dated-and if they are overborne by superior might, they will at least have honoured their convictions, and set an example which, under happier auspices, will yet be remembered and imitated. But the Dissenters, to whom, more than to any class, Providence is entrusting the sacred ark of Liberty, must respect the solemn charge too highly ever to surrender as vanquished, while one post can be defended, or one injury withstood. Neither chagrined by treachery, nor disheartened by desertion, nor awed by hostility, let them display a magnanimity great as the occasion and prolonged as the struggle. And will the English Dissenters stand by inactively, as if they were unconcerned spectators? Surely not. The cause is in every respect their own; for the voluntary principle has been longer held by them than by their Scotch brethren, and the same sort of crusade is avowedly meditated against them. Ecclesiastical domination had done enough, though it should not have frustrated the spirit and paralysed the efforts of English Non-conformity. It is true the Dissenters in England have more to contend against than their northern allies, in a richly endowed, and endlessly ramified, and ignorantly adored hierarchy; but they will never promote their cause, nor even preserve their present footing, by crouching before assumption. One half of the success with which the Establishment has recently assailed liberal men and measures, is traceable to the boldness of its asseverations and anathemas; and no party can cope with it while opposing cowardice to its courage, and vacillation to its decision. All consistent Dissenters assert the exclusive fitness and entire sufficiency of religion to accomplish its own objects: and it would ill become them to claim as their distinguishing maxim the omnipotence of truth, while timidly distrusting its power, or to invite the nation at large to rest all on principle, while resorting themselves to the evasions and shifts of a time-serving expediency. But the English Dissenters are moving on the question: they have held meetings and got up petitions in London, Manchester, Birmingham, and other towns, and these are only the prelude to a more general demonstration.

It is idle perhaps, at present, but interesting, to speculate on the prospects of the voluntary controversy. In both our national churches there is a great number of excellent people, who earnestly desire, in every sense of the terms, the well-being of the empire. Of these, a considerable portion hold the alliance of Church and State so sacred, that no facts, and no arguments, which could plead for its dissolution, are likely to obtain their attention. There is another section of them who wish the

Christian worship to be established by law, provided its legal establishment shall be found to consist with enlarged civil liberty. These may probably become doubtful whether the conditions on which they uphold state churches admit of secure and ample fulfilment. A recent Moderator of the General Assembly (Dr M'Leod), has recently declared that there are not above six of the Scotch clergy who are not Conservative in their politics. The proportion may be nearly the same among the eighteen or nineteen thousand clergy of the Church of England: that there is no great difference between the two cases sufficiently appeared at the late general election. A distribution so very unequal is not easily ascribed to any incidental or temporary cause. The clergy have been much blamed for thus ranging themselves with the opponents of the people, as if the evil belonged to the individuals and not to the system. But this procedure is not very generous or considerate; nor will it ever suggest an effectual remedy. If we will have state clergy, then it is senseless to quarrel with the inevitable effects of the position which we assign them. We make them monopolists, and then cannot endure that they are in love with monopolies. We place the entire kingdom, parcelled out into parishes, under their spiritual superintendence, and then scold them for claiming ascendancy, and accounting dissent intrusion. We appoint them pensions, and then asperse them for abetting the political party from whom pensioners have most to expect. There is little philosophy in this. The Tory canvassing of churchmen may be improper, but let us withdraw the temptation before we reprove the sin.

There are also many good people in our establishments, who adhere to them in the hope that a measure of religious freedom may yet be enjoyed within their pale. Patronage, they trust, is to be abolished in Scotland, and the Convocation, with a large infusion of liberal influence, possibly revived in England. Some attempts have been made to attain these ends, but with so little success that they are in danger of being despaired of and abandoned as chimerical. The General Assembly, moved by fear of the Voluntaries, lately tested its independence of the state, by arming the people with a veto on the nomination of ministers by patrons. The result of the experiment is discouraging and humiliating, for the Court of Session have pronounced the veto act illegal, and a large majority of the judges (8 to 5) in delivering their judgment, took occasion to read our establishments long and admonitory lectures on their necessary subjection to secular control. All friends of reform in our

church establishments are much to be honoured for their aspirations and exertions, but if such are the issues, may they not come to the conclusion that neither civil nor sacred freedom, on a grand scale, can be reasonably looked for till rulers shall annul invidious distinctions among subjects, and administer justice to all sects of religionists by conferring special bounties upon none?

Perhaps these influences may operate slowly: for a time the voluntary principle may even startle and alienate numbers not ready for its reception, so as to afford the church a seeming victory, and exalt a high church ministry to office. No doubt the church extensionists would regard this consummation as millennial; yet they might have cause to join trembling with their mirth. The church has ever been the principal strength of Toryism, but the fact has been heretofore more or less veiled and controverted, and a trial is yet awaiting, in these modern times, of an illiberal government, put in and upheld, notoriously and all but exclusively, by church influence. Such a government at this time of day will be impatiently borne, and odium may accumulate upon it till the foundation on which it rests crumbles under its weight. Then, if not before, establishments will be in danger. Come what may, however, of these prognostications, the question to which they relate possesses a great and growing interest, and merits the serious consideration of all men pretending to intelligence, religion, or patriotism. The ecclesiastical condition of the three kingdoms is manifestly unstable; every year the war of sects is becoming more general and alarming, and whether we will or no, we shall be compelled, by the progress of events, to inquire how the divisions of society may be healed, and peace permanently established on a basis of religious equality.

