Such a transaction conveys some illustration of the state of society at that time, in that part of the country. It was that semi-barbarous state in which an individual, if he can but once acquire weight, has more weight than (of the same rank) he would in any other; because there are fewer authorities to interfere with his, and divide with him the deference of the people,-no established standard of manners, to which they are to consider him as well as themselves amenable, no deliberately adopted system of opinions to afford a point of appeal from his judgment, and but little recognition of the authority of the law or government of the land. Even the considerable strength of superstition which is sure to remain among such a people, may, without his consent, come over to his side, to reinforce the hold he has on them by better bonds. It is related, that when Grimshaw had protested against the recurrence of a profligate wake, and the people were nevertheless resolute not to surrender so delightful and long established a luxury, a dreadful thunder-storm which happened just at the time, was really believed by some of the alarmed and dispersing multitude to be a vindictive sign from heaven in sanction of his disregarded remonstrance. But this ascendency over their minds, which their very superstition lent itself to confirm, was acquired by his virtues,-by the sanctity of his conduct, the invincible evidence of the sincerity of his piety, his generosity, his self-devoted zeal and indefatigable exertion to do them good in every possible way, and all this accompanied by that intrepidity of spirit which trebles the value, both in estimation and in fact, of almost every virtue.

But we are digressing from our business unpardonably, especially as these anecdotes are not recorded in the book before us. The apology is, that for hundreds of years there had not come within the district contiguous to that which was to be the scene of Dr. Fawcett's labours, a man so important to the welfare of the inhabitants as Grimshaw.

In addition to the benefit derived from such a vicinity, the transient but mighty labours of Whitefield had left a strong impression on the tract where it was the appoint

ment of Dr. Fawcett to be afterwards a preacher for more than half a century. Rather early in his youth, he was repeatedly one in the immense crowds that were commanded into solemnity by that voice which was probably heard by a greater number of persons at once than any voice that ever spoke, excepting, possibly, that of Nadir Shah, when he commanded to slaughter and devastation. It was to Whitefield that Dr. Fawcett owed the decidedly evangelical form of his religious faith and feelings, which till then had been but very imperfectly defined and consolatory.

He became a preacher and a pastor about the twentythird year of his age, after a after a long training of serious thought, and reading, and social religious exercises. The protracted, and solemn, and even distressing deliberation on the question of daring to enter on this employment, renewed afterwards in the form of a question whether it was not his duty to surrender it, may be produced as one of the monumental illustrations of an order of feelings at that time entertained respecting this form of Christian service, among the most serious of the Dissenters, feelings which will be but imperfectly comprehended in the present day. While we justly impute a degree of superstition to the notions and feelings of our excellent ancestors respecting a call to the Christian ministry, that service is now adopted by some of our young men with a light facility approaching as much to the other extreme.

Quite as unlike the present state of things is the biographer's account of the taste of those venerable ancestors in the selection, in that northern tract of the country, of situations for their places of worship.

Dr. Fawcett's first locality as a minister, had this solitude without this beauty: it was on the border of a wide and gloomy moor; but had, not far off, on the one side, narrow, deep, long-extended glens, with thick, dark woods and rapid torrents from the mountains, all together forming scenes of the most solemn and romantic character, in which it might have appeared impossible for the contemplatist to remain long without a sensible preclusion

from his mind of all ideas of a gay or even cheerful order. And indeed, we think it very possible that musing in these scenes actually did co-operate with Dr. Fawcett's favourite book, Young's Night Thoughts, and his ill health, to confirm at this early period that deep gravity of character which was habitual through life, and which, but for the effect of religion, would have borne a colour of gloomy funereal sadness. The solemnity and silence of those valleys, with almost all their romantic and ghostly influences, have since vanished, at the invasion of agriculture and manufacturing establish

ments.

