result to which these measures, if persisted in, must lead; should have been an object of hatred and suspicion to a government, whose failings he had mercilessly exposed; whose wrath he seemed studiously to have provoked; whose proffered favours he had indignantly rejected; and whose vengeance he fearlessly had dared. It was, therefore, a proud station that Curran occupied, when he dauntlessly advanced to the post which his talents, his professional reputation, his political opinions, unitedly called upon him to fill and when others shrunk dismayed beneath the scowl of authority, or recoiled in affright from the very breath of suspicion that might taint their loyalty, that he cheerfully accepted of the trust reposed in him, as the advocate of the leaders of the insurrection, when placed on their trial for their lives; believing, as he probably did, that some of them were innocent of the crime laid to their charge, in the full and awful extent of its delinquency; that improper methods were resorted to, to procure the conviction of others; or if this was not his real opinion, feeling, as he, and as every advocate should feel, that, guilty or innocent, these men had a right to claim his best exertions in their behalf. And his best exertions they unquestionably had, though made at the expense of his health, and in some cases at the peril of his life; surrounded as he frequently was by bands of soldiery, incensed beyond measure at his bold denunciations of their lawless conduct, when let loose upon the people in all the riot of martial law, and themselves in a state of insubordination, which their humane commander could only denounce and deplore, but was unable to repress. It was on one of these occasions when he was interrupted at the commencement of his speech by the clash of arms, and some of the military that thronged the court appeared from their looks and gestures about to offer him a personal violence; fixing his eyes sternly upon them, he exclaimed-" You may assassinate, but you shall not intimidate me.'

These certainly were not scenes or times for a calm preparation in the closet, of those animated appeals, those indignant vituperations, on which were suspended not only the lives of the accused, but, in the estimation of many, the liberty of their country. Much, therefore, at once of the vigour and the defects of Mr. Curran's addresses at this eventful period, must be attributed to the enthusiastic excitement of the moment; and if we find in them, as we shall find, an heterogeneous assemblage of figures, all of them bold and striking, but comparatively few classically correct,

the whole blame for their introduction must not be thrown upon the vitiated taste which, in this particular at least, deformed even the most studied specimens of his masculine eloquence. He loved the marvellous and majestic; his mind was cast in the mould of originality; and, seldom borrowing from others, but forming a range of novel imagery for himself, he was too careless whence it was gathered, if it were but imposing and new; and laid under equal contribution the sublimest and the meanest objects in nature and in art; the most pleasing and the most disgusting associations that could possibly be presented to the imagination of man. Without the least occasion for doing so, he would unveil the loathsomeness of the charnel-house; anatomize the putridity of the grave, and dwell with a lingering delight on the minutiae of the disgusting scene. At other times he would picture to the imagination as needlessly, and, if any sentiments but those of disgust were to be awakened in the mind, as inefficaciously, the deep yawning up its dead, to float in mangled masses on its surface; or chain the heart of the informer at the fire of the cook. Yet in him these faults might often be accounted for and excused, where, in the servile imitators of the most striking and the worst features of his style, they call for nothing but unmingled reprobation; for in him they were but the foil to a vigour of conception, a force of language, a command of the passions, a tone of feeling but rarely imparted, in their combined effect, to the eloquence of modern, and perhaps seldom exceeded in that of ancient times. We hesitate not, therefore, for a moment, to place Curran in the very foremost rank of the orators of later growth; and we are not quite satisfied that any one has superior pretensions to compete,-if competition in such a case may but be named, with the pride of Greece and of Rome. Yet we doubt whether his example has not been more injurious than beneficial to the country which he loved and adorned, in giving to its rising orators a splendid excuse for faults, to which they are nationally but too prone, without having been able to excite them to the study of excellencies less prominent and glaring, but more worthy of their imitation and applause.

The defects of the Irish school of eloquence, and of the great master of it now before us, have so often been pointed out, as long since to have become stale and trite, as a tale that has thrice been told. We have already said enough upon the subject to convince our readers, that our opinion of them differs but little, if in any thing, from that of most of

our brother critics; except, perhaps, that we draw a broader line of distinction between Curran and his imitators than some of them have done. Our limits forbid us to trace further the progress of his forensic career; and indeed it is too well known, and has been brought too nearly to its close to require that we should do it. His elevation to the mastership of the Rolls is known to have brought with it nothing but disappointment and dissatisfaction: in fact, it was a station for which he was very ill fitted, and in which he never felt himself at home. For the attorney-generalship, which he coveted, we think that he was eminently qualified, and that his merits and services to his party entitled him to have had what he desired; as by a compact, unjustifiably violated, he was warranted to expect it. What he obtained he soon resigned; pleasing himself, in the few last years of his existence, with the idea of writing a history of his life and times, which he was too idle to begin, and would, in all probability, have been too wedded to the prejudices of a party to have executed with fidelity. A national novel, which he projected, there may, perhaps, be more reason to regret that his aversion to the labour of composition prevented his ever writing.

