Richard Baxter, divines of the seventeenth century; and Gibbon, Burke, Johnson, and the author of the Letters of Junius, in the century following. A few remarks on the prince of this class of writers, Jeremy Taylor, some time Bishop of Down and Connor, may not be out of place here. A paragraph from the first section of his " Holy Dying" will properly introduce these:

"Every day's necessity calls for reparation of that portion which Death fed on all night, when we lay in his lap, and slept in his outer chambers. The very spirits of a man prey upon the daily portion of bread and flesh, and every meal is a rescue from one death, and lays up for another; and while we think a thought we die; and the clock strikes and reckons on our portion of eternity. We form our words with the breath of our nostrils; we have the less to live upon for every word we speak.

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“Nature hath given us one harvest every year, but Death hath two; and the spring and the autumn send throngs of men and women to charnel-houses; and all the summer long men are recovering from the evils of the spring, till the dog-days come, and then the Syrian star makes the summer deadly. And the fruits of autumn are laid up for all the year's provision; and the man that gathers them, eats, and surfeits, and dies, and needs them not, and himself is laid up for eternity; and he that escapes till winter, only stays for another opportunity, which the distempers of that quarter minister to him with great variety. Thus Death reigns in all the portions of our

time. The autumn with its fruits provides disorders for us, and winter's cold turns them into sharp diseases; and the spring brings flowers to strew our hearse, and the summer gives green turf and brambles to bind upon our graves. Calentures and surfeits, colds and agues, are the four quarters of the year, and all minister to death; and you can go no whither but you tread on dead men's bones."

Amidst all this accumulation of thoughts, power of diction, opulence of imagery, shifting of scenes, alternate darkness and light, splendour, beauty, and horror, life, death, time, and eternity- the mind of the reader is bewildered, delighted, astonished, overwhelmed; and at length retires into itself exhausted, with very little recollection of the strange process which it has undergone, while submitted to the spell of the orator. I say the orator, because, rich as the passage is in poetical materials, there can hardly be pointed out more than two strokes of pure poetry in the whole: "When we lay in Death's lap, and slept in his outer chambers:" and the offices of the seasons; "Autumn with its fruits provides disorders for us; winter's cold turns them into sharp diseases; spring brings flowers to strew our hearse ; summer gives green turf and brambles to bind upon our graves." All the rest is rhetorical, the result of hard thinking and strong memory, with little of quick fancy or deep feeling. There are seven pages of the same kind in the context, which rather resemble an inventory of ideas and metaphors, than a select and well-harmonised array of such as would best impress the mind, and affect the heart, on the most solemn of

all subjectsman's mortality. And such is the general character of composition in the multitudinous works of this "old man eloquent." He is never carried away by the fervency of passion; he always preserves presence of mind and self-possession; he can draw upon the treasures of his imagination to any amount, and can multiply examples and illustrations at leisure, to enforce his arguments with what may be called "cumulative evidence." His crowded sentences are like piles of magnificent furniture in the upholsterer's show-rooms-not tastefully disposed in the halls and saloons of a royal palace. They resemble instruments of war, curiously displayed in a national armoury — not glittering from afar, like those of well-appointed legions marching to battle. The sight of a single weapon, worn by a known hero, would impress the imagination more than the holiday spectacle of all the artillery in the tower, especially if the possessor had achieved some great feat with it. The sword of Goliath was glorious and terrible in the giant's own grasp; but was it not a thousand times more awful to look upon in the hand of David, the stripling, when he had cut off with it the head of him who alone seemed strong enough to wield it? It is not things themselves, but the associations which they awaken, that constitute the spirit and essence of poetry.

Hence, with all his genius, learning, and industry, Jeremy Taylor never could be a poet, because he never went beyond himself - beside himself, if you will. He has put the question beyond doubt: he tried verse; but his lines are like petrifactions, glit

tering, and hard, and cold; formed by a slow but certain process in the laboratory of abstract thought; not like flowers, springing spontaneously from a kindly soil, fresh, and fragrant, and blooming in open day. The erudite divine is always in his study. He never goes out to meditate in the field at even-tide, as Isaac did; of whom it is recorded, that "when he lifted up his eyes, behold, the camels were coming. And Rebekah, when she saw Isaac, lighted off her camel, and took a veil and covered herself." Thus Beauty comes to meet the poet in his solitary walk; reveals herself for a moment, then hides her countenance, conscious of worth

"That would be woo'd, and not unsought be won."

I have not disparaged this great man; I have only contended, that, full of poetic materials as his prose is, those materials are seldom poetically disposed. His productions, however, show, that, even without metrical arrangement, the English language can sustain its dignity under the most gorgeous array of diction, prodigality of thought, and heraldic blazonry of illustration. Our writers, therefore, who love a florid style, have no pretext for betaking themselves to "prose run mad," and dressing out their thoughts as fantastically as Lear in his frenzy. If they could make them rave as sublimely as the poor crazed king—why, then they might be forgiven.

Hebrew Poetry.

We conclude that poetry, in its technical form, must be verse. Verse is of various kinds, according to the language, the taste, and degree of civilisation among the people who employ it. The most ancient and simple (apparently) is the Hebrew; presuming, as we must, that the Psalms, Prophecies, and certain other portions of the Sacred Scriptures, are not poetical in substance only, but that they are metrical in the original. The secret, however, wherein their rhythm consisted, is irrecoverably lost; the language itself being only preserved in the skeleton form of consonants, with a very inadequate supply of vowels; and the words (independent of the masoretic points) resembling, if the figure may be allowed, those decayed leaves which we find in the forest in winter, of which nothing but fibres remain, like curious and delicate net-work. But in the artful structure of the sentences, in their melodious movement at times, and more especially in their corresponding members (as though every clause had its tally, every sound its echo, every image its reflection, and every thought its double), we may discover that the poetical portions of the Old Testament are in verse, of which the precise laws are no longer remembered.

Bishop Lowth, the greatest authority on this subject, says, "The harmony and true modulation depend upon a perfect pronunciation of the language, and a knowledge of the principles and rules of versification; and metre supposes an exact knowledge of the number and quantity of syllables, and, in some