1825.] 
and pray !”—God of Mercy! do they 
pray to thee ? 
But it is not in plain prose alone, that 
Dr. S. pronounces judgment against the 
poet: the preacher must be poetical 
also. Ecce signum! p.8. 
“ Though an earthly guest in the heaven 
of heavens, he draws no empyreal air. He 
has nothing in common with the seraphim, 
who stand veiled in glory before the eternal 
throne; nor does his muse wet her adven- 
turous brows with the dew of that holy 
afflatus which wraps the soul in the purity, 
the bliss, and the devotion of a celestial 
visitant.”” 
Now, all this, we suppose, is exceed- 
ingly sublime and beautiful. But, for 
our parts, much as we admire, we would 
wish to wnderstand a little of the mean- 
ing of these fine metaphors as we go.— 
A muse wetting her adventurous brows 
with dews, &c.!—Wetting her brows? 
Umph! — To wash off the soil, perchance, 
of the dusty turnpike-road along which 
she had been travelling?—‘“ With the 
dew of a holy afflatus!”? An afflatus, 
in strictness, indeed, is a breath, or a 
breathing,—and breath may certainly 
settle into dew; but it must be a tole- 
rably long breathing that deposited dew 
enough for the Muse to wash her face 
in it. The word, however, in the Eng- 
lish language, is exclusively used to 
signify a supernatural inspiration ; and 
to wet the brows with the dews of an 
inspiration, is a process we are not 
inspired enough to comprehend. But 
what are we to say of making a clean 
diaper of this same dew of the breath of 
inspiration ?—of “wrapping up the soul 
in the purity of an afflatus 2” * 
But it is not upon an individual only, 
that Dr. S. thinks fit to pronounce 
judgment. He directs the thunder of 
* We beg pardon—we are dazzled a little, 
we are afraid, by this splendid involution of 
metaphorical language. On looking again, 
we suspect that the afflatus is the agent 
only, not the material, in this wonderful 
wrapping :| THAT is furnished by another 
personage. ‘The afflatus, we perceive by 
the help of our spectacles, only ‘‘ wraps the 
soul in the purity, bliss and devotion of a 
celestial visitant /”? Wrapt up, however, the 
soul is; and so, in our apprehension, is the 
sense, also, of this super-sublime passage, 
in a mysterious kind of way, which, we 
should suspect, but few of Dr. S.’s congre- 
gation could be capable of understanding. 
But the Doctor is, perhaps, aware that it is 
more the business of an oraToR to be felt 
than to be understood ; and as to the kind of 
feeling meant to be generated, there is no 
sort of ambiguity. 
Philosophy of Contemporary Criticism.— No. XLII. 
14 
his moral and social excommunication 
against a whole sect or class:—a-sect, 
by the way, whose theological, or anti- 
theological, opinions we have not the 
slightest inclination to defend. _ All we 
contend for is candour and fair-dealing, 
in what concerns the moral appreciation 
of conduct between man and man:—all, 
in our estimation, with which man hath 
any moral right to interfere. 
“The Deists of the present day,” 
says Dr. S. (p. 20), “are as misanthro- 
pic and licentious, as depraved and de- 
moralized, as the Epicureans of the 
ancient world !”—an observation which 
leads us to suspect, that of “the Epicu- 
reans. of the ancient world,’ Dr. S. 
knows, in reality, as little as he does 
about some other subjects, upon which 
he chooses to be equally dogmatical. 
He confounds, it is very evident, the 
primitive Epicureans, whose moral max- 
ims, he ought to have learning enough 
to know (how objectionable soever 
their theological opinions) were remark- 
ably pure and simple:—so much so, 
that even Dr. S.’s researches into the 
history of the rise and progress of the 
Christian church, ought to have informed 
him, that the primitive Christians, on 
account of their resemblance, in the 
temperance and simplicity of their habits, 
were stigmatized, by the more libertine 
and voluptuous pagans of those days, as 
a sect of Epicureans. He confounds 
these temperate and philosophical Epi- 
cureans, as the opprobrium of vulgar 
language confounds them, with that 
profligate rout of Epicures who thronged 
the courts and palaces of Rome, in the 
Imperial age of wealth and degeneracy; 
and swarms of whose legitimate descen- 
dants (from something like the same 
causes, of successful rapacity, or inciden- 
tal accumulation) may be found among 
ourseives. These are, indeed, (whatever 
philosophy or whatever religion they 
may profess) the real infidels: for they 
are faithless to every trust of God and 
nature,—to themselves, and to society! 
But we know not a more ignorant or 
more unchristian-like species of bigotry, 
than that of measuring the moral con- 
duct or moral principles of any descrip- 
tion of individuals, by their speculative 
opinions on metaphysical and unfathom- 
able subjects, —subjects, upon which the 
very firmest believer should yet believe 
with charitable modesty, because nothing 
but besotted ignorance, or inveterate 
perverseness, can prevent him from ac- 
knowledging, that others, as honest, as 
upright, and (upon the main) as mtelli- 
gent 
