surpassed by several of his contemporaries; but as an essayist he is entitled to a place beside Rabelais, Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, Steele, and Addison. He unites many of the characteristics of these several writers. He has refined wit, exquisite humor, a genuine and cordial vein of pleasantry, and heart-touching pathos. His fancy as an essayist is distinguished by great delicacy and tenderness; and even his conceits are imbued with human feeling and passion. A confirmed habit of studying the early English writers had made their style, as it were, natural to him; and while he had their manner, he had likewise much of their spirit. As a critic, he displays exquisite powers of discrimination in his brief comments on the specimens of the early English dramatic writers. He discerns, at once, the true meaning of the writer, and seizes with unerring precision upon the proper point of view from which the piece ought to be seen. THE HOUSEKEEPER. The frugal snail, with forecast of repose, Touch but a tip of him, a horn, 'tis well- He's his own landlord, his own tenant; stay ON THE FAMILY NAME. Wha reason first imposed thee, gentle name- And I, a childless man, may end the same. 1 Read "Biography," by Talfourd; also articles in the "Edinburgh Review," lxvi. 1; "Quarterly," liv. 58; and Encyclopædia Britannica." Also, "London Athenæum" of 1848, page 741; "Gentleman's Magazine," Nov. 1848, p. 451; "American Quarterly," xix. 185, and xxii. 473. Also, an article entitled "Charles Lamb and his Friends," in the "North British Review," x. 179. THE SABBATH BELLS. The cheerful Sabbath bells, wherever heard, Their piercing tones fall sudden on the ear Of the contemplant, solitary man, Whom thoughts abstruse or high have chanced to lure And oft again, hard matter, which eludes And baffles his pursuit-thought-sick, and tired Half wishes for society again. Him, thus engaged, the Sabbath bells salute SHAKSPEARE CANNOT BE ACTED. The characters of Shakspeare are so much the objects of meditation rather than of interest or curiosity, as to their actions, that while we are reading any of his great criminal characters-Macbeth, Richard, even Iago-we think not so much of the crimes which they commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity, which prompts them to overleap those moral fences. In Shakspeare, so little do the actions comparatively affect us, that while the impulses, the inner mind, in all its perverted greatness, solely seems real and is exclusively attended to, the crime is comparatively nothing. But when we see these things represented, the acts which they do are comparatively every thing, their impulses nothing. The state of sublime emotion into which we are elevated by those images of fright and horror which Macbeth is made to utter that solemn prelude with which he entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to murder Duncan-when we no longer read it in a book—when we have given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses over seeing, and come to see a man, in his bodily shape before our eyes, actually preparing to commit a murder-the painful anxiety about the act, the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close-pressing semblance of reality, gives a pain and an un. easiness which totally destroy all the delight which the words in the book convey, where the deed-doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of presence; it rather seems to belong to historyto something past and inevitable-if it has any thing to do with time at all. The sublime images, the poetry alone, is that which is present to our minds in the reading. So, to see Lear acted-to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters, in a rainy night has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter, and relieve him—that is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me: but the Lear of Shakspeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimensions, but in intellectual; the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano-they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on-even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear-we are in his mind-we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corrup tions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when, in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that "they themselves are old?" What gesture shall we appropriate to this? what has the voice or the eye to do with such things? A QUAKERS' MEETING. "Still-born Silence! thou that art Offspring of a heavenly kind! Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the mind! Secrecy's confidant, and he Who makes religion mystery! Admiration's speaking'st tongue! Leave, thy desert shades among, Reverend hermits' hallow'd cells, With thy enthusiasms come, Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb!"1 Reader, wouldst thou know what true peace and quiet mean; wouldst thou find a refuge from the noises and clamors of the multi From "Poems of all Sorts," by Richard Flecknoc, 1653. tude; wouldst thou enjoy at once solitude and society; wouldst thou possess the depth of thine own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy species; wouldst thou be alone, and yet accompanied; solitary, yet not desolate; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in countenance; a unit in aggregate; a simple in composite: come with me into a Quakers' Meeting. Dost thou love silence deep as that "before the winds were made?" Go not out into the wilderness; descend not into the profundities of the earth; shut not up thy casements; nor pour wax into the little cells of thine ears, with little-faithed, self-mistrusting Ulysses. Retire with me into a Quakers' Meeting. For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it is commendable; but for a multitude, it is great mastery. What is the stillness of the desert compared with this place? what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes? Here the goddess reigns and revels. "Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud," do not with their inter-confounding uproars more augment the brawlnor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds-than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight. There are wounds which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The perfeet is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a Quakers' Meeting. Those first hermits did certainly understand this principle, when they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly but in shoals, to enjoy one another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by-say, a wife-he, or she, too, (if that be probable,) reading another, without interruption, or oral communication? Can there be no sympathy without the gabble of words? Away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade and cavern-haunting solitariness! Give me, Master Zimmerman, a sympathetic solitude! To pace alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some cathedral, time-stricken; "Or under hanging mountains, Or by the fall of fountains;" is but a vulgar luxury, compared with that which those enjoy who come together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneliness "to be felt." The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as the naked walls and benches of a Quakers' Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions, "Sands, ignoble things, Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings" but here is something which throws Antiquity herself into the foreground-SILENCE eldest of things-language of old Night—primitive Discourser to which the insolent decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatural progression. How reverend is the view of these hush'd heads, Nothing-plotting, naught-caballing, unmischievous synod! convocation without intrigue! parliament without debate! what a lesson dost thou read to council and to consistory! if my pen treat of you lightly-as haply it will wander-yet my spirit hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, when, sitting among you in deepest peace, which some out-welling tears would rather confirm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your beginnings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. I have witnessed that which brought before my eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest you for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the outcast and offscouring of church and presbytery. I have seen the reeling sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle with the avowed intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye as a lamb amid lambs. And I remember Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells us, and "the judge and the jury became as dead men under his feet." Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend to you, above all church-narratives, to read Sewel's "History of the Quakers." It is in folio, and is the abstract of the Journals of Fox and the primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affecting than any thing you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that much injured, ridiculed man, (who perhaps hath been a byword in your mouth,) James Naylor: what dreadful sufferings, with what patience, he endured, even to the boring through of his tongue with red-hot irons, without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatized for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet keep his first |