house, and when water rising two, three, and sometimes four this tank was full the contents were pumped feet above the general surface, the cone out into the street. So it was with other dividing occasionally into three, as though houses, to the great annoyance of passengers, ejected from so many orifices. During ebulli- and to the discomfort of residents. tion a violent agitation is communicated over long discussion a forced "contribution" was the whole surface of the lake. The sulphurous levied on the owners of property, and the open vapour arises in pretty equal density over the kennel gradually gave place to a covered sewwhole lake, there being no sudden ejection of er, having its fall into that of Fleet Street. gas observed from the point of ebullition; there The proprietors and tenants were for the most are no detonations; the colour of the water part very indignant at this compulsory act for is a deep dull grey, and it is highly charged cleanliness and health, but afterwards were with sulphur and decomposed rock. As the thankful to Lord Keeper Guildford, the chief outlet of the water is constantly deepening, mover in the affair, "for a singular good done the surface of the lake must gradually become them." "Which," North adds, "is an inlower, and it will, Mr. Prestoe thinks, ulti-stance showing that the common people will mately be destroyed, and its character be be averse to their own interest until it is forced changed to that of a geyser. It will then upon them, and then will be thankful for it." gradually fill up by the reduction of the adja

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