entreat you to recollect that it is to these pretended rebellions we owe our present constitution, and the privilege of being assembled at Westminster to deliberate upon the interests of our country."*

The late celebrated Irish parliamentary orator, Mr. Flood, is said to have rendered himself, at times, distinguished for such sort of oratorical strokes as those which the Abbé Maury here ascribes to Bolingbroke and Mr. Fox; and also for ingenious and sentimental expressions.

As a specimen of the latter sort, it is recorded that, at the commencement of the American war, having indulged himself in one of those prophecies which experience has since proved to be so erroneous, relative to the ruin of this country by the loss of America, Mr. Flood said, "Destruction shall come upon the British empire like the coldness of death; it shall creep upon it from the extreme parts:" and in speaking of the conduct of Lord Chatham upon the stamp act, and alluding to a passage in Thucydides, he introduced the following beautiful episode:-" İllustrious man! to whose tomb posterity shall come and say, as Pericles did over the bodies of his deceased fellowsoldiers, You are like to the divinities above us; you are no longer with us, you are known only by the benefits which you have conferred." Such an enlivening stroke deserves to be rescued from oblivion.

In Boswell's Life of the celebrated Dr. Johnson there is a remark in relation to the written Life of Young, which may be quoted as one of those strokes of energetic and prompt eloquence which M. Maury acknowledges the English possess.

"The Life of Dr. Young" (in Johnson's Lives of the Poets) was written," says Mr. Boswell, "by Mr. Croft, and displays a pretty successful imitation of Johnson's style. A certain very eminent literary character opposed this idea vehemently; exclaiming, 'No, no, it is not a good imitation of Johnson; it has

These are specimens which would be no discredit to the writings of Demosthenes. But a sublime idea does not constitute a discourse; a beautiful detached passage does not compose the art of eloquence.

Even until the present period the value of English orators is restrained within narrow bounds. Famous islanders! "It is not genius, it is the genius of oratory that you want," may we say to you, as Cicero did formerly to some of his contemporaries.*

The human mind owes an unceasing debt of gratitude for your sublime,discoveries on light, on gravitation, on electricity, on the aberration of the stars; but let not your pride be wounded if we contest the pre-eminence with your orators. Eloquence, the usual companion of liberty, is a stranger in your country. Do not affect a false and barbarous contempt of gifts which nature hath denied you. Turn your attention to the models of antiquity, and to the examples of Greece and Rome. Add to the glory of the good actions which are so common in your country, the

all his pomp, without his force; it has all the nodosities of the oak, without its strength.' This was an image so happy that one might have thought he would have been satisfied with it; but he was not: and setting his mind again to work, he added, with great felicity, 'It has all the contortions of the Sibyl, without the inspiration.'"-Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. ii, p. 361, 4to.

* Illis non ingenium, sed oratorium ingenium deficit. Brutus, 110.

merit, perhaps no less honourable, of knowing how to celebrate them.

I mean to set bounds to myself in this discussion. I shall not speak of the discourses of Boyle, which are entirely argumentative dissertations. I shall not detain myself with the sermons of Clarke; they are written

* Sermons preached by different able divines at the lecture founded by the Hon. Boyle.

Concerning these, Mr. Knox observes, that "they are among the best argued in our language. They have been the laboured productions of the most ingenious men. But the whole collection never did so much as a single practical discourse of Tillotson."-Knox's Essays, No. 168.

+ ແ The sagacious Clarke pretended not to wit. He affected not the ambitious ornament of rhetoric. He rarely reaches the sublime, or aims at the pathetic; but in a clear, manly, flowing style, he delivers the most important doctrines, confirmed on every occasion by well-applied passages from Scripture. If he was not a shining orator, according to the ideas of rhetoricians, he was a very agreeable as well as useful preacher. He was not perfectly orthodox in his opinions; a circumstance which has lowered his character among many. Certain it is, that he would have done more good had he confined his labours to practical divinity."-Ibid.

The following is the character of this divine, which was given in the Gentleman's Magazine:-" Samuel Clarke, D. D., rector of St. James's, Westminster : in each several part of useful knowledge and critical learning, perhaps without a superior; in all united, certainly without an equal; in his works, the best defender of religion; in his practice, the greatest ornament to it; in his conversation, communicative, and in an uncommon manner instructive; in his preaching and writing, strong, clear, and calm; in his life, high in the esteem of the wise, the good, and the great;

with such metaphysical abstraction that it is difficult to comprehend, in the retirement of the closet, the discourses of this well-known rector of St. James's.

SECTION XLVII

OF TILLOTSON.

THE eloquence of Tillotson, archbishop of Canterbury, is highly esteemed. I have read his sermons with the strictest impartiality, and these are my sentiments of the works of this prelate, who is universally regarded as the first orator of England:

Tillotson is an excellent writer. His principal merit consists in the style. He must,

in his death, lamented by every friend to learning, truth, and virtue."

Dr. Clarke's principal sermons were those preached at Boyle's lecture on" The Being and Attributes of God," and "The Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion;" besides which there are published many other sermons of his preached on particular occasions. Dr. Clarke was born in 1673, died 1729.

Dr. Blair's character of this divine is as follows:"Dr. Clarke everywhere abounds in good sense, and the most clear and accurate reasoning; his applications of Scripture are pertinent; his style is always perspicuous, and often elegant; he instructs, and he convinces; in what then is he deficient? In nothing, except in the power of interesting and seizing the heart. He shows you what you ought to do, but excites not the desire of doing it; he treats man as if he were a being of pure intellect, without imagination or passions."-Blair's Lectures, vol. ii, p. 223.

therefore, be much injured by a translation, in which the vernacular expression is lost, and especially by such a translator as Barbeyrac, who was always deficient in sublimity, in embellishment, in energy, and in elegance. But while we acknowledge all the faults of this French version, the subject matter of the archbishop of Canterbury's sermons still remains far inferior to the discourses of Massillon and Bourdaloue.*

Tillotson is more of a theologian than a moralist. He scarcely ever discussed any other than controversial subjects. He employs the same dull modes of syllogism or dissertation; and merely habituates himself to an insipid uniformity of method.

I discover in his discourses no rhetorical movements, no great ideas, no sublime strokes: he generally divides every paragraph, and has thirty or forty subdivisions in each of his serHis particulars are insipid, futile, and often devoid of excellence. In short, Tillotson is so much a stranger to the art of eloquence, that he scarcely ever makes an exor

mons.

* From this acknowledgment of M. Maury, that his ideas of Tillotson's sermons are derived from the im perfect French version of Barbeyrac, it would seem that he himself has but little acquaintance with the English language; if so, it must be presumed that he is not a competent judge of English writers; and that, therefore, the indiscriminate censures which he passes upon our English divines, must, in a great measure, be ascribed to his own ignorance of their works, and the language in which they are written.