the authority of the Scriptures, derives from the very Revelation he impugns, the knowledge of those primary theological truths which he attempts to turn against the believer. The existence and authority of Revelation must, then, be assumed as a first principle, in laying the foundation of theological science; and the legitimate purpose of à priori reasoning is, not to prove the truth of what, being revealed, is certain, but to answer the objections brought against the matter of Revelation. It is an unwarrantable and dangerous concession to the Humes, the Gibbons, and the Paines, to seem to admit, by the style of our reasonings, that there is any reasonableness in their scepticism, as to the genuineness and credibility of the sacred records, or that Christianity, at this time of day, stands in need of being proved to be true. Yet, in many of the apologies of its advocates, and many lectures on the external evidences of Revelation, there is, we think, something too much of the tone of concession; and there is in some theologians, a hesitating or timid way of referring to the Scriptural proof of religious doctrines, as if the inspiration of Scripture were really questionable; as if "Thus saith the Lord," were a less philosophical reason for believing, than, Such is the testimony of Tacitus, or, such the reasoning of Mr. Hume. The theological lectures of Dr. Dwight are characterized by a manner and spirit the very opposite of this. There is no dogmatism; neither is there any compromise of the claims of Revelation. He treads firmly, with the air of a man who knows the ground he has taken, and feels his position to be impregnable. There is, at the same time, a calm earnestness of manner, which bespeaks his conviction of the intrinsic value and practical efficacy of the truths he advocates. There is none of that professional sang-froid with which sometimes theological subjects have been discussed and lectured upon. The connexion between his intellectual powers and his moral sensibilities, seems never to be suspended; but a wholesome circulation is going forward, which communicates warmth to his most abstract speculations. ART. IV. THE REV. WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES. [From the Examiner. London, July, 1821.] The intention of this series of articles is, literally, to give sketches of the principal features of the living poets, as an artist might sketch those of their faces. Our wood cuts and our paper cuts are just meant to be worthy of each other.-With respect to the former, we give them only where we can feel assured of the likeness. If we do not notice the living poetesses, Miss Baillie, Mrs. Barbauld, &c. it is not because some of them (the ladies just mentioned for instance) are not eminent writers; but because, to say the truth, we are afraid of entering so wide and delicate a field-so luxuriant a crop of sensitive plants: and even our list of poets must be reduced as much as possible, or the task would be enormous. To begin then, with proper alphabetical wisdom, at the letter B; and as the French would say, at the interesting Bowles.-Mr. Bowles is the son of a clergyman of a Wiltshire family: a late memoir of him, though written upon a very courteous principle, has not been able to tell us the date of his birth; but in 1776 he was sent to Winchester school under Dr. Warton, the critic on Pope; and afterwards went to Trinity College under the Doctor's brother Thomas, the historian of English poetry. In 1797 he married the sister of a lady, with whom he had formerly anticipated a similar union, and whose death he has lamented in his sonnets; and about 1803 was presented with the rectory of Bremhill in Wiltshire, where he has since resided. It appears, that the zeal of some dissenting preachers in his neighbourhood has excited him to efforts of counteraction as a minister; and he performs his part also in the county as a magistrate. His leisure time he amuses, like Shenstone, with cultivating his garden, and sentimentalizing it with inscriptions. He appears to be an amiable man, who has no more business with controversy than the sparrow on his house top. Mr. Bowles is a poet of that minor branch of the school of Collins and Gray, which was set up by the Wartons, and which is rather negative than positive in its departures from the artificial system which they opposed. It feels its way timidly into nature, and retains most of the common place dressing in versification as well as fancy. Critics, partly from the natural progress of change, and more from the new track of reading into which they were led by inquiries into the old drama, had begun to feel that Pope was overrated as a poet. Collins, who was a man of genius; Gray, who had a genius reflected from Greece and Italy; and the Wartons, who may be said to have had a taste for genius, all contributed, in their several degrees, to unsettle the notion that poetry was a thing of wit and breeding about town. But the first, whose temperament was morbid and over sensitive, was confessedly awe-stricken at the new world he had re-opened;-Gray, whose most original powers lay on the side of humour and the conversational, wrote exquisite cantos rather than any thing else, and reminded us at least as much of the scholar as the poet;-and the Wartons took up the same cause, more like amiable disciples, accidentally and easily impressed, than masterly teachers who knew the depths of the question. To be bred up therefore in the Warton school was to become proselytes and proselyte makers, a little too much in the spirit of young men educated at a dissenting college. There was more faith than works, and an ungenial twist to the controversial. Mr. Bowles came a little too soon. He was helped to his natural impulses by the critics, instead of to his critical by nature. It remained for the French revolution to plough up all our common places at once; and the minds that sprang out of the freshened soil set about their tasks in a spirit not only of difference but of hostility. But more of this when we come to speak of Mr. Wordsworth. As to poor Cowper, he stood alone, "Like to the culver on the bared bough." The same misery which rendered him original in some things, made him too feeble to be so in others. He was alone, not because he led the way, but because he was left on the road side. His greatest claims are higher and more reverend things,-claims on another state of existence; and we trust they have been made up to him. The reader may now guess the nature of Mr. Bowles's poetry. It is elegant and good hearted, with a real tendency to be natural, but pulled back by timidity and a sense of the conventional. Talking much of nature, it shows more of art, and that art too more contented with itself than it might be, for one that is so critical upon art in others. No man, however, with a heart in his body, and any poetry in his head, woos nature for nothing. Mr. Bowles's most popular publication is his sonnets, written during various excursions which he took to relieve his mind under the loss of his first love. They were his first