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brance of Him; and that therefore the passion and death of Jesus Christ is as certainly your own as if you had endured all in your own body, that the Lord suffered in His sacred body for you; and that in order to secure to us this comfort, the Lord Jesus instituted His holy supper, that we might celebrate it with gratitude and joy, until He shall come in the clouds, and fully deliver us from the cross, under which we must patiently follow Him through this valley of tears, and receive us, soul and body, unto Himself in the everlasting kingdom of His Father. Is this your faith? Then

Answer-Yea.

3. Exhortation to firmness of purpose, and amendment of life.

In the third place, let every one examine his heart to know whether he truly desires to prove himself thankful to the Lord Jesus, for the rest of his life; whether also, you heartily renounce all envy, malice, and bitterness, forgiving your neighbors as the Lord Jesus has many thousand times forgiven us poor sinners. Whether you resolve as in God's presence heartily to hate all profanity, sinful words, and works, gluttony, drunkenness, and all other sins, so that you may, by the grace of God, nevermore, in your whole life, commit the same? Is this your firm christian purpose?

Answer-Yea.

All therefore who find this faith, and these purposes in their hearts, must not doubt that they already possess and certainly receive the pardon of all their sins, through the holy passion and death of Jesus Christ, as long as they persevere in these purposes, notwithstanding the many infirmities that may still remain in them, but which are covered with the righteousness and death of Jesus Christ. Wherefore let every one who heartily desires this, say with me-Amen.

(For the confession and absolution of sins see above.) Let us now pray as the Lord hath taught us:

Our Father, &c.

After this prayer the minister shall say:

The very God of peace sanctify you wholly and I pray God, your whole spirit and soul and body, be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He that calleth you, who also will do it.-Amen.

(Should any person have some special matter upon his mind, in reference to which he may desire to speak with the minister, an opportunity of so doing should by all means be afforded.) Easton, Pa. J. H. A. B. CORRECTION. On page 92, Jan. No., the name Isaac should read Isaiah.

OVIDIUS NASO REDIVIVUS.

I do not know when I have been better pleased than I was lately on entering into the the school-room of my friend E. S. to observe, seated at recitation, a whole class with one of them standing up and reading aloud, ore rotundo, in broad day-light, from the Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidius Naso. Under the quiet, abiding impression had I come into this room that this Latin classic, some time since, had been removed from his literary office, as being a worse than useless manual; that to satisfy the public wrath, which against him had been roused by some over-zealous reformers, on account of his somewhat suspicious morals and occasional lightness, as they said, our teachers had some years ago, been induced to expel him from their schools; so that as a class-book, to all intents and purposes, he was now morally defunct. As, at the same time, some others of our best ancient classics, by these same reformers, were threatened with a similar overthrow, trusting that with one victim their vengeance would be satiated, and fearing lest their mood might not be pacified but chafed by any remonstrance, I had felt, no doubt, with others of his friends, on the occasion, disposed to pass over in submissive silence this sudden, untimely removal of our Ovid. Amid surrounding storms I was willing that this unfortunate Jonah, much as I loved him, should be thrown overboard, if thereby would be calmed the waves of discontent and preserved the remaining heroes and wealth of the argosy. On entering into this school room then, under this settled impression, how great was my amazement to hear again the words of my longlost friend! Ovidius Naso redivivus! To see copies of his book held forth by a whole class of aspiring young scholars as their treasured vade-mecum! Not of Arion in the courts of Periander was the appearance more unexpected. Not of John Barleycorn, in summer livery, the standing up again, who had been ploughed down, was to me an event more joyous. From the proffered hand of an obliging, tender stripling how eagerly did I pluck one of these volumes! A well gotten up copy it was, edited by N. C. Brooks, A. M., including, of the Metamorphoses, my joy was a little abated to observe, only four books, but explained throughout by appropriate English notes and set off by pictorial embellishments.

After your common prints I would, by no means, have it supposed that I am apt to be drawn away in gaping admiration. On the contrary, I must say that, in most cases, I am rather chagrined at having my solid reading interrupted by a wood-cut on

every page. Poetry and pictures served up to me in equal proportions in a book are generally not gratifying to my taste. Embellishments of this sort, I feel persuaded, should come in a volume, "like angel's visits, few and far between," and like angels themselves, impressed always with the divine stamp of genius. In the best and longest poems only a few rare passages are seized upon by the inspired artist as proper subjects for his pencil; but on these he bestows all his phrensy. By brooding over these his imagination calls forth pictures well worthy of being studied, and such as are really ornaments to the books in which they are placed. Still, to the illustrators of the ancient classics greater freedom is to be allowed. In such books, even many engravings interspersed, if well designed, are not annoying, but highly gratifying to the student; as on the text they prove often to be the best commentaries, especially when illustrative of ancient manners and customs. Who, for instance, in this way, has not been aided and pleasured by the classical designs of Flaxman in Homer's Iliad? Who does not remember with fondness and gratitude the treasured pictures in his old Virgil? In a book like the present too they are peculiarly appropriate. The Metamorphoses of Ovid, as well stated by the editor of this edition, form the most suitable introduction to heathen mythology; and with this essential part of a good education, to make the student familiar, many pictorial designs are absolutely indispensable.

