intelligence, undauntedly pursuing the cultivation of that ideal which was the joint creation of a highly imaginative temperament and great attainments—one has to look wide over the literary history of every country to find her equal. Considering the great capabilities she possessed, her career may be accepted as some proof of the impossibility that women can ever attain to the first rank in imaginative composition. Such a combination of the finest genius and the choicest results of cultivation and wide-ranging studies has never been seen before in any woman, nor is the world likely soon to see the same again. Mrs. Browning swept over not only the whole range of modern literature, but was also deeply read in Plato and the Neo-Platonists, in Gregory Nanzianzen and Synesius, and the whole list of the Christian Fathers. Judging from the character of her writings, her reading seems to have been too exclusively imaginative to the destruction of the reasoning faculties, and thus her mind lacked both health and tone. A poet, perhaps, most of all needs the discipline of fact and reason to drill his intellectual energies and sensibilities into something like hardness and consistency. Men, whether they will it or no, get their minds disciplined in the world; but women, who require it most of all, if they would become great writers, are entirely cut off from this kind of experience, and a really imaginative temperament is not likely to acquire discipline from books. In Mrs. Browning's case the constant confinement to a sick chamber vented her from attaining to any real knowledge of the world at all. She lived on the outside of it like a spirit; now talking a mystic language, now singing mystic songs, full of mystic hopes and exaltations, and now bewailing in unutterable sorrow over the darkness and desolation of human life, setting its worst calamities and misfortunes to the most inconsolable and mournful strains of music. She had little taste for all the moderate emotions and moderate states of existence, on which so much of the happiness of humanity is founded, and out of which the most pleasing forms of poetry will ever be drawn. Nevertheless it will ever be remembered to her honour how deep was her sympathy for all that was poor, oppressed, and suffering. The pale sunken faces' of the factory children disturbed the dreams of her sick couch; the shriek of the slave came to her from over the Atlantic; the despairing eyes of the English poor and homeless were seen by her in the sunny regions of the South; and the whole strength of her soul was attracted by the cause of enslaved nationalities. Such faults as she had were those of her time, exalted and intensified by her exceptional nature and circumstances. Among those who

pre

came immediately in the wake of Byron, whose potent spirit had so long held the world in awe, the task of men who aspired to influence the world by song was indeed a difficult one. Two methods appear to have occurred to all who immediately succeeded, in order to gain some portion of the mantle of power he left behind him, the one, greater simplicity, and the other, greater elaborateness of style. Mrs. Browning, although on rare occasions she showed her capability for the simple style, cultivated the elaborate to an amazing degree; her inanimate objects are human beings, and her abstractions do everything but eat and drink. In an age of materialism and spirit-hallucinations, she strove vehemently to become one with the spirit-world and to provide for the super-sensual, seraph visions, strains of angelic harmonies, and soul banquets of ætherial luxuries; but it may be doubted whether these will have any greater influence on humanity than the table-turnings and spirit-rappings of the day, or than the meaningless apparitions with which a wandering charlatan can create a short-lived wonder. Not that in any way we would assimilate the ambition of Mrs. Browning's poetry to these vulgar delusions; but they are different manifestations of the same craving of the soul for more than it finds in the daily life before it.

6

Human life appeared to Mrs. Browning distorted by the atmosphere of a monstrous and feverish dream; consequently, though there are features of resemblance, the actual world, as portrayed in her pages, is as unreal as it is possible to be. She has produced splendid effects of light and shade, most tender concords of melancholy sounds, and bursts of high-souled resonant symphonies, but little that will remain permanently true, without which there can be no permanent life in poetry. It were well for all who aspire to write poetry to be aware that such painful tension of the highest chords of human nature is not likely to produce poetry of enduring value. The sweeter, and truer, and eternally grateful notes are struck with less show of art and less self-conscious ambition. The Auld Robin Gray' of Lady Anne Lindsay will last as long as there is a book printed in the English language; the emotions it excites must ever be simple and pure as long as human nature remains as it is, and this because the spirit and form of the ballad itself are simple and pure, and the truth of it universal. The triumphs Mrs. Browning achieved were not wrought in this manner; nevertheless it will be long ere her name will fade from English literature,-ere her memory cease to be regarded with the respect and admiration due to her impassioned genius and high enthusiasm, and long ere the lovers of literature cease to regret that a premature decay shortened the course of an illustrious career.

ART. X.- Sunday: its Origin, History, and present Obligation; considered in Eight Lectures, preached before the University of Oxford in the year 1860, on the Foundation of the Rev. John Bampton, M.A., Canon of Salisbury. By JAMES AUGUSTUS HESSEY, D.C.L., Head Master of Merchant Taylors School, Preacher to the Hon. Society of Gray's Inn, &c. London: 1860.

