You have seldom or never had the truth spoken to you when you have been directly addressed. You have been called the enlightened Public, the generous Public, the judicious Public, the liberal Public, the discerning Public, and so forth. Nay your

bare title THE PUBLIC oftentimes stands

alone par excellence in its plain majesty like that of the king, as if needing no affix to denote its inherent and pre-eminent importance. But I will speak truth to you, my Public.

Be not deceived! I have no bended knees,
No supple tongue, no speeches steep'd in oil,
No candied flattery, nor honied words! †

I must speak the truth to you, my Public,

Sincera verità non vuol tacersi.‡

Where your enlightenedness (if there be such a word) consists, and your generosity, and your judgment, and your liberality, and

your discernment, and your majesty to boot, - to express myself as Whitfield or Rowland Hill would have done in such a case (for they knew the force of language) - I must say, it would puzzle the Devil to tell. П faut librement avec verité francher ce mot, sans en estre repris; ou si l'on est, c'est trèsmal à propos.§

I will tell you what you are; you are a great, ugly, many-headed beast, with a great many ears which are long, hairy, ticklish, moveable, erect, and never at rest.

Look at your picture in Southey's Hexameters, that poem in which his laureated Doctorship writes verses by the yard instead of the foot, he describes you as "manyheaded and monstrous,"

Such as will join their profit with their pleasure, And come to feed their understanding parts; For these I'll prodigally spend myself, And speak away my spirit into air; For these I'll melt my brain into invention, Coin new conceits, and hang my richest words As polished jewels in their bounteous ears.] Such readers, they who to their learning add knowledge, and to their knowledge wisdom, and to their wisdom benevolence, will say to me,

Ὦ καλὰ λέγων, πολὺ δ' ἄμεινον' ἔτι τῶν λόγων
ἐργασάμεν', εἴθ ̓ ἐπέλα

θοις ἅπαντά μοι σαφῶς·

ὡς ἐγώ μοι δοκῶ

approve his writings, he would call for a division and count a majority. To please them is to obtain an earnest of enduring fame; for which, if it be worth anything, no price can be too great. But for the aggregate anything is good enough. Yes, my Public, Mr. Hume's arithmetic, and Mr. Brougham's logic, Lord Castlereagh's syntax, Mr. Irving's religion, and Mr. Carlisle's irreligion, the politics of the Edinburgh Review, and the criticism of the Quarterly, Thames water, Brewers' beer, Spanish loans, old jokes, new constitutions, Irish eloquence, Scotch metaphysics, Tom and Jerry, Zimmerman on Solitude, Chancery Equity and Old Bailey Law, Parliamentary wit, the patriotism of a Whig Borough-monger, and the consistency of a British cabinet; Et s'il y a encore quelque chose à dire, je le tiens pour dit.

Yes, my Public,

Nor would I you should look for other looks,
Gesture, or compliment from me. *

Minus dico quam vellem, et verba omninò | frigidiora hæc quam ut satis exprimant quod concipio: these and anything worse than these, if worse than what is worse can be imagined, will do for you. If there be anything in infinite possibility more worthless than these, more floccical-naucical, nihilishpilish, assisal-teruncial, more good for nothing than good for nothingness itself, it is good enough for you.

themselves, and there whipt into a little more learning, so many silly classifications of this kind would not mislead those readers who suppose, in the simplicity of their own good faith, that no man presumes to write upon a subject which he does not understand.

Stiles may with more accuracy be classed, and for this purpose metals might be used in literature as they are in heraldry. We might speak of the golden stile, the silver, the iron, the leaden, the pinchbeck and the bronze.

Others there are which cannot be brought under any of these appellations. There is the Cyclopean stile, of which Johnson is the great example; the sparkling, or micacious, possessed by Hazlitt, and much affected in Reviews and Magazines; the oleaginous, in which Mr. Charles Butler bears the palm, or more appropriately the olive branch: the fulminating which is Walter Landor's, whose conversation has been compared to thunder and lightning; the impenetrable — which is sometimes used by Mr. Coleridge; and the Jeremy-Benthamite, which cannot with propriety be distinguished by any other name than one derived from its unparalleled and unparallelable author.

Ex stilo, says Erasmus, perpendimus ingenium cujusque, omnemque mentis habitum ex ipsâ dictionis ratione conjectamus. Est enim tumidi, stilus turgidus; abjecti, humilis, exanguis; asperi, scaber; amarulenti, tristis ac maledicus; deliciis affluentis, picturatus ac dissolutus; Breviter, omne vitæ simulacrum, omnis animi vis, in oratione perinde ut in speculo repræsentatur, ac vel intima pectoris, arcanis quibusdam vestigiis, deprehenduntur.