His political conduct was consistent, and highly honourable to his integrity, when we consider the bribes which were offered him on the one hand, and the intimidations used on the other, to induce him to abandon the course which he had adopted, from a full persuasion that by it alone could the salvation of his country be ensured. In some points he was undoubtedly too pertinacious an opponent of the powers that were; but then his error was one of the judgment, not of the heart. If the deep tones of his prophetic voice on others were uniformly gloomy and desponding, time has but matured into a dreadful certainty the evils he foresaw, and would have prevented. His parliamentary elocution was very far beneath his forensic efforts; nor need we be suprised that an advocate, jaded to death in the Courts, should not afterwards rise in the freshness of his vigour in the midnight debates of the Senate. The gross personal invective in which he there indulged, was not the fault of the man, but of the times and the country in which he lived; and affords a convincing proof, that whatever Ireland may have lost, as many have fancied that she has lost, by her union with Great Britain, her senators have gained much of decorum and of gentlemanly feeling in conducting their debates, by their transplantation to the Imperial Parliament.

Of his private life we wish to say little, because we fear little can be said that is good. He was an excellent companion in his convivial hours, over which decency and discretion were but too seldom the presiding graces. In his friendships he was warm-hearted and sincere; nor was there much implacability in his resentments. His favourite associate, the soother of his death-bed hours, was Godwin, whose baneful principles and practices, as far as they affect some of the strongest and most important bonds of society, were too nearly allied to his own. For the sake of the living, we will say no more of the frailties, we must go further and add— the vices, of the dead; but thus much we conceived it our duty to say, lest, as is too often the case, the great should be confounded with the good. On one other topic, however, we must briefly touch-the levity with which, both in his speeches and his letters, Mr. Curran was in the habit of making scriptural allusions, and of treating sacred things. In some cases, indeed, the former were made with solemnity and effect, we will even add with propriety; but there was something so mechanical in the frequent recurrence of the habit, that even when the illustration partook not of the ludicrous, as too often it did, the Bible was of necessity reduced to the level of any other book, whence a simile or a passage might be borrowed, to round a period, or adorn a tale. The latter can admit of no palliation, when, to raise a smile upon the countenance of a friend, he makes a jest of the amelioration of his health causing him " to be waited for in heaven longer, perhaps, than they looked for;" and by promising to shew his gratitude for a posthumous care of his reputation, as well as he can," by saying handsome things of his friend to the saints and angels before he came." We had perhaps said less on this subject, were we not convinced, that, both in public addresses and private correspondence, the practice we are reprobating is a growing evil.

The works that have furnished the materials for this article demand a parting word, though it needs must be brief indeed. That of the younger Mr. Curran is modest, unassuming, impartial, and in every way creditable to the talents of the son of such a father; and will, we are persuaded, give satisfaction to every one whom our recommendation shall induce to read it. What could we say more, were we to devote whole pages to the criticising its merits? Of its two ephemeral, catch-penny, and egotistical precursors, what in justice can we say less, than that their perusal most forcibly reminded us of the concluding lines

of an epigram on the conflicting claims of two rival tragedians of some celebrity in their day:

"Which is the best is hard to be guess'd,
But which is the worst is a toss up."

Sermons preached in the Cathedral Church of Worcester, by the late Rev. James Stillingfleet, A. M., Prebendary of Worcester, and formerly Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. London, 1819. Longman. 8vo. pp. 594.

CONTRARY to the usual practice of our fraternity, we shall begin our notice of the volume before us with a quotation from its pages; both because it will at once furnish the reader with a tolerable notion of the author's general drift and manner of writing, and because it touches on a subject of great importance, upon which we wish, at the outset of our career, to make a few observations.

"Sacrifices, considered in themselves, are no better than weak and beggarly elements. The principles of natural religion, as it is called, or the vain hypothesis of presuming to know and serve God acceptably by the powers of reason and nature, doth not lead us to conceive that we stand in need of the intervention of sacrifice to placate the Deity. But when the law of sacrifice is considered in its true light, as a 'shadow of good things, of which Christ is the substance,' then they serve the purpose of a schoolmaster, to bring us to the knowledge of Christ, who, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins' upon the altar of his cross,' for ever sat down on the right hand of God,' as the great High Priest of our profession after the order of Melchizedec.' This hath been the Catholic faith of the true church of God from the beginning. The canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testament throughout speak decidedly to this purpose. And in concurrence therewith, the confessions of the primitive church, of the reformed churches universally, and of our own truly apostolical communion, maintain the same doctrine. Yet notwithstanding all this accumulated evidence, such is the perverseness and obstinacy of man's nature, arising from the innate pride of his heart, that in a spirit of independence and selfsufficiency, instead of submitting to the superior wisdom of God, and giving himself up to be taught of him according to the principles laid down in his word, he is prone to counteract them, to question their veracity, with an insinuation not unlike that of the first tempter, yea, hath God said so?' (Gen. iii. 1.) and to examine them at the bar of his own reason. This hath been the case from the time of Cain, to the projectors of a new religion at Babel, upon their dispersion after the flood; and in after ages, the