meaning any disrespect to the excellent of the earth whom he has chosen for his subjects,) that such powers should not, like those of Lord Clarendon, have been exercised upon characters who had acted more conspicuous parts upon the stage of life. Hall, indeed, appears to have been a very nice observer of men and manners; drawing his conclusions sometimes from trifles, which none but a keen critic of his kind would have considered as tests. Mr.,' says he to Mr. Greene, is too much taken up with the world-he is overdone with business-if you observe, Sir, he always stoops when he walks out, and looks towards the ground, as if he were of the earth, earthy.'* A remark of the same class as that of Johnson's, who pronounced upon the general character of a lady, when he saw her forbear to cut a cucumber at table; or that of Shakspeare, who makes Cæsar observe upon the leau looks of Cassius, that such men are dangerous,' and that he would rather have men about him that are fat.' 6 Accordingly in his biography, which (as may be supposed) is confined to such persons as, upon the whole, he admires, he still does not allow his admiration to dazzle his judgment; but discriminates in a way to set the party vividly before our eyes, and to work in us a conviction that the sketch is from the life. Of the letters more need not be said than that they are valuable, as all honest men's letters are, from throwing light upon the character and sentiments of their author. We have frequently referred to them already in the course of this paper, and shall be still more indebted to their contents, whilst we attempt, as we shall now do in conclusion, to put our readers in possession of a more personal knowledge of Hall-premising, however, that we have little means of estimating him but such as his writings afford. He has been described to us as a preacher of a very marked character; at the opening of his sermon somewhat embarrassed, and subject to the perpetual interruption of a short and teasing cough; but no sooner did he kindle with his theme, which he speedily did, than his manner became rapt and impassioned, his soul commercing with the skies, and the vehemence of his mind bearing before it in triumph both himself and those that heard him. His father, of whom he speaks with great feeling, was a decided Calvinist; he also a Calvinist, but of a more moderate school- that of Baxter and Howe,+ their opinion upon election being that of Milton in Paradise LostSome I have chosen of peculiar grace Elect above the rest; so is my will; The rest shall hear me call and oft be warned Reminiscences, p. 192. + Vol. v., p. 454; iii., p. 478. Their sinful state, and to appease betimes The incensed Deity, whilst offered grace The corruption of human nature he considers very great, perhaps total; he speaks of, the mind as fatally indisposed,'' alienated from the life of God,'' having no delight in his converse,' —as 'having lost the divine image.' * Yet he argues with almost all the leading divines of our church for the evidence of the law written on the heart,' for a moral impress ;'t an opinion scarcely consistent with the utter depravity of our nature. The change which he maintains it necessary for man to undergo before he becomes a new creature he holds to be rather of slow growth than of sudden impulse; and as a consequence perhaps of this, he does not entertain the doctrine of assurance; § he has for himself, indeed, a feeble hope, which he would not exchange for a world; but more than this, though a most desirable attainment, he does not regard as essential, nor would he lay claim to more in his own case. The need we have of the Holy Spirit to guide and support us in all things he strenuously and amply asserts; whilst he precludes every enthusiastic pretension, by entering as a caveat, that the internal illumination of the Spirit is merely intended to qualify the mind for distinctly perceiving and cordially embracing those objects, and no other, which are exhibited in the written word.** He disclaims the notion of conditions of salvation as meritorious, but still contends for them as a sine quâ non; the idea of the former being inconsistent with the gospel considered as a system of free grace, but the latter being necessary to confound the pretensions of a licentious professor; he holds it culpable, therefore, to flinch from the use of plain language upon this subject, inasmuch as it would pave the way, he thinks, to antinomianism. This heresy, and every approach to it, however remote, he is on every occasion most anxious to condemn; for of all the features of Hall's religion this is the most conspicuous-the practical nature of it; it shows itself at every turn; every attempt that has been made to rear religion on the ruins of nature, and to render it subversive of the economy of life, has proved, according to Hall, but a humiliating monument of human folly.§§ He loves not squeamish auditors, who can listen to nothing but doctrinal statements. He considers the general principles of morality to be not less the laws of Christ than positive rites, such as baptism or the supper of the Lord.¶¶ The credenda, or things to be believed, must indeed precede the facienda * Vol. i., pp. 237, 171, 349. § Vol. v., p. 292. ** Vol. i., p. 257. Vol. i., p. 171. §§ Vol. iii., p. 41. VOL. XLVIII. NO. XCV. K Vol. i., p. 236. ¶¶ Vol.ii., p. 138. or or things to be done, but the two must not be separated by an interval; those who have been long detained in the elementary doctrines being found to acquire a distaste for the practical,-an impatience of reproof, an aversion, in short, for everything but what flatters them with a favourable opinion of their own state; so that their religion evaporates in sentiment, and their supposed conversion is nothing more than an exchange of the vices of the brute for those of the speculator in theological difficulties.* His preaching at Plymouth, he tells us, gave general dissatisfaction, arising, as he suspects, from its practical complexion. His injunctions to Mr. Carey, when he was going out to India as a missionary, are mainly practical; he was to be mild and unassuming in his deportment, attentive to the temporal as well as spiritual interests of the natives;-he was to study human nature, the success of any great and hazardous undertaking depending, under God, on the voluntary co-operation of mankind-and the first ministers of the gospel, who were for examples, being in nothing more remarkable than in the exquisite propriety with which they conducted themselves in the most delicate situations ;-he was not to devote much time to an elaborate confutation of the Hindoo or Mahometan systems-great practical effects upon the populace being never produced by profound argumentation; his instruction was rather to run in the form of a testimony, and his manner of imparting it, though not his spirit, to be dogmatic.