he only is the Evangelical
Who holds in equal scorn dogmas and dreams,
The Shibboleth of saintly magazines,
Deck'd with most grim and godly visages;
The cobweb sophistry, or the dark code
Of commentators, who, with loathsome track
Crawl o'er a text, or on the lucid page
Beaming with heavenly love and Gods own light,
Sit like a nightmare![1]
This, and not the accomplished spouter who turns out on a Sunday morning, "with looks saddening the very sunshine, to instruct the parish poor in evangelic lore," and teach them to cast off all good works as filthy rags, and to fly morality as the gates of hell. What sort of world would that school substitute for the world they bid us forsake and in toto abandon? A dark, narrow world, indeed—so Christopher North has answered that question—yet, narrow as it is, haunted by, thoughts that can, and too often do, debase and terrify into idiocy or madness; for nature thwarted, must dwindle into decay or distortion—the very shape of the soul becomes deformed, its lineaments ghastly, as with premature age; the spring is struck out of life; the gracious law of her seasons is disobeyed; and on the tree of knowledge we are to look for fruits before blossoms. Bad philosophy and worse religion![2] Hence our sympathy with the "high-and-dry" bard's apostrophe:
Oh shallow, and oh senseless! in a world
Where rank offences turn the good man pale,
Who leave the Christian's sternest code, to vent
Their petty ire on petty trespasses—
If trespasses they are—when the wide world
Groans with the burden of offence—[3]
who swallow camels, straining at a gnat; who deem the Almighty frowns upon his throne, because two pair of harmless dowagers,
Whose life has lapsed without a stain, beguile
An evening hour with cards; who deem that Hell
Burns fiercer for a Saraband.
In its tendency, therefore, to "show up" a sham system and a sham professor of sanctity, we recognise something healthy and seasonable in the "Vicar of Wrexhill." The effect of this beneficial tendency was, however, as in so many other instances of Mrs. Trollope's polemical ventures, marred and disabled by the bitterness of the medium employed for its "exhibition," as doctors say. The character of the Vicar has been not unjustly pronounced, by a favourable as well as competent reviewer, "not merely a libel on the sect, but a libel on humanity." Painful as this novel is in tone and in details, and overwrought though it be in glare of colouring and in the drawing of the central figure, it is the one of its author's thousand-and-one productions which most completely and pointedly illustrates the individuality of her art—its disagreeableness of course included. The subject of "Michael Armstrong" trenches upon the debateable ground of art. The province of fiction has its limits. "Child-torturers,"
- ↑ * Rev. W. Lisle Bowles: "Banwell Hill; or, Days Departed."
- ↑ See Blackwood's Magazine, vol. xxvii., p. 300.
- ↑ Bowles.
