o'erpassing of a summer cloud; but one who has learned, as only storm-laden sorrow can teach, the possible anguish that human life can entail and human heart endure. By one overmastering affliction, God's shadow on her face is laid But sighs of heart weariness escape ever and anon from the o'er fraught heart that else would break. In no modern poet are these suspiriosæ cogitationes more pregnant with meaning. In none are retrospective reveries shadowed forth in greater depth of solemn sadness. We have never seen the recognition their pathos claims awarded to those self-communings in "Night and the Merry Man," for instance, where memory evokes from the past souvenirs of fancy's golden treasures, and of poems delightedly conned in childhood, ere the chilling discovery was made that life is not a poem too : A yet more moving example, to the same effect, is found in "The Fourfold Aspect," beginning with a time when "the worst recorded change was of apple dropped from bough, when love's sorrow seemed more strange than love's treason can seem now :" Then, the living took you up and thence, tracing the shades of the prison-house as they close in upon, and well-nigh darken to despair, well-nigh stifle and slay, the mortal that had yet to learn its mortality: Ay, but soon ye woke up shrieking, And the full sense of your mortal All things changed, you rose up straight way, And saluted death and sin. Since your outward man has rallied, These are but scant glimpses of one or two phases of the "Fourfold Aspect." Let the reader survey all four aspects, in the original, with the care and feeling they demand, nay, command, and then ask himself if the poem does not merit a higher rank and wider acceptance than is its lot. R DR. SOUTH, THE WIT OF THE OBERT SOUTH, the son of a London merchant, was born at Hackney, in 1633, and was educated under the famous Dr. Busby at Westminster School. Thence he proceeded to Oxford, and, along with John Locke, became a distinguished student at Christ Church, of which Dr. Owen was at that time the dean. Even then he showed the elements of that character to which subsequent years gave development and emphasis; wit and illhumor, petulance toward those whom it was safe to offend, and considerable adroitness in taking care of himself. His first publication was a congratulatory ode to Cromwell at the conclusion of the war with Holland, but as soon as the power of the Independents began to wane, the young churchman grew valiant, and shewed his heroism by insulting Dr. Owen. While there was a prospect of Presbyterian ascendency he flattered the Presbyterians by his invectives against Independency; and when the Restoration divested Prelacy of its dangers he availed himself of an Episcopal ordination which, in 1658, he had obtained from one of the deprived bishops, and came out an ultra-royalist and a reviler of all the sectaries. In 1660 he was chosen University orator. In this capacity he had occasion to present to * "Mortal," a Barrettism for mortality. Syncope is a very summary way of turning an adjective into a substantive, pro ré natá. the comitia for an honorary degree, an officer of distinction, and began in the usual style, "Prasento vobis virum hunc bellicosissimum;" that instant some accident made the great warrior turn round, and in the same tone of voice he proceeded, qui nunquam antea tergiversatus est." His great talents, and the effect with which he delivered his eloquent discourses, attracted the notice of Lord Clarendon, who was Chancellor of Oxford, as well as Lord High Chancellor of England, and in 1661 South was appointed his chaplain. The avenue to preferment was now open before him, and his ambition and selfreliance were keenly alive to the opportunity. But his first appearance before his majesty was by no means auspicious. A sermon "for the times," which he preached before Clarendon, was so spicy and clever that if it could only be presented to the king his patron was sure it would suit the royal palate. Accordingly he obtained for the brilliant preacher an invitation to give the discourse in the Chapel Royal; and, as Anthony à Wood relates, with a fond minuteness, on the authority of some "fanatic" informant, "every one's expectation was heightened; and happy was he or she, among the greatest wits in the town, that could accommodate their humor in getting convenient room in the chapel at Whitehall, to hang upon the lips of this so great an oracle. The day appointed being come, our author ascends the pulpit, and the eyes of all were immediately fastened upon him. After he had performed his obeisance to his majesty he named his text, which was Eccl. vii, 10, 'Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these?' The prohibition in the text he labored to enforce by an induction of particulars. The first was, that the pagan times were not better than these; then the popish times were not, etc. But the last insisted on was, the times of the late rebellion; and while he was endeavoring to evince that, which was, indeed, the main thing that he intended to handle, it pleased God, as the fanatic observed, that he was suddenly taken with a qualm, drops of sweat standing in his face as big as peas, and immediately he lost the use of his speech, only he uttered some few words to this effect, 'O Lord, we are all in thy hands; be merciful unto us:' and then