but the mission proved unsuccessful. In the year 1784, the Reverend Mr. Charles Wharton, who had been chaplain to the Roman Catholics of the city of Worcester, in England, published in this country, a Letter to his former congregation, stating the grounds upon which he had seen fit to abandon the faith which they professed, and impugning the doctrines of their Church. An Address to the Roman Catholics of the United States of America, in reply, was immediately prepared and published by Mr. Carroll, which was greatly admired, both here and in England, as a candid and luminous exposition of the real tenets of the Roman Catholic Church upon the controverted points, and for the liberal spirit which characterised it as a polemic production.

The Roman Catholic clergy having been always under the immediate superintendence of a spiritual hierarchy, established by the see of Rome, in England, they had solicited the Pope to place them under a similar one in this country, as a substitute for that in England. In compliance with their wishes, and by the unanimous recommendation of all his clerical brethren, Mr. Carroll was appointed Vicar General by the Holy See, in 1786, when he took up his residence in Baltimore. At a subsequent period, in the year 1789, the Pope was induced, by the earnest solicitation of his same brethren, to appoint him Bishop over the Catholic Church in the United States; and in the summer of 1790, he repaired to England for the purpose of being consecrated. On the 15th of August of that year, he was accordingly consecrated at Lulworth Castle, the seat of Thomas Weld, Esq., in Devonshire. In the same year he returned to Baltimore, and as the seat of his Episcopal see was established at that city, assumed the title of Bishop of Baltimore.

From this period until that of his death, he devoted himself, as he had always done in every situation in which he had been placed, to the regular and steady performance of the duties of his new station, in the faithful superintendence and care of his extensive diocese, which he governed with exemplary zeal and discretion. A few years only before his death, he was raised to the Archiepiscopal dignity. The degrees of Doctor of Laws and of Divinity, had been conferred upon him many years before, by several Universities in the United States. On the 22d of February, 1800, he commemorated the character and services of General Washington, who had died but a few months before, by a solemn discourse which he prepared upon the occasion, and delivered in the Catholic church of St. Peter, at Baltimore. On the 3d of December, 1815, he departed this life at Baltimore, in the eighty-first year of his age. His life was almost at the last ebb, and his surrounding friends were consulting about the manner of his interment. It was understood that there was a book belonging to his library which prescribed the proper ceremonial, and it was ascertained to be in the very chamber in which he then lay. A clergyman went, as softly as

possible, into that chamber in search of it. He did not find it immediately, and the Archbishop overheard his footsteps in the room. Without a word having passed, he called to the clergyman, and told him that he knew what he was looking for; that he would find the book in such a position on a certain shelf; and there it was accordingly found. When we consider that the prelate was, at this moment, fully sensible of his nearness to the tomb, and that the knowledge that his friends were searching for the volume which explained the established mode of burial for Archbishops and other dignitaries of the church, was, above all things, calculated to bring fully and strongly to his thoughts the melancholy and gloomy ideas attendant upon so solemn a service, and those ideas applicable to his own person, it is impossible to restrain our admiration, not only of the clearness and precision of his memory, at the age of eighty, but the sublime tranquillity of his spirit, which discoursed of mortality as if he had passed its limits, and regarded the concerns of this world as if he had become already an inhabitant of the other. When he was called to receive the reward of his many virtues, the excellence of his character shone out with fresher lustre. Dying, he inquired if a conveyance was prepared to take away his sister and weeping connexions; he told them the scene was about to close, and requested them to take rest and nourishment. He gave them his benediction, turned his head aside, and expired. His countenance retained in death, the benignant expression of life. His piety grew warmer as life closed, and the glow of religious hope was elevated almost to enthusiasm. "Sir," he said to an eminent Protestant divine, who observed that his hopes were now fixed on another world, "Sir, my hopes have always been on the cross of Christ." Yet, humility tempered his confidence; and while a numerous circle, who surrounded his bed of death, were transported with veneration at the moral sublimity of his last moments, and his joyous expectations of a speedy release, he called to his friend and associate to read for him, the "Miserere mei Deus-Have mercy on me, O Lord." Reversing the wish of Vespasian, he desired, were it practicable, to be placed on the floor, that he might expire in the posture of deepest humility.

We may be permitted to pay, ourselves, an humble, direct tribute to the memory of him whose society we had often the good fortune to enjoy. No being, that it has been our lot to admire, ever inspired us with so much reverence as Archbishop Carroll. The configuration of his head, his whole mien, bespoke the metropolite. We cannot easily forget the impression which he made, a few years before his death, upon a distinguished literary foreigner, (of Scotland), who conversed with him for a half hour, immediately after the celebration of the mass, in his parlour, and had seen the most imposing hierarchs