publication, and whatever he or others may say, they are his best. They were his first love. There are good passages scattered here and there in his other works, but even in those we think we can trace the overflowings of this earlier inspiration. The rest is pure, good natured common place. He had real impulses and thoughts upon him when he wrote his sonnets. His other works rather seem to have been written, because he had a reputation for writing. Men cannot be every thing which it would be fine in men's eyes to be. Even poets cannot add a cubit to their stature, but are such as times and circumstances, as well as nature, make them. If they have any thing at all in them of a gift so uncommon as poetry, they ought to be grateful. Petrarch expected to be admired by posterity for his Latin epic poem, and has prefaced even his sonnets with an apology; yet his sonnets have been like bells for the whole earth to hear; while who knows any thing of his epic? Mr. Bowles should not trouble himself with odes and heroics, any more than with town matters and great tables. His forte, to use an Irish pun, is his piano. Above all, being what he is, an elegant sonnetteer and an åmiable country Clergyman, he should never meddle with critical controversy, nor even with the morals of Pope. Though a Clergyman, he has too much good nature to visit other men's differ Vol. III. 58 ences in moral opinion with severity in his heart, and he should not affect to do it in public. It is beneath him to put on airs as a clergyman, which he does not affect as a man. As to the controversy which lately brought him so much before the public, it has been completely settled by an article in the London Magazine. (See Art. VIII. this No.) ART. V.-LORD byron. THERE have not been many noblemen who have written poetry, or indeed any thing else much to the purpose. They have been brought up in too artificial a state, with too many ready-made notions of superiority; and their lives have passed in a condition too easy, conventional, and to say the truth, vulgar. France has produced the greatest number, because the literature prevailing in that country has been more attainable by common means: but the very best of them, with the exception of Montesquieu, who was a country gentleman, write somehow like lords. Buffon handles men and brutes equally with his gloves on; and Rochefoucault's philosophy is the quintessence of contempt. Even Montaigne, while he laughs at all classes in the gross, shows himself not a little to be Montaigne of that ilk. In England, the spirit of chivalry helped to fetch out the genius of Surrey, Sir Philip Sidney, and Lord Herbert; but even they were all more or less hurt by their situation, and expected the Muses to visit them like gentlemen. There was something grand, however, and peculiar, in the solitary courage of Herbert's deism. Dorset and Rochester were men of wit, who might both have come nearer to Dryden, especially the latter. Bolingbroke defended liberty itself like an aristocrat, and for no purpose but to get it into the power of its enemies. He wrote against religion, too, upon the principle of a feudal baron, who laughed equally at his liege lord and his serfs. As to Horace Walpole, however Lord Byron may find his esprit du corps roused in his behalf, he was an undoubted fop, who had the good luck to stumble upon the Castle of Otranto over his own escutcheon. George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron, whom the peerage ought to value much more than he does or can value it, is the grandson of the celebrated Commodore Byron, whose outset in a disastrous life has interested us all so much, in our reading of voyages and shipwrecks. He was born in Scotland, in 1791. His father, the brother of the late Lord, was an officer in the Guards; his mother a Gordon of Park, related to the Earls of Fife. The poetry, that finally took its due aspect in his person, had given various intimations of itself in his family, in the shape of verse-writing ladies and romantic adventures. The race, who were great country proprietors in Yorkshire, were ennobled in the person of Sir John Byron, for his loyal efforts in the cause of Charles the First; but the greatest Byron of old, was one recorded in Sir John Beaumont's poem of Bosworth-Field, for his friendship with his companion Clifton. As it is part of the spirit of our Sketches, to be as characteristic every way as possible, without violating any real delicacy, we shall touch upon some matters which must always interest, and some which shall agreeably surprise the public. This is said to be" an age of personalities ;" and it is so: but if we can give the interest of personality without any thing of the scandal of it, we shall perhaps help even to counteract the latter, better than if we said nothing. Lord Byron is of good stature, with a very handsome face and person. His hair is brown, with a tendency to run in ringlets; his head and forehead finely cut; his eyes of a lamping blue, and might give his face too haughty an expression, if it were not for his mouth and chin, which are eminently bland and beautiful. The portrait after Philips in Mr. Murray's editions, from which our wood outline is taken, is the best, and indeed only likeness of him; the others being inefficient attempts to catch his expression under various moods, real or imaginary. It is not new to the public, that all this beauty of aspect has one contradiction to it, in a lame foot; but this lameness is hardly perceptible in a modern dress, as he sits; and even when he is lounging about a room, he seems little more than sweeping hither and thither with a certain lordliness of indolence. It is a shrunken foot, not one raised upon irons, or otherwise prominently defective. We are the less scrupulous in alluding to this lameness, because it has been mentioned in the grossest manner by some poor creatures, who thought to worry his Lordship's feelings. Did these sorry beings contemplate, for an instant, how pernicious their success might be? Too wretched for his revenge, they might yet awake in him thoughts about human nature, for which a defect of this sort does not help to sweeten the kindest. It is remarkable, that the two eminent living writers, whose portraits of humanity are, upon the whole, mixed up with a greater degree of scorn than those of any of their contemporaries, are both of them lame. The other we allude to is Sir Walter Scott. Sir Walter, with a feeling which we shall certainly not call vanity, has been willing to let the public understand, that Shakspeare also was " but a halting fellow." To our minds, that indifferent sentence, coupled as it is in our recollections with another about lameness, is the most touching in all his works. Nor need he, or his Lordship, disdain us such an emotion. They can afford to let us have it. As to Shakspeare, we know not upon what authority this lameness of his is ascertained; but we can imagine it probable, were it for nothing but Iago's judgment of Desdemona, "Tush, man, the wine she drinks is made of grapes." The circumstance, if proved, and |