K.

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ART. V. The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies; Hero and Leander; Lycus the Centaur; and other Poems. By Thomas Hood. Longman and Co. 1827.

National Tales. By Thomas Hood. Ainsworth. 1827.

The Dream of Eugene Aram, the Murderer. By Thomas Hood; with Designs by W. Harvey. Tilt. 1831.

Tylney Hall. By Thomas Hood. A. H. Baily and Co. 1834. Whims and Oddities, in Prose and Verse. By Thomas Hood. New Edition. Tilt. 1836.

Hood's Own, or Laughter from Year to Year. Nos. 1, 2, and 3. A. H. Baily and Co. 1838.

HAVING already done honour to "the only true and lawful Boz," and anatomised the brilliant farce of Theodore Hook, and the Addisonian humour of H. B., it is now beseeming and proper that we should speak of the works of Thomas Hood.

To do this intelligently is not an easy task. Paradoxical as our assertion may appear, it is nevertheless true that there are few writers extensively popular who are so little known or so imperfectly understood as our friend of the thousand-and-one crotchets. His works, indeed, have been largely enjoyed, but enjoyed, as some author quaintly says of the wine-cup, "without respect." The public have crowded to appreciate and admire them, much as a party of street-purchasers, gentle and simple, would throng, some twenty years since,-round the tray of an image-vender; so intent upon the familiar green parrot, and the nodding Mandarin, Napoleon's cocked-hat and Hessians, and Blucher's tyrannic whiskers, as to forget the presence of those shapes of beauty in which were accurately, though, it may be, coarsely, repeated some of the least perishable creations of Genius. And even now, in these more intelligent days, how few are there among the thousands capable of bearing hearty witness to the truth of the neighbourly in-turned toes, the rig-and-furrow stockings of Tam o' Shanter or Souter Johnny-who can admire, otherwise than by imitation or tradition, the fascinating terrors of the Medusa, or the aerial triumph of the winged Victory, or the cherubic health and innocence of Fiamingo's children! Every one can laugh, but it is not given to every one to perceive the Beautiful.

Still fewer are those who are either able or willing to recognize its existence, when it is largely mixed up-not alternated—with

the ridiculous. Let men love laughter as they may, they invariably form a depreciating estimate of what makes them laugh; neither the persons nor the books endowed with that gift, ever have justice done to their more serious qualities. We are too apt to prefer something of delusion and surprise in our serious pleasures. Like school-boys when abroad for a holiday, we would escape from what is familiar to what is distant-we would lose ourselves among the visionary shapes of a dead world, rather than avail ourselves of the realities which abide with us at home, and eat and drink, and bargain, and lie down with us. Hence, while in art and literature the severely classical, the purely imaginative, have always been most highly esteemed, the grotesque has till lately, been scornfully passed over as absurd and unworthy of interest, or even senselessly denounced as far-fetched and unnatural. Far-fetched! ... Who is there so dull that, in some moment or other, he has not, with half-shut eye, overpassed in imagination the boundaries of sense and spirit?-not watched the growth and decay of strange faces in the bickering fire at even-tide ?—not bent his ear to listen to counsel in the creaking of the door, after the fashion of the willing French widow, who was advised into matrimony by the tinkling of the church-bells? Unnatural!... In what passage of life is Dignity to be found without its flaw of littleness, or Truth without its disfiguring speck of falsity?-the sacred beauty of Sorrow unblemished by distortion?-the eloquence of Passion wholly guiltless of bombast?-or the merriest laughter unchecked by its undertone of sadness? It is but going a few steps beyond Nature in the apposition of these things that forms the secret of the grotesque. For Nature, though exceeded, must never be wholly forgotten. A healthy, as well as an exuberant taste-a sound judgment, no less than a subtle apprehension-must preside in this school of art also, freakish and irregular as it appears. While Fancy is permitted her airiest scope, Reason must still be propitiated. The face in the fire, just mentioned, to be seen by two persons, must possess some recognizable lineaments-the tournament traced out by the child in the veins of a block of marble must have at least one undeniable spear and helmet and charger among its mass of struggling figures. "There is a form," as Lady Blarney hath it, "in a Satyr's hoof;-a possible length in a mermaid's tail; Pegasus cannot mount aloft on the wings of dragon-flies, nor must Daphne be presented as shrinking away into a pollarded laurel. Even in the wildest of arabesques a certain proportion and harmony are called for. The riotouslyfancied sculptures of the Middle Ages had their period of corruption and decadence; and every curiosity-monger, from Mr Beckford