There is the lean stile, of which Nathaniel Lardner, and William Coxe may be held up as examples; and there is the larded one, exemplified in Bishop Andrewes, and in Burton, the Anatomist of Melancholy; Jeremy Taylor's is both a flowery and a fruitful stile: Harvey the Meditationist's a There are the hard and dry; weedy one. the weak and watery; the manly and the womanly; the juvenile and the anile; the round and the pointed; the flashy and the fiery; the lucid and the opaque; the lumi

nous and the tenebrous; the continuous and the disjointed. The washy and the slapdash are both much in vogue, especially in magazines and reviews; so are the barbed and the venomed. The High-Slang stile is exhibited in the Court Journal and in Mr. Colburn's novels; the Low-Slang in Tom and Jerry, Bell's Life in London, and most Magazines, those especially which are of most pretensions.

The flatulent stile, the feverish, the aguish, and the atrabilious, are all as common as the diseases of body from which they take their name, and of mind in which they originate; and not less common than either is the dyspeptic stile, proceeding from a weakness in the digestive faculty.

Learned, or if not learned, Dear Reader, I had much to say of stile, but the under written passage from that beautiful book, Xenophon's Memorabilia Socratis, has induced me, as the Latins say, stilum vertere, and to erase a paragraph written with ink in which the gall predominated.

Ἐγὼ δ ̓ οὖν καὶ αὐτὸς, ὦ Αντιβῶν, ὥστες ἀλλές τις ἢ ἵππῳ ἀγαθῷ ἢ κυνὶ ἢ ὄρνιθι ήδεται, οὕτω καὶ ἔτι μᾶλλον ήδομαι | τοῖς φίλοις ἀγαθοῖς· καὶ, ἐάν τι σχῶ ἀγαθὸν διδάσκω, καὶ ἄλλοις σύνιστημι, παρ ̓ ὧν ἂν ἡγῶμαι ὠφελήσεσθαί τι αὐτοὺς εἰς ἀρετήν· καὶ τοὺς θησαυροὺς τῶν πάλαι σοφῶν ἀνδρῶν, οὓς

with the thorough-paced Liberals, that there is no Principle at all, (and in one sense, exemplify this in your own conduct,) or with the Unitarians that there is no Evil one; or whether you incline to the Manichean scheme of Two Principles, which is said to have its advocates,—in either case the diabolical expletive in your speech is alike reprehensible : you deserve a reprimand for it; and you are hereby reprimanded accordingly.- Having discharged this duty, I answer your question in the words of Terence, with which I doubt not you are acquainted, because they are to be found in the Eton grammar: Homo sum, nihil humani à me alienum puto."

"And what the Devil have the words of Terence to do with my query?"

"You are again reprimanded, Sir. If it be a bad thing to have the Devil at one's elbow, it cannot be a good one to have him at one's tongue's end. The sentence is sufficiently applicable. It is a humane thing to offer advice where it is wanted, and a very humane thing to write and publish a book which is intended to be either useful or delightful to those who read it."

"A humane thing to write a book! — Martin of Galway's humanity is not a better

"Martin of Galway's humanity is no joke, Sir. He has begun a good work, and will be remembered for it with that honour which is due to all who have endeavoured to lessen the sum of suffering and wickedness in this wicked world."

"Answer me one question, Mr. Author, if you please. If your book is intended to be either useful or delightful, why have you filled it with such a parcel of nonsense?

"What you are pleased to call by that name, Mr. Reader, may be either sense or nonsense according to the understanding which it meets with. Quicquid recipitur, recipitur in modum recipientis. Look in the seventh Chapter of the second book of Esdras, and at the twenty-fifth verse you will find the solution of your demand.”

"And do you suppose I shall take the trouble of looking into the Bible to please the humour of such a fellow as you ?"

"If you do not, Sir, there are others who will; and more good may arise from looking into that book,-even upon such an occasion, than either they or I can anticipate."

And so, scornful reader, wishing thee a better mind, and an enlightened understanding, I bid thee gladly and heartily farewell!

PREFACE TO THE

THE present Volume contains all that it is thought advisable to publish of the Papers and Fragments for THE DOCTOR, &c. Some of these Papers, as in the former Volume, were written out fair and ready for Publication but the order, and the arrangement intended is altogether unknown.

I have taken care to examine the different extracts, - and occasionally I have added a note or an explanation, where such seemed to be needed.

Mihi dulces

Sept. 14th, 1847.

CHAPTER CCI.

