mark, Bide a wee, Doctor, bide a wee, and ye's and Robert Hall, in whose lofty eloquence be dry eneuch when ye get into the pulpit."

Secondly, there is the Biblical-criticism style, growing too common with many among the more scholarly of the clergy, which produces sermons very valuable in type, but not equally valuable in the pulpit; thirdly, there is the moral or didactic style, which as the audience gets educated tends to pass away, audiences of to-day not being much edified by Sunday essays on life, which the Saturday Review or the Spectator can do twice as well; fourthly, the alarmist style, which as universalism spreads becomes of less and less moment, except as it empties churches; and fifthly, the gentle style

he evidently believes - he was perhaps the

our

example of seventh style- and of whom he gives this anecdote, which to us at least is new:

"Hall was of an independent spirit, and often winced under the control exercised, or attempted to be exercised, by English Dissenters over the preaching of their pastors. I had the following anecdote from Dr. Chalmers: - A member of his flock, presuming on his weight and influence in the congregation, had called upon him and took him to task for not more frequently or more fully preaching Predestination, which he hoped would in future be more referred to. Hall, the most moderate and cautious of men on this dark question, was very indignant; he looked steadily

which urges the promises of the Gospel. at his censor for a time, and replied, Sir, I perDean Ramsay descants on each in a gossipy ceive that you are predestinated to be an ass; but withal serious and gently forbearing and what is more, I see that you are determined way irresistibly attractive; but nevertheless to make your calling and election sure!'"

he forgets both the sixth and the seventh

styles, which seem to us to be among the effective styles of preaching, namely, the human, in which the preacher talks of religion as a man talks with his brethren of other things of importance, using plain words, and familiar illustrations, and strong

Mere brutality, most readers will say; but Dean Ramsay has lived among churches where every old woman is a critic, and cannot forbear a certain sympathy, and neither can we. He then glides into an analysis of the power displayed in the pulpit by Chalappeals, and caring only to convince; and mers and Irving - an analysis of little orithe oratorical, when a man gifted to that ginality, and revealing, we think, a someend makes ideas which are perhaps old, and what florid taste - and ends with this genthoughts which are perhaps flat, powerful eral counsel, at least as much needed in through his faculty at once of delivery and England as in the Dean's own country: expression. is the "Sermons will vary much in language, in most common and effective among the style, and in ability; but there are certain qualpreachers of this world, the least frequent ities which should be found in all sermons, and

among the preachers of the next. This, we take it, was the main gift of Chrysostom, in whom the Dean believes so greatly, but whose discourses, if badly delivered or so arranged as to lack some of that external beauty of which it is so difficult to divest them, might seem in a modern pulpit very flat things indeed. No man appears among us even now with the fire of the genuine orator on his lips, the prose poet who can stir men, but his church or chapel fills to the roof with men careless of his special " Would I describe a preacher such as Paul, dogmatic opinions.

certain qualities which should be excluded from all. There should always be gravity, sincerity, simplicity, earnestness, and truth. There never should be affectation, buffoonery, or self-conceit. There never should be the vanity which would sacrifice propriety to popularity. Men will have their favourite preachers - men will have their

Dean Ramsay passes lightly, but easily, over the historical portion of his subject, interlacing short but pithy accounts of ancient, mediæval, and Reformation preaching with many a quaint or humorous anecdote; outlines Hooker, Barrow, and Jeremy Taylor, of which triad he prefers the last, as the man of genius, "the Shakespeare of the pulpit," mentions, not we think very lovingly, Massillon and Lacordaire, Whitfield, whose sermons, however, he had never seen, John Wesley, of whom he quotes the markedly doctrinal opinion given above,

own ideas of what are the finest sermons.

But

the essential elements of the true Christian orator have been already drawn by the hand of a

master:

Were he on earth, would hear, approve, and

own,

Paul should himself direct me. I would trace

His master strokes, and draw from his de-
sign;

I would express him simple, grave, sincere;
In doctrine uncorrupt; in language plain,
And plain in manner; decent, solemn, chaste,
And natural in gesture; much impressed
Himself, as conscious of his awful charge,
And anxious mainly that the flock he feeds
May feel it too; affectionate in look,
And tender in address, as well becomes
A messenger of grace to guilty man.''"

