His or things to be done, but the two must not be separated by an interval; those who have been long detained in the elementary doctrines being found to acquire a distaste for the practical,-an impatience of reproof, an aversion, in short, for everything but what flatters them with a favourable opinion of their own state; so that their religion evaporates in sentiment, and their supposed conversion is nothing more than an exchange of the vices of the brute for those of the speculator in theological difficulties.* preaching at Plymouth, he tells us, gave general dissatisfaction, arising, as he suspects, from its practical complexion.† His injunctions to Mr. Carey, when he was going out to India as á missionary, are mainly practical; he was to be mild and unassuming in his deportment, attentive to the temporal as well as spiritual interests of the natives;-he was to study human nature, the success of any great and hazardous undertaking depending, under God, on the voluntary co-operation of mankind—and the first ministers of the gospel, who were for examples, being in nothing more remarkable than in the exquisite propriety with which they conducted themselves in the most delicate situations;-he was not to devote much time to an elaboräte confutation of the Hindoo or Mahometan systems-great practical effects upon the populace being never produced by profound argumentation; his instruction was rather to run in the form of a testimony, and his manner of imparting it, though not his spirit, to be dogmatic.‡ Hall's philanthropy is still practical: that species of it which affects to feel for every part of mankind älike, he regards as spurious; it must warm in proportion as the object on which it spends itself is near, the first duty of life being to cultivate well one's own field.§ With respect to Hall's own temperament, we gather from various passages in his writings, that it was by nature indolent ;|| and many and unfeigned are the lamentations which he utters over his own unprofitableness:¶-it was averse to every kind of display; he sighs for the leisure of an obscure village, where he might escape from visiters and call his time his own; he declines à lecture in London, partly from the vanity argued by the acceptance of it; he is reluctant to attend public religious meetings, discovering in them something of an ostentatious spirit, and figuring to himself, that the Great Head of the church did not strive, nor cry, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street ;*** he is offended at the perpetual rivalry displayed at missionary sermons, as to whose collection shall be the greatest; he is not pleased with the * Vol. iii., p. 381. & Vol. i., p. 250; v.,) p. 466. **Vol. v., pp. 478, 503. + Vol. v., p. 427. ‡ Vol. i., p. 302. spectacle presented at an ordination in the Baptist denomination, when elders are congregated from far and near, more, as he thinks, for show than use; he is a foe to all canting, all gestures, all manœuvres, all display of self; and professes no aptitude for what is called religious conversation in general company. He was irritable, as might be conjectured from à passage in his Memoir of Dr. Ryland, where there is a species of apology for occasional outbreakings of anger, a violent suppression of the natural feelings being, as he holds, not the best expedient for obviating their injurious effects. We come to the same conclusion from a very characteristic, and, to Hall, honourable, letter of excuse to a friend for his incivility to his servant, who had caused some interruption to his closet-devotions by the pertinacious delivery of an unimportant message; and, indeed, from the general tone of his writings, especially those of a political or controversial kind. Some allowance, however, is to be made for a little habitual spleen in a man who, conscious of high superiority, was depressed by circumstances below his natural level in life; for such a person, so placed, not to kick against the pricks would indeed have been a spectacle of protracted self-denial of the rarest merit, but was one which required a degree of virtue unreasonable to expect. Though unsocial, as he tells us more than once,¶ and when at Cambridge reluctant, as we have heard, to meet the advances even of men the most distinguished both for rank and talents, who studiously sought his acquaintance, he was easy and playful in his intercourse with such persons as had the privilege of his friendship, affecting amongst them no extraordinary gravity; and when, on one occasion, rebuked by a fellow-preacher of some charity sermons, more precisian than himself, for the vivacity of his conversation, Brother Hall, I am surprised at you, so frivolous, after delivering so serious à discourse!' Brother, was the retort, I keep my nonsense for the fire-side, while you publish yours from the pulpit.' With no one prejudice like ** Johnson, he still reminds us of him-he is what Johnson would have been (if it be possible to conceive him such) had he been a whig and a dissenter. He has something of his dogmatismsomething of his superstition++-something of his melancholysomething of the same proneness to erect himself before man and prostrate himself to the earth before God; a mixture of pride. and of humility-of domination and self-abasement: he has much too of Johnson's love for common-sense and home-spun philosophy, combined, however, with an imagination far more vivid *Vol. v., pp. 532, 556. † Vol. iv., p. 490. § Vol.i., p. 402. Vol. v., p. 507. **Reminiscences, p. 194. K 2 Reminiscences, p. 161. and and excursive, for which the former qualities did not always serve as an adequate corrective. His learning is not on the same scale as his mother-wit-it is enough, however, to add stamina to his speculations, and for more perhaps he did not greatly care. His knowledge of metaphysical and deistical writers appears to have been that in which he chiefly excelled; his allusions to classical authors are few, and his quotations from them (a practice which he somewhere gives us to understand he held cheap) in general trite and unscholar-like-but he was too affluent to borrow, and too independent to be a slave to authorities. We Such is our idea of this remarkable man and of his writings, formed upon a careful perusal of the five volumes before us. fear the memoir of him announced by his early friend and (we believe) fellow-student, Sir James Mackintosh, was never written, We waited long and anxiously for its appearance, but have had the sorrow to learn that the meditative and humane spirit which had undertaken this delicate task, has itself been lost to us. Some other hand will, no doubt, try to supply us with a regular life of Hall. But time rolls on-the great events of the day soon close upon every individual interest-and we have, therefore, preferred to speak for ourselves now whilst we have the season, rather than postpone our observations to a period when we might have profitably entered into the labours of others. If, in the former part of this paper, we may seem to have treated the name of Hall with less deference than it demands, we can only repeat, that on sitting down to the book, we did so with the most friendly feelings towards its author-that it was our intention to express those feelings without qualification or reserve, and that we had not a suspicion we should meet in it with matter so offensive. At the same time we trust, that whatsoever we have said has been so said as to evince our sense of the respect due to the author's genius and character, and our conviction, that of him it may be still exclaimed with truth, in spite of all his failings, there is a great man fallen this day in Israel.' ART. V.