the ignorant, a reclaimer of the erring, and a reprover of the vicious, it becomes him to pursue. The following word of seasonable exhortation, with which the Bishop closes the important pages of warning and instraction which he had opened, will testify at once to the spirit and the value of this Charge. "I have touched upon these topics, my Reverend Brethren, as cursorily as might be, chiefly for the purpose of recurring to those points of your professional duty which such meetings as the present are intended more especially to enforce. The remedy for all these evils, the preservative against all these dangers, so far as we are personally responsible, will be found in that diligent, faithful, uncompromising, and, undeviating discharge of our respective functions, which, while it must raise us in the estimation of all impartial observers of our conduct, will also lay the best foundation of our own individual satisfaction, and of the general welfare. Even the retired and unobtrusive labours of your profession cannot but greatly advance the public good. But your sphere of usefulness may be more widely extended, by uniting your efforts with others of the Clergy and Laity who are now carrying on, with a zeal and energy proportioned to the exigency of the times, the great works of National Education, and of promoting Christian Knowledge, both at home and abroad. The establishment of Diocesan and District Committees, in union with the Parent Societies instituted for these important purposes, has of late years been successfully adopted throughout this, as well as other parts of the Principality. The contributions, too, which have been raised in your respective parishes, towards the support of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, bespeak a liberal spirit, and an ardent desire of doing good. While this spirit prevails, we need not be dismayed by any efforts of our adversaries. These great public institutions, together with the Society for the Enlargement and Rebuilding of Churches and Chapels, may be regarded as main bulwarks of our Ecclesiastical Establishment. They provide for the instruction of the great mass of the community in every way in which it can be administered; by training the infant mind to a knowledge of Christian duty; by supplying the adult with every assistance to a right faith and practice; by providing for the wants of our fellow-countrymen separated from us in distant countries; by scattering the seeds of Christianity in every climate and in every soil; and by affording to those among ourselves, who might otherwise be debarred of such benefits, the means of attendance on the public ministrations of the Church. "With these advantages within their reach, let us hope the time is at hand, when none among us need complain that Evangelical light and truth must be sought elsewhere than within the pale of the Church of England. Not that we would depreciate the good that is done by others, nor regard them with an invidious eye. Towards our Dissenting brethren, intent as many of them undoubtedly are upon promoting in common with ourselves the great purpose for which the Gospel was imparted to mankind, it behoves us to demean ourselves with charity, with good-will, with respect. But while they pursue their course unmolested and unreproved, let it be allowed to us to do the same. We concede toleration freely and fully we claim only to be equally unmolested in our own privileges, and thus to preserve the relations of peace and amity. What more does Christian Charity require? Or what further advances can be made towards an interchange of good offices, without a compromise on one side or the other, or perhaps on both, of sincerity and truth?" P. 21. This excellent advice will not, we are confident, be thrown away upon the Clergy of the Diocese of Llandaff. They will know how to appreciate the advantages they now enjoy in having their Bishop resident among them for some considerable portion of the year; and they will shew their sense of these advantages, by their readiness to adopt every measure for the dissemination of sound doctrine, and the cultivation of Christian charity, which he may recommend. We could expatiate with delight on the benefits which not only that diocese, but the Church at large may, under Providence, derive from the continued exertions of that discreet and discriminating zeal which characterizes the Charge before us. But motives, which our readers will not fail to understand, restrain our pens. The Bishop of Llandaff is too well known to the Church in which he deservedly fills so distinguished a station, to require our feeble testimony to his merits-" A city set on an hill cannot be hid ;" its fair proportions will be seen, and its strength appreciated, even though no man stand forward to "count its towers," to "describe its bulwarks," and to "consider its palaces." ART. IV. Letters of Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey; with a Memoir, and illustrative Notes. 8vo. pp. 344. 9s. 6d. Murray. 1821. EVERY body knows that there are three sorts of human beings: "Men, Women, and Herveys." And if any body were inclined to doubt the assertion, the lady before us, though only incorporated into the family by marriage, would sufficiently prove it. She writes dog-latin and demi-deism as glibly as any half-educated he-philosophist; and yet loves her husband and children with the tenderness of a household hen. Strange as it may seem, with all these recommendations, her Letters are immeasurably dull; and no elderly gentlewoman who ever gossiped through a common-place correspondence has more to lay to the charge of the Varius and Tucca who neglected to burn it. It is difficult to believe that the Lady Hervey of these Letters is the Mary Lepel, whose "merit, beauty, and vivacity," extorted homage even from the virulence of Pope's resentment; and who had the extraordinary distinction of being celebrated in English verse by Voltaire. Our readers, perhaps, may quarrel with us if we do not transcribe this singular effort of the muse of Ferney: 66 TO LADY HERVEY. "Hervey, would you know the passion That by words can be express'd. "In my silence see the lover: True love is by silence known: P. ix. These lines are light