REVIEW-Remains of the late Rev. C. Wolfe. 327 1825.] Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him; But such patient investigation and dry Aristotelian expression are not suited to the taste of Irishinen. From Burke to Mr. Charles Phillips, they convert the Senate and the Bar into a Theatre, though all are persuaded that nothing should be thrown into the scales of Justice but law and evidence, and the wise know well that passion can never be the right road to reason. However, this nationality, when it is applied only to the exhibition of acknowledged useful truths, has the tendency to interest the feelings very strongly in their support, and there is no danger of misapplication in the impression created. Maturin's exposure of the silliness of Popery is one of the best instances known to us of the utility of imagination, directed in the form mentioned. We have gone into this short preface, because we like Irish originality. It has produced many literary felicities, and among them one of the first character, applicable to the author before us, viz. the exquisite "Elegy on the Burial of Sir John Moore," who fell at Corunna. Glory to the harp of this Minstrel, who, like a hero at a tournament, stole into the poetical lists in disguise, broke a lance successfully with its men of established fame, and was awarded the meed of triumph by the impartial umpireship of Byron. As the copies have been incorrectly published, we shall give the beautiful original in an authentic form. The words in italics (the correct version) will show where the fine painting of the poetry had been disfigured by unskilful daubing. "Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, The sods with our bayonets turning; With his martial cloak around him. dead, And we bitterly thought of the morrow. "We thought, as we hollowed his narrow bed, And smoothed down his lonely pillow, That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head, And we far away on the billow. "Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that's gone, And o'er his cold ashes upbraid himBut little he'll reck, if they let him sleep on In the grave, where a Briton has laid him. "But half of our heavy task was done, When the clock struck the hour for re- And we heard the distant and random gun, We From the field of his fame fresh and gory; carved not a line, and we raised not a stone, But we left him alone with his glory." Of the person who possessed such high poetical merit *, our readers will be glad to know something. Charles Wolfe was the youngest son of Theobald Wolfe, Esq. of Blackhall, in the county of Kildare. His mother was the daughter of the Rev. Peter Lombard. He was born in Dublin, December 14, 1791, and upon the decease of his father, who died when the poet was very young, removed with his family to England. In 1801 he was sent to a school in Bath, but was obliged to return home in a few months, through the delicacy of his health. In 1805 he was placed under the tuition of Dr. Evans of Salisbury, "From which he was removed in the year 1805; and soon after was sent as a boarder to Winchester School [read Hyde Abbey School, Winchester], of which Mr. Richard's, sen. was then the able master. There he soon distinguished himself by his great proficiency in classical knowledge, and by his early powers of Latin and Greek versification, and displayed the dawnings of a genius, which promised to set him amidst that bright constellation of British poets which adorns the literature of the present age." I. p. 4. There are many other fine specimens in the first volume. We 328 REVIEW-Remains of the late Rev. C. Wolfe. [Oct. parts of the floor, constituted all the furniture of his sitting room. The mouldy walls of the closet, in which he slept, were hanging with loose folds of damp paper; and between this wretched cell and his par lour, was the kitchen, which was occupied by the disbanded soldier, his wife, and their numerous brood of children, who had mi We knew (or know, if he is yet living) Mr. Richards, sen. and the great stress which he laid upon composition in the business of his school. We therefore think that Wolfe there acquired those poetical habits which have since so distinguished him. He never received even a slight punish-grated with him from his first quarters, and ment or reprimand at any school to which he ever went, and was the pride of Winchester School (p. 8). In year 1809 he entered the University of Dublin, and distinguished himself by his academical exercises. In 1817 he took Orders, became a Country Curate in the North of Ireland, (Bally-clog in Tyrone) and gives the following account of his new situa the tion. "I am now sitting by myself opposite my turf-fire with my Bible beside me, in the only furnished room of the