JOHN FOSTER AND ROBERT HALL. Or the English minds that have departed from our world within a few years, none have excited a deeper interest, nor wielded for a season a loftier power, than John Foster and Robert Hall. They were both triumphant instances of the superiority of intellect, and the homage that will be paid to it over all circumstance and mere external distinction. These men were two of the "Intellectual Incas" of their race. In the two together there were combined nearly all the grand qualities that ever go to make up minds of the highest order. Severity and affluence, keenness and magnificence, simplicity and sublimity of thought, ruggedness, power, and elaborate beauty and exquisiteness of style, precision and splendour of language, condensed energy, fire, and diffusive richness of imagination, originality, independence, and perfect classical elegance, comprehensiveness and accuracy, nobleness of feeling, intense hatred of oppression, Christian humility, childlike simplicity. And yet there were greater differences between them than there were similarities. In some respects their minds were of quite an opposite mould. Hall's mind was more mathematical than Foster's, and he was distinguished for his power of abstract speculation, and his love and habit of reasoning. The tenor of Foster's mind was less argumentative; but more absolute, more intuitive, more rapidly and thoroughly observant. The impression of power is greater from the mind of Foster than of Hall. On this account, and for its eminently suggestive properties, Foster's general style, both of thinking and writing, is much to be preferred; though Hall's has the most sustained and elaborate beauty. Yet the word elaborate is not strictly applicable to Hall's style, which is the natural action of his mind, the movement, not artificial, nor supported by effort, in which his thoughts arranged themselves with the precision and regularity of & Roman cohort. Hall's was a careful beauty of expression, his carefulness and almost fastidiousness of taste being a second nature to him; Foster's was a careless mixture of ruggedness and beauty, the ruggedness greatly predominating. Hall's style is too constantly, too uniformly regular; it becomes monotonous; it is like riding or walking a vast distance over a level macadamized road; a difficult mountain would be an interval of relief. We feel the need of something to break up the uniformity and startle the mind; and we should like, here and there, to pass through an untrodden wilderness, or a gloomy forest, or to have some unexpected, solemn apparition rise before us. There is more of the romantic in Foster than in Hall; and Foster's style is sometimes thick set with expressions that sparkle with electric fire of imagination. Hall's mind, in the comparison of the two, is more like an inland lake, in which you can see, though many fathoms deep, the clear white sand, and the smallest pebbles on the bottom. Foster's is rather like the Black Sea in commotion. Hall gives you more of known truth, with inimitable perspicuity and happiness of arrangement; Foster sets your own mind in pursuit of truth-fills you with longings after the unknown-leads you to the brink of frightful precipices. There is something such a difference between the two, as between Raphael the sociable angel, relating to Adam, in his bower, the history of creation; and Michael ascending with him the mountain, to tell him what shall happen from his fall. Hall's mind is like a royal garden, with rich fruits, and overhanging trees in vistas; Foster's is a stern, wild, mountainous region, likely to be the haunt of banditti. As a preacher, Hall must have been altogether superior to Foster, in the use and applica tion of ordinary important evangelical truth, "for reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness." But Foster probably sometimes reached a grander style, and threw upon his audience sublimer illustrations and masses of thought. Foster was not successful as a preacher; his training and natural habits were unfortunate for that; and the range of thought, in which his mind spontaneously moved, was too far aloof from men's common uses, abilities of perception, tastes, and disposition. But Hall was, doubtless, one of the greatest preachers that ever lived. Yet there were minds that would prefer Foster, and times at which all the peculiar qualities of his genius would be developed in a grander combination of sublimity and power. As a general thing, Hall must have been more like Paul preaching at Athens in a Roman toga; Foster like John the Baptist in the wilderness, with a leathern girdle about his loins, eating locusts and wild honey. He speaks of one of his own sermons, which a man would give much to have heard; we can imagine some of its characteristics. It was on the oath of the angel with one foot upon the sea, and another on the land, swearing that time should be no longer; and his own mind was in a luminous, winged state of freedom and fire, that seems to have surprised himself; but no record of the sermon is preserved. The vigour and uptwisting convolutions of Foster's style are the results simply of the strong workings of the thought, and not of any elaborate, artificial formation. For though he laboured upon his sentences with unexampled interest and care, after his thoughts had run them in their own original mould, they were always the creation of the thought, and not a mould prepared for it. The thought had always the living law of its external form within it. We know of scarce another example in English literature where so much beauty, precision, and yet genuine and inveterate originality are combined. It is like the hulk of a ship, made out of the smoothed knees of knotty oak. There is a glow of life in such a style, and not merely quiet beauty, whether elaborate or natural, that is like the glow in the countenance of a healthy man, after a rapid walk in a clear frosty morning. But it sometimes reminds you of a naked athletic wrestler, struggling to throw his adversary, all the veins and muscles starting out in the effort. Foster's style is like the statue of Laocoon, writhing against the serpent. Hall's reminds you more of the Apollo of the Vatican. The difference was the result of the intense effort with which Foster's mind wrought out and condensed, in the same process, its active meditations. Everywhere it gives you the impression of power at work, and his illustrations themselves seem to be hammered on the anvil. It gives you the picture he has drawn of himself, or his biographer for him, in the attitude of what he called pumping. At Brearly Hall he used to try and improve himself in composition, by "taking paragraphs from different writers, and trying to remodel them, sentence by sentence, into as many forms of expression as he possibly could. His posture, on these occasions, was to sit with a hand on each knee, and moving his body to and fro, he would remain silent for a considerable time, till his invention in shaping his materials had exhausted itself. This process he used to call pumping." Foster's style is the very image of a mind working itself to and fro, with inward intensity. The characteristics of power and rugged thought in Foster, are admirably set forth in some of his own images. Speaking, in his journal, of a certain individual's discourse, he says, " He has a clue of thread of gold in his hand, and he unwinds for you ell after ell; but give me the man who will throw the clue at once, and let me unwind it; and then show in his hand another ready to follow." H He speaks of the great deficiency of what may be called conclusive writing and speaking:-"How seldom we feel, at the end of the paragraph or discourse, that something is settled and done. It lets our habit of thinking and feeling just be as it was. It rather carries on a parallel to the line of the mind, at a peaceful distance, than fires down a tangent to smite across it." Foster always smote across the mind. Many things," says he, "may descend from the sky of truth, without deeply striking and interesting men; as from the cloudy sky, rain, snow, &c., may descend, without exciting ardent attention; it must be large hailstones, the sound of thunder, torrent rain, and the lightning's flash; analogous to these must be the ideas and propositions which strike men's minds." Foster's own writings are eminently thus exciting. And it may be said of him, as he remarked of Lord Chatham, speaking of the absence of argumentative reason in his speeches, "he struck, as by intuition, directly on the results of reasoning, as a common shot strikes the mark, without your seeing its course through the air, as it moves towards its object." But Foster thought, and reasoned in thinking, most intensely and laboriously; it was not mere intuition that has filled his pages with such condensed results. J. F. L. THE IVY. LIKE the frail ivy which some prop requires, And sometimes I have seen the ivy cling To plants which have themselves no strength to rise; |