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The late F. W. Robertson, of Brighton, was a born enthusiast for a military life-" rocked and cradled," as he phrased it, "to the roar of artillery;" impressed to tears by a review, as suggesting the conception of a real battle; and unable to see a regiment manœuvre, or artillery in motion, without a choking sensation. His father's opposition to his passionate desire to follow that father's profession, he encountered with strenuous counter-pleas; and when the temptations to which he would be exposed in the army were strongly set before him, Frederick refused to admit that these were real barriers against his entrance into it on the contrary, "with his usual desire for some positive outward evil to contend with, he imagined that it was his peculiar vocation to bear witness to God, to set the example of a pure and Christian life in his corps, to be the Cornelius of his regiment."* All the impulses of his character to self-sacrifice, chivalry, daring, romantic adventure, the conquest of oppression, the living of life intensely, he is said to have looked forward to satisfying as a soldier; and we are told how closely the trained obedience of an army to one head, harmonized with his own strong conception of the beauty of order and the dignity of duty. After his wishes had been disappointed, and the clerical profession decided upon, instead of the military,a decision most reluctantly come to on his part, we find him writing from Oxford to his father, at the close of his University

* "To two great objects—the profession of arms which he had chosen, and the service of Christ in that profession-he now devoted himself wholly. They filled his life, and for both of them he read carefully. Parallel with his military reading, in rather a strange contrast, ran his religious reading. Sometimes both glided into one another, as when, in the hope of advancing Christ's kingdom, he devoted a portion of his time to the history of Indian missions and the study of the reason of their small In his commonplace book may be seen the fluctuations of his mind between the Church and the army as professions, or, at least, his desire to bring Christianity into a soldier's life."-Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, i. 12 sq.

success.

Again and again he expresses his conviction that in a military life the highest self-sacrifice he was capable of could alone have been accomplished. Those who have heard him speak of battle, says his biographer, will remember how his lips quivered, and his eyes flashed, and his voice trembled with restrained emotion.

career, that somehow or other he still seemed to feel the queen's broad arrow stamped upon him, and that the men whom he had longed to benefit in a red coat, he might now be useful to, with a better-founded hope of usefulness, "in the more sombre garb of an accredited ambassador of Christ." In short, his strong desire was now for a military chaplaincy. But neither was this to be. It is noteworthy, that at his ordination, on being presented with his papers by the Bishop of Winchester,* that prelate (Dr. Sumner) gave him as his motto the text, "Endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ,”— noteworthy, because it is one of the keynotes of his character, as Mr. Stopford Brooke draws it, that all his life long he was a soldier at heart. The ring of his words and the choice of his expressions were influenced and coloured by the ideal he had formed of a soldier's life, by the passionate longing of his youth to enter it, and by the bitterness of the regret with which he surrendered it. But it is claimed for him that he transferred the same spirit of sacrifice with which he would have died for men in battle, to a more hidden and a diviner warfare. Throughout his Lectures on the Influence of Poetry on the Working Classes, what his biographer calls his "rapturous

*His first curacy was in that cathedral city (1840).

"He often thought that he had mistaken his profession, and said to his friends that he would rather lead a forlorn hope than mount the pulpit stairs."-Life, p. 96.

In his letters from abroad we often come upon some such passage as this in one from Innsbruck, referring to Hofer and his sword (in the museum): "I drew his sword, and almost felt that it was done with a soldier's feeling."-Ibid., p. 116.

Years later, again. "As I walked home in my dragoon cloak, I thought that I ought to be at this moment lying in it at rest at Moodkee, where the Third fought so gallantly, and where spots of brighter green than usual are the only record to mark where the flesh of heroes is melting into its kindred dust again" (p. 291). So, too, after a visit to the churchyard at Hove, by moonlight, and musing on the graves: “Young R—, too, is gone, but I do not envy any of them except the soldier, perhaps. I wish I had been with my own gallant, wondrous regiment in that campaign [Chillianwallah]" (p. 269).-Again, in a letter to Mr. Drew, referring to Mr. Kingsley's sermon for the latter (in 1851), and what came of it: "I am afraid my illustrations are somewhat too military; but I was rocked and cradled to the roar of artillery, and I began life with a preparation for, and appointment to, the 3rd Dragoons. Dis aliter visum."—Ibid., vol. ii., p. 15.

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delight in a military career" breaks out,―witness his eloquence in describing the "glorious death of the heroes of Trukkee," the gathering of the bravest in battle round the torn colours which symbolized courage and honour, and the chivalry of war in contrast with a selfish and ignoble peace; witness, in particular, the closing sentence, spoken in anticipation (Feb. 1852) of a French invasion. Often, "with most unclerical emphasis,” it seems, did he express his wish to die, sword in hand, against a French invader.