The roads traversing the country where the meetinghouses were thus, like hermits' cells, sequestered among woods or in the dreary precincts of moors, were scarcely anything like what we now mean by the term: they were mere tracks, or, at best, narrow, rough lanes for rural communication, often requiring some geographical knowledge and address, and no small labour, to wind through them to the intended point. And many of the persons constituting the congregations, had to come from a distance of miles, of many miles, on the Sunday morning, and return the evening of the same day. A number of Dr. Fawcett's first auditors, for instance, are here said to have resided at a place fourteen miles from the meetnig-house. Among the zealous worshippers of those days and places, it was not, even in the depth of winter, thought too much for persons of the stronger sex, to go and return many miles on foot. man like Dr. Fawcett would be greatly and conscientiously anxious that hearers so little sparing of exertion, should reap all the benefit that diligence on his side could supply.

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In process of time it came to be one of his occasional employments and highest gratifications, to assist the little parties thus coming from various distances for worship and instruction, to make a commencement of public religion in their own neighbourhoods respectively, where he had the pleasure, during the subsequent years of his long life, to visit them now and then, to witness their

success and progress, and repeat to them such instructions as those under which their Christian course, as individuals and as societies, had begun. Some of those societies have since become ramified into several congregations, each of which subdivisions has grown to a strength which the original church could not in its earlier periods have expected, even singly and undivided, ever to attain.

In the earlier part of Dr. Fawcett's ministry, his pleasure and usefulness were ungraciously affected by the narrow, disputatious, and inquisitorial spirit, which is described as prevailing in the people and teachers of the religious denomination to which he belonged, about the middle, and for a good while subsequently to the middle, of the last century. A very curious account is given by our author of the manner in which their minds were cramped, stunted, and irritated by a hyper-calvinistic cast of doctrine, acquired, but with the commonly attendant circumstance of a greater excess in the disciples than even in the doctors, from the writings of Dr. Ĝill, a man of great learning, and of Mr. Brine, a man of distinguished acuteness. But men destitute of both these qualifications, and especially one Johnson, of Liverpool, were suffered, in that north-western part of the country, to have an influence reflecting very little honour on the understanding of many of the religious societies. Even many who were by sincere piety checked from following out their train of speculation, to daring and profane assertions respecting the divine government, and an antinomianism of inference, were nevertheless incapable of relishing or enduring any preaching or writing that omitted the doctrine of eternal decrees. They could find no vitality or instruction in any religious ideas below the altitude of the supralapsarian ground. To quote from our author a very curious synonyme of theirs to this epithet, and one which we confess to be new to us in the history of religious cant, "the upper fall settlements” were the favourite region of their Christian contemplations. "The Gospel Call," to cite another sample, was necessarily implicated in their disquisitions; and to

them it was one of the greatest of abominations, that a preacher of Christianity should endeavour to enforce that religion on the consciences of unconverted sinners. Dr. Fawcett retained far too strong an impression of Whitefield to coalesce, or to be capable of any approach toward coalescing, with any such order of religious sentiment and ministerial practice; but then, there was no avoiding the accustomed penalty for maintaining mental freedom among mental slaves. It was not solely among the Baptists, as his biographer remarks, that the rigid creed and pugnacious temper prevailed, from which both his opinions and his habits of feeling kept him aloof.

We do not attempt any historical abstract of his long and valuable life. Duties constant, multiplied, accumulated, ponderous, were laboured through with more than a hero's resolution, but they were of too plain a kind, and too much the same from year to year, to admit of a stimulant diversification in the record. Long and violent sufferings at several times from the stone, the loss of amiable near relatives, and two or three changes of abode, are some of the most marking circumstances of the history. His ministry was to the same congregation from the beginning to the end; and great disinterestedness was evinced in this faithful attachment, as he refused repeated advantageous offers of change, one of them at a time of great pecuniary difficulty. The building of a new meeting-house for the enlarging congregation, in a locality of less wild, inhospitable, and solitary, but not less picturesque character, in which, in his infirm and suffering state of health, he would have thought it the absurdest of all predictions that he should preach nearly forty years, was one of the most prominent circumstances and changes in the uniform tenor of his life. Half a century ago, the raising of a new meetinghouse was vastly more of a novelty than it is now, when it is an event but little more remarkable in many parts of England than the erection of an ordinary dwellinghouse of the same cost. The altered character of the times in which his later life was cast, was, in this one circumstance of change, highly gratifying to him as a