Novels, that they have indirectly led to the illustration of several interesting periods of English history, by means of the works which have followed in their wake, and partaken the gale.' The attentive reader of that work,' says Mr. Orme, referring to the above-mentioned novel, who may deign to 'cast his eye over the following pages,'

'must be struck with various points of resemblance between its puritanical hero Major Bridgenorth, and the honest and venerable William Kiffin. Both belonged to the same class of religious professors; both made considerable fortunes during the period of civil dudgeon; both exercised their talents in the field, and their gifts in the church; and both were the subjects of heavy domestic misfortunes, involved in religious persecution, or in the calamities of political intrigue. Here, however, I must stop. Bridgenorth is a caricature, the creature of fiction, and designed to ridicule either the profession or the weaknesses of religious persous. Kiffin is a real character, possessing, it is true, a few peculiarities, but imbodying the substantial excellencies of Christianity, which the Author of the Scottish Novels seems little capable of estimating. In this last production, indeed, there is a greater tone of moderation in regard to religion, than in some of his former works. There is an admission, that "his Puritan is faintly traced to his Cameronian"-a poor apology for his unrighteous treatment of the patriotic and persecuted covenanters. The Author of "Peveril" still considers " hypocrisy and enthusiasm❞ (terms in the vocabulary of the world for the religion of the Bible) as fit food for ridicule and satire. "Yet," he says, "I am sensible of the difficulty of holding fanaticism up to laughter or abhorrence, without using colouring which may give offence to the sincerely worthy and religious. Many things are lawful which are not convenient; and there are many tones of feeling which are too respectable to be insalted, though we do not altogether sympathize with them." If this be not a testimony of homage to truth, it is at least a deference to public feeling; and every step in the return to right thinking and acting ought to be acknowledged with approbation.

6

There is some reason to believe,' adds Mr. Orme, that an extensive change in the public opinion respecting the nature of genuine religion, has been silently operating for a considerable time. All the talents are obviously not on the side of infidelity and irreligion. The faith of Christ is not entirely limited to the vulgar and the wretched. It has been adopted in all its peculiarities, and manifested in all its decision, by men of the highest order of intellect, and of the most brilliant parts. It is not so convenient as it once was, to decry seriousness as fanaticism, and religious zeal as madness. It is discovered that a Christian may be a gentleman, and that sourness and grimace have as little connexion with godliness as levity and profaneness. This change in the public mind appears, among other things, in the increased respect which is shewn to puritanical writings-puritanical characters-and to what may be called the puritanical age of English history. Even Oliver Cromwell has ceased to be regarded

merely as a hypocrite and a villain, and has found historians and apologists, not only among Dissenters and Whigs, but among Churchmen and Tories.'

There could not be a much more striking proof of this change of public opinion, than the deference which is paid to it by authors of novels and works of fiction. Even in the most exceptionable and perhaps the finest production of the Author of Waverley, Old Mortality, there are concessions made to the piety and heroism of the Cameronians, which distinguish the injustice of the historical novelist from the coarser misrepresentations of party-writers and the ribaldry of the satirist. Such, however, was the character of those times, and such the state of things in our own country in the days of Peveril of the Peak, that it would not perhaps be easy to bring home the charge of stepping beyond the line of truth in the depiction of individual characters. The misrepresentation lies in the sweeping inferences which are drawn from such instances when held up as specimens. I readily grant,' says Mr. Orme, that during the period in which Kiffin lived, ⚫ there were many false pretenders, not a few wild enthusiasts, and some who made gain by godliness.' Many of the Pu ritans would have been singular and eccentric characters though they had not adopted a religious profession.' We fear that the general character of the age must be allowed to have been that of stormy grandeur, rather than of light and purity; and such spirits as Milton, and Howe, and Hutchinson were upborne above the element of their times, rather than partook of its influence. We should not like to undertake the defence of all the sentiments and doings even of the sincerely religious in that age, and should most assuredly hesitate to subscribe to many of the dogmas of the puritan theology. Our admiration of those olden times is by no means unbounded, nor do we think them to have been better than these we live in. But, compared with the mass of their countrymen at that period, the party which furnishes the Novelist or the Satirist with his caricature portraits of fanaticism, and which contained but too many pretenders and counterfeits to serve as originals to these portraits, included, unquestionably, by far the larger mass of the wise and good; nor is it possible to hold up their peculiarities to ridicule, without countenancing the ribaldry of the scoffer and the impiety of the profane.

The misrepresentation of the men would be an offence of no further consequence than as it tends to perplex and obscure the page of history, were it not that something much more mportant than the character of any set of individuals or of