Glebe-house surrounded by mountains, frost and snow, and with a set of people with whom I am totally unacquainted, except a disbanded artillery-man, his wife and two children, who attend me, the Churchwarden and the Clerk of the Parish." P. 148. Irish Curacies are very different from those of England. He says, "here is a parish, large beyond all proportion, in which the Curate, who here does every thing, will be unavoidably called on every moment to act indirectly as a magistrate." P. 176. Soon after he removes to Caulfield, a village in the parish of Donoughmore, and his set out is thus described. "One waggon contained my whole fortune and family (with the exception of a cow, which was drawn along-side of the waggon), and its contents were two large trunks, a bed and its appendages; and on the top of these, which were piled up so as to make a very commanding appearancesat a woman (my future house-keeper) and her three children, and by their side stood a calf of three weeks old, which has lately become an inmate in my family." P. 180. The following is an account of the way in which some Irish Curates at least are accommodated with the necessary comforts of life. "He seldom thought of providing a regular meal; and his humble cottage exhibited every appearance of the neglect of the ordinary comforts of life. A few straggling rush-bottomed chairs, piled up with his books-a small rickety table before the fireplace, covered with parish memoranda; and two trunks containing all his papers-serving at the same time to cover the broken concern, entertaining him merely as a lodger, seemed now in full possession of the whole and usurping the entire disposal of his small plot of ground, as the absolute lords of the oil." P. 216. held a Curacy (says Dr. Miller in p. During the short time in which he 252) he so wholly devoted himself to the discharge of his duties in a very populous parish, that he exhausted his strength, by exertions disproportioned disease [in 1822, æt. 31,] in what to his constitution, and was cut off by should have been the bloom. of youth. He seems in the latter part of his certainly destroyed the high capacity life to have expedited his disease, and which he possessed, by adopting that Calvinistical gloom, which makes redoing, mischievously occasions them ligious feelings miserable; and, by so to be unwelcome, and in consequence discarded. Christianity itself is an unquestionable blessing; but erroneous modes of professing it may be just as unquestionable curses. Here was a tion, and high imaginative talent, who, young man of very delicate constituhad he regarded religion with the feelings of Gessner, Klopstock, and Sturm, might have found in it the means of prolonging his happiness and existence. Instead of this, under a presumption that he should do more good, he adopted the wretched pseudodivinity of declaimers for the vulgar, his reputation and taste by writing in and, as his Sermons show, injured both their common-place jargon-a Scripture text, and then a groan ther, and an anathema-a third, and an ejaculation-a fourth, and a long aposthrope of insipid bathos-a fifth, and a declamation against innocent pleasures and agreeable feelings a sixth, and an invective against all other modes of professing religion-a seventh, and a warm and unblushing commendation of themselves-an eighth, and last, another, and a demand upon the pockets of their auditors for liberal contributions for the further propagation of their trash, or the better support of ignorant professors of religion, who -ano can 1825.] cannot construe à Latin-much more a Greek Testament, and whose ignorance is to be accounted a feather in their cap, because such uninformed people can talk, and learned persons can do no more; and whether they talk sense or nonsense, is no point of consideration with their auditors. We have a just right to speak thus severely, because we are told (i. p. 203) that some fanaticks were so pleased with Mr.Wolfe's manner of preaching, as to say, "he would almost do for a Meeting Minister,"-a species of eulogium, which a scholar or gentleman would deem severe satire. We are sensible that this young man, to speak analogically, might have made another Butler another Paley-another Sherlock-perhaps, for his poetry is of the first rank, another Milton; and we regret that the University did not retain him among themselves, in order that he might have become a national ornament and public benefactor; instead of suffering him to be thrown away upon a Curacy (abounding with contemptible thinkers,) where he was literally " pearl among swine," a thing which they could not understand, and which they could only sport with. This they did. a 63. Dr. Parr's Letter to Rev. Dr. Milner, continued from p. 243. THE late learned