‡ Hall's philanthropy is still practical: that species of it which affects to feel for every part of mankind alike, he regards as spurious; it must warm in proportion as the object on which it spends itself is near, the first duty of life being to cultivate well one's own field.§ With respect to Hall's own temperament, we gather from various passages in his writings, that it was by nature indolent ;|| and many and unfeigned are the lamentations which he utters over his own unprofitableness:¶-it was averse to every kind of display; he sighs for the leisure of an obscure village, where he might escape from visiters and call his time his own; he declines a lecture in London, partly from the vanity argued by the acceptance of it; he is reluctant to attend public religious meetings, discovering in them something of an ostentatious spirit, and figuring to himself, that the Great Head of the church did not strive, nor cry, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street ;'** he is offended at the perpetual rivalry displayed at missionary sermons, as to whose collection shall be the greatest;†† he is not pleased with the + Vol. v., p. 427. Vol. iii., p. 381. Vol. i., p. 302. spectacle presented at an ordination in the Baptist denomination, when elders are congregated from far and near, more, as he thinks, for show than use; he is a foe to all canting, all gestures, all manoeuvres, all display of self; and professes no aptitude for what is called religious conversation in general company. He was irritable, as might be conjectured from a passage in his Memoir of Dr. Ryland, where there is a species of apology for occasional outbreakings of anger,-a violent suppression of the natural feelings being, as he holds, not the best expedient for obviating their injurious effects. We come to the same conclusion from a very characteristic, and, to Hall, honourable, letter of excuse to a friend for his incivility to his servant, who had caused some interruption to his closet-devotions by the pertinacious delivery of an unimportant message ;|| and, indeed, from the general tone of his writings, especially those of a political or controversial kind. Some allowance, however, is to be made for a little habitual spleen in a man who, conscious of high superiority, was depressed by circumstances below his natural level in life; for such a person, so placed, not to kick against the pricks would indeed have been a spectacle of protracted self-denial of the rarest merit, but was one which required a degree of virtue unreasonable to expect. Though unsocial, as he tells us more than once,¶ and when at Cambridge reluctant, as we have heard, to meet the advances even of men the most distinguished both for rank and talents, who studiously sought his acquaintance, he was easy and playful in his intercourse with such persons as had the privilege of his friendship, affecting amongst them no extraordinary gravity; and when, on one occasion, rebuked by a fellow-preacher of some charity sermons, more precisian than himself, for the vivacity of his conversation, Brother Hall, I am surprised at you, so frivolous, after delivering so serious a discourse!' Brother,' was the retort, I keep my nonsense for the fire-side, while you publish yours from the pulpit.'** With no one prejudice like Johnson, he still reminds us of him-he is what Johnson would have been (if it be possible to conceive him such) had he been a whig and a dissenter. He has something of his dogmatismsomething of his superstition++-something of his melancholy— something of the same proneness to erect himself before man and prostrate himself to the earth before God; a mixture of pride and of humility-of domination and self-abasement: he has much too of Johnson's love for common-sense and home-spun philosophy, combined, however, with an imagination far more vivid Vol. v., pp. 532, 556. † Vol. iv., p. 490. Reminiscences, p. 161. tt Ibid., 132. and His and excursive, for which the former qualities did not always serve as an adequate corrective. His learning is not on the same scale as his mother-wit-it is enough, however, to add stamina to his speculations, and for more perhaps he did not greatly care. knowledge of metaphysical and deistical writers appears to have been that in which he chiefly excelled; his allusions to classical authors are few, and his quotations from them (a practice which he somewhere gives us to understand he held cheap) in general trite and unscholar-like-but he was too affluent to borrow, and too independent to be a slave to authorities. We Such is our idea of this remarkable man and of his writings, formed upon a careful perusal of the five volumes before us. fear the memoir of him announced by his early friend and (we believe) fellow-student, Sir James Mackintosh, was never written. We waited long and anxiously for its appearance, but have had the sorrow to learn that the meditative and humane spirit which had undertaken this delicate task, has itself been lost to us. Some other hand will, no doubt, try to supply us with a regular life of Hall. But time rolls on-the great events of the day soon close upon every individual interest—and we have, therefore, preferred to speak for ourselves now whilst we have the season, rather than postpone our observations to a period when we might have profitably entered into the labours of others. If, in the former part of this paper, we may seem to have treated the name of Hall with less deference than it demands, we can only repeat, that on sitting down to the book, we did so with the most friendly feelings towards its author-that it was our intention to express those feelings without qualification or reserve, and that we had not a suspicion we should meet in it with matter so offensive. At the same time we trust, that whatsoever we have said has been so said as to evince our sense of the respect due to the author's genius and character, and our conviction, that of him it may be still exclaimed with truth, in spite of all his failings, there is a great man fallen this day in Israel.' ART. V.-A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand, in 1827; together with a Journal of a Residence in Tristan D'Acunha. By Augustus Earle, Draughtsman to His Majesty's Surveying Ship The Beagle.' Svo. London. 1832. THIS HIS is a spirited performance, and contains many details about New Zealand which, we feel strongly persuaded, are as authentic as they must be allowed to be amusing; yet we have not undertaken to give our readers some account of it, at pre sent, |