In the meantime, let it be remembered, that David Levi stands pledged as the author of an unsupported charge against the veracity of the Evangelists, and let every faithful Christian to whom those holy records are dear, but most of all the proper guardians of our Church, be prepared to meet their opponents and his charge. But alas! I can hardly expect that the raising | out, I dare believe his inclination will not stand a dead tree to life would have been thus success- in the way. ful, though even infidelity asserts it, when the miracle of restoring a dead man to life hath not silenced his cavils, but left him to quibble about hogs and figs, and even in the face of his own confession to arraign the Saviour of the world as "unjust and irrational" through the channel of a Christian press; neither am I bound to admit that his correction of the miracle would in any respect have amended it; for as an instance of Christ's miraculous power, I can see no greater energy in the act of enlivening a dead tree than in destroying a living one by the single word of his command. I must yet ask patience of the reader, whilst I attend upon this objector to another cavil started against this miracle of the fig tree in the account of which he says there is a contradiction of dates between St. Matthew and St. Mark, for that in the former it appears" Christ first cast the buyers and sellers out of the temple, and on the morrow cursed the fig tree; whereas, according to St. Mark, it was transacted before the driving them out of the temple; and such a manifest contradiction must greatly affect the credibility of the history.", Whether or not a day's disagreement in the dates would so "greatly affect the credibility of the history," we are not called upon to argue, because it will be found that no such contradiction exists. St. Mark agrees with St. Matthew in saying that "Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple," and on the morrow cursed the fig tree; he then adds that he returned to Jerusalem and drove the buyers and sellers out of the temple. Again, the next morning, he and his disciples passed by the fig tree and saw it dried up from the roots. This is told in detail. St. Matthew agrees with St. Mark in saying Jesus went into the temple the day before he destroyed the fig tree, but he does not break the narrative into detail as St. Mark does: for as he relates the whole miracle of the fig tree at once, comprising the events of two days in one account, so doth he give the whole of what passed in the temple at once also. Both Evangelists agree in making Christ's entrance into the temple antecedent to his miracle; but St. Matthew, with more brevity, puts the whole of each incident into one account: St. Mark more circumstantially details every particular. And this is the mighty contradiction which David Levi hath discovered in the sacred historians, upon which he exultingly pronounces, that "he is confident there are a number of others as glaring as this; but which he has not, at present, either time or inclination to point out." These menaces I shall expect he will make good, for when his time serves to point them But our caviller hath not yet done with the Evangelists, for he asserts that "they are not only contradictory to each other, but are inconsistent with themselves; for what can be more so than Matthew i. 18, with Matthew xiii. 55." Now mark the contradiction! "The birth of Jesus was on this wise; when as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost," chap. i. 18, The other text is found in chap. xiii. 55: "is not this the carpenter's son? is not his mother Mary? and his brethren James and Joses and Simon and Judas ?" Need any child be told, that in the first text Saint Matthew speaks, and in the second the cavilling Jews? who then can wonder if they disagree? As well we might expect agreement between truth and falsehood, between the Evangelist and David Levi, as between two passages of such opposite characters. Is this the man who is to confute the holy scriptures? Weak champion of an unworthy cause! What he means by an inconsistency between Luke i. 34, 35, and Luke xiv. 22, I cannot understand, and conclude there must be an error of the press, of which I think no author can have less reason to complain than David Levi. These two unprosperous attacks being the whole of what he attempts upon the inconsistency of the sacred historians with themselves, I shall no longer detain my readers than whilst I notice one more cavil, which this author points against the divine mission of Christ, as compared with that of Moses, viz. "That God speaking with Moses face to face in the presence of six hundred thousand men, besides women and children, as mentioned in Exod. xix. 9, was such an essential proof of the divine mission of Moses, as is wanting on the part of Jesus:" and therefore he concludes, that taking the miracles of Moses and this colloquy with the Supreme Being together, the evidences for him are much stronger than for Christ. A man, who does not instantly discera the futility of this argument, must forget all the several incidents in the history of Christ, where the voice of God audibly testifies to his divine mission: for instance, Matt. iii. 