paper on the Sources of the Divina Commedia, the review of Schmidt's History of the Albigenses, and the article on the Revolution in Prussia. A brief paper on Jasmin, the Barber Poet, though of an inferior order of merit to the others, will also be read with interest.

Memoir of the Life and Character of the RIGHT HON. EDMUND BURKE, with Specimens of his Poetry and Letters, and an Estimate of his Genius and Talents compared with those of his great Contemporaries. A new Edition, revised and enlarged. By JAMES PRIOR, Esq. In two volumes. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. 1854. 16mo. pp. 508, 478.

PRIOR'S Life of Burke has a well-established reputation, as the best biography of that great political philosopher that has yet appeared. Croly's Life is, in fact, the only memoir of the great statesman that can challenge comparison with it. Superior in some respects, Mr. Croly's work is decidedly inferior to it in others. Both writers were Tories, and both viewed Burke's life and opinions through the colored medium of a strong party feeling. But Mr. Croly's partisanship was much more violent and unreasonable than that of the earlier writer, and scarce a solitary ray of liberal principles illuminates his fierce eloquence. His style, indeed, is far superior to the stiff, formal, and not always correct sentences of Mr. Prior. But his work deals almost wholly with Burke's public life and political principles, and was written to subserve a mere temporary end. On the other hand, a crowning merit in Mr. Prior's work is the prominence which he gives to Burke's private habits and personal friendships. This circumstance in itself would be sufficient to give the preference to that gentleman's Memoir, even if it were not marked by a nearer approach to impartiality and greater elaborateness and minuteness of detail.

Mr. Prior brought to the execution of his task several important qualifications in a biographer. He had a warm appreci ation of Burke's unrivalled genius as a political philosopher, and a thorough acquaintance with the productions of his pen. He had made diligent search into the history of every event connected with the great orator's life, and he had had access to a considerable mass of unpublished letters. Of these he made an excellent use; and no part of his volumes will be read with so much interest, as the extracts from Burke's correspondence. But his admiration of his hero and his own partisan prejudices sometimes led him astray. Over that portion of Burke's career which was passed as a leader of the opposition to his Majesty's minis

ters, he glides hurriedly and with reluctant praise. When Burke, however, inflamed by the prosecution of Hastings and the breaking out of the French Revolution, gave the reins to his fervid imagination, sundered the friendships of early years, and outstripped even Mr. Pitt in his new-born zeal for Toryism, Mr. Prior's admiration knows no bounds. Henceforth Burke usurps the place of the idols of the Tory party in the estimation of the writer; and his life goes down in a splendor that is unobscured by a single cloud. Still, with all our admiration of this great man, we cannot but regard the sentiments of his later years, and the course which he then pursued, as far less worthy of his great ness than his career before the impeachment of Warren Hastings and the destruction of the Bastile had so excited his too fertile imagination.

And yet Burke was confessedly the greatest man of his age, towering above Pitt and Fox as much as they surpassed ordinary men; and his life and works are both fruitful in the lessons of political wisdom. No man, indeed, can be said to be acquainted with English history, or with the most important lessons of political philosophy, who has not made himself acquainted with the life and works of Edmund Burke. Though the shadow of passion and an ungoverned imagination may rest on the close of his career, his works are the greatest storehouse of practical wisdom applied to political questions, that his country has ever offered for the instruction of the world. To them men will always have recourse for their almost boundless treasures of wisdom, their learning and eloquence, their wonderful flights of imagination, and the withering force of their sarcasm, however opposed to any portion of his views may be the judgment of the reader.

New

A Memoir of the late REV. WILLIAM CROSWELL, D.D., Rector of the Church of the Advent, Boston. By his Father. York: D. Appleton & Co. 1853. 8vo. pp. 528.

SINCE Christendom has been divided into sects, and these sects have been subdivided into parties and coteries, each of them has furnished its type of Christian character for a wider or narrower circle of friends and admirers. We love to study these exhibitions of human nature under the discipline of the real or supposed elements of the Gospel, and we love to read of them when they have become the subjects of biography. Many pleasant and profitable hours have been spent by us in the perusal of this Memoir of Dr. Croswell. That he had the sterling qualities of a Christian and of a most estimable man, we knew before.

But some delicate and tender elements of his character are brought out in his correspondence which could have been recognized only by his most intimate friends. Such kindly and affectionate feelings as are expressed in his letters, and such closeness of filial, fraternal, and friendly sympathies as were manifested by him in his whole career from childhood to his death, are the unmistakable tokens of a Christian heart. We can well conceive how trying, and at the same time soothing, to the feelings of his aged father, was the work of preparing this memorial of such a son. There runs through the book a mingling of delicacy and of dignity, becoming the sacred profession of both father and son, and well suited to engage the confidence of a reader. Only on one point—that which concerns the Bishop of the Episcopalians in this State-can an exception be raised by any one.

The volume affords us no means of judging the late Dr. Croswell through his attainments as a scholar or his power as a preacher. He was heartily devoted to his work as a Christian minister, was especially faithful in the service of the poor and afflicted, and had a sweet gift of poetry, which was in the main consecrated to sacred themes. The respect and affection entertained for him by his most intimate friends are to be taken as more than an offset to the apparent coldness, stiffness, or reserve ascribed to him by some who had but a slight knowledge of him.

