1829.]

THAT

cestors, as well as the edifices

which they raised for the purpose of religious worship, are equally deserving of our notice, whether viewed as remains of art, or monuments of their labour and ingenuity, we have full proof, by the attention which is manifested in your Miscellany to every sub. ject that has a tendency to illustrate the manners and customs of our forefathers. Under such an impression, I take the liberty of sending you the annexed view of a curious timber house, situated at the bottom of the Wyle Cop, adjoining the East or English Bridge in the town of Shrewsbury, which has been taken down during the present year. (See Plate I.)

2

The mansion is supposed to have been erected in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, by William Jones, an alderman and opulent draper of the town, and father of Thomas Jones, esq. six times Bailiff, and first Mayor, of Shrewsbury.

The building was spacious and rude, its exterior, unlike the generality of our ancient mansions, being void of the usual carved ornaments, grotesque heads, &c. The entrance from the street was by a remarkably low arch-1 way, which led to a small area surrounded by the house and its former appendages, and formed a communication to a few smaller buildings adjoining the river side, which were doubtless the warehouses of the original occupier of the house.

A portion of the great chamber or withdrawing room remained nearly. in its original state, having a large, chimney piece adorned with grotesque carving, and a variety of devices and armorial bearings in plaster displayed upon the ceiling, and, with the other principal apartments, fronted the street. Yours, &c.

Mr. URBAN,

H. PIDGEON.

Bremhill, Dec. 3.

1

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date from it much of his subsequent ill-health!!"

This is something like what is stated by Neal, who says, that a Puritan Clergyman had his days shortened by what he suffered from prelatical persecution, he dying at upwards of eighty!!

Now, Sir, being at Winchester with Crowther, I assert that I never saw any oppression, except in one instance, in six years, among two hundred boys; and those who inflicted this one oppression, on complaint to the Warden, were expelled instantly.

'How many have died since by such oppression, I know not; but poor Crowther must have been a long time dying; and as I have never been in robust health, it may be said, if any mention of so humble a Wykechamist may be made after death, that I" never recovered the oppression I suffered at school." You shall have at least, during life, my hand to the contrary; and I shall add, that dining and sitting next to this identical MR. CROWTHER at a Wykechamist meeting in' London, having never met him from the time of our being at school, he' spoke with delighted reminiscence of those days, and it would be singular indeed that he should have come to dine with his oppressors, so many years afterwards, if he "never recovered the oppression he suffered !"

These charges in general are too despicable to notice; but the name under which they are published, has induced me not to withhold my own, and to be somewhat more particular.

Mr. Wilson says, "his (Mr. Crowther's) TENDER spirit, like Cowper's, never recovered the OPPRESSION under which he suffered from the lyranny of the ELDER boys!!"

I was the senior of the ELDER BOYS, when he was junior; and I defy any human being to say that from me, as one of the oppressors, he ever heard an unkind word, or that one junior

Daniel Wilson, in a Sermon preached at Christ Church, Newgatestreet, of the late Mr. Crowther,"that his tender spirit NEVer recoVERED THE OPPRESSION he suffered at Winchester, from the TYRANNY OF THE ELDER BOYS! if he had not to GENT. MAG. December, 1829.

tection. Many now alive were elder boys with me at the time, some in the highest stations; and I can say the same of them.

As this accusation has been publicly made, I shall here give the names of all those elder boys, some of whom

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[Dec.

ter was every thing I could expect from a gentleman and Christian; "but my opinions are unaltered.

oppressors,

Having given testify against Mr. the names of these Wilson's statement, as publicly as he has not hesitated to make it. I have one more observation to offer. Crowther remained at Winchester till 1788. Can a reflecting human being imagine if, in his junior year, he had received such treatment as is inferred,—that this "meek" boy should have said not one word to his father or mother, or that they should have made no representation, what a monster of a mamma must she have been, to have sent the "meek" boy back again to his oppressors! in order that a most respectable character -doubtless from some misapprehension-should be left, forty years afterwards, to cry out "Murder!!"

and

However such statements may be calculated to amuse and edify the Mayor and Aldermen of London, I believe there is no one who knows any thing about the matter, who would not say with me, INCREDULUS ODI!