16, 17: “And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water, and lo! the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him; and lo! a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." The same is repeated by Mark, i. 10, 11; again by Luke, iii. 21, 22; again by John i. 32, 33, 34. If these supernatural signs and declarations do not evince the superiority of Christ's mission above that of Moses; if Christ, to whom angels ministered, when the devil in despair departed from him, Christ, who was transfigured before his disciples," and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light, and behold! there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him :" Christ at whose death "the vail of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom, and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent, and the graves were opened, and many bodies of saints, which slept, arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many:" in conclusion, if Christ, whose resurrection was declared by angels, seen and acknowledged by many witnesses, and whose ascension into heaven crowned and completed the irrefragable evidence of his divine mission; if Christ, whose prophecies of his own death and resurection, of the destruction of Jerusalem and the subsequent dispersion of the Jews, have been and are now so fully verified, cannot, as our caviller asserts, meet the comparison with Moses, then is the Redeemer of lost mankind a less sublime and important character than the legislator of the Jews. I have now attempted in the first place to discover how far the world was illuminated by right reason before the revelation of Christ took place; for had men's belief been such, and their practice also such as Christianity teaches, the world had not stood in need of a Redeemer. The result of this inquiry was, that certain persons have expressed themselves well and justly upon the subject of God and religion in times antecedent to the Christian era, and in countries where idolatry was the established worship. That the nation of the Jews was a peculiar nation, and preserved the worship of the true and only God, revealed in very early time to their fathers, but that this worship, from various circumstances and events, in which they themselves were highly criminal, had not been propagated beyond the limits of a small tract, and that the temple of Jerusalem was the only church in the world, where God was worshiped, when Christ came upon earth. That from the almost universal diffusion of idolatry, from the unworthy ideas men had of God and religion, and the few faint notions entertained amongst them of a future state of rewards and punishments, the world was in such deplorable error, and in such universal need of an instructor and redeemer that the coming of Christ was most seasonable and necessary to salvation : That there were a number of concurrent prophecies of an authentic character in actual existence, which promised this salvation to the world, and depicted the person of the Messias, who was to perform this mediatorial office in so striking a manner, that it cannot be doubted but that all those characteristics meet and are fulfilled in the person of Christ : That his birth, doctrines, miracles, prophecies, death, and passion, with other evidences, are so satisfactory for the confirmation of our belief in his divine mission, that our faith as Christians is grounded upon irrefragable proofs : Lastly, That the vague opinions of our own dissenting brethren, and the futile cavils of a recent publication by a distinguished writer of the Jewish nation, are such weak and impotent assaults upon our religion, as only serve to confirm us in it the more. If I have effected this to the satisfaction of the serious reader, I shall be most happy; and as for those who seek nothing better than amusement in these volumes, I will apply myself without delay to the easier task of furnishing them with matter more suited to their taste. NUMBER LXVII. Musa dedit fidibus divos puerosque deorum, The Muse to nobler subjects tunes her lyre; In times of very remote antiquity, when men were not so lavish of their wit as they have since been, Poetry could not furnish employment for more than Three Muses; but as business grew upon their hands and departments multiplied, it became necessary to enlarge the commission, and a board was constituted, consisting of nine in number, who had their several presidences allotted to them, and every branch of the art poetic thenceforth had its peculiar patroness and superintendent. As to the specific time when these three senior goddesses called in their six new assessors, it is matter of conjecture only; but if the poet Hesiod was, as we are told, the first who had the honour of announcing their names and characters to the world, as we may reasonably suppose this was done upon the immediate opening of their new commission, as they would hardly U or tribe, the legislator who established a state, As enter upon their offices without apprizing all those whom it might concern of their accession. Befere this period, the three eldest sisters condescended to be maids of all work; and if the work became more than they could turn their hands