in Great Britain. The visiter seemed, on leaving the apartment, to be strongly moved, and repeatedly exclaimed-that, indeed, is a true Archbishop!" The prelate could discourse with him on all the leading affairs and pregnant vicissitudes of the world; with equal elegance and facility in Latin, Italian, or French; with the most enlightened and liberal philosophy; blending dignity with suavity, delicate pleasantry with grave and comprehensive remark. Much of his correspondence was conducted in those languages; he wrote them not less readily and tersely than his own: and he had few equals in his critical knowledge and employment of the latter. He bore his superior faculties and acquirements; his well improved opportunities of information and refinement, abroad and at home; his unrivalled personal consideration and influence; his professional rank and his daily honours, we will not say meekly, but so courteously, happily, unaffectedly, that while his general character restrained, in others, all propensity to indecorum or presumption, his presence added to every one's complacency, and produced an universal sentiment of earnest kindness towards the truly amiable and truly exalted companion and instructer. He mingled often with gay society; relished the festivities of polished life and the fellowship of the fire-side; held the most cordial and familiar intercourse with both clergy and laity of the Protestant denominations: and it was this expansion of his sympathies and social pleasures-as well the breadth of his charity, the benignity of his nature, and the simplicity of his spirit and carriage, as his elevated station and the sanctity of his way-that drew to his funeral a greater concourse, comprising more real mourners, than had ever been witnessed in Baltimore on a similar occasion; filled the streets and windows with sympathizing spectators; and produced as vivid a sensation in the whole body of Catholics throughout the Union, as if each congregation or individual had lost the dearest of immediate pastors or friends. Archbishop Carroll belonged, as has been said, to the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits; and he was ever proud and fond of that relation. Could Jesuitism have been determined in its proper meaning by his disposition, it would have had an acceptation the very reverse of the common one. He was wholly free from guile; uniformly frank, generous, and placable-he reprobated all intolerance; and when accused, in the newspapers, of having, in a pastoral letter, "excluded from the honourable appellation of Christians, all that were not within the pale of his Church," he answered, by the same channel,—“If such a passage can be pointed out, he (the Bishop) will be the first to condemn it; since, so far from em

bracing this opinion, as an article of his faith, he holds the doctrine directly contrary to it to be that of his Church, to which he and all Catholics are bound to submit, and which Catholics have constantly maintained in opposition to the tenets of some pretended reformers."

The Archbishop's patriotism was as decided as his piety. He ranked and voted with the Federal party-yet he entertained no predilection for Great Britain or her government. He loved republicanism; and so far preferred his own country, that if ever he could be excited to impatience, or irritated, nothing would have that effect more certainly, than the expression of the slightest preference, by any American friend, of foreign institutions or measures. He had joined, with heart and judgment, in the Revolution:-he retained, without abatement of confidence or fervour, the cardinal principles and American sympathies and hopes, upon which he then acted. We have heard from some of the most intelligent and observant of his auditors, when he delivered his masterly funeral panegyric on Washington, in which he recited the terrors, the encouragements, the distresses, and the glories of the struggle for Independence, that he appeared to be labouring under intense emotions correspondent to those topics-to be swayed, like the aged minstrel of the Poet, with contagious influences, by the varied strain which he uttered. That discourse has been published; and, also, we believe, some of his tracts. His sermons have not been printed; but they were most skilfully tempered, and classically written.

The trait of patriotism, or Americanism, which we have designated in Archbishop Carroll, was common to the great. plurality of our clergy, both before and during the Revolution. We have found this to be the case, in investigating their lives as far as the inquiry was practicable. They sided with their country in all the disputes with Great Britain,they prayed and preached in favour of Independence, at the proper period; some even took up arms. It was especially natural and consistent in the New-England ministers, to be republican patriots-they were proclaimers of civil and religious liberty-sturdy whigs, from the settlement. Old President Stiles, with his puny body and large soul, preached a discourse on the occasion of the Death of George II. and the Accession of George III., in which he admonished the latter against suffering any retrenchment of the liberties of NewEngland. In the best known of his works, his History of the three Judges of Charles I., he is all for "republican renovation;" he announced-before our Revolution,-that the 30th

of January, which was observed by the Episcopalians, in commemoration of the martyrdom of Charles I., "ought to be celebrated as an anniversary thanksgiving, that one nation on earth had so much fortitude and public justice, as to make a royal tyrant bow to the sovereignty of the people." So Jonathan Mayhew,-the famous leader in what was called the Episcopal controversy, to whom Archbishop Secker and Dr. Johnson replied, and otherwise of great literary and ecclesiastical consequence,-was a republican of the boldest port. Such pastors contributed not a little to prepare the people for prompt and inflexible resistance to every attack on their rights.

It is unquestionable that the lives of the American clergymen have been sound as to morals, and active as to the duties of the priesthood. Instances of libertinism, obliquity, or indecorum, have been very rare comparatively. Making every allowance for the prudence or partiality of biographers, it is yet most edifying to find such proof, as these records afford, of domestic virtue, public exemplariness, devout diligence, combined with various talents, profound learning, scientific honours, and personal ascendancy. The vices and the irregularities with which the ecclesiastical bodies of Europe and South America are reproached, have no place in the true history of ours:indolence, luxury, substitution, simony, licentiousness, horseracing, cock-fighting, gambling, street-mendicancy, none of these things can be cast upon any portion worth mentioning, of the dead or the living ministers of the Gospel, in our country. This fact is, in part, one of the effects, and therefore one of the merits, of our political system, and the order of our society. Republicanism has its share in the honour, with whatever tendencies it may be charged, towards multiplication of sects and dispersion of doctrine.

We must hasten to the profane side, if we may be allowed. the phrase, of American Biography; or, we shall lose the pleasure of citing even a few of the lay names, which will radiate for ever, in story, shedding the brightest lustre over the annals of America, and kindling, as long as her free institutions are preserved, a holy fire in the hearts of our countrymen. The ante-revolutionary biography is rich in thorough and successful scholars, other than ministers of the gospel; in statesmen, magistrates, and writers, of extensive capacity and reputation; and in personages who won, by their martial exploits against the French and Indians, and their conquests over the wilderness and its portents, laurels which their descendants should not suffer to wither through neglect. Our literature is