Patmos, and interpreting the mysteries of the seven-sealed scrolls. His ebullient Protestantism and his rampant anti-Gallicism got the better of him, and fired him to explain the vastest, sublimest, most inscrutable of apocalyptic symbols by their "things of the day." He could descry in the spelling of Apollyon a dreadful identity with that o£ Napoleon. His eager snatches at allusions and analogies may remind us of Wordsworth's smile
At gravest heads, by enmity to France
Distempered, till they found, in every blast
Forced from the street-disturbing newsman's horn,
For her great cause record or prophecy
Of utter ruin.
Coleridge, whose liaison with Edward Irving must have imparted to him a special extrinsic interest in the theme of this Commentary, was even vehement in the tone of his strictures upon it. We find him writing as follows, in a letter to Dante Cary:—"I have been just looking, rectius staring, at the Theologian Croly's Revelations of the Revelations of St. John the Theologian—both poets, both seers—the one saw visions, and the other dreams dreams; but John was no Tory, and Croly is no conjuror. Therefore, though his views extend to the last conflagration, he is not, in my humble judgment, likely to bear a part in it by setting the Thames on fire. The divine, Croly, sets John the Divine's trumpets and vials side by side. Methinks trumpets and viols would make the better accompaniment—the more so as there is a particular kind of fiddle, though not strung with cat-gut, for which Mr. Croly's book would make an appropriate bow. Verily, verily, my dear friend! I feel it impossible to, think of this shallow, fiddle-faddle trumpery, and how it has been trumpeted and patronised by our bishops and dignitaries, and not enact either Heraclitus or Democritus. I laugh that I may not weep. You know me too well to suppose me capable of treating even an error of faith, with levity. But these are not errors of faith; but blunders from the utter want of faith, a vertigo from spiritual inanition, from the lack of all internal strength; even as a man giddy-drunk throws his arms about, and clasps hold of a barber's block for support, and mistakes seeing double for 'additional evidences.'"[1] The most sage and sensible of men appear, somehow, liable to monomaniac tendencies on the one subject of prophecy: even Newton was crotchety here; and Dr. Croly but adds another name to the list of those celebrated by his satirical fellow-countryman, such as
- ↑ Memoirs of the Rev. H. F. Cary.
