our habits of chewing, spitting, and eating, we are silly enough to quarrel. To the United States, in reference to the popgun shots of foreign tourists, might be addressed the warning which Peter Plymley thundered against Bonaparte, in reference to the Anti-Jacobin jests of Canning: Tremble, oh! thou land of many spitters and voters, "for a pleasant man has come out against thee, and thou shalt be laid low by a joker of jokes, and he shall talk his pleasant talk to thee, and thou shalt be no more!" In order that America may take its due rank in the commonwealth of nations, a literature is needed which shall be the exponent of its higher life. We live in times of turbulence and change. There is a general dissatisfaction, manifesting itself often in rude contests and ruder speech, with the gulf which separates principles from actions. Men are struggling to realize dim ideals of right and truth, and each failure adds to the desperate earnestness of their efforts. Beneath all the shrewdness and selfishness of the American character, there is a smouldering enthusiasm which flames out at the first touch of fire,—sometimes at the hot and hasty words of party, and sometimes at the bidding of great thoughts and unselfish principles. The heart of the nation is easily stirred to its depths; but those who rouse its fiery impulses into action are often men compounded of ignorance and wickedness, and wholly unfitted to guide the passions which they are able to excite. There is no country in the world which has nobler ideas embodied in more worthless shapes. All our factions, fanaticisms, reforms, parties, creeds, ridiculous or dangerous though they often appear, are founded on some aspiration or reality which deserves a better form and expression. There is a mighty power in great speech. If the sources of what we call our fooleries and faults were rightly addressed, they would echo more majestic and kindling truths. We want a poetry which shall speak in clear, loud tones to the people; a poetry which shall make us more in love with our native land, by converting its ennobling scenery into the images of lofty thoughts; which shall give visible form and life to the abstract ideas of our written constitutions; which shall confer upon virtue all the strength of principle and all the energy of passion; which shall disentangle freedom from cant and senseless hyperbole, and render it a thing of such loveliness and grandeur as to justify all self-sacrifice; which shall make us love man by the new consecrations it sheds on his life and destiny; which shall force through the thin partitions of conventionalism and expediency; vindicate the majesty of reason; give new power to the voice of conscience, and new vitality to human affection; soften and elevate passion; guide enthusiasm in a right direction; and speak out in the high language of men to a nation of men. - ART. II. Lowell Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity. By JOHN GORHAM PALFREY. With a Discourse on the Life and Character of John Lowell, Jr. By EDWARD EVERETT. Boston James Munroe and Company. 1843. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 367 and 444. - en To the late John Lowell, Jr., we are indebted, not only for the most munificent private endowment for literary or philanthropic purposes ever made in New England, but yet more for the conception of an entirely new institution, occupying at once the highest and the broadest ground, listing in its administration the best and most cultivated minds in the community, and bringing the results of their learning and acumen within the reach of multitudes who could enjoy them in no other way. The Lowell Institute is a free University,-a University for the people,—designed to embrace every department of literary, scientific, and ethical culture, to develope and cherish original thought and laborious research on the widest range of subjects, and then to give to genius or application its best reward, in an enlarged utterance, and in the power of the highest usefulness to the greatest number. The first series of lectures published in behalf of the Institute ought, of course, to contain Mr. Everett's beautiful biography of its founder. From this we learn, that the bequest, by which he has made his fellow-citizens so largely his debtors, was in entire harmony with his whole life and spirit. He belonged to that class of liberal-minded merchants, whose generous love of arts and letters has left its traces in the foundation of nearly every professorship in our ancient University, and in nearly every alcove in her library; while their philanthropy has surrounded their city with noble institutions for the relief of almost every infirmity of body, mind, and heart. Among those who have contributed to raise to so high an intellectual and moral standard the mercantile character of our metropolis, the ancestors and near kindred of Mr. Lowell, both on his father's and his mother's side, deserve, and have received from Mr. Everett, the most respectful and grateful notice. Thus surrounded by examples of talent and wealth consecrated to the public good, even while most deeply engrossed in business, Mr. Lowell neglected no worthy cause which he could aid, and shunned no trust or office, in which he could contribute to the general welfare. With an earnest thirst for knowledge, he combined a no less earnest desire for its diffusion; and a prominent item of his preparation for the extended plan of travel, in the prosecution of which he died, was the bequest of an ample portion of his property for the support of those courses of lectures which now bear his name. His testamentary directions were completed in a codicil to his will, written amidst the ruins of Thebes. These directions, with Mr. Everett's just and appropriate commentary upon