HERE is something of a happy accident about this book. For it can seldom occur that a Bampton Lecturer, when appointed, should have by him (as Dr. Hessey tells us was his own case) materials ready collected upon a subject at once definite and extensive; and one moreover which, while possessing wide and popular interest, has not recently attracted the attention it deserves. Many an one, over whose shoulders the same mantle has been thrown, even when the choice is essentially a good one, must have found the call singularly embarrassing. We confess that in Dr. Hessey we do not recognise a man endowed very largely with the higher prophetic gifts; but we find a writer who has much to say on an important subject, and who has said it well. We have read his Lectures with great satisfaction and approval, and under their guidance have made much fuller acquaintance than we could claim before with many of his authorities, returning from such investigations with a deeper impression of his candour and diligence, though with a diminished estimate perhaps of the originality of his researches. The subject was so thoroughly investigated in some of its parts by learned writers, and especially English writers, of the seventeenth century, Selden, Heylin, Bramhall, Jeremy Taylor and others, that on these points little, perhaps, could be done, and little has been done by Dr. Hessey, but to select and arrange materials already accumulated, and to confirm or modify the judgment which his predecessors have pronounced. On all points which he touches he gives us the conclusions of a sensible, well-disciplined, and well-stored mind, though he has not in some particulars thrown all the light upon the matter which might be drawn from newly opened sources, nor employed all the approved methods of criticism which modern thought has developed.

Dr. Hessey's views are such as in Scotland would be condemned as singularly lax, and would hardly have obtained a hearing before a Presbyterian audience. Even in England it requires some courage in a clergyman to maintain them; and

VOL. CXIV. NO. CCXXXII.

N N

the credit of this courage, at any rate, will not be denied to the Bampton Lecturer. He complains (and we think with justice) that there is too generally a fear, on the part of his order, of treating the subject with fairness and openness, and notices in consequence (what can hardly fail to be the result) the growth of a contemptuous incredulity among the better-informed laity upon a topic thus evaded.

Casting his eye first over the opinions which have prevailed in England since the Reformation, Dr. Hessey divides the theories which he notes into six several varieties. The passage is too long to quote; nor, indeed, do we think that the classification is quite satisfactory, seeing that it is impossible (as he himself admits) to reduce all writers to one or other of these heads; and that variations, which to one mind seem immaterial, will appear to another to involve essential differences. More felicitous is the distribution which he adopts of all the rival theories under the two principal heads of Sabbatarian and Dominical (names which he reasonably begs may be accepted simply as useful technical distinctions, without the implication of any sort of reproach); the Sabbatarian theory being that which traces the origin and obligation of Sunday either to a Jewish or to a primæval Sabbath, whatever modifications may, nevertheless, be admitted in such particulars as its transference to another day of the week, its commemorative import, and the mode of its observance: the Dominical theory being that which, regarding the Sabbath as entirely abolished, accounts the Sunday a purely Christian institution, whether standing on Divine, or on apostolical, or merely ecclesiastical authority; so that the law of its obligation and the prescribed mode of keeping it must be sought wholly in Christian documents. Dr. Hessey advocates the Dominical theory, though taking on that theory (as we shall presently see) the ground which most nearly approaches to the Sabbatarian.

The most valuable portion of the book is that in which the author traces the history of these theories from the earliest ages until now. As the result of his conclusions respecting the first fifteen centuries of the Church (reserving however for fuller examination the apostolic age, as well as the post-Reformation period), we give, in part, Dr. Hessey's own summary of his longer narrative. He shows by ample proofs, exhibited in detail,

"That the Lord's day. . was acknowledged and observed by the Apostles and their immediate followers, as distinct from the Sabbath (or Jewish festival on the seventh day in each week); the obligation

to observe which is denied both expressly and by implication in the New Testament.

'That in the two centuries after the death of St. John, the Lord's day was never confounded with the Sabbath, but carefully distinguished from it, as an institution under the law of liberty, as observed on a different day, and with different feelings; and, moreover, that as a matter of fact it was exempt from the severity of the provisions which had been the characteristics of the Sabbath in theory, or in practice, or in both.

'That after the first three centuries a new era in the history of the Lord's day commenced; tendencies towards Sabbatarianism, or confusion of the Christian with the Jewish institution, beginning to manifest themselves. These, however, were slight until the end of the fifth century, and are traceable chiefly to and in the civil legislation of the period. Afterwards they developed themselves more decidedly. Sabbatarianism became at length systematised, in one of its phases, in the ante-Reformation Church both in England and on the Continent, by the later schoolmen, probably in their desire to lay down exact rules for conscience, and under a fancied necessity of urging the precedent of Jewish enactments in support of Christian holydays.' (Pp. 19, 20.)

After examining the passages contained in the Fathers of the second and third centuries, which bear upon the points in question, Dr. Hessey remarks as follows:

These writers speak variously of the Sabbath, some insisting on the fact of its abrogation, some bringing out its allegorical and typical character. And they speak variously of the Lord's day; some referring to the circumcision day as a type of it; some to the commencement of the manna shower, as an honour conferred by anticipation upon it; some to the primæval creation of light for its sanction; some, in fact the great majority, to the Lord's resurrection as having been its reason. They are not critics, and perhaps we cannot always coincide with their exegesis of Scripture, or sympathise with all their expressions, either in the passages now adduced, or in the rest of their compositions; but, with every abatement, their negative evidence is most valuable. None of them speak of the Sabbath as binding on Christians, or as connected with the Christian life, except in a typical and instructive sense; none of them identify it with the Lord's day; none of them transfer the spirit of the Sabbath into the Lord s day, or refer either to the fourth commandment or to God's rest after the Creation, for the sanctions of the Lord's day.' (P. 72.)

'As they did not dream of saying that the Sabbath still exists, though shifted from the seventh day to the first by Christianity, so they did not dream of asserting that the Lord's day (admitting it to be a distinct institution) is to be observed, as was the Sabbath either of tradition or of Scripture.' (P. 304.)

"With the recognition of the Sunday, however, by the civil power, set forth especially by the decrees of Constantine, Valentinian, Theo