Mr. Greaves, with the exception of the temporary infelicity arising from the loss you advert to, is, perhaps, among our early friends, the individual on whose lot and progress Providence has borne fully as auspicious an aspect as on any other. We three have all of us the strongest reason to be thankful to that most gracious Providence. And, considering our age, and now established principles, views, and habits, it is no slight satisfaction to hope that we are now passed safe beyond the most unsteady, hazardous, and tempting periods, feelings, and scenes of life;—not that we can ever be safe but by divine preservation; but still it is no trifling advantage that some of the most pernicious influences of a bad world have necessarily, as to us, lost very much of their power. I cannot but be gratified at hearing so favorable an account of my father and mother. I should like to see them, and all of you again; but a consideration of the melancholy of parting, the enormous expense of travelling so far, with many other considerations, prevent me from forming any plan or positive intention on the subject. I deeply regret the condition of the manufacturers and the poor in your neighborhood; and the more as there seems no prospect, in the political state of the world, of any material change in favor of commerce. . . . . The business of reviewing has been the chief use I have made of the pen for a good while past, and probably will for some time to come. I mean to addict myself a good deal to other composition for a while; and, in the meantime, I consider this reviewing as the best possible kind of discipline for my improvement in composition, while also I am acquiring a little of different kinds of knowledge by the reading which attends it. The review of Crabbe's Poems in the January number is by Mr. Hall, but is only the second article he has ever contributed, and, I am afraid, may not soon be followed by any other: he has such a strange and unfortunate aversion to writing. LXXIX. TO D. PARKEN, ESQ. Bourton. There is a very good show of ability and knowledge in the Quarterly Review. The article about Spain is by some person better acquainted with the actual state of that country than any of the political critics. It involves, however, no refutation of the notions of Cobbett and us; on the contrary, it tends more fully than anything I have seen to prove the necessity of an absolute and total demolition of every part of the government, the prostration to the very dust of every institution throughout the country, in order to create any union and prolongation of the national energy. I own it goes a good way, at the same time, towards showing that this was impracticable, and therefore t at the whole design was preposterous, and the English but fools to encourage it. Southey's article may do good, by gaining the attention to the mission, of persons whose attention would never have been gained by the professedly religious publications, that is, as he will foolishly have it, the Methodistical.* . . I have not the means of learning, further than by internal evidence, what you do for the Eclectic Review. The article about Hannah More was very decently done; part of the first page being unintelligible, as should always be the case, when the article is to be of some length, in order to give it, at the outset, a kind of oracular and mysterious dignity. . . .... With great and melancholy interest I have been running through a good part of the New Annual Register for the years 1791-2-3-4, &c., and contemplating the enormous expense of talent, grand achievement, and life, under circumstances where one clearly sees the moral impossibility of doing any good. Between the depravity of the French populace and the effects inevitably produced by the coalition of the hostile powers, one sees how the greatest talents and virtues that ever came on this earth, would have failed to establish the French people in a state of liberty and happiness. LXXX. TO D. PARKEN, ESQ. Bourton. As to the phrase "gnashing of teeth," you should be more discreet than to defend it; it is quite enough to have inserted it, and it is more than enough, in condemning it, to say, that it is an attempt to turn into a witticism one of the expressions used in the Bible to describe the most dreadful of all things in the universe, the agonies inflicted by the divine vengeance in another world. As to my often adverting to the great wicked spirit, it does not become me to say that I do not too often and too lightly do this; but there is, notwithstanding, a very material difference between alluding too lightly to him as the prompter of many fooleries as well as many crimes, and alluding with the same indefensible lightness to the express, inspired description of infernal suffering. Have you any guess who wrote the admirable review of Sydney Smith in the Christian observer? Has Hall undertaken anything more? An excellent subject for him would be, when it comes to a volume, Coleridge's "Friend," excepting what is political in it. Do you read it? He is a marvellously original and subtile thinker. Appearances are favorable thus far as to religion, and I hope he is one of the few geniuses that the aforesaid Satan does not inspire, and will not be allowed to seize. If Hall should not choose, I might have the ambition of trying my own hand on this "Friend," but Hall is the proper man. * Vide Quarterly Review, Feb., 1809, Art. xvII., “Periodical Accounts relative to the Baptist Missionary Society," &c. The "four supporters" are no doubt oracular men, one and all, but I can tell these supporters that it is with the dissenters that the work will ultimately stand or fall, and with the dissenters it has but barely even now recovered its character for spirit and freedom, after its merge in that slough of low sycophancy to church and state, through which these supporters had the wisdom to make it go, in the commencement. Talk of me" hanging them," why they were within the smallest trifle of hanging themselves, and would have done it, if I and Co. had not slackened the noose, by means of a quantity of that very independence which these very same rescued and living men bawl out will be hanging of them. As it is totally out of the question to think of really pleasing both of the two great parties, the policy is to lean towards the dissenters they are the rising party, and they are the final resource and hope of anything which is to pretend to freedom of thinking; and the "supporters" know, or may know, that, do what they please, it will be absolutely impossible to satisfy permanently the church people with anything that would deserve the approbation of independent men. it is not simply the church and state peopie, as it should seem, but the high church and state that these supporters are so intimidated at: the class of persons, I suppose, that cannot endure to have it said that there has ever been corruption among statesmen, or intolerance and persecuamong bishops; i. e. who must not allow a reference to the most notorious facts of our history, even when the transactions