"It seems to me admitted, that the sermons of Massillon, the tragedies of Euripedes and Racine, and the Georgics of Virgil, are the most perfect of human compositions. Those, therefore, who read sermons, merely for their literary merit, will generally prefer the sermons of Massillon to those of Bourdaloue and Bossuet. On the other hand, the profound theology of the sermons of Bossuet, and the countless passages in them of true sublimity, and exquisite pathos, will lead many to give him a decided preference over both his rivals. But those who read sermons for instruction, and whose chief object, in the perusal of them, is to be excited to virtue, or confirmed in her paths, will generally consider Bourdaloue as the first of preachers, and every time they peruse him, it will be with new delight. No sermons possess, in so great a degree, the indescribable charm of simplicity; and no composition, sacred or profane, contains any thing, which, in grace or effect, exceeds that insensible rise from mere instruction into eloquence, of which Bourdaloue scarcely has a sermon that does not furnish more than one example.To these must be added, his inestimable talent of conversing with his hearers. Was Magdalen,' he says in his panegyric of her, better acquainted with Jesus Christ, than we are? On the contrary, the mysteries and doctrines of Christianity, in which we have been instructed, have discovered to us wonders that were hidden from her eyes. Why, therefore, should we make a longer delay? Without going further, why, before we quit this church, before we stir from this very altar, where Jesus Christ himself is present,(not indeed as a guest, which he was at the house of the Pharisee, but, as our food and nourishment, as a victim immolated for us, as our priest, as our pastor,)—why should we not now give ourselves up to him?-Let us, for once, completely do what we have, so often, proposed to do;-Let us say to him, No! O Lord! It shall not be in a year's time; at the end of a month; it shall be to-day. It is wrong for me to temporize with thee.-It shall not be, when I have finished this or that business; for it is unjust that the concerns of the world should make me postpone the concerns of God to them: It shall not be, when age comes upon me, for thine, O God! is every age and it would be a sensible insult to thee that I should reserve for thee the last years, the refuse of my life.~ It is now, O God!-I am thine; and I will be always thine. Receive the protestation I make to thee, and strengthen the resolution which I form in thy sight.' Can simplicity, can instruction, can eloquence go beyond this passage? "To Bourdaloue, other merits must be added, particularly the perfection of his style. Always plain, always unambitious, he appears to strike, by what he says, and not by the manner of his saying it. Upon the whole, the public opinion, that, after reading Bourdaloue, we shall not think Bossuet the first preacher of the French nation, seems to be founded. "Few sermons of Bossuet were published before the Benedictine edition of his works made its appearance. They fill three volumes of that edition; but many sketches and extracts of sermons are inserted in them, which, in that form, at least, should not have been presented to the public. "The following passage is both beautiful and sublime: Human life resembles resembles a road, which ends in a frightful precipice. We are told of this, at the first step we take: but our destiny is fixed; we must proceed. Advance! Advance ! An invincible power, an irresistible force impels us forward; and we must continually advance to the precipice. A thousand crosses, a thousand pains, fatigues and disturbances, vex us on the road.-If we could but avoid the terrible precipice! No! Advance! You must run on; such is the rapid flight of years. Still, on the way, we occasionally meet with some objects that divert us; a flowing stream, a passing flower: we are amused by them, and we wish to stop. Advance! Advance! We see that every thing around us tumbles down, a frightful crash! an inevitable ruin! Still, here and there, we pluck some flowers, which fade in our hands; some fruits, which vanish, while we taste them, which, however, comfort us for the moment. But, all is enchantment and illusion: we are still hurried on to the frightful gulph. By degrees, every thing begins to fade; the gardens seem less fair, the flowers less lively; the colours less fresh ; the meadows less gay; the waters less bright; every thing decays, every thing falls away.-At length the spectre of death rises upon us! -We begin to be sensible of our near approach to the fatal gulph'-We touch its brink:-One step more!-and-Horror now seizes our senses: the head turns, the eyes wander! We must advance!!! Oh that we might return! But there are no means of returning; all is fallen! All is vanished and gone!" "It is impossible to deny the force or beauty of this passage: the following, perhaps, is in a finer The discourses of St. Paul,' says Bossuet, far from flow manner: The ing with the agreeable softness, and tempered equality, which we admire in the orators of Greece and Rome, appear unequal, and without connection, to those, who have not sufficiently penetrated into them. The polished taste and delicate ear of the people of the world, are offended with the hardness of his irregular style. But, my brethren! don't let us be ashamed of St. Paul! the language of the apostle is simple, but all his thoughts are divine. If he be ignorant of rhetoric, and despise philosophy, Jesus Christ stands to him, in the stead of all. name of Christ, which he has always in his mouth, the mysteries of the gospel, which he so divinely announces, make him omnipotent in his simplicity. Yes, he-this man, so ignorant of the art of fine speaking, will go with his homely language, and his foreign phrase, into Greece, the mother of philosophers and orators; and, in spite of the whole world's resistance, will establish in her more churches, than Plato, with all his divine eloquence, had scholars.