-A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand, in 1827; together with a Journal of a Residence in Tristan D'Acunha. By Augustus Earle, Draughtsman to His Majesty's Surveying Ship The Beagle.' 8vo. London, 1832. THIS is a spirited performance, and contains many details about New Zealand which, we feel strongly persuaded, are as authentic as they must be allowed to be amusing; yet we have not undertaken to give our readers some account of it, at present, sent, without considerable hesitation. The reason is, that it abounds in sweeping sarcasms on the English Missionaries settled in this remote region, supported only by a handful of anecdotes which, although the author may have been sincerely desirous of telling the truth, are not improbably tinged by his personal prejudices, and susceptible of explanations destructive in part, if not entirely, of the inferences which he requires us to adopt. The direction of the Church Missionary Society, in particular, is in hands so well entitled to respect and confidence, that we would fain have waited until there had been time for its secretaries to make adequate inquiry into the grounds of the author's bitter reflections on the conduct of its distant ministers, and lay the result in some authoritative shape before the world. The writer's description, however, of the rapid increase of intercourse between the Port of London and a part of the world which, but twenty years ago, it was considered impossible to visit without running ten chances to one of being massacred-to say nothing of being baked and devoured afterwards-satisfies us that Mr. Earle's book will be speedily followed by others on the same subject, and that we shall accordingly have plenty of opportunities for taking up, more satisfactorily than we could hope to do at present, the grave and serious question to which we have alluded. It is obvious enough, that those of our countrymen who visit New Zealand for merely commercial purposes have, in general, a vehement dislike of the missionary settlers now multiplying on various parts of the coast, and even of the interior; and that, after the usual fashion of human nature, there is little love lost. Presently, it is to be expected, we shall have enough of conflicting evidence to sift : perhaps some fortunate accident may enable us to bring forward a witness whose character and position may authorise us to claim for him far more reliance than the public at large might be willing to place on the testimony either of a New Zealand missionary, or of a South Sea skipper, or of any individual adventurer thrown by circumstances almost exclusively into the society of one or other of these classes. Meantime, having thus signified our belief that, in whatever regards the missionaries, Mr. Earle's statements must be received, for the present, with anything but rash confidence, we shall pass lightly over that questionable part of his volume, and select for the entertainment of our readers a few of those picturesque details of savage life in this Ultima Thule of the south, which, whatever may be the fate of his reputation otherwise, certainly entitle him to no mean place among the painters of manners. He is indeed a painter by profession; and though few of us may ever have heard his name, there are perhaps still fewer who have not ere now been indebted both for amusement and instruction to his indefatigable pencil. Regularly bred as an artist, and, it would seem, a person of highly respectable connexions, Mr. Earle has been, from opening manhood to middle life, as very a wanderer on the face of the earth as old Lithgow himself, or the still more venerable Ibn Batuta. For seventeen years past, he has been almost perpetually on the move, driven apparently by a sort of gipsy instinct from one quarter of the world to another, and in spite of overturns and robberies by land, and shipwrecks and all sorts of chances and changes at sea, happy everywhere, except when he had a touch of the liver complaint, against which no spirits can hold up, in Madras. To have visited every capital in Europe is now-a-days no distinction-on that score he is only qualified to be put on the ballot of the Traveller's Club. He has perambulated America, North and South, from Canada to Paraguay he has passed the Alleghanies and the Andes, and made sketches of numberless cities and harbours, which subsequently, being transferred to the panorama-limners, have enlightened most of us either in Leicester Fields or the Strand. He has wandered all over India in like fashion, and brought home the materials for panoramas of Madras, Bombay, and we know not how many more places in our Eastern empire. He has often sailed in king's ships, and after witnessing Lord Exmouth's performances at Algiers, he obtained leave to land, toured away the rest of that season in Barbary, and executed more drawings of its architectural monuments than anybody since Bruce. Among other little excursions he made one to New Holland a few years back-sketched the pretty panorama of Sidney-inspected Van Diemen's Land-and finally spent most part of a year in New Zealand-whence this book: which, however, contains also the history of another interesting episode in this restless adventurer's life-the Journal, namely, of his forced residence for ten months of 1824, on the desolate island of Tristan D'Acunha, where he had been accidentally left behind by a trading sloop bound from Brazil to the Cape of Good Hope, and had to wait patiently among a small colony of Jack Tars until another vessel picked him up. Such a life as this indicates not a little of the temper and character of the man that has chosen to lead it; and perhaps might have been sufficient of itself to prepare our readers for a book more abounding in lively descriptions, and clever off-hand observations, than in pains-taking research, and a cautious balancing of pros and cons. He has given no map of New Zealand, and introduces so many rivers and bays hitherto unheard of, at least by his names, that it is not easy to follow him in his perambulations, so as to add anything very accurately to the stock of our geographical knowledge, |