Alas!

"Never durst Poet touch a pen to write,

Unless his ink were tempered with love's sighs."

No sooner does this grave, well-meaning and orderly gentleman get astride on Pegasus, than all those prankish and amorous propensities of his youth, which he has so long (and we doubt not, so successfully) schooled himself to mortify and suppress, ooze from his heart and liver, flow down the taper canals of his fingers, and burst out through his grey goose quill, till they deluge the unstained and virgin foolscap which he had dedicated to spiritual meditation. Nor is it otherwise with his sympathizing friend-Arcades ambothey are both in the same tune, and keep jiggetting and curvetting together, all tenderness and dalliance, through more than a hundred duodecimo pages.

Who this friend is, though his name is concealed for very obvious reasons, we have a most shrewd saspicion. Poetry, like travelling and politics, brings a man acquainted with strange bedfellows; and if we are not deceived by a force of internal evidence, which indeed appears almost irresistible, it is not the first time that the author of the following lines has been guilty of "little sinnings in love."

"If her lamp, while she slumbers, begins to grow dim, It is still so replenish'd with oil from above,

That the flame will revive which she hastens to trim,

And will light up her path to THE BANQUET OF LOVE." P. 95.

There can be no doubt of the subject matter of this stanza; the only wonder is "how the it got there?" It plainly relates to the hapless and over-inquisitive Psyche at the very moment of discovery; when the scalding drop is about to fall upon the bosom of her mysterious bridegroomthe theme of so many children of fancy, whether love-sick or sentimental, from the days of Apuleius to our own. Neither, Gentle Reader, can you doubt the identity of this Poet whom we here present to you, let him disguise himself as he may. Have you not already outrun our judgment, and "not without some choler" (as honest Stapleton expresses it) at finding Saul among the Prophets, have you not broken forth to yourself, in the words of Erasmus to the great (not the LITTLE) Sir Thomas, "Aut tu MORUS es, aut nullus?"

But ecce iterum.

"How cheering the thought, that the spirits in bliss Will bow their bright wings to a world such as this ;

VOL. XXI, JUNE, 1824.

Will leave the sweet songs of the mansion above,

To breathe o'er our bosoms some message of love!" P. 15.

And "here's another more potent than the first;"

"How sweet * *

** to repair

To the Garden where Mary delighted to rove;
To watch her wan cheek and her eye of despair,
To hear her low whisper of sorrow and love;

*

*

*

Contented with Mary to sorrow below,

If with her we may

P. 108.

Now mark the perpetual burden of these Ballads.

P. 8.

P. 15.

To the sight and the arms of," &c.
"And lay me to rest in the arms of," &c.
"But ascends &c. to sink in his arms." P. 57.
"And lay me to rest in their arms." P. 74.
"I long to be with thee in heaven."

P. 88.

"Go bask in the beam of his smiles." P. 50.

And lastly, their powers of description,

"I have seen the young morn, as it shed its first ray,
Engage with the mists of the hill, as in fight;

Till, cloth'd in the far-piercing splendours of day,

P. 65.

It pour'd o'er the landscape a torrent of light." P. 57.
"The wand'ring moon, with feeble beam,
Plants her fair image on the stream;
Where the pale flower her seedling casts,
A kindred flower adorns the wastes."
"Like the dew of the mountain it lay,
All sparkling and fresh on the ground;
Like the dew of the mountain it melted away,
And its place could no longer be found.'

P. 91.

We do not pretend exactly to adjust the claims of these two brother bards, who, like Bion and Moschus of old, stand cheek by jowl in one volume of amatory minora; but the strains of least Corybantian fury are most probably the right and property of the author of the Preface: who, to make amends for the greater lack of fire in his allotment of Poetry, sometimes runs out of breath and bursts almost into metre, when we least look for it, in his Prose. In this department also, we now and then fancy that we recognise a pen with which we are not unacquainted.

"This world is indeed, as far as the pursuits and habits of man are concerned, a world of shadows." P. 80.

Now we would wager our honesty as the stake, that the

hand which wrote these words was deeply dipped in the World without Souls; and if so, we are not far wrong in our distribution of the Parnassian laurels. Every body knows how much Poetry is to be found in De Rancè.

As to Doctrine, in the few droppings of it which are to be collected, it is just what might be expected.

""A man's foes' may, even now, be sometimes found in the bosom of his own household.' The same beam from heaven which visits one part of a family may not reach another. Those linked to a sincere Christian by the bonds of nature, may, as in the case of our Lord, consider him as 'beside himself." In this case, let the sacrifice cost what it will, it is essential, in a certain sense, to forsake' those who forsake Christ. We cannot adopt their principles; we cannot imitate their habits; and we may be called to separate from their society." P. 69.

This smacks strongly of the prying spirit of that school, the disciples of which, under the masque of religious zeal and affectionate remonstrance intrude upon the sacred privacy of the domestic hearth, promote separation instead of unity among those in one house, and canker the peace of families by setting up the intoxicated fancy of the children against the sober judgment of the parents.