and venerable Doctor thus resumes his remarks: Deep, Sir, is the concern, with which I read your note upon the passage just now quoted from p. 244 of Part III. The pre sent writer,' say you, has beeu informed, on good authority, that one of the Bishops, whose calumnies are here quoted, when he found himself on his death-bed, refused the proffered ministry of the Primate, and expressed a great wish to die a Catholic. When urged to satisfy his conscience, he exclaimed: what then will become of my Lady and my Children? "Dr. Milner, on the behalf of that lady, whose sensibility has not been blunted by old age, and who, by her accomplishments and her virtues, is justly endeared to her friends and her children-on behalf of those friends, who most assuredly will sympathize with me in their solicitude to rescue the character of the Bishop from the apostacy which you have imputed to him—on the behalf of those children who are now respectable members of society, and whose feelings must be most painfully wounded by the representations which you have given of their GENT. MAG, October, 1825. 329 affectionate father in the trying moments of his death-on behalf of that Church, with the members of which I have lived in communion from my boyhood to grey hairs, and hope, by the Providence of God, to pour forth my latest breath-on behalf of your own Church, which abounds, I am sure, with enlightened and upright men, who would disdain to support the honour of it by misrepresentation on the behalf of every honest and every pious Christian, whether he be a Protestant or a Romanist-I beseech you to tell the world, unreservedly and distinctly, what is that authority, which you have deliberately and publicly pronounced good. Your learning, your eloquence, your well-earned reputation for orthodoxy and zeal the dignity of your office, and the celebrity of your name, must give more than usual weight to any opinion which you may adopt, and any assertion which you may ad vance. Again, therefore, do I require you to tell us, what is your authority for saying, that the Bishop, whose calumnies you had quoted, when he found himself upon his death-bed, must have been struck with shame and compunction, for having mis-employed his talents in giving publicity to those calumnies. "Suffer me now, Sir, to bring forward a third passage, in which you drop all mention of probability and good authority, and speak with equal confidence of Luther, Melancthon, Beza, and Bishop Halifax. You assume that confidence for the purpose of showing that certain refractory children in modern ages have ventured to call their true mother a prostitute, and the common father of Christians, the author of their own conversion from Paganism, the Man of Sin, and the very Antichrist. But they do not really believe what they declare, their object being only to inflame the ignorant multitude." After this double charge of profligate hypocrisy and turbulent malignity, you close a very elaborate letter upon the very momentous question, whether the Pope be Antichrist, in these most remarkable words: "I have sufficient reason to affirm this, when I hear a Luther threatening to unsay all that he had said against the Pope; a Melancthon lamenting that Protestants had renounced him; a Beza negotiating to return to him; and a late Warburtonian lecturer lamenting, on his death-bed, that he could (Part III. p. 326.) not do the same.' "Here, Sir, we find your story not in the notes, but in the text; and a third introduction of it is a decisive proof of the importance which you affix to it. Well then ; you, in the same sentence, speak with the same positiveness of three foreign reformers, who died long ago; and of an English prelate, whose death comparatively may be called.recent. Is it possible, Sir, that for the same charge you can in every instance have the same 330 REVIEW.-Dr. Parr's Letter to Dr. Milner. same evidence? For your charges against Luther, Melancthon, and Beza, there may be some grounds, either in the histories which you have read of their lives, or in passages which you can select from their writings. But in what genuine work, which bears the name of Halifax, or in what respectable publication, which professes to give a fair and well-founded account of his faith and practice, do you trace even the slightest vestiges of the thoughts and the words which you have ascribed to him? "Reflect, I beseech you, upon the excruciating and perilous situation in which Dr. Halifax must have been placed, if your narrative, Sir, be well-founded, at that moment when hypocrisy, as Dr. Young says, 'drops the mask, and real and apparent are the same.' He, from want of conviction, could not find consolation in the Church of England, and from want of fortitude he did not seek it in the Church