any party, gets misrepresented through them. They are dead and gone, and all their private interests have long been buried in forgetfulness. Whatever be their claims to our veneration as patriots or as divines, we have no further interest in their reputation, than that which, as Englishmen and as Christians, we feel for the wise and good whose names illustrate the annals of our civil and ecclesiastical history. Owen is no more to us than Wicliffe, nor Baxter more than Latimer. Whatever were their errors or their oddities, we have no cause to blush for the one, nor to refrain from a smile at the other. The principles which we hold in common with the early Puritans and Nonconformists, ally us as nearly, in feeling and in fact, to Hooker, to Reynolds, and to Leighton, with whom they are now eternally associated. Were they alive at this moment, retaining all the notions of their age, it would be hard to say from which we should find ourselves differing the more widely. In many things,' as Mr. Orme justly remarks, we do not sympathize with the men of the seventeenth century; nor will the men of the twentieth, perhaps, sympathize with us.' But even if we could consent to go further than this, and give up the professors' of that age to the pens of Clarendon and of Butler, as a set altogether of hypocrites and fanatics, our objection would not be in the slightest degree lessened to the ludicrous exhibition of their peculiarities as religionists. In all such representations, religion itself must be made to supply the point of the jest. There is nothing ludicrous in hypocrisy; it is in itself a thing simply hateful. What it is, then, that is amusing in these suspected or alleged hypocrites? It must be the piety which they affected. Take away their scripture phrases and religious habits, and you destroy the joke. They formed, it is said, a caricature of religion. Be it so; what other purpose can the exhibition of a caricature answer, than the casting ridicule on the original? There must be a resemblance, to constitute it a caricature: there must have been something in these men very like religion, to make their hypocrisy or enthusiasm pass for it. Then how is it possible to hold them up to ridicule without connecting the burlesque with religion itself? Let it not be said, that it was they who rendered religion ludicrous. It is not the fact. Their habits were the habits of the times; and however quaint, or affected, or precise they may seem to us, they were no more ridiculous in the estimation of their contemporaries, except to those who scoffed at the Scriptures and the religion of the Bible itself, than Wicliffe's translation of the Bible was ridiculous in the age of Richard II., or than the costume of our great grandmothers was in the days of Queen Anne. The contrast which VOL. XX. N. S. E

is one cause of the ludicrous effect, is supplied by the manners and dialect of the several periods. There can be no doubt that the manners and customs of the primitive Christians, could they be portrayed by the Author of Waverley, or had they been authentically delineated in some classical Hudibras, might be made to furnish equal entertainment. And innocently enough, if their religion suffered no prejudice by this means. Diorephres, or Alexander the Coppersmith, or some of the Corinthian teachers, might be made to occupy the place of Habbakkuk Mucklewrath or of Major Bridgenorth on the canvass, and we should have in that case an equally fair and undoubted specimen of the fanatics of the first century. No question but those trouble-coasts wore the same quaint dress, affected the same unsocial nonconformity to the world, observed the same strange customs, talked in the same rude dialect, as Demetrius, and Onesiphorus, and Stephanas. What would minister food to ridicule, therefore, must be, not what distinguished the sincere from the counterfeit, but what both had externally in common.

Fanaticism, except in its wildest excesses, may be termed the religion of weak minds, and it is always more or less nearly allied to real religion. Its errors are the exaggerations of truth; its repulsive features are a bad copy of the blameless original. But is it quite certain that no portion of the dislike or indignant ridicule levelled at fanaticism, is provoked by the closeness of its resemblance to true piety, rather than by the points of deviation? Whence arises the admitted difficulty of holding up fanaticism to laughter or abhorrence without using colouring which may give offence to the sincerely worthy and religious?' To us it appears to arise simply from its being an imperceptible line of demarcation which often separates the object of ridicule from pure religion. The contrariety between fanaticism and piety, as between hypocrisy and piety, lies less in the external manifestation than in the principle itself. But it is the external appearance, the accidents of fanaticism, not its essence, which are hated or despised; and these may chance to be the accidents of true piety. The austerity or moroseness of the fanatic is ridiculed; but are the seriousness and temperance of the Christian admired? The cant phrase is laughed at: is the sentiment respected? Their pretended sanctity is despised: is the saint revered? Who shall say when the zeal of the Christian reaches the precise point in the scale, which marks the temperature of fanaticism? Who is to decide when faith in Divine providence becomes presumptuous, when devotion runs into enthusiasm, prudence into craft, heroism into obstinacy? Shall it be the man who

is himself devoid of the substantial qualities of faith, of devotion, and of ardour? Shall it be the novel-reader, or the writer of novels ?

Every one knows that the harmless oddities of a friend we venerate, the eccentricities of a genius we admire, the weaknesses of a great man, are not merely pardoned and treated with indulgence, but sometimes dwelt upon with fondness, as a characteristic part of the portrait. If religion itself were universally an object of love and veneration, it would in like manner redeem from contempt and heartless ridicule, the human infirmities which became associated with it. But unhappily, this is not the case. Religion, to the generality of those who seek for amusement in works of fiction, is in the disadvantageous predicament of a stranger, whose substantial excellencies are unknown, and who is, therefore, recognised only by the awkward stoop, or inelegant gait, or provincial dialect, or cynical mien which may happen to distinguish him. Those who are taught to laugh at the Cameronian or Puritan fanatic, would not know the Christian were they to meet him; or if they did, they would soon be disgusted at finding how closely the other resembled him. How disagreeable must that needs be in reality, which is so near being ridiculous or detestable, that when pushed to what is deemed an excess, or associated with a few peculiarities of costume, it becomes so!

The frequent use of Scripture phraseology, which gives a quaintness and the appearance of affectation to the writers of the puritanical age, and which is stated to have characterized even their familiar intercourse, has furnished infinite store of merriment and sarcasm, from the days of Hudibras, down to those of the Author of Waverley. But there is one circumstance which appears not to have been taken into the account, in judging of the practice of the Puritans in this respect; and it is a consideration which greatly aggravates the profaneness of Butler: we refer to the state of the English language at that period. The phraseology of the Authorized Version of the Bible is now antiquated, and is on this account peculiarly susceptible of a ludicrous effect when applied to familiar subjects. But the translation had then very recently been executed. The language of the Bible was at that time the language of common life: its quaintness was the quaintness of the age. There was a naturalness, therefore, in their use of Scripture language, which is lost to us. Instead of the phraseology of the Puritans being formed upon the Scripture, the phraseology of Scripture was greatly formed upon theirs. This must be allowed to make some difference in the matter of affectation. The speeches of Cromwell are held to be un