The epitaph on Colonel Prude,* in Canterbury Cathedral, takes no very high flight poetically speaking; but it is known to have attracted and impressed Mr. Windham, who remembered the lines, within a word or two, after an interval of long years. With part of them we may close this chapter.

Rests one whose life was war, whose rich increase
Of fame and honour from his valour grew,

Unbegg'd, unbought; for what he won he drew
By just desert having in service been

A soldier, till near sixty, from sixteen

Years of his active life; continually
Fearless of death, yet still prepared to die

In his religious thoughts; for midst all harms
He bore as much of piety as arms."

THE VOICE OF HEROD AND THE VOICE OF THE MOB.

ACTS xii. 22.

HERE was a certain set day, upon which Herod, arrayed

THE

in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration before the people. And the people gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man.

That is to say, the vox populi, the voice of the people, on this occasion, was, that the voice of Herod was the voice

* Killed at the siege of Maestricht, July 12, 1632.

of a god, της τε ο δε δήμος ἐπεΦΩΝΕΙ· Θεοῦ ΦΩΝΗ, καὶ οὐκ fouerte. And if the tux popall be rux di, the divinity of Herod's oration is thus settled at once.

That the rar Ahal is not infallible, however, and therefore not rar di absolutely, is suggested by more than one other passage of history in this same book of Acts of the Apostles. When the people of Lystra, for instance, saw what Paul had done to the man impotent in his feet, a cripple from his mother's womb, who never had walked,—they lifted up their voices-ipar rip $QNHN ait,-saying in the speech of Lycaonia, The gods are come down to us, in the likeness of men." This rex populi affords another example of the same edifying process of deifying made easy. Unhappily, before the scene closes, certain Jews from Antioch and Iconium have persuaded the people," and St. Paul is stoned, and drawn out of the city, as supposed to be dead. The barbarous people, again, of Melita, are equally facile with civilized mobs in changing their mind. No doubt, they said, when they saw the viper hang on the apostle's hand, No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he hath escaped the sea, yet Vengeance [A] suffereth not to live. But when they saw him shake off the viper into the fire, and saw no harm come to him, they changed their mind, and said that he was a god.

Who can forget, in connection with the vox populi subject, that the people once were instant with loud voices [pwvaîs μeyadais], requiring that One might be crucified, against Whom the voices of them prevailed?

Vox populi vox dei is a proverb, but all proverbs are not, and in all senses, worthy of all acceptation. To whom we owe this proverb, is not clear, but it is cited by William of Malmesbury as one. When Archbishop Trench comes to deal with it, in his lectures on the lessons in proverbs, he urges the necessity of an intelligent appreciation of its import. If, he cautions us, it were affirmed that every outcry of the multitude, supposing only it be loud enough and wide enough,

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ought to be accepted as the voice of God speaking through them, no proposition more foolish or more impious could well be imagined. But the voice of the people, he goes on to say, is something very different from this. He explains the proverb to rest on the assumption that the foundations of man's being are laid in the truth; from which it will follow, that no conviction which is really a conviction of the universal humanity, but reposes on a true ground; no faith, which is indeed the faith of mankind, but has a reality corresponding to it. "The task and difficulty, of course, must ever be to discover what this faith and what these convictions are; and this can only be done by an induction from a sufficient number of facts, and in sufficiently different times, to enable us to feel confident that we have indeed seized that which is the constant quantity of truth in them all, and separated this from the inconstant one of falsehood and error, evermore offering itself in its room; that we have not taken some momentary cry, wrung out by interest, by passion, or by pain, for the voice of God; but claimed this august title only for that true voice of humanity, which, unless everything be false, we have a right to assume an echo of the voice of God."

The Queen of Arragon says to Carlos, in the French play,

"Quoi que vous présumiez de la voix populaire,

Par de secrets rayons le ciel souvent l'éclaire."

Ecclesiastical history signalizes such voces as decided the Council of Clermont,-whose decision moreover was believed to be instantly known in remote parts of Christendom.

"GOD WILLETH IT,' the whole assembly cry;
Shout which the enraptured multitude astounds.
The Council-roof and Clermont's towers reply;
'God willeth it,' from hill to hill rebounds,

And in awe-stricken countries far and nigh,

Through Nature's hollow' arch that voice resounds."

Swift favours the popular acceptation of the proverb when he thus addresses one of his popular Drapier's Letters to both houses of Parliament: "But whenever you shall please to