In two or three of these embellishments, however, it struck me that the artist had not fixed upon the happiest moment for presentation. To describe motion or changes in bodies comes not properly under the art of painting. Her scenes may be more actual and vivid, to be sure, being addressed to the eye, than those of poetry, which are addressed to the imagination; but with her sister art she cannot move along, hand in hand, in time. Her figures are immovable and forever confined to a single instant. It is cruel then, I would think, in any artist to seize upon a poor, unfortunate individual, only half transformed, and hold him up to the public gaze forever fixed in this awful plight without any hope of a consummation. A more incongruous monster is in this way produced than is that smiled at by Horace in the beginning of his Art of Poetry. The Midsummer Night's Dream of Shakespeare, as well remarked by Hazlitt, is not adapted for scenic representation. Pleasing as its fancies are to the private reader or the social circle they lose half their interest in being shown as actual things on the stage. The imagination then can no longer delight itself with its own unreal phantasmas. "Bottom's head in the play," says this excellent critic,

" is a fantastic illusion produced by magic spells; on the stage it is an ass's head and nothing more; certainly a very strange costume for a gentleman to appear in. Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine." If by scenic representation then this sort of poetry is injured much more must it be by pictorial delineations; which, while they present the same actual objects to the sight, are yet not relieved by the novelty of continual change and progress. How absurd then for an artist, in illustrating the Metamorphoses of Ovid, to show us Lycaon wearing the head of a wolf, Actæon that of a stag, and, worse than all, Ocyrrhoe that of a mare! Less wonderful, to be sure, but certainly more seemly, would their figures have appeared had they been presented to us either immediately before or immediately after their metamorphoses. With how much better taste are Daphne and Syrinx exhibited, each at the water's brink, and Narcissus, hanging over the brook, without, as yet, a single, incipient, vegetable sprout showing itself from their devoted bodies!

Into his notes, I was pleased to observe that the editor had thrown many choice passages from both ancient and modern authors. These, as in his preface he tells us, not only to illustrate the text, has he introduced, but to excite besides in the young scholar a taste for general literature. What a pity it is that the Metamorphoses of Ovid if read at all, are generally handled by the student at a time, when, it is to be presumed, he has as yet made but little advancement in Greek! On this account it is, no doubt, that of the quotations from this language the annotator has given us, for the most part, only translations by modern writers and these not always the most literal. Citations from the ancients too are brought in mostly to explain merely the text or some ancient customs; whereas a modern passage is often lugged in, I am sorry to say it, for little more than to display its beauty. Besides this, though I know the editor is a warm admirer of the ancients, yet he sometimes alarms my fears lest by some of his notes introducing modern verses he may induce the unwary student to surmise that perhaps, after all, the merits of these old classics have been over-rated. While setting forth some choice gem of later poets which, he says, surpasses anything, at any rate, of the same sort, in the old books, am apprehensive lest he should mislead the young sciolist to infer, from this one instance, perhaps itself over-estimated, a general conclusion, and set it down that, in all its departments, modern poetry is superior. While remarking, for instance, on Daph

ne's "sideribus similes oculos," on account of this apprehension, I had been just as well pleased had he refrained from passing on Moore that high encomium, on the occasion, which he doth, saying that, although by many former poets these sublunary orbs of female beauty had been compared to those in the heavens, yet for this modern bard it had been reserved to describe the human brilliants as surpassing those above.

"Look out upon the stars, my love,

And shame them with thine eyes."

Again, when poor Ovid, in the simplicity of his heart, while depicting the morning, setteth forth Aurora as the principal figure, which any Greek or Roman poet could not have helped doing, our annotator remarks, I fear exultingly: "The following description of morning by a modern poet far transcends the ancient." Whereupon he gives us some lines from N. P. Wil

lis.

Now, in descriptive poetry, I am willing to admit that the ancients are inferior to the moderns. To depict natural scenery after the plain manner of landscape painting the old Greek and Latin poets were not very ambitious. They issued no such poems as Cowper's Task or Thomson's Seasons, charming as these properly are to a modern ear. In the whole range of Grecian Literature (though that of the Romans is not quite so fruitless) only two or three very brief sketches of this sort are to be met with. But was this owing in them to any want of imagination or love for what is beautiful or romantic in nature? I trow not. It was because, of their respective countries with the bewitching sceneries they were so enamoured that, with describing their mere outward show, they were not satisfied, but they wished, by their creative imaginations, to seize upon the inmost spirits of these and bring them forth embodied into day. That around the objects of nature their warın affections might cling more fondly, to render these, in the first place, more congenial and captivating by assimilation, they personified their beauties. In every clear and secluded fountain they spied lurking a white Naiad; amid the rustling leaves of an old oak they heard faintly. uttered the sweet voice of a pensive Hamadryad; and while rambling in the remote glens of the mountains they sometimes came suddenly upon a frolicking, wild Oread; or from underneath the laughing forest-trees of June they startled up at times a whole set of dancing Fans or Satyrs. No wonder then that, in the morning, they were not content with depicting the mere

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