of Rome. In a man so accustomed, as Bishop Halifax was, to the study of Theology, such a change of sentiment as you have ascribed to him, could not be instantaneous. It was not effected by the interposition of any wily casuist, or any proselyte-hunting zealot, who might take advantage of those circumstances which sometimes are found in the death-chamber of the most virtuous and the most devout; and by such circumstances, Sir, I mean fluttering spirits, an impaired understanding, a disturbed imagination, momentary fears succeeded by momentary hopes, one dim and incoherent conception rapidly succeeded by another, and sentences formed imperfectly, or uttered indistinctly. No, Sir, the Bishop of St. Asaph, according to your own account, was visited by a Protestant Metropolitan. "Previously, therefore, to his dissolution, while afflicted by sickness and oppressed by age, he must have suffered many a pang from conscious insincerity; and upon the near approach of that dissolution, he was doomed to breathe his last in a disgraceful and dreadful conflict between timidity and piety-between calls upon his prudence, from the praise of men, and upon his conscience from the approbation of God-between the impulses of paternal and conjugal affection upon one hand, and of self-preservation upon the other-between the opposite and irreconcileable interests of time to his family, and eternity to his own soul. "To the Primate, who proffered his ministry, and to the Bishop, who, according to your representation, could not avail himself of it, no appeal can be made, for they are numbered among the dead. But the facts, said to be known to your unnamed informer, could not be wholly unknown to those who were under the same roof with the expiring Prelate. Such, I mean, Sir, as personal friends, as near relatives, as chaplains, as domestics, and, perhaps, medical attendants. These men, surely, can [Oct. bear a direct and decisive testimony to a plain fact. They must have been deeply impressed by such a conversion as you describe. They must have the evidence of their senses whether or no such conversion ever occurred; and, upon the supposition that it did not occur, if such a host of witnesses be set in array, in opposition to your anonymous informer, depend upon it, that the attention of all good men will be strongly attracted by this extraordinary case, that their best sympathies will be roused, and that their decision between the veracity of the accuser and the merits of the accused will be ultimately and completely just. Thus far I have expostulated with you, Sir, upon your charges against a Prelate, who, having sunk into the grave, cannot defend himself, and who has been summoned by his Maker to that tribunal, where his guilt or his innocence cannot be unknown." An unpardonable attack on another very excellent Dignitary is thus indignantly repelled : "I make no apology to you, Sir, for producing the very offensive passage, in which you have described Dr. Rennell, one of the candidates for the Episcopal Bench, from whom it would be in vain to expect more moderation than you have observed in Dr. Porteus, Bishop of London; Dr. Halifax, Bishop of St. Asaph; Dr. Barrington, Bishop of Durham; Dr. Watson, Bishop of Llandaff; Dr. Benson, Bishop of Gloucester; Dr. Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester; and Dr. Sparke, Bishop of Ely; and who, while he was content with an inferior dignity, acted and preached as the friend of Catholics; since he has arrived at the verge of the highest dignity, proclaims Popery to be idolatry and Antichristianism;' maintaining, as does also the Bishop of Durham, that it is the parent of Atheism and of that Antichristian persecution (in France), of which,' you add from yourself, it was exclusively the victim." (Part III. p. 242, 243.) "The writer may add, that another of the calumniators here mentioned,' (id est, the Bishops just now named, Mr. De Coetlegon and Archdeacon Hook), being desirous of stifling the suspicion of his having written an anonymous No-Popery publication, when first he took part in that cause, addressed himself to the writer in these terms: How can you suspect me of writing against your religion, when you so well know my attachment to it.' In fact, this modern Luther, among other similar concessions, has said this to the writer, 'I sucked in a love for the Catholic religion with my mother's milk.' (See note, Part III. p. 244.) "Dr. Milner, I have not presumed to hold you up to the scorn and abhorrence of Protestants, nor to let loose upon you the hideous appellations of bigoted controvertist, falsifier, calumniator, incendiary, persecutor, a modern Bonner, and an English Malagrida. 1825.] REVIEW.