From a letter from the Junior in my chamber, and Crowther's friend at New College, I extract the following passage: Of the six Præfects you mention, I will engage that four of them (yourself, Lee, Hamley, and Howley,) never hurt the hair of a junior boy's head. Of the others, I have no particular remembrance; but I repeat that, having left Crowther a stout boy at Winchester in 1785, and KNOWING HIM WELL afterwards at College (New College), I have NO REASON

WHATEVER TO BELIEVE A WORD OF

THE STATEMENT PUBLISHED!! I knew Crowther very well, both at WINTON and OXFORD!!"

SPECULATIONS ON LITERARY PLEASURES.-No. XIX. (Continued from p. 417.)

terminated our speculation in the former number, it may, in view of the desolations which cover the face of

Iceland, be objected by some, that the argument in Archbishop King's 3d chapter of the Goodness and Benevolence of God, as indicated in the economy of our planet, stands invali

dated.

The speculations, which in the times of the ancient Greek sages, Anaximander and Xenophanes, prevailed in physics and theology, are still urged by the philosophers of these times, and sometimes inferences derogatory to Divine Benevolence are drawn. In this our own age, as indeed in most others, the discoveries of the geognost, the naturalist, and the astronomer, are often made the basis of assumptions invali dating certain points in revelation, and what we know of the Divine attributes.

The inauspicious aspect of Iceland may, therefore, be cited by some of these philosophers, on the present occasion. The vain sceptic, arrogating to himself that right of judging which none save a higher than human intelligence has any just pretension to use, might probably urge in full view of the gloomy and chaotic aspect of the extensive districts which diversifies almost the whole face of that island, that an argument here may be superinduced of the improvidence of nature, and the inadaptation of the means to the end. An answer, however, might be found to a position of this kind. It is conjectured, and with much appearance of reason, that that very extensive island, reared in the midst of the ocean, had its origin from marine volcanoes, and hence its prominent characteristic features would seem not so much intended for the support of mankind, as to subserve certain probable effects in the physiology of that part of our globe, unknown to us. This is beyond question possible; while it is granted, on the other

1829.]

hand, that the inauspicious nature of its soils are discouraging to any other hypothesis. In the language of an intelligent observer of those regions, "there is no quarter of the globe in which we find crowded within the same extent of surface such a number of ignivomous mountains, so many boiling springs, or such immense tracks of lava, as here arrest the attention of the traveller. The general aspect of the country is the most rugged and dreary imaginable. On every side appear marks of confusion and devastation, or the tremendous sources of these evils, in the yawning craters of huge and menacing volcanoes. Nor is the mind of a spectator relieved from the disagreeable emotion arising from reflection on the subterraneous fires which are raging beneath him, by a temporary survey of the huge mountains of perpetual ice by which he is surrounded." And here, whilst contemplating this terrestrial arena of many and complicated relations, this scene of earth, with its ordained economy, imagination, though framed in her happiest mould, is continually bewildered and astounded. Des Cartes, we are told, ❝raised his eyes to the heavens, and grasped the universe in one comprehensive idea, all its parts disposed with equal wisdom and simplicity by an Eternal Lawgiver. Amid this stupendous assemblage he seeks a centre.”

The student, in like manner, casts his eyes about him, and surveys his own immediate neighbourhood, and sees that the work of accurately exploring the most inconsiderable nook in the illimitable empire which nature opens to his view, demands a period equal to the allotted term of human life. The individual mind, therefore, can only glance at the infinitely varied system which science unfolds, and rise to general corollaries from the teachings of analogical inference. Filled with the survey, he rejects with disdain the cold positions of presuming sciolists, whose arrogance of reason is continually baffled by alleged infractions of Nature's harmonies, as preestablished in their own understandings, and gives utterance to the language of his heart in the enthusiasm of a more generous philosophy. Such aspirations have been adopted, amongst others, by Lord Shaftesbury. This nobleman, from certain delinquencies in his writings, has been considered a