From The Spectator, 22 Aug.

THE LESSON OF THE FRENCH LOAN.

PEOPLE who care to understand Continental politics, that is, the inter-relation of three out of the four active races of mankind, will do well to read, and read with some care, M. Magne's report to the Emperor upon the recent Loan. It is for politicians a most instructive paper. It is very easy and quite true to say that it is "lyrical," and "inflated," and "Byzantine," and no doubt the style of the Second Empire is as offensive either to a simple or to a cultivated taste as it is well conceivable that any system of arranging words should be. That habit of ascribing the earth's mo

tion on its axis to the wisdom of the Emperor, or the Constitution of the United States, or to the glorious revolution of 1688, is, no doubt, extremely wearisome, and when the theme is pursued in a quasiOssianic dialect, like that of M. Magne, or Mr. Seward, or the Daily Telegraph, it ex

going under any circumstances - with great ease at 4 1-2 per cent. The effort would be great, the burden would be great, the ultimate suffering might be very great indeed; but still, Napoleon could find in a day the means of waging a war of the grandest magnitude, the sort of war which extinguishes States and creates Empires, through an entire year. And there is no sufficient proof, in fact, no proof at all, that France, with greater effort, and a heavier burden, and more ultimate suffering, could not repeat the exertion, could not, that is, keep up a national war, in the highest, fullest, and most exhausting sense of that phrase, for two full years. Even the first fact, which is beyond doubt, is a tremendous one, one it is most unwise to forget, one which explains many circumstances otherwise inexplicable in Continental affairs, one that fully justifies Continental statesmen in a certain terror, or, as it were, awe of France which we are apt in our islands sometimes to despise. They know better than

cites a feeling very hard to be distinguished we do what the resources of France are, from loathing. Nevertheless, truth is how splendidly great are the latent powers truth, however expressed, and the truth on at the disposal of any French ruler once which the French Minister of Finance di- fairly engaged in war. They know, and so lates with such offensive unction is one it is do we, that France is organized permamost inexpedient to forget. Six hundred nently like an army, that the exquisite millions sterling, says M. Magne, thirty- mechanism really works, that the Emperor

four times all we asked, have been subscribed to a loan at three per cent., and what a magnificence of power is there? Well, M. Magne, if judged by arithmeticians or financiers who understand what the resources of nations really are, is, no doubt, lending himself to the publication of fibs. No nation, not England or the Union, could subscribe 600,000,000l. in cash to any loan, on any terms, in any season, however favourable. Half the subscriptions to the French Loan must be struck away at once as mere figures put down in order to ensure a chance of the premium, with no intention of actually subscribing anything but the deposit, and at least half of the remaining moiety as the result of a bold guess that the Government would not require a fifth or a third of the amount nominally subscribed. Nevertheless, when these allowances are made, the facts remain that 26,000,000l. were paid as a deposit in hard cash, that the tenth which will be allotted to most subscribers is less than they hoped for, that, to

in Paris cannot breathe without some faint film appearing on mirrors in Auxerre and Marseilles. They know, and so do we, that ten words uttered in a little white and gold room in the Tuileries would set in motion a machine as strong as a locomotive and as carefully regulated as a watch. And they know, what we sometimes forget, the depth of the mine from which this machine can be supplied. We English hear of discontents in France, and opposition, and conscriptions, and exhaustive administrative devices, and the petite culture, and peasants' mortgages, and bad farming, and high taxes, till we are blinded to the grand fact that in one of the richest corners of the earth thirty-five millions of the most industrious, most inventive, and least wasteful of mankind are exhausting energy in the effort to produce. Among countries thoroughly organized or fairly developed, there is none like France, none with so varied a richness of soil and climate. We are very proud of counties like Essex, where the

use conjectural but still obviously trustwor- land, if one puts ten pounds an acre into it, thy figures, the Empire could have raised can be made to yield ten quarters of good