and characters of that history are the subjects formally in hand. But why did not this right worthy class of readers patronize the Review at first, when it was so anxiously cooked to their taste? tion But LXXXI. TO THE REV. JOSEPH HUGHES. Bourton, June 28, 1810. A residence in a place like this is subject to such a perfect sameness of occurrences, actions, and feelings, that one really has a consciousness, at any time, all round the year, of having nothing at all to write about to a friend at a distance. You can form no notion of it, in the remotest degree, in your active sphere, and various expeditions, pursuits, and societies. The truth is, that my faculties suffer very materially, in point of vigor and dexterity, and even in point of mere knowledge, by this extreme recluseness of life. But this is no neighborhood to mend the matter. Society here, with the exception of one or two individuals, is all miserable trifling, and small talk. These observations involve or imply no complaint whatever of my immediate domestic society; that is soft, complacent, tender; and it is improving, too, so far as this very softness does not tend to preclude the harder subjects, and the severer exertions of thought from social converse. But in the midst of affectionate complacency, and the numerous topics of more facile discussion, my wretchedly indolent mind is reluctant to set itself, in earnest, to dialogues (in which it would not be left without co-operation) on the questions that contribute most to harden and invigorate the intellectual man. We read socially a great deal; among other books, almost all those that I review. As far as I read or study solitarily, I am just as desultory and unsystematic as I have always been-but shall not be to the end of the chapter. It is an interesting, though too rapid, sketch you give of your northern adventures. We must have the deficiency made up by oral recitais, a little while hence. I am glad you are not yet too old and sapless to be delighted with recollecting, on the spot, your morning of life, and its interests. I have myself but little of this capability now. Notwithstand ing the acknowledged, and not to be forgotten, beauties of Todmorden Vale, I have no wish to revisit the scene of early life, but on account of those two old persons you saw, and half a dozen others, several of them of nearly the same antiquity. I am very glad those two have once seen you; they always think of you as a benefactor to them, in having been so to me; and as long as they live they will be gratified to have at last a defined image of you in their minds. I find my immediate relationships at prodigious extremes when I turn in thought from those two venerable persons, whose joint ages amount to at least seventy-mine years a-piece, to Jack here, that is scarcely six months old. He is a healthy, vigorous fellow, and occupies quite as much of people's time and attention as he deserves. As to "education," if he live to be its progressive subject, it may be much better than the ordinary quality of that article, and yet far enough from "perfect." If, however, it could be near perfection, I know too much of human nature to be very sanguine. LXXXII. TO THE REV. JOSEPH HUGHES. Bourton, 1810. You say there are "materials lying within you (as well as .... around you) inefficient, and but little known. Why are they inefficient? I must take the liberty of saying, you are bound to make them efficient. Were they beyond the moon or so, there were no duty in the case; but as lying within you, they are in some way or other of the nature of a talent, for which you are made accountable. For the rest, your dissertation, or rather, as I suspect, your philippic against the circle in which you move, is too sadly just. They do not derive from your presence half, nay, not a tenth part of the advantage they might, and would, if they were thoughtful and docile. But you abdicate, emphatically, the right to complain when you advert to that most stupendous instance of but partial efficiency-Him that shone a light in darkness, and "the darkness comprehended it not." At the same time, each of the "lesser lights" should be carefully trimmed, and every possible ac cession made to its means of burning and shining, however small a sphere of illumination it may be able to create in so dark and thick an atmosphere. LXXXIII. TO THE REV. JOSEPH HUGHES. Bourton, November 21, 1810. MY DEAR FRIEND,— If I had been in the habit of writing to Battersea twice a week, I suppose an hour would quite suffice to run on a sheetful; the longer the interval, the less one seems to know what one has to say. My wife and the brat are in good health. The latter grows, frisks, and indicates the decent symptoms of approaching to something of an intelligent nature; though it is, to be sure, rather a slender sign to be so full of exceeding wonderment at the knocking of a hammer, the ringing of glasses, or a blazing stick. But doubtless I, and even you, were once at this very same pass. He is degenerate, physically, from the genuine Yorkshire quality, for he does not walk yet, at an age at which I, and three more of us in succession, were able to march and fight. His elders keep strictly at home, save that I frequently go out hither or thither of a Sunday. . . . . One of the places I have had most frequently to go to, is a town about ten miles hence, where one worthy individual, a tradesman, has been the mean of commencing, and putting in a most hopeful train, a new preaching establishment. Within a few months a very neat meeting-house, to hold perhaps four hundred people, has been raised and covered in, and is expected to be opened at the beginning of January. The man's character and intentions are so unquestionably excellent, and some such undertaking is so evidently desirable in a rather large and very heathenish town (Winchcomb, seven miles on this side Cheltenham), that he has received the most marked approbation from all us zealous people in his neighborhood, and easily obtained a number of us in rotation to preach in his house, till the meeting should be raised. He is sanguine, and I think reasonably, that the expense (near 10007.) will be so far discharged, as in two or three years not to leave a very oppressive debt. . . . . The meeting-house is now vested in trustees by a deed, of which one permanent condition is, the freedom for what is called mixed communion, though this projector and conductor is himself a Baptist. It was a very serious disappointment not to see you here. . . But when you were given up, it remained among my expectations that I should before now see you in London. But, not to mention what is centripetal on the score of affection, I have each month seemed to have something indispensable to be done at home, and not a sufficiently definite business in London. I did, however, very positively resolve and promise for a fortnight at Frome and Bristol neighborhood; but when the intended time for that came, I had reviews to write, money to earn, and a long-pledged excursion with Coles for a few days to Worcester, |