to, they have nobody but themselves and their fellow-deities to complain of; for, had they been content to have let the world go on in its natural course, mere mortal poets would not probably have over-burdened either it or them; but when Apollo himself (who being their president should have had more consideration for their ease) begot the poet Linus in one of his terrestrial frolics, and endowed him with hereditary genius, he took a certain method to make work for the muses: accordingly, we find the chaste Calliope herself, the eldest of the sister-interest with his father Apollo. But to dwell no hood, and who should have set a better example to the family, could not hold out against this heavenly bastard, but in an unguarded moment yielded her virgin honours to Linus, and produced the poet Orpheus: such an instance of celestial incontinence could not fail to shake the morals of the most demure; and even the cold goddess Luna caught the flame, and smuggled a bantling into the world, whom, maliciously enough, she named Musæus, with a sly design no doubt of laying her child at the door of the Parnassian nunnery. Three such high-blooded bards as Linus, Orpheus and Musæus, so fathered and so mothered, were enough to people all Greece with poets and musicians; and in truth they were not idle in their generation, but like true patriarchs spread their families over all the shores of Ionia and the islands of the Archipelago: it is not therefore to be wondered at, if the three sister muses, who had enough to do to nurse their own children and descendants, were disposed to call in other helpmates to the task; and whilst Greece was in its glory, it may well be supposed that all the nine sisters were fully employed in bestowing upon every votary a portion of their attention, and answering every call made upon them for aid and inspiration: much gratitude is due to them from their favoured poets, and much hath been paid, for even to the present hour they are invoked and worshipped by the sons of verse, whilst all the other deities of Olympus have either abdicated their thrones, or been dismissed from them with contempt; even Milton himself in his sacred epic invokes the heavenly muse, who inspired Moses on the top of Horeb or of Sinai; by which he ascribes great antiquity as well as dignity to the character he addresses. longer on these fabulous legends of the Greeks, we may refer to the books of Moses for the earliest and most authentic examples of sacred poetry: every thing that was the immediate effusion of the prophetic spirit seems to have been chanted forth in dithyrambic measure: the valedictory blessings of the patriarchs, when dying, the songs of triumph and thanksgiving after victory are metrical; and high as the antiquity of the sacred poem of Job undoubtedly is, such nevertheless is its character and construction, as to carry'strong internal marks of it being written in an advanced state of the art. The poet therefore, whether Hebrew or Greek, was in the earliest ages a sacred character, and his talent a divine gift, a celestial inspiration; men regarded him as the ambassador of Heaven and the interpreter of its will. It is perfectly in nature, and no less agreeable to God's providence, to suppose that even in the darkest times some minds of a more enlightened sort should break forth, and be engaged in the contemplation of the universe and its author: from meditating upon the works of the Creator, the transition to the act of praise and adoration follows as it were of course: these are operations of the mind, which naturally inspire it with a certain portion of rapture and enthusiasm, rushing upon the lips in warm and glowing language, and disdaining to be expressed in ordinary and vulgar phrase; the thoughts become inflated, the breast labours with a passionate desire to say something worthy of the ear of Heaven, something in a more elevated tone and cadencé, something more harmonious and musical; this can only be effected by measured periods, by some chant that can be repeated in the strain again and again, grateful at once to the ear and impressive on the memory and what is this but poetry? Poetry The powers ascribed to Orpheus were, under then is the language of prayer, an address the veil of fable, emblems of his influence over becoming of the Deity; it may be remembered, savage minds, and of his wisdom and eloquence it may be repeated in the ears of the people in reclaiming them from that barbarous state: called together for the purposes of worship; this upon these impressions, civilization and society is a form that may be fixed upon their minds, took place: the patriarch, who founded a family and in this they may be taught to join. of the dead, calls forth their apparitions, descends to the very regions of the damned, and drags the Furies from their flames to present themselves personally to the terrified spectators: such are the powers of the drama; here the poet reigns and triumphs in his highest glory. The fifth denomination gives us the lyric poet chanting his ode at the public games and festivals, crowned with olive and encompassed by all the wits and nobles of his age and country; here we contemplate Stesichorus, Alcæus, Pindar, Callistratus: