of pertinent reflections and observations which may be wrought into an extended dissertation equally instructive and edifying to his Christian readers. Such a work is the Portrait of St. Paul, written by the late pious vicar of Madeley, Rev. John William de la Fletchere. This admirable production is published at the Methodist Book Room, in New-York, and widely circulated through the medium of that most efficient channel. No well disposed Christian or Christian minister can peruse it with prayerful attention without receiving much spiritual benefit from it. He will leave it a better Christian; and, if a minister, a more apostolical and successful laborer in the vineyard of his Lord. We live in a day when the multiplication of such works is much needed. The swarms of novels and romances which are daily issuing from the press, to corrupt the taste and vitiate the morals of the youth of our country, are a standing reproach to us as a professedly Christian nation. It is a source of deep and painful regret to the truly pious of all denominations, and loudly calls on every friend of our common Christianity to exert his utmost efforts to counteract the pernicious influence of this diffusive and insidious moral poison, by substituting a more healthy aliment for the mind. Who that is capable of forming any just estimate of the demoralizing tendency of such productions as are here alluded to, can help deploring that their authors should be eulogized, and their names identified with the nation's literature as its chief supporters and most brilliant ornaments? But such is the fact; and until talent and literature, eloquence and authorship, shall be consecrated to the cause of true piety, this stigma will probably remain a standing reproach to both our intelligence and our moral taste as a Christian community.

On opening the volume before us, and glancing over the title page and a few lines setting forth the "plan and scope of the work," we felt a degree of pleasure arising from a secret hope that it might be one of those truly devotional productions of a pious heart and an enlightened understanding, which the circumstances of the times so imperiously require. It did appear to us that whoever would, at this time, select the lives and labors of the apostles as a theme for a book of more than six hundred royal octavo pages, must have a heart in some measure imbued with the apostolic spirit, and would, in all probability, amplify his subject in such a way as to produce a most salutary impression upon the moral

and religious feelings of his readers. It was such a delusive hope which induced us to procure the work, its enormous price notwithstanding; and to enter with more than ordinary interest upon a perusal of its contents, little suspecting that they would furnish occasion for such strictures and animadversions as we have felt it our duty to make upon it. To tell the truth, we were disappointed in it. It is a far less devotional work than we had hoped to find it; and in other respects by no means such as the nature of the subject would authorize us to expect. We do not mean by this remark, however, wholly to condemn it as a worthless production. It has merits. But we cannot resist the conviction, that a dissertation on the lives and labors of the apostles of Jesus Christ ought to be a peculiarly religious work, calculated to inspire the reader with much of the spirit which characterized those holy men who are set forth as illustrious examples of the power and purity of the gospel they were divinely commissioned to teach. Such is by no means the character or tendency of the work before us; and we must, therefore, deem it wanting at least in appropriateness.

Unlike the author of the Portrait of St. Paul, who in the very first paragraph of his book calls the reader's attention to the early piety of the apostle, and thenceforward keeps it fixed in contemplation of the eminent traits of character developed throughout the whole course of his devoted life, the writer of the volume before us occupies some thirty or forty pages in describing the civil state of "the world in the apostolic age," before he comes to the main object of his work. This may be admissible as an introduction, though it too evidently indicates that the writer's mind was not so deeply imbued with the spirit of his subject as could be desired to insure a profitable discussion of it. Of this we have still farther evidence in the manner of his connecting the political sway of the Roman emperor with the advent of the meek and lowly Saviour. This is certainly novel in some respects, and extremely questionable in others. Who, for example, is prepared to hear Julius Cesar proclaimed as "Christ's forerunner?" Such, indeed, was John the Baptist, an honor most fitly conferred upon him as a devoted prophet of the Most High. Julius Cesar was neither his rival nor his associate; and it is difficult to conceive for what purpose, other than to exhibit the eccentricity of the author's mind, (of which there is abundant evidence throughout his work,) the appellation

appropriated to the heaven-appointed messenger of the Lord, who was especially sent to prepare his way before him, is given to an earthly monarch, without so much as one trait of character befitting a mortal for so holy an association.

But were the Cesars and the state of the Roman empire dismissed where the history of the apostles commences, there would be less occasion for complaint on the part of the Christian reader. He might then pursue the theme adopted by the writer without farther interruption. Even common readers know the vexation. occasioned by having the thread of an instructive or edifying essay ever and anon broken off, and the mind thus confused and distracted by the introduction of new and irrelevant matter. The impression which might otherwise be made by the subject is weakened and rendered indistinct, and the object which all writers for the public should have in view, partially, if not wholly, defeated. The want of unity in a discourse or dissertation is a fault which no critic can fail to detect; and where this fault is a prominent characteristic of a literary or religious production, it is a duty which the reviewer owes alike to the author and the public to notice it.

Had we room we could adduce numerous instances showing that the labored production of our author is extremely defective in this respect. Let the reader turn to page 201 of the work, and read the section through, and then ask himself what single sentence or line it contains to indicate that it is a part of a dissertation on the lives of the apostles. It stands in the body of the work thus:-

"HEROD AGRIPPA.

