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For nearly forty years past, Dr. Croly has been distinguished in the paths of polite literature, by his contributions to the departments of poetry, history, biography, romance, and criticism. As a politician and a divine, he is one of the few surviving representatives of old-fashioned, consistent, leal-hearted conservatism in Church and State. Not High Church, if that implies sympathy with the opinions and practices of our Puseys and Denisons; not Low Church, if a penchant towards the technicals of the Clapham Sect, and the policy of the Evangelical Alliance, enters into that definition; not Broad Church, according to the modern Latltudinarians, as depicted in the Edinburgh Review;—but one of those staunch, steadfast, Church-of-England Protestants, whom we are wont to regard as the model clergy after the very mind and heart of good old George the Third. Exception, however, must be allowed to his peculiar views on Prophecy, which are dissonant enough from the harmony of the theological Georgium sidus.
Nowhere, probably, is Dr. Croly more emphatically and satisfactorily himself, than in his political memoir of Edmund Burke; a memoir which, had it but comprised also some account of the great statesman's home and private life, would have secured a far more prominent, and maybe a permanent, place in the world of books. The Doctor's enthusiastic appreciation of Burke, it does one good to follow; nor is his own style an unworthy vehicle of such eulogy—cast as it is in so similar a mould, and presenting so many features of high, and not merely mimic, relationship. The glow of affectionate reverence colours with hues warm and lustrous the pages of this biography. The biographer's own eloquence kindles high, when he revives for us the scene of the arch-Orator's parliamentary battles:
While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by Custom; and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart Theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born[1]—
in times big with ominous change, which, "night by night, provoked keen struggles, and black clouds of passion raised"—but when the flightiest and the fiercest of the Orator's foemen would sit "rapt auditors," "dazzled beholders,"
When Wisdom, like the Goddess from Jove's brain,
Broke forth in armour of resplendent words,
Startling the Synod.
- ↑ Wordsworth: "Prelude," book vii.