sublime, abrupt, impetuous, they strike us with the shock of their elec The next step in the progress of poetry from of actors, brings music, dance, and dress to his the praise of God is to the praise of men: illus-aid, realizes the thunder, bursts open the tombs trious characters, heroic actions are singled out for celebration the inventors of useful arts, the reformers of savage countries, the benefactors of mankind, are extolled in verse, they are raised to the skies and the poet, having praised them as the first of men whilst on earth, deifies them after death; and, conscious that they merit immortality, boldly bestows it, and assigns to them a rank and office in heaven appropriate to the character they maintained in life; hence it is that the merits of a Bacchus, a Hercules, and numbers more are amplified by the poet, till they become the attributes of their divinity, altars are raised and victims immolated to their wor-tric genius; they dart from earth to heaven; ship. These are the fanciful effects of poetry in its second stage: religion overheated turns into enthusiasm; enthusiasm forces the imagination into all the visionary regions of fable, and idola-transitions and ellipses escape our apprehension ; try takes possession of the whole Gentile world. The Egyptians, a mysterious dogmatizing race, begin the work with symbol and hieroglyphic; the Greeks, a vain ingenious people, invent a set of tales and fables for what they do not understand, embellish them with all the glittering ornaments of poetry, and spread the captivating delusion over all the world. there is no following them in their flights; we stand gazing with surprise, their boldness awes us, their brevity confounds us; their sudden we are charmed we know not why, we are pleased with being puzzled, and applaud although we cannot comprehend. In the lighter lyric we meet Anacreon, Sappho, and the votaries of Bacchus and Venus; in the grave, didactic, solemn class we have the venerable names of a Solon, a Tyrtæus, and those who may be styled the demagogues in poetry: Is liberty to be asserted, licentiousness to be repressed? is the spirit of a nation to be roused? it is the poet not the orator must give the soul its energy and spring. Is Salamis to be recov march to its attack. Are the Lacedæmonians to be awakened from their lethargy? it is Tyrtæus who must sing the war-song and revive their languid courage. In the succeeding period we review the poet in full possession of this brilliant machinery, and with all Olympus at his command: surrounded by Apollo and the Muses, he commences every poem with an address to them for pro-ered? it is the elegy of Solon must sound the tection; he has a deity at his call for every operation of nature; if he would roll the thunder, Jupiter shakes Mount Ida to dignify his description; Neptune attends him in his car, if he would allay the ocean; if he would let loose the Poetry next appears in its pastoral character; winds to raise it, Eolus unbars his cave: the it affects the garb of shepherds and the language spear of Mars and the ægis of Minerva arm him of the rustic: it represents to our view the rufor the battle; the arrows of Apollo scatter pes-ral landscape and the peaceful cottage! It retilence through the air; Mercury flies upon the messages of Jupiter; Juno raves with jealousy; and Venus leads the Loves and Graces in her train. In this class we contemplate Homer and his inferior brethren of the epic order; it is their province to form the warrior, instruct the politician, animate the patriot: they delineate the characters and manners; they charm us with their descriptions, surprise us with their incidents, interest us with their dialogue: they engage every passion in its turn, melt us to pity, rouse us to glory, strike us with terror, fire us vith indignation; in a word, they prepare us for the drama, and the drama for us. A new poet now comes upon the stage: he stands in person before us: he no longer appears as a blind and wandering bard, chanting his rhapsodies to a throng of villagers collected in a groupe about him, but erects a splendid theatre, gathers together a whole city as his audience, cords the labours, the amusements, the loves of the village nymphs and swains, and exhibits nature in its simplest state: it is no longer the harp or the lyre, but the pipe of the poet which now invites our attention; Theocritus, leaning on his crook in his russet mantle and clouted brogues, appears more perfectly in character than the courtly Maro, who seems more the shepherd of the theatre than of the field. I have yet one other class in reserve for the epigrammatist, but I will shut up my list without him, not being willing that poetry, which commences with a prayer, should conclude with a pun. NUMBER LXVIII. prepares a striking spectacle, provides a chorus TASTE may be considered either as sensitive or mental; and under each of these denominations | distorted nature in the ambition of surpassing is sometimes spoken of as natural, sometimes as her. acquired; I propose to treat of it in its intellectual construction only, and in this sense Mr. Addison defines it to be that faculty of the soul which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike. This