and elegant; and from the known difficulty of English composition to a foreigner, they must be regarded as a great display of that quality which, after all, was Voltaire's chief possession, cleverness. If they are not precisely such as a confiding husband of our own days would wish to see addressed to a brilliant and attractive wife, we must remember, that they were written at a time in which he who was not poetically in love with every woman to whom he wrote verses would have been chased from Parnassus. Just at present our bards are less individually amorous; and the young ladies who chaunt love sonnets to the piano, must be content to substitute general views of the tender passion for private and particular gallantry. We do not know that they are gainers either in pleasure or in modesty. Mary Lepel was born in 1700. She was the daughter of Brigadier-general Nicholas Lepel; and was early initiated into the highest mysteries of the beau-monde as maid of honour to Queen Caroline, at that time Princess of Wales. At twenty years of age she married John Lord Hervey, eldest son of the Earl of Bristol. Lord Hervey was called up to the house of peers in his father's life time, and died before him in 1743. The marriage was one of much happiness, and Lady Hervey every where speaks of her living husband with admiration, and of his memory with tenderness. Her ladyship's days were passed in the most brilliant society of the time; and she was transferred in succession from one generation of wits to another. Of Pope and Voltaire we have already spoken. Lord Chesterfield mentions her to his son as having acquired all the easy good breeding of a court without its frivolousness; as "having all the reading that a woman should have, and more than any woman need have;" and of shewing above most of her sex " le ton de la parfaitement bonne compagnie, les manieres engageantes, et le je ne scais quoi qui plait:" and Horace Walpole, himself, lays aside his cynical sneer wherever he speaks of her even in her old age. The Letters in the present collection were written during the last five and twenty years of her ladyship's life, to the Reverend Edward Morris, a country clergyman, who had been tutor to her sons George, Augustus, Frederic, and William; the three first each successively Earls of Bristol; the last a general in the army. We are taught by the editor of them not to expect " the gay graces" which fascinated the celebrated men whom we have before mentioned, and which, even now give a traditionary splendour to the Augustan age of the court of England." In this the editor is right; how far he may be so in predicating their "good nature, good sense, good feeling, and good taste," our readers may presently determine for themselves. 66 We believe Mandeville, however deservedly he is neglected now, was a popular writer in his day. The present taste in blasphemy is somewhat coarser than that of our forefathers; for we regard the flavour less than the strength of the article; and swill sheer alcohol where they sipped cinnamon water. Still at no time should we have expected to find the champion of private vice as the companion of a fine lady's toilet; or his sophistries assimilated to the reasonings of a Christian divine. Mais voici. "I am very much obliged to you, Sir, for all the news you send me, but much more so for your own reasonings upon it; it reminds me of the pleasure I took in reading the Fable of the Bees, in which I only considered the text as what led to the comment let the former be ever so trifling or uninteresting, the latter was always lively, instructive, and agreeable." P. 20. But Lord Bolingbroke. Bishop Hoadley, and Conyers Middleton, are among Lady Hervey's favourite English theologists. Helvetius, the great contributor to, if not the original framer of the most infamous forgery which ever issued from the French Pandemonium, is a man of "wit, learning, probity, and every amiable quality any one can be possessed of ;" and she absolutely sent a commission to Paris, sous le manteau, to purchase two copies of his dull dissertation de l'esprit, for three times its original cost price, for no other reason than because she heard it was suppressed and forbidden. Rousseau's Emile, "the more she considers it the more she finds to admire;" and though she does not hold his system of education, taken exactly, to be quite practicable, yet she "firmly believes a much better plan of education may be struck out (from the hints given by it) than has hitherto been made use of." This is a point to which her ladyship again refers the fashion which has since become more prevalent was then commencing, by which the little dancing, little French, little science, and much infidelity of Geneva, is substituted for the sound and sober discipline of English education. How far the exchange succeeded in the immediate instance which Lady Hervey so warmly approved, may be fairly estimated, by the character of the subject upon whom the experiment was tried. We will not say that the late Lord Stanhope's eccentricities were caused, but we may be permitted to say, that they were not corrected by the unfortunate resolution which sent him to Geneva at eleven years of age: a place in which Lady Hervey assures us he may be much better educated than first at one of our great schools, and after at one of our universities." Another of her favourites is extolled in a strain which we must not venture to paraphrase. "There is no one but the King of Prussia who is worth thinking of, or turning one's eye towards. What a persevering spirit, what courage, what sagacity, how able a legislator at home, how formidable and humane an enemy abroad; a pattern and a model of arts and sciences! In short, something in the great scale of beings between a man and a Deity! and whatever the weak admiration for antiquity may be in general, I make no difficulty in preferring him to Cæsar, and consequently very much before Alexander. He has the virtues of both without their vices, and they wanted some of the virtues that he has." P. 235. With this catalogue of pets we are not surprised to find Lady Hervey somewhat to seek in her conceptions of religion. "One only thing seems pretty evident to me, which is, that the |