QUESTION CONCERNING THE USE OF TONGUES. THE ATHANASIAN CONFESSORS. GIBBON'S RELATION OF THE SUPPOSED MIRACLE OF

thy labourer the ox, thy servant the horse, thy friend, if thou deservest to have such a friend, the dog, thy playfellow the kitten, and thy cousin the monkey? †

THE MIRACLE IMAGINARY, AND THE HISTORIAN THE DUPE OF HIS OWN UNBELIEF.

FOR what use were our tongues given us? "To speak with, to be sure," will be the immediate reply of many a reader. But Master, Mistress, Miss or Master Speaker, (whichever you may happen to be,) I beg leave to observe that this is only one of the uses for which that member was formed, and that for this alone it has deserved to be called an unruly member; it is not its primary, nor by any means its most important use. For what use was it given to

This refers to Vol. vii. of the edition in 8vo.

because it is for my present purpose to make it appear that the tongue, although a very convenient instrument of speech, is not necessary for it.

It is related in Gibbon's great history, a work which can never be too highly praised for its ability, nor too severely condemned for the false philosophy which pervades it,

maritime colony of Mauritania, were by that the Catholics, inhabitants of Tipasa, a command of the Arian King, Hunneric, Genseric's detestable son and successor, assembled on the forum, and there deprived of their right hands and their tongues. "But the holy confessors," he proceeds to "continued to speak without tongues; say,

Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia notis. ENNIUS.

and this miracle is attested by Victor, an African bishop, who published an history of the persecution within two years after the event. If any one,' says Victor, 'should doubt of the truth, let him repair to Constantinople, and listen to the clear and perfect language of Restitutus, the subdeacon, one of these glorious sufferers, who is now lodged in the palace of the Emperor Zeno, and is respected by the devout Empress.' At Constantinople we are astonished to find a cool, a learned, an unexceptionable witness, without interest and without passion. Eneas of Gaza, a Platonic philosopher, has accurately described his own observations on these African sufferers. 'I saw them myself: I heard them speak: I diligently inquired by what means such an articulate voice could be formed without any organ of speech I used my eyes to examine the report of my ears: I opened their mouth, and saw that the whole tongue had been completely torn away by the roots; an operation which the physicians generally suppose to be mortal.' The testimony of Eneas of Gaza might be confirmed by the superfluous evidence of the Emperor Justinian, in a perpetual edict; of Count Marcellinus in his Chronicles of the times; and of Pope Gregory the First, who had resided at Constantinople as the minister of the Roman Pontiff. They all lived within the compass of a century, and they all appeal to their personal knowledge, or the public notoriety, for the truth of a miracle, which was repeated in several instances, displayed on the greatest theatre of the world, and submitted during a series of years, to the calm examination of the senses." He adds in a note that the miracle is enhanced by the singular instance of a boy who had never spoken before his tongue was cut out."

Now comes the unbelieving historian's comment. He says, "this supernatural gift of the African confessors, who spoke without tongues, will command the assent of those, and of those only, who already believe, that their language was pure and orthodox. But the stubborn mind of an infidel is

guarded by secret, incurable suspicion; and the Arian, or Socinian, who has seriously rejected the doctrines of the Trinity, will not be shaken by the most plausible evidence of an Athanasian miracle."

Well has the sceptical historian applied the epithet stubborn to a mind affected with the same disease as his own.

Oh dear unbelief

How wealthy dost thou make thy owner's wit!
Thou train of knowledge, what a privilege
Thou givest to thy possessor! anchorest him
From floating with the tide of vulgar faith,
From being damn'd with multitudes ! *

Gibbon would not believe the story because it had been adduced as a miracle in confirmation of the Catholic doctrine as opposed to the Arian heresy. He might probably have questioned the relation between the alleged miracle and the doctrine and if he had argued that it is not consistent with the plan of revelation (so far as we may presume to reason upon it) for a miracle to be wrought in proof of a doctrinal point, a Christian who believes sincerely in that very doctrine might agree with him.

But the circumstances are attested, as he fairly admits, by the most ample and unexceptionable testimony; and like the Platonic philosopher whose evidence he quotes, he ought to have considered the matter of fact, without regard to the application which the Catholics, in perfect good faith, made of it. The story is true, but it is not miraculous.

Cases which demonstrate the latter part of this question were known to physiologists before a book was published at Paris in the year 1765, the title of which I find in Mr. D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature, thus translated; "The Christian Religion proved by a single fact; or a Dissertation in which is shown that those Catholics whose tongues Hunneric King of the Vandals cut out, spoke miraculously all the remainder of their days: from whence is deduced the consequence of the miracle against the Arians, the Socinians and the Deists, and particularly against the author of Emilius,

* MARSTON.