definition may very properly apply to the faculty which we exercise in judging and deciding upon the works of others: but how does it apply to the faculty exercised by those who produced those works? How does it serve to develope the taste of an author, the taste of a painter or a statuary? And yet we may speak of a work of taste with the same propriety as we do of a man of taste. It should seem therefore as if this definition went only to that denomination of taste which we properly call an acquired taste; the productions of which generally end in imitation, whilst those of natural taste bear the stamp of originality: another characteristic of natural taste will be simplicity; for how can nature give more than she possesses, and what is nature but simplicity? Now when the mind of any man is endued with a fine natural taste, and all means of profiting by other men's ideas are out of the question, that taste will operate by disposing him to select the fairest subjects out of what he sees either for art or imagination to work upon; still his production will be marked with simplicity: but as it is the province of taste to separate deformity or vulgarity from what is merely simple, so, according to the nature of his mind who possesses it, beauty or sublimity will be the result of the operation: if his taste inclines him to what is fair and elegant in nature, he will produce beauty; if to what is lofty, bold, and tremendous, he will strike out sublimity. Agreeably to this, we may observe in all literary and enlightened nations, their earliest authors and artists are the most simple: First, adventurers represent what they see or conceive with simplicity, because their impulse is unbiassed by emulation, having nothing in their sight either to imitate, avoid, or excel: on the other hand, their successors are sensible that one man's description of nature must be like another's, and in their zeal to keep clear of imitation, and to outstrip a predecessor, they begin to compound, refine, and even to distort. I will refer to the Venus de Medicis and the Laöcoon for an illustration of this: I do not concern myself about the dates or sculptors of these figures: but in the former we see beautiful simplicity, the fairest form in nature, selected by a fine taste, and imitated without affectation or distortion, and as it should seem without even an effort of art in the Laöcoon we have a complicated plot; we unravel a maze of ingenious contrivance, where the artist has compounded and Virgil possessed a fine taste according to Mr. Addison's definition, which I before observed applies only to an acquired taste : he had the “faculty of discerning the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike: he had also the faculty of imitating what he discerned; so that I cannot verify what I have advanced by any stronger instance than his. I should think there does not exist a poet who has gone such length in imitation as Virgil; for to pass over his pastoral and bucolic poems, which are evidently drawn from Theocritus and Hesiod, with the assistance of Aratus in every thing that relates to the scientific part of the signs and seasons, it is supposed that his whole narrative of the destruction of Troy, with the incident of the wooden horse and the episode of Sinon, are an almost literal translation of Pisander the epic poet, who in his turn perhaps might copy his account from the Ilias Minor (but this last is mere suggestion). As for the Æneid, it does little else but reverse the order of Homer's epic, making Æneas's voyage precede his wars in Italy, whereas the voyage of Ulysses is subsequent to the operations of the Iliad. As Apollo is made hostile to the Greeks, and the cause of his offence is introduced by Homer in the opening of the Iliad, so Juno in the Æneid stands in his place with every circumstance of imitation. It would be an endless task to trace the various instances throughout the Æneid, where scarce a single incident can be found which is not copied from Homer: neither is there greater originality in the executive parts of the poem, than in the constructive; with this difference only, that he has copied passages from various authors, Roman as well as Greek, though from Homer the most. Amongst the Greeks, the dramatic poets Eschylus, Sophocles, and principally Euripides, have had the greatest share of his attention; Aristophanes, Menander, and other comic authors, Callimachus and some of the lyric writers also may be traced in his imitations. A vast collection of passages from Ennius chiefly, from Lucretius, Furius, Lucilius, Pacuvius, Suevius, Nævius, Varius, Catullus, Accius, and others of his own nation, has been made by Macrobius in his Saturnalia, where Virgil has done little else but put their sentiments into more elegant verse; so that in strictness of speaking we may say of the Eneid," that it is of a miscellaneous compilation of poetical passages, composing all together an epic poem, formed upon the model of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; abounding in beautiful versification, and justly to be admired for the fine acquired taste of its author, but devoid of originality either of construction or execution." Besides its |