and doubt, distrust, and conjecture still. more perplexing, on the other. Most gladly would he take an observation, as to whence he has come, or whither he is going; alas! he has not the means: his telescope is too dim, his compass too wavering, his plummet too short. Nor is that little spot, his present state, one whit more intelligible, since it may prove a quicksand that may sink in a moment from his feet; it can afford him no certain reckoning, as to that immeasurable ocean that he may have traversed, or that still more formidable one that he must: an awful expedition, that is accelerated by every moment by which it is delayed. Neither is the outfit less gloomy or less forbidding than the voyage itself: the bark is a coffin; the destination, darkness; and the helmsman, death.

Christianity has been emphatically termed the social religion, and society is the proper sphere of all its duties, as the ecliptic is of the sun. Society is a sphere that demands all our energies, and deserves all that it demands. He, therefore, that retires to cells and to caverns, to stripes and to famine, to court a more arduous conflict, and to win a richer crown, is doubly deceived; the conflict is less, the reward is nothing. He may indeed win a race, if he can be admitted to have done so, who had no competitors, because he chose to run alone; but he will be entitled to no prize, because he ran out of the course. Who hath required this at your hands?" 'This single question ought to have made the ascetic pause, before he weaved his horsehair, or platted his thong. - Alas! how has the social and cheerful spirit of Christianity been perverted by fools at one time, and by knaves at another; by

the self-tormentors of the cell, or the all-tormentors of the conclave. In this enlightened age, we despise perhaps the absurdities of the one, and the atrocities of the other. The day is gone by when saints could post to paradise by the smack of their own whip, as if virtue, like beauty, were only skindeep, and devotion, like a top, could not be kept up but by flogging; as though the joys of heaven, like the comforts of an inn, required to be heightened by the privations of the journey, and the ruggedness of the road. But after we have laughed at these things, let us look a little seriously at ourselves. Are there no other words ending in ism, that are now creating as many self-tormentors as catholicism has lost? Are there no protestants who are their own popes? and are there no dissenters from truth, as well as from error? Are there none whom Calvin has placed upon a spiritual pinnacle far more giddy and aspiring than the marble pillar of St. Simeon? and are there none whom he torments with the scorpion-stings of a despair ten times more horrible than the whips of St. Dominic; who have perhaps escaped the melancholy of madness, only by exchanging it for the presumption of pride; denying that eternal mercy to others, of which they themselves also once despaired, as though that were a fountain that thirst could diminish, or number exhaust?

Warburton affirms that there never was a great conqueror, legislator, or founder of a religion, who had not a mixture of enthusiasm and policy in his composition: enthusiasm to influence the public mind, and policy to direct it. As I mean to conne myself, ir this article, to war and warriors,

think it right to premise, that policy is a much more common ingredient, in such characters, than enthusiasm. I admit, that in some particular idiosyncrasies, as for instance in that of Cromwell, or of Mahomet, this heterogeneous mixture may have been combined; but even then, these contradictory elements, like oil and vinegar, required a constant state of motion, and of action, to preserve their *coalescence; in a state of inaction, and of repose, it was no longer a union, but the policy invariably got the ascendency of the enthusiasm. William the Third, on the contrary, and Washington, united three great essentials, much more homogeneous than those insisted on by Warburton: courage, coolness, and conduct; but enthusiasm is the last thing I should impute to either of these men. If we look into White's institutes of Tamerlane, or, more properly speaking, of Timour the lame, we shall find that there never was a character who had less to do with enthusiasm, than this Tartar hero, nor that despised it more. His whole progress was but one patient and persevering application of means to ends, causes to consequences, and effects to results. Without the slightest particle of any thing visionary or enthusiastic in himself, and with a certain quantum of contempt for these qualities in others, he commenced his career by being a lame driver of camels, and terminated it by reigning over twenty-six independent principalities. Therefore we must not take every thing for gospel that comes from the pen of such a writer as Warburton, who on one occasion shuddered at the skeptical doctrines of antiquity, as subversive of the estab lished gods of Athens! But to return to war, and warriors. There are some ideas afloat on this subject, that I cannot help conceiving to be both ruinous and wrong. I shall not despair of producing my own convictions on this subject with that portion of my readers who think with me, that every war of mere ambition, aggression, or aggrandizement, is an evil both hateful and degrading; who think it a nuisance that ought to be abated, and who abominate every thing appertaining thereto, or connected therewith. Considered in the abstract, and unconnected with all views of the causes for which it may be undertaken, surely war is an evil that none but a misanthrope could conscientiously rejoice in, or consistently promote. But all men think not thus; there are minds, and powerful ones, too, endowed with a right feeling on every other subject, who seem to labour under some mental hallucination on this. In the first place, I am so unfortunate as not to be able to discover those marvellous efforts of talent, gigantic combinations of power, and exuberant fertility of resource, which some would persuade us are essential to great commanders, and confined to them alone.*

But

With the exception of Victor, Marmont, and Suchet, all the modern French generals have been men of no very splendid intellectual or adscititious endowments: the rudiments of all they know, they seemed to have gained in the ranks, and to have gleaned all their talents in the field wherein they were exerted. In one respect these men were superior to their masters; but it was on a point where courage was more prominent than talent; they said to their soldiers: 'Come on; their master sometimes contented himself with saying: 'Goon.' Napoleon himself had great talent, and to deny him this would be a gross libel on mankind; it would be no less than an admission that all Europe had for fourteen years been outfought in the field, and outwitted in the cabinet, by a blockhead, But when we have allowed him talent, we have allowed him all that he deserves. 1

setting aside the truism, that fortune, though blind, has often led the most sharpsighted hero to that victory which he would have lost without her, what qualities are there in a conqueror which have not been held in common by the captain of a smuggler's crew, or a chief of banditti? 'The powers of these latter have been exhibited on a narrower stage, rewarded by a less illustrious exaltation, and recorded in a more inglorious calendar. With

confess there is one thing that excites in me the greatest astonishment, which causes me to wonder with exceeding wonder, μεγαλω θαύματι θαυματιζομενος,' and that is the circumstance, that any lover of rational liberty, or constitutional freedom throughout the whole civilized world, should be found in the list of this man's admirers. To every thing connected with freedom he was the most systematic and deliberate foe that ever existed upon the face of the earth. No human being was ever intrusted with such ample means and brilliant opportunities for establishing his own true glory and the solid happiness of others: and where can history point out one that so foully perverted them to his own disgrace, and the misery of his fellow-men? He has been described by one who witnessed only the commencement of his career, as the 'child and champion of Jacobinism; but if he were the child of Jacobinism, he was the champion of despotism; and those who wished to rivet the chains of slavery, chose a paradoxical mode of forwarding the work, by opposing the workman. This therefore is the man whom I cannot find it in my heart, either to pity or to praise. Are we to praise him for that suicidal selfishness that dictated his treachery to Spain, and his march to Moscow? Are we to pity him because, having ceased to be a field-officer, he could not begin to be a philosopher; but having books to read, ample matter to reflect upon, men to talk to, women to trifle with, horses to ride, and equipages to command, he died at last of ennui upon a rock, from a cause not the most likely to excite the sympathy of the patriot nor the regret of the philanthropist? it was this: that Europe would not supply him with any more throats to cut or provinces to plunder.