"At this time the monarch of the Roman world was CAIUS CESAR, commonly known by his surname, CALIGULA. Among the first acts of a reign, whose outset was deservedly popular for its numerous manifestations of prudence and benevolence, forming a strange contrast with subsequent tyranny and folly, was the advancement of a tried and faithful friend to the regal honors and power which his birth entitled him to claim, and from which the neglectful indifference at first, and afterward the revengeful spite of the preceding Cesar, Tiberius, had long excluded him. This was HEROD AGRIPPA, grandson of that great Herod, who, by the force of his own exalted genius, and by the favor of the imperial Augustus, rose from the place of a friendless foreign adventurer to the kingly sway of all Palestine. This extensive power he exercised in a manner which was, on the whole, ultimately advantageous to his subjects; but his whole reign, and the later years of it more particularly, were marked by cruelties the most infamous, to which he was led by almost insane fits of wild and causeless jealousy.

On none of the subjects of his power did this tyrannical fury fall with such frequent and dreadful visitations as on his own family; and it was there that, in his alternate fits of fury and remorse, he was often made the avenger of his own victims. Among these numerous domestic cruelties, one of the earliest and the most distressing was the murder of the amiable Mariamne, the daughter of the last of the Asamonean line:— 'Herself the solitary scion left

Of a time-honored race,'

which Herod's remorseless policy had exterminated. Her he made his wife, and after a few years sacrificed her to some wild freak of jealousy, only to reap long years of agonizing remorse for the hasty act, when a cooler search had shown, too late, her stainless innocence. But a passionate despot never yet learned wisdom by being made to feel the recoil of his own folly; and in the course of later years this cruelty was equalled, and almost outdone, by a similiar act, committed by him on those whom her memory should have saved, if any thing could. The innocent and unfortunate Mariamne left him two sons, then mere children, whom the miserable, repentant tyrant cherished and reared with an affectionate care, which might almost have seemed a partial atonement for the injuries of their murdered mother. After some years passed in obtaining a foreign education at the imperial court of Rome, these two sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, returned at their father's summons to his court, where their noble qualities, their eloquence, and manly accomplishments, as well as the interest excited by their mother's fate, drew on them the favorable and admiring regard of the whole people. But all that made them admirable and amiable to others was as powerless as the memory of their mother to save them from the fury of the suspicious tyrant. Those whose interests could be promoted by such a course soon found means to make them objects of jealousy and terror to him, and ere long involved them in a groundless accusation of conspiring against his dominion and life. The uneasiness excited in Herod by their great popularity and their commanding talents, led him to believe this charge; and the wretched old king, driven from fear to jealousy, and from jealousy to fury, at last crowned his own wretchedness and their wrongs by strangling them both, after an imprisonment of so great a length as to take away from his crime even the shadowy excuse of hastiness. This was one of the last acts of his bloody life; but ere he died returning tenderness toward the unfortunate race of Mariamne led him to spare and cherish the infant children of Aristobulus, the younger of the two, who left three sons and two daughters to the tender mercies of his cruel father."

Thus does the writer of the "Lives of the Apostles" introduce into the very heart of his work a portion of Roman history, which he continues through several pages, for no other apparent purpose than to inform his readers that at a certain period during the lives of the apostles, Herod Agrippa, a man of singular and various fortunes,-now a beggar, now a prisoner, and now a king,—reigned

in Palestine, and was a favorite with the Jews; and that under his reign new persecutions broke out against the Christians. All of this matter which was in any way relevant to the subject might have been told in ten lines, and the narrative of the apostles left unbroken and complete. This certainly would have been more creditable to the author, and far better calculated to produce the desired impression upon the minds of his readers.

In this connection we invite attention to another feature of the author's composition which deserves a passing notice. It is the inadaptation of his style to his subject. It will be borne in mind that the life of St. Peter is the subject of discourse in this part of the work; and the mind of the reader is naturally impatient of whatever keeps it in suspense, and throws in the distance those prominent features of the apostle's character, and incidents in his life, which constitute the materials of an interesting and useful biography. The event to be noticed in the consecution of incidents, is Peter's remarkable deliverance from the prison in which he was confined between two soldiers. In preparing the way to bring this interesting occurrence before the minds of his readers, the author has already carried them through a dozen tedious pages of profane history in a style indicated by the extract above; and now, falling into the subject of his narrative, he occupies some ten or twelve pages more in describing, in the same verbose and tedious manner, all the minute circumstances, real or imaginary, relative to the latent malice of the Jews against the disciples, the advantage which Agrippa's favorable disposition toward Jewish institutions afforded them to gratify this malice by rekindling the fires of persecution, the apprehension and imprisonment of the apostle, the ceremonies and joyous celebration of the national feast by the Jews, and the solemn musings of the disciples, as well as of Peter himself, during the period of these transactions, with many other things of the kind, before he commences a relation of that wonderful deliverance, which is rendered the more interesting and sublime in the sacred volume by being narrated in a manner so concise, simple, and unadorned. As a sample of the author's method take the following paragraph, in which he describes the excitement and consternation that a discovery of Peter's escape occasioned among the keepers of the prison. It runs thus: