as "historical of Mr. Bentham's early life," that the great English Jurisconsult was originally a deacon of the Church of England, and afterwards, by Lord Mansfield's management, admitted as a barrister!

In doing ample justice to Dr. Johnstone's editorial fidelity and ability, and to the general interest of the biographical portion of his work, we have considered it right to animadvert on these the inexcusable defects of the publication. Dr. Johnstone frequently alludes to unpublished and valuable literary correspondence of Dr. Parr, for which he could not find a place in the present edition. We should suggest the incorporation of these papers with a revised edition of his memoir, a selection of the correspondence now communicated to the public, and the posthumous sermons, incomparably the most useful and masterly production of Dr. Parr's powerful mind and extraordinary learning. Such a reduced publication would be the most lasting record of the reputation of Parr, the most useful to posterity, the most honourable and profitable to Dr. Johnstone.

We had intended to have tried, convicted, and executed, "E. H. Barker, Esq. of Thetford, Norfolk," the editor of Parriana. But the office has been previously performed by some of our contemporaries. A more ill-judged, pedantic, or disgraceful publication never issued from the press during the present century. It has not a single redeeming virtue. We can only regret that some of his correspondents of real respectability should have been seduced to reply to the lithographic circulars, directed by this incorrigible literary alms-seeker to every person, however remotely known to Dr. Parr. The most formal and immaterial answer has offered a peg for this literary pretender to hang his puffs on.

Mr. E. Barker advertises in the Preface, " Addenda et Corrigenda" of his first-born volume :-" if any mistakes should be discovered by the reader, and communicated to the author, publicly or privately, with any additional matter, respecting any facts, circumstances, or individuals referred to in this work, the author will, in the second volume, be able to avail himself of the information from whatever quarter it may proceed." If this novel mode of manufacturing biography be legal and legitimate, why should not every needy literary adventurer or publisher advertise their several intentions of publishing memoirs, and for all persons in possession of letters, papers, or anecdotes, to send in their specification, tenders, and contract price? If the quantity falls short of a volume, it is easy to make up the deficiency; forgery joined to theft will always accomplish that. But this system is a scandalous injury to the living and the dead. The injury punished is not redressed. What an author would not publish in his lifetime has no right to be indiscriminately printed after his death. We can add nothing to the force of the bare enunciation of this obvious truth. Legislation, et d'une Vue d'un Corps complet de Droits; terminés par un Essai sur l'Influence des tems et des lieux relativements aux lois. Paris, 1802. 3 tomes. 2. Théorie des Peines et des Récompenses. Londres, 1811. 2 tomes.

3. Essai sur la Tactique des Assemblées Politiques. Genève, 1816: ensemble, sur les Sophismes.

4. Traité des Preuves Judiciares, &c.

THE RELIGIOUS WORLD DISPLAYED.

SKETCH II.-THE REV. DR. CHALMERS.

We have in a former paper stated our opinions touching the pretensions of the Rev. Edward Irving; it may be with some freedom, but we are sure with perfect honesty, and every disposition to do justice to both the moral and intellectual character of the man. Taking a line, however, as we did between the two extremes of indiscriminate invective and outrageous panegyric, and as we trust equally remote from both, it is exceedingly probable that very few of those of our readers, who had previously heard much about Mr. Irving, may have been satified with our strictures, or found in them exactly an echo of their own sentiments. We cannot help that. We cannot consent either to talk of Mr. Irving as a person of no talent at all, that we may win the approval of those random calumniators who despise whatever they do not understand; or to descant about him as a very wonder of genius and eloquence, that we may please himself, and the rest of his more blind and insatiable admirers. He is, as we conceive, a man of considerable powers, but much greater pretensions; and as such we have spoken of him. If either the power or the pretension be altogether wanting, we have done him less or more than justice.