We have hinted that there is one portion of the contents of this volume concerning which the opinions of readers will differ, to a degree which will perhaps lead them to question the good taste or discretion of the venerable divine who is its author. It relates to a subject upon which it is evident that much heart-burning has been already endured. The late Dr. Croswell was an extreme ritualist. His convictions, as well as the cast and tone of his sentiments, led him to attach vast importance to the peculiarities which are entitled High-Churchism. At a crisis in the affairs of the Episcopalian denomination, when the love and the fear of certain ecclesiastical practices, supposed to have a tendency to Romanism, were developed in the two sections of the body, Dr. Croswell identified himself with the so-called Puseyite party. When he returned to Boston to assume for the second time the care of a church, he introduced certain usages and symbols which in one point of view are of most trivial consequence, but in another point of view are significant of evil to a Protestant. The Bishop refused to go to his church to administer the rite of "Confirmation," because the communion-table looked like an altar, and was surmounted by a cross and "a shelf"; because the minister preached in a white gown instead of a black one, and read prayers not in a reading-desk nor with his face to the peo

ple. Whenever the above-named rite was desired by candidates in Dr. Croswell's church, a correspondence, for the most part courteously worded, but holding much wounded feeling in suspense, took place between the Bishop and "his presbyter." A bitter strife attached to the issue thus raised. Dr. Croswell was deprived of the just delight that he might have enjoyed in the large number of the candidates which he could present as the fruits of his faithful labors, because some of them went to other bishops for "Confirmation," or refused to receive it from their own Bishop in another church. The father enters warmly into the controversy, and freely uses epithets concerning the Bishop which often exceed in severity those that are found in the letters of the son. Perhaps an indifferent observer may be pardoned for saying, that all which redeems the issue from the merest puerility is the fact, that the Bishop may have viewed the tokens that offended him only as signs of something worse to grow out of them, and that Dr. Croswell and his friends may have been deterred from going farther by the opposition which they encountered. Dr. Croswell says in one of his letters, "We kneel at an angle of forty-five [degrees] towards the end of the altar, exhibiting the profile to most of the congregation." (p. 404.) A very good angle certainly, and quite fit for prayer, if one should happen to take it. But what would an Apostle say concerning the raising of an issue one way or another on such a matter?

But the spirit of ritualism was in the good man, and it seems to have strengthened with his years. He could take no part with Christians of other denominations in any Christian work, or cause of benevolence. He could not even accord with his own brethren in this city and neighborhood: he would not attend their ministerial association. He preferred to wait till the whole world should become High-Churchmen, before he would coöperate with other Christians in good works. He speaks of preaching on the annual Fast Day in Boston, but of studiously avoiding the recognition of it as a day of humiliation. He says (p. 103), "I gave all the services the character which belongs to the festal season." This was because "the Church" gave the season one designation, and "the narrow-minded prejudices of the founders of the Bay State " gave it another. But whence did he derive his liberty of action or judgment in this case? "The Church" of which he writes so glibly, if it means any thing in its connection, means a body which would have silenced him on all occasions; and "those narrow-minded prejudices of the Bay State made him free even to scoff at the religious institutions of the land to which he owed all civil privileges and blessings.

Again, writing in the conference-room of a church in Phila delphia, he says: "On the desks and seats about me, the princi pal book is Henshaw's Collection of Revival Hymns,' while the Prayer-Books are very scarce. Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who is Henshaw, that his Collections should supersede the Collects?" (p. 214.) And we would ask, Whose are the Col lects? They certainly did not drop from the skies, nor did they come from Jesus or Paul. Perhaps it might be proved that their sources are not one whit more pious or Christian than the sources of "Henshaw's Collections."

The only abatement to the Christian spirit and the edification which are most delightfully ministered to by these pages, is to be charged to the occasional obtrusion of such trumpery as we have just referred to. How a Christian minister, in the full experience of the sins and woes of human life, and with the great commission of his Master to guide him, can lay any stress, and such stress too, on the angle at which he shows his profile in prayer, and upon the little miserable technicalities of ritualism, is to us a problem, though one hardly worth the solving. We gratefully accord our respect to Dr. Croswell for his devotion in his ministry, and for his private virtues, but his exclusiveness towards even his own brethren, and the narrowness of his religious sympathies, are traits that even zeal and sanctity cannot commend to us.

The Frontier Missionary: a Memoir of the Life of the REV. JACOB BAILEY, A.M., Missionary at Pownalborough, Me., Cornwallis and Annapolis, N. S., with Illustrations, Notes, and an Appendix. By WILLIAM S. BARTLET, A.M., with a Preface by RIGHT REV. GEORGE BURGESS, D.D. Boston: Ide & Dutton. 1853. 8vo. pp. 365.

THE editor of this racy volume has made a very valuable and interesting addition alike to our historical and to our biographical treasures. With admirable judgment, as well as with the best taste and the most careful research, he has wrought together materials which throw light upon many things of high impor tance, and which present us with the sketch of a somewhat original and peculiar character. Mr. Bartlet has evidently spent much labor on his work, and the results entitle him to the gratitude of his readers. Keeping himself in the background when the subject of the Memoir has left his own words to speak for him, the editor is ready to supply illustrative information as it is needed. His Notes and Appendix show an antiquarian's dili gence and a scholar's care. Though he deals with topics which