100,000,000l., rather more than an extra year's revenue, eight years' of the ordinary expenditure on the Army, a year of the highest estimated cost of that Army in full motion - two millions a week would keep it

wheat; but there are districts of France as large as Essex which would bear a rental of ten pounds an acre, and then yield a profit to the cultivator of the vine. There are Englands in France as rich as England in all but minds, and those Englands are | with Europe behind them, were still opnot tilled by slouching hinds with nothing pressed with one sovereign dread, might but the Union before them; but by owners, not France rise to spit them out? - and by men to whose thrift the thrift of Lowland the Allies were right. So far from wonScotchmen is wastefulness, men who dream dering that Bismarck hesitates, we wonder

of the spade as they sleep, men who never in life lighted a lamp because the sun costs nothing per hour. There is nothing in the world quite so greedy as the greed of a French peasant, and he expends it first of all upon his land. He has insufficient capital? True, so he makes it up in toil; mortgages? so his wife and children grow old with labour before their time; heavy taxes? so he lives on lentils; a conscription? so women draw as well as guide the plough. We should like to set a few "industrious "British labourers, or artizans either, down in a central district of France, say Auvergne, to get a living out of a handkerchief estate, with the regular mortgages on it, for five

that he can even dream of internecine war with a power so terrible, a power which, were the Channel dry land, would make every Englishman a soldier, and then leave him doubtful whether, being a soldier, he was secure in his sleep.

That this power of France, this organized strength, is no protection to the Empire, considered as an alternative form of Government, we may readily admit. A Republic once established could get a loan just as easily as the Empire; Louis Philippe did get loans at a much cheaper rate. м. Grévy's election for the Jura is not the less ominous a sign, because his constituents obtain and hoard more cash than Englishmen

years. They would come back with a suppose. M. Magne's success may, for

slightly different notion of what work meant, and what extravagance meant too. With everything against him except his soil, insufficient capital, heavy taxation, a conscription, and no machinery, the French peasant gets wealth out of his sweat of which Englishmen are wholly unaware, wealth which dispenses with the poor law, wealth which, when the nation calls on it, seems practically exhaustless, or if destroyed is, like the wealth of Egypt, renewed in the next overflooding. Nobody in France is wealthy as in England, but in every one of those eight millions of houses there is cash, cash kept though its owners are driven to lentils without salt - cash which, if they were educated, would be expended in a hundred fruitful enterprises; but which, being as they are, they will trust only to the State, that is, to themselves, and to the land. People talk of repudiation in France. Well, Paris may decree repudiation, if her rulers dare at the same moment wipe out the mortgages on the land, the private as well as the public Rente; but if not, Paris, with all her chequered history, will never have been in such danger yet. And all this, all these hoards, these estates, these people, are at the disposal of the Government for a national war, for any war which seems essential to the honour of the one thing the peasant sets before himself

ought we can prove, be altogether forgotten in the Tuileries, in presence of the fact that an agricultural department without a city has, for the first time since 1848, declared by a vote of two to one that it will none of Bonapartism, that it prefers the man who resisted the establishment of the Presidency, and moved that the Sovereign Assembly elect and remove its own executive when needful, as Premiers are elected in England. All that is proved by M. Magne's report, all that we wish to make clear to our readers, is that the Jura is none the poorer or weaker because M. Grévy is elected, that France is immensely, terribly powerful, whether the Opposition or the Emperor rules. They know quite as well as we do the permanent corollary of that fact, that while the Head of the Administration rules, - be he Napoleon or Cavaignac, worshipped or hated, - he can dispose of this strength; that if two hundred and fifty MM. Grévys were elected, they, war once declared, would be for conducting it to victory. If, then, France is so great and her mechanism so absolutely under the control of the engineer, can we wonder that Germany pauses to think out the risk of invasion, that every power on earth, from the Union to Spain, hesitates and delays and negotiates and sometimes succumbs, before it compels the engineer to set in motion

France. After twenty years of battle, after such a machine. It is nervous work, cutthe Emperor had decreed that only sons ting the dam of a pond; but cutting the should enter the ranks, when whole districts dyke of a reservoir, and that as full as

were tilled by women, and beasts fit to draw

the plough were not in the land, the Allies,

France!

:

From Temple Bar.

SAMUEL LOVER.

HIS LIFE, GENIUS, AND WRITINGS: WITH SOME-
THING ABOUT SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

BY THE KNIGHT OF INNISHOWEN.