came down. ... The expectations of all being then sadly disappointed, they were contented with the divertisement of an anthem, and so the solemnity of the service for that day was ended. In the meantime great care was taken of Mr. South, and by the use of cordials and other means proper for him in that condition, he quickly recovered his spirits, and was every way as well again as before." It was not by dint of mere assurance, however, that Mr. South "recovered his spirits." He was not in the predicament of a mere coxcomb, who, having pushed upward from his proper place, has fallen and found his level. His vigor of mind and force of expression were already unrivaled among pulpit orators, and, in all probability, the unfinished sermon was enough to convince the good-humored sagacity of King Charles that he had been listening to no ordinary preacher. At any rate, with his strong sense, with his perpetual sparkle of wit, and with a satirical vein, which seemed inexhaustible in its gibes at republicans and fanatics, he suited the taste of his own sovereign as thoroughly as, with his florid grandeur and purple pomp of language, his cotemporary, Bossuet, delighted Louis XIV., and, notwithstanding his embarrassing introduction, the young Oxonian soon made himself at home in the pulpit of Whitehall. Indeed, like the rest of Charles's favorites, he found his royal master so devoid of all true dignity, that he could jest at the king's expense, and some of his sayings are not so remarkable for their point as for their freeand-easy impudence. One day sleep had overtaken part of his audience, including its most illustrious member. Stopping, and changing his voice, he called three times, "My Lord of Lauderdale!" and when the earl woke up, "My lord," said South, "I am sorry to interrupt your repose, but I must beg that you will not snore quite so loud, lest you should awaken his majesty," and then went on with his sermon. However, it would seem that his majesty was wide awake when Dr. South preached his well-known sermon on "The lot cast into the lap;" for, after giving other examples of a remarkable rise from a lowly position, when he came to the late protector, "And who that had beheld such a bankrupt, beggarly fellow as Cromwell, first entering the Parliament House with a threadbare, torn cloak and greasy hat, (and, perhaps, neither of them paid for,) could have suspected that, in the space of so few years he should, by the murder of one king and the banishment of another, ascend the throne, be invested in the royal robes, and want nothing of the state of a king but the changing of his hat into a crown?" the king was convulsed with laughter, and turning to Laurence Hyde, Lord Rochester, with one of his peculiar ejaculations, he exelaimed: Lory, your chaplain must be a bishop; therefore put me in mind of him at the next death." But South was never made a bishop. In 1663 he was installed Prebendary of Westminster, and in 1670 Canon of Christ Church, and in 1678 he was presented to the rectory of Islip, in Oxfordshire. At the Revolution he was sorely perplexed. He had so often expatiated on the right Divine, and had been so fulsome in his flattery of the Stuarts, that he could hardly be expected to join the invitation to the Prince of Orange; and, with so little to choose between a loathsome Puritanism and an unlovely Popery, he refused to take an active part on either side, but said that he would go into retirement, and give himself to prayer. When he came out of his retirement the Revolution was effected, and William and Mary were safely seated on the throne. To the sovereign de facto South took the oath of allegiance, and, growling out an occasional regret for the good old times of absolutism, he consented to retain his preferment, and reconciled himself, as well as he could, to the evil days of religious toleration and constitutional monarchy. Living to witness the accession of George I., he died July 8, 1716, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, to which his brilliant satire and fierce invective had so often drawn overflowing audiences, and where an elaborate monument still marks the place of his sepulture. Like Fuller, the name of South is associated with wit, and almost every sermon gleams with scintillations. Sometimes it is a sly hit, or, as he himself would have called it, a "rub" in the by-going: as, when ironically apologizing for the imageworship of the papists, he says, "But the image of a Deity may be a proper object for that which is but the image of a religion;" or, when quoting a Romish casuist, who says, "It is a truth but lately known and received in the world, that a lie is absolutely sinful," he adds, "I suppose he means that part of the world where the Scriptures are not read, and where men care not to know what they are not willing to practice." Sometimes the vein is more decidedly comic, as in the abovementioned sermon on "The lot in the lap," where, after mentioning the fortuitous way in which men have acquired a reputation for wisdom, he proceeds, "And as the repute of wisdom, so that of wit is very casual. Sometimes a lucky saying, or a pertinent reply, has procured an esteem of wit to persons otherwise very shallow, and no ways accustomed to utter such things by any standing ability of mind; so that if such a one should have the ill hap at any time