Whatever may be thought, however, of this individual, intellectually considered, his deportment, as a religious character, jars frightfully, we confess, with all our preconceptions of the devoted Christian. Just conceive such a personage as Mr. Irving figuring in the New Testament. How oddly would the whole tenour of his movements contrast with those of the lofty-minded but simple-hearted and simple-mannered men whom we there find performing their parts in the grandest drama to which our world has ever served for a theatre, and whose words have throughout so little about them of the inflammation of earthly feeling, that almost by their pure spirituality alone they vindicate their divinity! With these men and their doings we cannot imagine our noisy harangue-monger of the Caledonian mingling his clamour, his rudeness, his systematic eccentricity, and the other tricks and assumptions to which he owes his mob-notoriety, with other feelings than those with which we should listen to a recitation from Paradise Lost, broken in upon by a rumble of metrical thunder from Mr. Robert Montgomery's Omnipresence of the Deity, or a ranting stave from some modern drinking-song suddenly interrupting one of the splendid harmonies of Handel or Mozart. Let us not be misunderstood. We mean not to denounce Mr. Irving as no Christian. We only maintain that many of those peculiarities to which he seems most anxious to call our attention as evidences of his Christianity, are its disfigurements, rather than either its constituents or its decorations. Far be it from us to deny or to disbelieve that, half suffocated as it may be by the vulgar vanity which manifestly forms the natural basis of his character, there may not, vertheless, live in his heart a fervent and deep-seated sense of that

of which he makes such vociferous profession with his lips. It know but little of human nature to doubt at least of the possi

bility of this; and for our own part, in the case of Mr. Irving, we be lieve in much more than its possibility. With the abatements we have already made, we give him all manner of credit for the sincerity of his convictions. We only say that he mistakes, to a considerable extent, what Christianity is, and that it consequently appears in a very different shape in him from that which it seems to us to bear, as preached and practised by its divine Founder, and his earliest followers.

We are now, however, to speak of a luminary of the Christian world in these our days, who is, in all things, most unlike to Mr. Irving, however much their names may, from accidental circumstances, have been associated by the public voice. If ever piety looked altogether beautiful or noble in any one, it does so in Dr. Chalmers. In his case, religion is evidently an influence that has shed itself over the native character of the man, only to soften or subdue whatever about it partook of the harsh or the repulsive, and still more to exalt and refine all its loftier and better tendencies. He is a man of high genius, regenerated by an alchemy which is even more powerful than that of genius. Notwithstanding the generosity and overflowing kindliness of nature which have marked him from his birth, his fervid and impetuous spirit was not, probably, originally exempted from that impatience and precipitancy which form the besetting disease of extreme sensibility, especially when excited by the consciousness of extraordinary powers; and some passages in his earlier history, indeed, are not yet altogether forgotten, which prove clearly enough that in those days his feelings were rather more than a match for his prudence. He used, at all events, as is well known, to be one of the most latitudinarian and unscrupulous of clergymen; preaching with his characteristic zeal a very ultra-liberal theology to his flock on the Sunday, and very often, during the rest of the week, throwing off his black coat for a red one; for at that period the military epidemic was universal, and the reverend doctor had caught it in all its virulence. It has even been affirmed that he was wont occasionally to startle the villagers by exhibiting himself in his scarlet attire of a summer afternoon even immediately after descending from the pulpita manifestation of warlike ardour which those who know the feelings with regard to the sacredness of the Sabbath that exist among the Scottish peasantry, will readily believe must have excited no common sensation. The spirit of soldiership by which he was animated at this time breaks out with most amusing naïveté, in a work on the Financial Condition and Resources of the Country, which he composed while under its influence, and gave to the world through the medium of a provincial press. It is eloquently and powerfully written, though in somewhat a different, many will say a better style, than his subsequent works; and abounds in original views developed with infinite ingenuity and plausibility; but the direction of every shilling of the national wealth that can be spared after the population have obtained the absolute necessaries of life, to the manufacture and maintenance of soldiers, is not so much advocated by the author by dint of argument, as assumed throughout the volume, without any argument at all, to be the only policy a sane government would ever dream of pursuing. It is a production which we would recommend to the perusal of the coming generation, likely as they are to grow up, it is to be hoped, in the cool

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atmosphere of peace, in order that they may learn in some degree to conceive what was the state of the general mind in the stirring times of their fathers—in the days when clergymen carried muskets, and every village in the land bristled with bayonets.

This was not, however, Dr. Chalmers' first publication. He had some years before printed an anonymous pamphlet in reference to a matter -the appointment of Mr. Leslie to the mathematical chair in the University of Edinburgh-which agitated for many months the whole clerical and literary world of Scotland; in which he gave still more reckless expression to the views he then entertained with regard to the obligations of his sacred office, by declaring that he knew no other duties a clergyman had to perform, except to write his sermon on the Saturday, and deliver it on the Sunday. But never ought this rash avowal to be alluded to, without mention being made at the same time of the manly and truly noble manner in which it was, many years after, retracted as publicly as it had been uttered.