THE grave has just closed over the most popular of Ireland's song-writers since the days of Moore; and although his sweet pathos and genuine native humour are undoubted, he cannot be ranked anything like second to the noblest of her lyric writers. Lover died at the ripe age of seventy-two,

Miscellany," in the days when Dickens came out in that periodical with his "Oliver Twist," Harrison Ainsworth with his "Jack Sheppard" and "Guy Fawkes," and Albert Smith with his "Ledbury Family" and "Marchioness of Brinvilliers." Lover's Irish novel had some capital scenes, full of rich humour here and there, but it failed in sustainment and artistic treatment generally. Finis coronat opus - the end and test of such works are their sale; and the sale of "Handy Andy," when republished from the "Miscellany" in the usual after having enjoyed life peacefully and three-volume novel, was anything but a pleasantly enough, and fulfilled a destiny crowning success. The fortunate writer of which, estimating his genius and education short and racy episodes in the history of the at their true worth, was quite as fortunate Irish national character, such as those which as he or his warmest admirers had a right introduced him at his first going off to Dubto expect. Some perhaps who, remember- lin notice, and which he rendered addition

ing his earlier productions, which were by far his best, and disappointed at the falling off he displayed in his subsequent efforts, would rank him amongst

ally attractive by his accompanying pencil sketches, as well as by reciting them at the best evening parties and convivial meetings of the Irish capital, completely failed when he came to make a longer and more laborious, in other words, a more compli

"Rory O'More," which as a ballad, and a first-rate one it is, was sung in every direction, from the drawing-room to the street, and played by the band of every regiment throughout the United Kingdom - even the Temperance Bands of Hope used to play it

"The inheritors of unfulfill'd renown; " whilst others look upon his merits, in a lit-cated effort. erary point of view, as overrated, and the renown he attained, if the term can be applied to such literary achievements as his, in a great measure unmerited. The truth lies mid-way between, as in similar cases of exaggeration on both sides. At his period of middle age (in his younger days he was a miniature-painter), he achieved very considerable, indeed high fame, as having written about a dozen very pretty - some of them pathetic, some of them humourous songs, all of them on Irish subjects, and placed a successful Irish comedy ("The White Horse of the Peppards") on the stage, the chief character in which latter production drew out the best powers of the most popular Irish actor of our time, the late lamented Tyrone Power. This was something for an Irishman, and an unlettered one, conventionally speaking, to achieve, when Moore was yet alive, and we were still reminded of Sheridan in the presence of his beautiful and gifted granddaugh

ters.

Fortunate would it have been for Lover if, instead of abandoning his portrait-painting, he had followed it as his chief support, and made his literary realisations a secondary consideration to his original and legitimate profession. But he had thrown himself upon the world of literature, and he must fag on.

"Handy Andy," a rollicking sort of novel, immeasurably inferior to any of the "Harry Lorrequer" set, appeared at irregular intervals in the pages of "Bentley's

was raised, after some by no means unskilful manipulations on the part of its author, to the dignity of an operetta, and had no inconsiderable success. It lived its little day, and shared the fate of much higher productions of our lyric stage at the hands of a people who never will have a native school of music, because they will not steadily encourage one by whom Barnet, Balfe, Loder, Macfarlane, and Wallace, were praised, patronised for a little season, neglected, and forgotten!

It was upwards of thirty years ago, when I was a student of Trinity College, and a scribbler in one or other of the Dublin publications, that I met, for the first time, Mr. Lover, then approaching his fortieth year, on the occasion of both of us paying a morning visit to an English prima donna who was then starring it on the Dublin boards. This lady's musical knowledge and judgment as well-and they do not always go together - were superior to her voice, which was of a high range, but not of the highest. The little pet of the Dublin drawing-room, for he had come out successfully in the leading society of the Irish capital a season or two previously, with his droll native stories and recitations, had come to submit a song for her opinion, which, although it was one of his first efforts* at song-writing, he | when he wrote everything short; when he sat down to the pianoforte and threw off conceived happy thought or seized on for us without any mauvaise honte or hesita- some one else's, packed it up into a little tion. His voice, if not like the great poet's casket or cadre of a dozen or score of pretty " still small voice of conscience," was still lines, and made the most of it. Like a small one enough, in all conscience. Like Moore, he sang his songs to his own accomTom Moore's, however, it was sweetly mod- paniment, and quite as judiciously did he