mon inheritance. No party, no sect can monopolize it. Here, on this English feeling, the patriot is disposed to think that the last hope of his country may be safely placed. If every other dependence should fail, here is solid rock. When you touch a certain theme, when you strike a particular chord, partisanship is merged, mutual hatred is in abeyance; rival and exasperated religionists lay down their arms. One mighty tide of pure British feeling courses through all breasts. This was what Bonaparte found to be invincible; this was what wrested Europe from his grasp.

Connected with this feature in the British character, and perhaps growing out of it, is a disposition to disparage that which is foreign. The patriotism degenerates into bigotry and exclusiveness. Nothing is worthy of regard except it have the English imprint. It sometimes appears in the form of a supercilious disdain of whatever has a foreign accent or garb. Hence the common report that the British traveller on the continent of Europe awakens more prejudices and meets with more collisions and petty annoyances, than the sojourner from any other nation. He is superior, in many respects, to multitudes whom he meets, even in the most civilized regions; yet he is too conscious of it, and accordingly obtains little credit, if he does not provoke retaliation and rebuffs. He obeys the injunction of the apostle in letter, not in spirit, or rather in the letter of the English version. He condescends to men of low estate, and as nearly all with whom he meets are, in his view, men of low estate, his whole life is a series of condescensions. This hauteur, this assumed superiority, is not confined to the gentry, to the higher classes, to the ancient families of the nobility. Possibly it is less discoverable in the upper circles than in some others. Excellent gentlemen in the middle classes of society betray this same spirit of self-conceit and of contempt for their neighbors, perhaps unwittingly, and with no intention to give offence. We sometimes meet it in quarters where we should least expect it. The Quarterly Review, and Blackwood's and Frazer's Magazines, the British Critic and the British Magazine, might be expected to give proof of their powers of wit and raillery at the expense of us poor Americans. But the organs of the dissenters ought surely to divest themselves, if it is within their ability, of modes of thinking and of phraseology which

SECOND SERIES, VOL. IV. NO. I.

14

*

in them are not seemly. We have no objection to fair and impartial criticism, even if it is severe. Doubtless, the

* We will throw some proofs of our charges into a note. The London Eclectic Review is a publication of great ability, and, in general, kind and courteous towards the people of this country. We have taken great pleasure in reading the successive numbers of the work for several years. It is no honor to our literary community that the Review has not been republished here from the beginning. If it rarely reaches, in power, an occasional article in Blackwood, yet it is wholly free from the silly trash which crowds many of the pages of the Northern Tory Journal. Yet even in the Eclectic, the national characteristic to which we have adverted, will sometimes break out. The tendency cannot be entirely suppressed even in that courteous and liberal journal. In a review of Dr. Porter's Lectures, Jan. 1840, we meet with the following sentence, the italics in which are our own: "Like the generality of the theological publications of our transatlantic brethren, the work is respectable. To originality it makes no pretension, but it is written with good sense and moderation, and is deeply imbued with the spirit of piety. Like all the publications, however, which have appeared in that country, it manifests a most deplorable deficiency in the knowledge of the best English books, and especially in the department of sermons." After mentioning the names of ten writers of sermons that are omitted in Dr. Porter's list, the writer proceeds: "We should have thought that such omissions were beyond even the capacity of Anglo-American ignorance of English classics." Again, Feb 1839: "Most of the American religious miscellanies are either defective or redundant. They are generally too sectarian and bigoted to be extensively useful, or they are filled with disputations upon recondite topics, which are comparatively of minor importance, or which cannot satisfactorily be elucidated." In a notice of Malcom's Travels, March 1840, the reviewer closes thus: "We have no wish to point out faults where the intention is so benevolent, and the general composition is so respectable; else we should spend a few critical remarks on the patois of New England, and a few vulgarisms which we know not how to classify. Perhaps they also are idiomatic to our transatlantic brethren." Let us, with all deference, quote some of the patois and vulgarisms of old England. "The more Christians are present the less will there be of confusion and