"Scire volunt secreta domûs atque inde timeri,”

Again we are told that,

"In man, the creature who of all the works of the Lord has fallen the farthest from the perfection of his original nature." &c. P. 40.

Here we would ask the profound expositor whether the Devils are not among the works of the Lord? and if so, whether he holds that man has fallen farther than the Devils from the perfection of his original nature? Perhaps he would answer in the affirmative.

But enough of this: we did not expect to meet in these pages with much of a didactic character, and from the specimens which we have afforded, we shall not quarrel with the author of them because there is no more. Neither will we press too hardly upon that scholarship which permits itself to write" the Sea of Tiberius." P. 26. But we are threatened with three other volumes of Morning Thoughts; if they come, there is a proverb respecting DEUTÉρaι Opovтides which we sincerely trust will not lose its application. We are not, however, without hope that they may be stifled before their birth; for their appearance, we are told, is to depend upon the degree of public approbation which may be won by this, their

precursor. On the public opinion, we dare venture to 'pronounce boldly, but the opinion of a party may perhaps be accepted by the blindness of self-love for the opinion of the public. In quitting this volume, therefore, we would propose a single question to its author, with all good will, but with all earnestness and solemnity; and upon the return of a conscientious answer to it, we would rest our hope that the embryo mischief might even yet be suppressed. Is it consistent with the duties of a Christian minister to debauch the minds of the young, by introducing into that teaching the characteristics of which are simplicity and sobriety, inflammatory images and undefined language; which may verted to impure purposes, and applied with greater facility to an earthly than to a beavenly flame;, which are not outdone in ambiguous fervor by the crazy aspirations of a Moravian Canticle; and which, after all, at the best, are but parodies of those Melodies so pregnant with meaning, which fashion permits to be trilled languidly and, lusciously, by the lips of many who would blush if they were suspected of ability to explain the precise bearing and intelligence of words, respecting which they do not hesitate to express their general and most unqualified admiration ?

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ART. V. The Precepts of Jesus the Guide to Peace and Happiness, extracted from the Books of the New Testament ascribed to the Four Evangelists. To which are added, the first, second, and final Appeal to the Christian Public, in reply to the Observations of Dr. Marshman, of Serampore. By Rammohun Roy. 8vo. 672 pp. Calcutta, printed; London, reprinted by the Unitarian Society. 1824.

14s.

THIS is a very curious and remarkable publication, and, if we are not mistaken, it is calculated to produce a very different effect from that which has led our English Unitarians to reprint it amongst us. Its author, Rammohun Roy, as is well known, is a learned Brahmin, who, like many of the ancient philosophers, not being satisfied with the popular idolatries of his countrymen, set his wits to work, to extract, out of the heterogeneous mass of Hindoo superstitions, a system of pure Theism; or, as it is now termed, Monotheism. He does not appear to have been very successful in these attempts to reform the opinions of his brethren; and we

imagine that he produced much about the same effect by his translation of "The Vedant" on the inhabitants of India, as was formerly produced on the slaves of Rome by the writings of Epictetus, or on its patricians by those of Antoninus.

Not being quite satisfied with the success arising out of these Monotheistie deductions from the Veda and the Vedant, this worthy Brahmin next turned his attention to the writers of the New Testament-from the perusal of which he asserts, that,

"In his long and uninterrupted researches into religious truth, he found the doctrines of Christ more conducive to moral principles, and better adapted for the use of rational beings, than any other which had come to his knowledge. The doctrine of the Trinity, however, which appeared to his mind quite as objectionable as the Polytheism of the Hindoos, presented an insuperable obstacle to his conversion to Christianity, as he found it professed by those with whom he conversed. But as the system so fully approved itself, in other respects, to his reason and his piety, his candour would not, on account of this single difficulty, allow him at once to reject it as false. As the most likely method of acquiring a correct knowledge of its doctrines, he determined upon a careful perusal of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures in their original languages. From this undertaking he arose with a firm persuasion, that the doctrine of the Trinity was not inculcated in them, and that the Christian religion was true and divine." Preface, p. xiii.

Having now commenced a Unitarian-no, we beg his pardon-an Arian Christian-he lost no time in presenting his countrymen with the fruits of his conversion. To this end he published the work which is the basis of the present article: "The precepts of Jesus," &c. This consists entirely of extracts from the four Evangelists; i. e. their moral sentences disjoined from their doctrinal sentiments. It is not surprising that such a publication attracted the notice of our Christian Missionaries; accordingly, it soon produced a controversy at Calcutta, just as would have happened in this quarter of the world.

We have no wish at all to enter into the particulars of this controversy. The publications of Dr. Marshman and his, friends, have been reprinted, we believe, by the Baptist Society in this country-also, per contra, those of Rammohun Roy are now reprinted by the Unitarians. As members of the Church of England, we have no immediate concern with either of these parties, and we conceive that our neutrality in this respect, enables us to give a candid view of the general merits of the controversy.