The General Assembly of the Scottish Church, it may be necessary to inform our readers, is a deliberative body composed of deputies both from the clergy and the laity of the country, to the amount of between three and four hundred, which meets every year at Edinburgh, and continues its sittings for about a fortnight, for the final determination of all questions relating to the internal management of the Church that may be proposed by any of its members, or have been referred to its decision by the inferior ecclesiastical judicatories. Sanctioned as are the sittings of this body by the presence of an enthroned commissioner from the sovereign, who is always a Scottish nobleman, and surrounded as its proceedings are with not a little both of civil and military pomp, it presents-both from these external circumstances, and from the rank and talent of many of its members, among whom are always to be found, besides the clergy, a considerable proportion of the aristocracy, the judges, and the most distinguished names from the bar-a spectacle sufficiently imposing at least to the eye of a Scotsman, and not without interest to any over whose sympathies the aspect of popular institutions and the voice of free debate have any power. The General Assembly has in fact been for ages the Parliament, or House of Commons of Scotland-by far the freest she ever had-and has often well supplied to her in times of peril and oppression, the want of every other spiraculum libertatis. It was, we think, in the year 1825, at the close of a warm and prolonged debate in this court, in which Dr. Chalmers had taken a distinguished part, that a member on the opposite side of the house took occasion to twit him in very coarse terms with the change his sentiments had undergone since the commencement of his pamphleteering career, when he had announced his creed upon the subject of clerical duty in the words that have been quoted above. The unmannerly and unfeeling attack was received by the crowded house and overflowing galleries to whom it was addressed, with a general murmur of indignation; and every eye was instantly turned upon its object, who sat with unmoved countenance until the orator had concluded his harangue.

As soon as it was over, he rose; and for a few moments the silence intense expectation suspended the gazing audience. Dr. Chalmers,

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we should remark, is not distinguished as an extemporaneous speaker; the ornate and antithetic style of his oratory forbids that fluency which is only compatible with a less ambitious diction; and all his more brilliant addresses, accordingly, are prepared wilh great care and elaboration. On this occasion, therefore, we dare say, some of his friends, considering the extreme delicacy of his position, and how suddenly and unexpectedly he had been assaulted, awaited his coming defence with some degree of trembling. But never shall we forget the instant and overwhelming triumph of that reply. He acknowledged in the amplest terms the justice of the rebuke that had been administered to him, and expressed his joy that the hour had come, when an opportunity was given him of thus publicly confessing how wrong, how outrageously wrong, had been the estimate he had formed, in those bygone days, of the littleness of time and the magnitude of eternity. It was humbly, and yet proudly spoken; for the speaker felt, while the words fell from his lips, that he was acquitting himself nobly, and lifting himself to an immeasurable height, even while thus assuming the tone and attitude of sorrow and self-condemnation, above his humiliated assailant. We never witnessed any effect of eloquence like that produced by those few solemn sentences, thus firmly and dignifiedly pronounced, in circumstances that would have covered most men with abashment and confusion. They were followed by a universal storm of applause, in the midst of which the ashamed and mortified Thersites, whose vulgar abuse had been so manfully encountered and so splendidly repelled, endeavoured in vain to make himself heard, even in apology for his luckless onset. His voice, repeatedly raised, was as often drowned in an outcry of aversion and disgust.

It is the distinction of Dr. Chalmers's piety,-in an age in which what is popularly called the 'religious world' is so overrun with cant, imbecility, and pretension,-that it is the piety of high intellect, and can never be mistaken for any thing else. It is as impossible for this distinguished person to throw off his genius as it would be for him to throw off his godliness; and, from this peculiarity of character, he has formed, more perhaps than any other man of his time, a bond of connexion between the two worlds of religion and literature, having a name and a conspicuous rank in each, and being known to give to the one as well as to the other the devotion of all his affections. It is this, after all, that has constituted the secret of the mighty influence he has exercised in his own country especially, where for many years past his name has been with peer and peasant a consecrated sound; and the proudest members of the aristocracies both of literature and of fashion have recognized, in the humble parish minister, their associate and their equal. Still more popular preachers, in the literal sense of the phrase, than he has ever been, have often arisen in past times, and are possibly to be found even in the present, in that land of fervid and overflowing theology. But he alone has been at once both the orator of the people, and the delight of the most cultivated and searching criticism-the charmer, not less of the appreciating few, than of the merely wondering many. Indeed, placed by the side of his pulpit rivals, his eminence is undoubtedly far more surpassing to the eye of lettered taste than it is, or can be, to that of his plebeian