to strike a man dead with a smart saying, it ought, in all reason and conscience, to be judged but a chance-medley; the poor man (God knows) being no way guilty of any design of wit." And, not to quote instances where the drollery degenerates to buffoonery, its most legitimate examples are the more latent, where the keen perception of incongruities does not so much provoke a smile, as point the moral, and make the lesson pithy: "The Gospel does not dictate imprudence: no evangelical precept justles out that of a lawful self-preservation. He, therefore, that thus throws himself upon the sword, runs to heaven before he is sent for; where, though perhaps Christ may in mercy receive the man, yet he will be sure to disown the martyr." "Love an ungrateful man, and he shall despise you. Commend him, and, as occasion serves, he shall revile you. Give to him, and he shall but laugh at your easiness. Save his life, but, when you have done, look to your own." Speaking of unqualified teachers: "A blind man sitting in the chimney corner, is pardonable enough; but sitting at the helm, he is intolerable. If men will be ignorant and illiterate, let them be so in private, and to themselves, and not set their defects in a high place, to make them visible and conspicuous. If owls will not be hooted at, let them keep close within the tree, and not perch upon the upper boughs." But no wit is enduring which has not strong sense for its substratum, and our author was gifted with an uncommon share of homely, vigorous, practical wisdom. It was in virtue of this that he burst through scholastic trammels, and discarding technical phraseology, addressed his audience in plain but energetic English; and it was this which led him to select such proofs and arguments as were likeliest to carry the popular understanding. And it is this which now renders his discourses such a mine of golden thought and sagacious aphorism. As in a mine, so in these sermons, there is many a sharp stone to graze the knuckles, and there is mud enough to soil the fingers; but even amid the most offensive ribaldry, the explorer is constantly rewarded with gems, from which truth flashes like light from the diamond, or in which it is coyly locked up, and kept curiously undulating like a sunbeam imprisoned in opal. when the busy tempter shall be more than usually apt to vex and trouble him, and the pains of a dying body to hinder and discompose him, and the settlement of worldly affairs to disturb and confound him, and, in a word, all things conspire to make his sick-bed grievous and uneasy; nothing can then stand up against these ruins, and speak life in the midst of death, but a clear conscience. And the testimony of that shall make the comforts of heaven descend upon his weary head, like a refreshing dew or shower upon a parched ground. It shall give him some lively earnest and secret anticipations of his approaching joy. It shall bid his soul go out of the body undauntedly, and lift up its head with confidence before saints and angels. Surely the comfort which it conveys at this season is something bigger than the capacities of mortality-mighty and unspeakable, and not to be understood till it comes to be felt. And now, who would not quit all the pleasures and trash and trifles which are apt to captivate the heart of man, and pursue the greatest rigors of piety and austerities of a good life, to purchase to himself such a conscience as, at the hour of death, when all the friendships of the world shall bid him adieu, and the whole creation turn its back upon him, shall dismiss his soul and close his eyes with that blessed sentence, 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord!" " For South we cannot claim that he possessed an imagination like Taylor, a power of philosophizing like Cudworth and More, a strategic range of vision and a dialectic fairness and prowess like Barrow, still less an erudition like Lightfoot and Pocock, and, least of all, a fervor like Baxter and the hated Puritans; but of all these desirable attributes, or of others equivalent, he possessed a share so respectable that, turned to the best account by a consummate rhetorician, it secured for him a place of enduring eminence in the ranks of pulpit oratory. Of learning he had enough to preserve him from mistakes and solecisms, and to supply the theme in hand with apposite facts and instructive illustrations; and his usual exemption from pedantry compels us to forgive an occasional quotation from "the fifty-second book of Dion Cassius," or a scrap of Greek from the fifty-seventh epistle of Synesius. Nor have many preachers made a happier use of the materials supplied by mental science. In his remarks on conscience, on ingratitude, on complacency in the sins of other men, there are passages where for a moment he anticipates the masterly grasp and seer-like intuition of Bishop Butler; while of his sermon on "Man in God's Image," it is hardly too much to affirm that nothing had appeared before it in English prose, at once so beautiful in conception and so exquisite in language. Of tender or gracious feeling there is little trace in Dr. South's lively and eloquent compositions; but there is much of what is usually understood by "unction" in the following close of his sermon on conscience: "At this disconsolate time, ❘ not to be followed by men, in case the