-Dr. Parr's Letter to Dr. Milner. Malagrida. I have treated you, Sir, with the courtesy which is due to a Roman Catholic dignitary, who professes to teach the religion of a meek, lowly, and benevolent Redeemer; to have received in a special manner' (Part II. p. 216), his legitimate ordination and divine mission in a direct succession from the apostolic age; and to plead the cause of that only true Church which exclusively lays claim to unity, to sanctity, to Catholicity, to apostolicity, and to the visible protection of the Omnipotent in a series of miraculous interpositions, vouchsafed for the illustration of that Church through the long space of eighteen centuries. But if the English ecclesiastic, whose private conversation you have confessedly divulged, should in reality NOT be the contemptible and execrable miscreant which a modern Luther, according to your delineation of his Prototype, must be, then, Sir, I leave it with yourself to find a proper name for that writer, who, in the eighteenth century, and in a civilized country, should present to his readers, Catholic or Protestant, such a portraiture as you have exhibited of such an ecclesiastic as Dr. Rennell." "The man whom, iu one place, you have arraigned at the bar of the public as a modern Luther, and whom, in another, you have virtually accused of inconsistency, insincerity, and corrupt ambition, is now living; and long may he live to be a fellowlabourer with the Maltbys, the Butlers, the Blomfields, and other eminent contemporaries, in the cause of literature, to exhort and convince the gainsayers by sound doctrine, and to adorn the revealed will of God our Saviour in all things!" Here Dr. Parr introduces a welldeserved compliment to an eminent young Divine, whose early death has been so generally deplored." not "Whether or no he may be pleased to lift up his giant arm in crushing the assailaut of his long-established and well-earned reputation, I take not upon myself to determine. But the prudence, at which you once hinted, ought to have suggested to you, that our modern Luther has a son quite unworthy of such an illustrious father, not quite unable to wield the choicest weapons of lawful warfare, when confronted by so sturdy and well-disciplined a champion as yourself. My authority, Dr. Milner, is good, not only from common fame, but from the general consent of scholars, and my own personal observation, when I say with equal confidence to Protestants and Romanists, that by profound erudition, by various and extensive knowledge, by a well-formed taste, by keen discernment, by glowing and majestic eloquence, by morals Alas! The Dean has not now a son. EDIT. 331 correct without austerity, and by piety fervent without superstition, the son of the Dean of Winchester stands among the brightest luminaries of our national literature and national church. "Perhaps, in the progress of his son's improvement, the time will come, when the Dean would pardon his contemporaries for saying of himself, as compared with that son,— nati spectans bene facta fatetur Esse suis majora, et vinci gaudet ab illo." In respect to myself, Sir, it is impossible for me to foresee what sentiments I may entertain, when the transitory scene of this world is closing to my sight." (Part II. P. 236.) deprecate from you, Sir, or any human being But, at the present moment, I shall not whatsoever, the imputation of wilful ignorance, when I declare to you what is the reading not very confined, and of reflection state of my own mind, after a course of not very negligent for more than fifty years. I leave you, Sir, to glory in the name of Catholic without impeaching your sincerity. But I am myself not a Lutheran, not a Calvinist, not a Whitfieldite, not a Wesleyan, nor of the Kirk of Scotland, nor of the Con sistory of Geneva." (Part II. p. 194.) I am a member of that English Church, which, according to your own acknowledgment, has better pretensions to unity, and the other marks of the true church, than any other Protestant society has.' (Part II. p.125.) On ing to you, is of no ordinary magnitude, "The subject, upon which I am writand therefore you will excuse me, if, at the close of this letter, I accommodate to that subject the solemn language, with which your own elaborate work concludes. this occasion reflect seriously, and consci entiously, dismissing all worldly respects of whatever kind from your mind; for what will the prejudiced opinion of a rash and incredulous informer avail you at that tribunal where we are all soon to appear?'" Pp. 49-52. An Appendix is added, at the request of the Rev. Mr. Hallifax, son of Bp. Hallifax; consisting of a Letter from Mr. Hallifax to the Rev. Archdeacon Butler; two Letters from Mr. Hallifax to Dr. Milner, with an Answer to one of them. These will be noticed in the Review of Dr. Milner's Parting Word. |