-He will preach Christ, in Athens, and the most learned of the senators will pass over from the Areopagus to the school of this barbarian. He will pursue his triumph, and, in the very presence of her proconsul, will lay the fasces of 'Rome prostrate at the feet of Christ; and every judge before whose tribunal he is cited, will tremble. Rome herself shall hear his voice, and the day will come, when this city, this mistress of the world, will esteem herself more honoured by a letter, addressed by him to her citizens, than by all the barangues which she heard from her Cicero.A power, more than natural, is mixed in the divine simplicity of his words, and gives them a force which does not, perhaps, flatter the taste, taste, but goes directly to the heart. Like a great river, which preserves in the plains, through which it flows, the impetuous force, which it received in the mountains, whence it derived its source, the virtue, which St. Paul's Epistles contain, preserves, even in the simplicity of his style, all the vigour which it brought from heaven, its divine original.' "The following is a more exact specimen of Bossuet's general manner: "I can scarcely listen to the idle objections, which worldly wisdom makes to us, on the false supposition, that God ought to have manifested himself to the world with a splendour and a train that should be thought worthy of his majesty. Miserably does opinion deceive us, if we think that the splendour of this world contains any thing worthy of God, who himself possesses sovereign greatness. Shall I mention what strikes me, in the babe of Bethlehen, as great and admirable, and truly worthy of a God, descending from heaven, and conversing with man, From on high, he saw that man was touched by nothing, but sensual pleasure and external pomp. In his wisdom, he remembered, that he had created man, for much more solid happiness; and, being resolved to show, as much by his own example as his precepts, the folly of these notions, and his contempt of what this world admires, he chose for his lot what the world most despises. He was pleased therefore to be born in a wretched stable but that stable becomes, as it were, a triumphal car, after which he drags the vanquished world. There, all that the world has of ignominy, is conquered; all its terrors are treated with contempt, all its pleasures are spurned, all its torments are braved, the triumph of Christ over them is complete ; nothing is left undone, nothing left unfinished: and it appears to me that, in the midst of this glorious triumph, he turns to us his animating countenance, and loudly exclaims to us, Take courage! I have vanquished the world!' By the lowliness of my birth, by the obscurity of my life, by the cruelty and ignominy of my death, I have triumphed over all that men admire, all they esteem, all they fear. This is the sign, by which you should know me!'-Yes, O my God! by this sign I do know thee! Thou art my Saviour and my God!' "With passages of beauty equal to any transcribed in these pages, the sermons of Bossuet abound. "Their general merit is a subject of a particular dissertation of the Cardinal Maury; and fills many a page of his Essai sur l'Eloquence de la Chaire. The first edition of that work was published, above thirty years ago, without the author's permission. The last edition of it is of the year 1810, and is entitled' Essai sur l'Eloquence de la Chaire; Panegyriques, Eloges, et Discours, par son Eminence Monseigneur le Cardinal Maury, ArchEveque de Montefiascone et de Corneto, Membre de l'Institut Imperial, &c.' It abounds with curious and useful information and judicious criticism. But an Englishman, (however he may endure what his eminence says of the superiority of the French over the English in pulpit eloquence), must smile at the following exclamation, which the cardinal archbishop addresses to the English nation, on the general merits of their oratory. 'Illustrious insularies! I try to discover an orator, a real orator, among your sacred ministers, your -- your writers, your members of parliament of the highest celebrity: be it said, without offence to your glory, I find no one, among you, worthy of that name.' The intrepidity of this address, is the more striking, as, by the cardinal archbishop's own confession, he is wholly ignorant of the English language. It remains to give some account of Bossuet's method of preparing his sermons. All his funeral orations, and some of his sermons, were composed by him with extreme care; yet in those, he trusted something to the feelings of the moment and, so great was his opinion of the necessity of attending to them, that, even in the sermons, which he prepared with most precision, he inserted many duplicates of sentences, of phrases, and of words, leaving the choice of them to his actual feelings at the instant of delivery. Of his other sermons, he sometimes composed only the skeleton. Sometimes