people of the United States have literary offences enough to answer for. We do not, however, like insinuation, innuendo, sweeping assertion, or a self-complacent, though it may be tacit, assumption, that the English are the people, and that wisdom will die with them. Why do not our transatlantic brethren' judge us with the close observation, stern impartiality, discriminating kindness of the Frenchman, De Tocqueville, or even of Chevallier? One of our answers would be, that the English have always hated the French. They have cherished a settled antipathy towards their Galprofanity," etc. Eclectic Rev. Sept. 1839, p. 320. "And who have therefore plenty of time," etc. Ib. Jan. 1840, p. 11. "If a man had the genius of an angel, and the knowledge of an angel to back it." Ib. p. 12. "The ghost of his own consistency would scare him into such hysterics, that his prizemoney would glide, guinea after guinea, into the pockets of some sapient son of Esculapius, before his locks could be sufficiently combed down either for the weight of a mitre, or the venerable cauliflower of an archdeacon." Ib. Feb. 1839, p. 134. "Because of the unceasing endeavors which are being made." Tracts for the Times, No. 5. "Prevent matters from progressing further." British Critic, vol. XXV. p. 398. "The teacher is all along aware that something is being withheld from the taught, and this not only from the mere necessity of the case, but also as best for him; the things kept back seeming as yet not so well for him to know. Of course the course and order to be followed, the principle upon which any such reserve is observed," etc. Ib p. 258. Truly cacophony is not being withheld from such sentences. "Although he settled as a Presbyterian minister." Stephens's Life of Sharp. In the principal British Reviews and Magazines, both secular and religious, we find a constant use of words and phrases which have been denounced as pedantic Americanisms,† and which are not used by good writers on this side of the Atlantic. We have marked some words in the London Christian Observer, which are certainly not New England patois. In the December No. 1839, of the Eclectic Review, there is a brief article on some of the dialects spoken in England. From the specimens given, we should infer that they are not dialects of the English language, whatever else they may be.

* See Pickering's Americanisms.

+ We refer to such words and phrases as talented, literality, lay for lie, as, Shall I lay down? iterate, entirely, acidulate, etc. etc.

lic neighbors, which has predisposed them to judge uncandidly of all other nations. This anti-French feeling has, in some cases, as in that of Coleridge, amounted almost to a frenzy of hatred. The insular situation of England, it must be confessed, is unfavorable to the cherishing, on the part of her inhabitants, of large and magnanimous views. This infelicity of location is not counterbalanced, in all respects, by the immense colonial possessions. These distant colonies of pagans hardly constitute an integral part of Britain, so far as their effects on the feelings and character of Englishmen are concerned. The great nations on the continent of Europe are more favorably situated in this respect, and have exhibited a modification of character accordingly.

Should our position on this subject be controverted, we have only to say that the whole civilized world would accord in our verdict except the island empress' herself. At the same time, though we lament this national weakness, none can be more prompt than ourselves in admiration and love of the British character. It may have forbidding features and unpleasant excrescences; the Englishman may be too conscious of his own merits, and too ready to undervaJue others in the comparison, yet there is soundness at the bottom; the substratum is firmly laid. We can trust an Englishman, which is more than we can confidently affirm of some of the continental tribes. England has forethought, wisdom, energy, philanthropy, and these are, through God, saving the world. She may make unseemly boasts, but she does not fail you in the breach; her deeds of light are chronicled on almost every shore. Her philanthropy and faith will yet gladden every clime.*

We are now prepared to consider, more in detail, the religious condition of England. We shall do this, however, with all the brevity which is consistent with an intelligible presentation. As preliminary, a slight historical sketch may not be without its value. It may throw some light on the present ecclesiastical differences in England.

We fear that a sad exception must be made in respect to China. Will England consent to the stupendous iniquity of forcing opium upon an innocent, and, in this respect, more virtuous people?

son.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, there were three parties in the Established Church, the Reformation party, of which the present evangelical school in the church claim to be descendants; the High Church, or Laud party, kindred, in some respects, to the present Oxford School; and the Latitudinarians, whose founder was Archbishop TillotDr. Birch, in his life of that prelate, remarks, that in the age of remarkable dissoluteness in which Tillotson lived, he judged that the prominent presentation of the principles of natural religion would be the best way to put a stop to the growing impiety. The great design of Christianity, in his view, was to reform men's natures, restrain their appetites and passions, and raise their minds above the interests of the present world. Cardinal Maury remarks, that the English pulpit, about the year 1700, from being an arena for politics, became, almost exclusively, a school for the moralities of social life. In proof of this he refers to the Boyle Lectures, from Bentley to Derham, including Kidder, Williams, Gastrell, Blackall, Harris, Stanhope, the two Clarkes, and Whiston.

At the same time, no divines asserted more strongly than Tillotson and Burnet, the doctrine that the Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants. In consequence, the Laud, or High Church School, assailed the Archbishop with the utmost acrimony. Still, Tillotson was far from what we should term an evangelical divine. He has, in his sermons, numerous statements of Christian doctrine, but as a whole, they are very deficient in the peculiarities of the system of grace. Burnet's exposition of the Articles has been termed one of the most anti-evangelical works in the language, its chief object being to rescue the Anglican Confession from the hands of old reformers, or the reformation divines, and to show that it might be so softened as to be approved by Latitudinarian Theologians. The Tillotson party triumphed over the School of the Reformers, who had become nearly extinct. It also overwhelmed the party of Laud. "The great majority of the bishops and clergy," says the work just referred to, "became Tillotsonians, as to their general doctrines and preaching, subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles rather as articles of peace than as ex

London Christian Observer, XXXIX. p. 82.