But, although there is little pathos, there is no want of warmth and vigor, and there are few things with which we sympathize more heartily than honest indignation. As, for instance, after quoting from Bellarmine the extraordinary proposition, "That if the Pope should, through error or mistake, command vices and prohibit virtues, the Church would be bound in conscience to believe vice to be good and virtue evil," he exclaims, "Good God! that anything that wears the name of a Christian, or but of a man, should venture to own such a villainous, impudent, and blasphemous assertion in the face of the world as this! What! must murder, adultery, theft, fraud, extortion, perjury, drunkenness, rebellion, and the like, pass for good and commendable actions, and fit to be practiced? and mercy, chastity, justice, truth, temperance, loyalty, and sincere dealing, be accounted things utterly evil, immoral, and Pope, who is generally a weak, and almost always a wicked man, should, by his mistake and infallible ignorance, command the former and forbid the latter? Did Christ himself ever assume such a power, as to alter the morality of actions, and to transform vice into virtue, and virtue into vice by his bare word? Certainly never did a grosser paradox, or a wickeder sentence drop from the mouth or pen of any mortal man, since reason or religion had any being in the world. And I must confess, I have often with great amazement wondered how it could possibly come from a person of so great a reputation, both for learning and virtue too, as the world allows Bellarmine to have been. But, when men give themselves to the defense of wicked interests and false propositions, it is just with God to smite the greatest abilities with the greatest infatuations." Unfortunately, however, much of South's indignation is lavished on men whose memory is now dear, and whose depressed condition should have been a powerful appeal to the forbearance of a generous reverend harpies, who, by plunders and sequestrations, had scraped together three or four thousand a year, but, presently, according to the sanctified dialect of the times, they dubbed themselves God's peculiar people and inheritance. So sure did those thriving regicides make of heaven, and so fully reckoned themselves in the high road thither, that they never so much as thought that some of their saintships were to take Tyburn in their way." Again : "Whensoever you hear any of these sly, sanctified sycophants, with turned-up eye and shrug of shoulder, pleading conscience for or against anything or practice, you should forthwith ask them, What word of God they have to bottom that judgment of their conscience upon ? And if they can produce no such thing, (as they never can,) then rest assured that they are arrant cheats and hypocrites, and that, for all their big words, the conscience of such men is so far from being able to give them any true confidence toward God, that it cannot so much as give them confidence toward a foe. To trample on the fallen, or to tor-wise and good man; no, nor yet toward themselves, who are far from being either." Racy and idiomatic as is our author's English, it is too often debased by slang. In the same way, his wit not rarely degenerates to ribaldry, and the temptation of a keen or humorous remark is always too powerful for his reverence. Thus: "With two or three popular, empty words, such as 'Popery and superstition,' ' right of the subject,' 'liberty of conscience,' 'Lord Jesus Christ,' well tuned and humored, a skillful manager of the rabble may whistle them backward and forward, ture a victim whose hands are tied, is no great token of chivalry; and, in his invectives against republicans and Puritans, South knew full well that they could not retaliate. Had the pulpit been open, or the press been free, they might have reminded their accuser of his former connection with themselves; and while they might safely have asked him to point out the sacrifices by which he had evidenced his sincerity, they might have hinted, that of all enemies the most truculent and unforgiving is a turncoat or an ungrateful protégé. With language like the follow-upward and downward, till he is weary, ing, the walls of Whitehall and Westminster Abbey used to resound on days consecrated to the "Happy Restoration of King Charles the Second :" "In the late times of confusion, how was the black decree of reprobation opened and let fly at them [loyalists] both from pulpit and press, and how were all the vials of wrath in the Revelation poured upon their head! Every mother's son of them was a reprobate and a castaway, and none were to hope for the least favor hereafter who had not Cromwell or Bradshaw for his friend here. and get up upon their backs when he is so." Again: "The truth is, they [the Jews] were all along a cross, odd, untoward sort of people, and such as God seems to have chosen, and (as the prophets sometimes phrase it) to have espoused to himself, upon the very same account that Socrates espoused Xantippe, only for her extreme ill conditions above all that he could find or pick out of that sex; and so the fittest argument both to exercise and declare his admirable patience to the world." And in the outset of his sermon on "The Christian Pentecost" there is a hit at the Protector of a nature so profane that it is better to leave it where we found it. |