them, we had marked for insertion; but find that they were quoted in a former number of this Journal, in a notice of Mr. Everett's Lecture,* an edition of which was published soon after its delivery. Referring our readers to that notice for the sketch of Mr. Lowell's life and plan, which we should otherwise have given here, we pass at once to Dr. Palfrey's Lectures. We have, in these volumes, three courses of eight lectures each, delivered in three successive years, the first course comprising the "general scheme of the evidences of Christianity," and the second and third being a compend of the history of infidelity, a synopsis of Jewish, Pagan, and Deistical objections to Christianity. We have, also, in an Appendix to the first volume, Dr. Palfrey's valuable Dudleian Lecture on "The Theory and Uses of Natural Religion." Dr. Palfrey's style of thought is eminently perspicuous. We never encounter in his writings those shadowy, half * Vol. LI. pp. 225, et seq. formed, prematurely penned ideas, which in our times stand so often in the place of sound, sober thought. His language is carefully chosen, explicit, and in pure taste. His sentences are all full of meaning, and unencumbered by mere expletives. His only fault of style is a tendency to involved, indirect, circuitous phraseology, an over-fondness for parenthesis, a too free use, and too frequent repetition of qualifying words and phrases, the besetting sin of an accurate mind, which likes not to trust to the reader any one idea, without connecting with it, in the compass of the same sentence, all its needed modifications and abatements. This peculiarity, no doubt, makes Dr. Palfrey a less popular writer with the multitude than he might otherwise be; but the patient and diligent reader will find that he is making constant progress with his author, and that, when one of these complex sentences is mastered, he has taken a long step forward on solid ground, -has become fully possessed of some one entire and definite idea closely connected with the point under discussion. The work before us is marked throughout by carefully matured thought, and by explicit and guarded statement. Its reasoning, though close and acute, is never captious or sophistical, though profound, is always clear. As a compend of the evidences of Christianity, it takes precedence of all previous works in point of comprehensiveness and thoroughness, while in no respect is it inferior to any, except that one may miss in it the winning naïveté of Paley's style and manner, a grace in which he confessedly stands alone and unapproached. Dr. Palfrey's reasoning is, throughout, severely just and accurate, equally shunning the opposite errors of unauthorized assumption on his own side, and of gratuitous concession to his opponents. This happy medium has rarely been attained. The error of many professed defenders of the faith has been, that they have assumed more than a skeptic is bound to grant, that they have taken their stand on a higher ground than their opponents, that they have begged some points in order to prove others. The result has been the production of wholesome homilies, of well-phrased panegyrics on Christianity, highly edifying to a believer, but worse than useless for their professed purpose, inasmuch as they leave upon an indifferent or hostile mind the impression, VOL. LVIII. NO. 122. 6 that Christianity has not its basis in the common laws of belief, in those fundamental truths which no one questions. Christians have written as if it were gross sacrilege to uncover the foundations of their faith; they have been restrained by sincere religious awe from the minute, logical analysis of the elements of their belief; and their adversaries have mistaken their reverence for a lurking skepticism. But in the work before us, while a tone of deep religious reverence is sustained throughout, it is not suffered to interfere with the full and candid statement of difficulties and objections, with the exhibition of the entire field of controversy, with the surrender of all the vantage-ground often claimed on the score of hallowed associations. No appeal is made to the religious biases of education, — none to the odium which so generally attaches to infidelity. Dr. Palfrey has no less happily shunned an error of the opposite bearing. Many writers on the evidences of Christianity have written as if they doubted the force of their own arguments and the validity of their own answers to objections. Difficulties, which they had seemingly disposed of, they have not suffered to lie still. Phantoms of doubt, which they had once laid, they have summoned up again. Indeed, the process in some works has seemed to be, the evoking of every spirit of unbelief, and the doing battle with all of them to the last, the curtain dropping in the midst of the grand mêlée, with the scales of victory equipoised. Dr. Palfrey claims the right of trying each separate issue by itself, — of regarding a point once proved as definitively settled, and an objection once refuted as put out of the combat. For instance, after proving that the Gospels, which we now have, are the undoubted writings of the men whose names they bear, he suffers no floating doubt of the authorship of these records to mingle with the discussion of their trustworthiness, but makes use of their genuineness, already demonstrated, as an available "stand-point" for farther reasoning. In like manner, too, when he has vindicated the Evangelists from the charge of imposture, and has made their honesty an established fact, he takes his position upon that fact in proving that they were well-informed and undeluded witnesses and historians. Now, this is the only true mode of reasoning; it is acknowledged as legitimate in every other department of inquiry; nothing that needs proof |