he only committed to paper particular sentences of them; and sometimes he committed nothing of them to paper: but, unless there was an absolute necessity, he never preached without much serious preparation, and without arranging, with a great degree of minuteness, the general disposition of his discourse, in respect both to its principal and its subordinate parts. A considerable number of his sermons have been preserved; but many are lost; and among those, his panegyrics of St. Augustine and St. Ignatius are particularly regretted. His appearance in the pulpit was imposing, but graceful; his voice was loud and clear, but too shrill; his action was both vehement and dignified; his memory never failed him. ON THE TALES AND FICTIONS OF THE EAST. [FROM MR. WEBER'S ROMANCES OF ORIENTAL ORIGIN.] S conveying in general a true and striking picture of the manners and customs prevalent amongst some of the most interesting nations of the earth, the value of these tales has been less disputed, particularly since the authenticity and vraisemblance of the portraits they convey has been established by the authority of some of the most faithful and best informed travellers in the east. By the perusal of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and of other collections of a similar nature, we obtain, in a manner the most impressive on the memory, and the most pleasing to the mind, a perfect insight into the private habits, the domestic comforts and deprivations of the orientals; we are led to participate in their favourite amusements, and acquire a knowledge of their religious sentiments and superstitions: and it thus happens that a boy, who has been indulged in the perusal of these ingenious fictions, is made as well acquainted with the peculiarities of oriental manners, and of the tenets of the Mahomedan faith, during the time of relaxation, as he is, during his school hours, with the customs and mythology of the Greeks and Romans. "A striking instance of the truth of these observations occurs in Mr.Dalla way's way's Description of Constantinople, where that intelligent traveller informs us, that much of the romantic air which pervades the domestic habits of the persons described in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, particularly in inferior life, will be observed in passing through the streets of this city; and we receive with additional pleasure a remembrance of the delight with which we at first perused them, in finding them authentic portraits of oriental nations.' "Several travellers have borne testimony to the great popularity of this and similar collections of tales in the east, where they form one of the chief amusements of the people. They are recited in the public coffee-houses of the cities, among the secluded inhabitants of the haram, in camps and caravans, and, in short, wherever an aggregate number of auditors are collected, by professional story-tellers. The account of these recitations, given by Dr. Russel, an author of unimpeached veracity, in his History of Aleppo, has been frequently quoted; but it gives so curious a picture of the subject, and forms so apt an introduction to the perusal of these tales by Europeans, that its omission in this place would be unpardonable. -The recitation of eastern fables and tales,' he observes, partakes somewhat of a dramatic performauce; it is not merely a simple narrative; the story is animated by the manner and action of the speaker. A variety of other storybooks, besides the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, (which, under that title, are little known at Aleppo,) furnish materials for the story-teller, who, by combining the incidents of the different tales, and varying the catastrophe of such as he has related before, gives them an air of novelty even to persons who at first imagine they are listening to tales with which they are acquainted. He recites walking to and fro in the middle of the coffee-room, stopping only now and then, when the expression requires some emphatical attitude. He is commonly heard with great attention; and not unfrequently, in the midst of some interesting adventure, when the expectation of his audience is raised to the highest pitch, he breaks off abruptly, and makes his escape from the room, leaving both his hero, or heroine, and his audience in the utmost embarrassment. Those who happen to be near the door, endeavour to detain him, insisting on the story being finished before he departs; but he always makes his retreat good; and the auditors, suspending their curiosity, are induced to return at the same hour next day to hear the sequel. He no sooner has made his exit, than the company, in separate parties, fall a disputing about the characters of the drama, or the event of the unfinished adventure. The controversy by degrees becomes serious, and opposite opinions are maintained with no less warmth than if the fate of the city depended on the decision.' 66 Among the Arabs these stories are as popular as with the Turks. On this subject the observations of Volney and Colonel Capper afford sufficient testimony. The former observes,- All their literature consists in reciting tales and histories in the manner of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. They have a peculiar passion for such stories, and employ in them almost all their leisure, of which they have a great deal. In the evening they seat themselves on the ground, at the door of their tents, or under cover, |