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mong the number of the proscribed. Occasionally an impugner of certain things which, as believers in Revelation, we hold sacred, he yet cannot be classed with the school of Hume without manifest injustice, as the cold philosophy of the last had no parallel in the author of the "Characteristics." In surveying, then, the wide empire of Physics, instead of arraigning when we do not understand, we are constantly ready to indulge rather in the magnificent apostrophes of Lord Shaftesbury, and follow him when he says, "Let us not, my friend, thus betray our own ignorance, but consider where we are, and in what a universe! Think of the many parts of the vast machine in which we have so little insight, and of which it is impossible we should know the ends and uses,-when, instead of seeing the highest pendants, we see only some lower deck, and are, in this dark case of flesh, confined even to the hold, and meanest station of the vessel."-"O glorious Nature!" he afterwards exclaims, "supremely fair and sovereignly good! O'thou impowering Deity, supreme Creator! Thee I invoke, and Thee alone adore! Thy Being is boundless, unsearchable, impenetrable! In thy immensity all thought is lost, fancy gives over its flight, and wearied imagination spends itself in vain, finding no coast nor limit of this ocean, nor, in the widest track through which it soars,-one point yet nearer the circumference than the first centre whence it parted."

The philosophical Ptolinus, upwards of sixteen centuries since, piously soliloquizes with a sentiment not always used by the modern investigator: "As he who diligently surveys the heavens, and contemplates the splendour of the stars, should immediately think upon and search after their Artificer, so it is requisite that he who beholds and admires the intelligible world, should diligently inquire after its Author, investigating who he is, and where he resides, and how he produced such an offspring as intellect,—a son beautiful and pure, and full of his ineffable Sire."

The pious heart, expanding with the boundless survey which the system we inhabit presents, glows with the warmth of writers such as these, and disdains the callous and calculating carpings of him who prostrates the power of Deity to the level of his own understanding. In an atmosphere of

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unclouded serenity, when the black tempests of wintry vapours, or the tremendous magazines of heaven's sublime artillery, have "forgot to rage," and left creation to repose, an illimitable expanse of bright ether unfolds upon our optics,-regions of space, which stretch far beyond our system, excite thoughts concerning unknown spheres, perhaps other and higher modes of rational and animate existence; and when thus relaxing from closer inquiries, we give the rein to imaginations which mathematical admeasurements and computations have excited, we are constrained often to admire the wisdom of an all-provident Deity, as displayed in these to us his remoter provinces of empire. As the borealis within the arctic circle of our planet, so the luminous ring which describes the circumference of the planet Saturn, subserves to the comfort and felicity of those tribes who live within the sphere of its influence; and in like manner it may be conjectured, that the atmosphere which surrounds the planet Mercury is of so dense a nature as to resist the overwhelming influence of the sun's rays.

Like the veins and stratification of our native planet, beyond an inconsiderable depth, the upper regions of our atmosphere lie as yet equally without the sphere of our knowledge. The borealis; the metallic and mineral showers which frequently arrest the observation of the curious; the meteor, in all its fiery shapes, have been individually the subjects of frequent hypothesis; but theories connected with them are by no means placed on a basis every way satisfactory. The eye of sense, wandering aloft, ascends through these immediate spaces surrounding our planet, measures the magnitude, mutual distances, and relative motions of the luminaries which assail its notice, and, powerfully aided by science, endeavours at length to grapple with ideas of space and bulk too mighty and vast for imagination to conceive. Wrapt in intensity of thought, curiosity is ever busied in framing her thousand hypotheses, while surveying either with the unassisted organ, or through the "nightly tube," the trembling firmament glowing with the fires of unnumbered stars. And yet, in reference to the state of our knowledge, it is a consideration well calculated to teach a lesson of

[Dec.

humility to the boasted triumphs of modern science, that, after all the discoveries, from the days of Copernicus to those of Herschel, which have tended to raise the rank and order of astronomical speculations to something more approximating coherency and grandeur, our highest flights of speculative knowledge terminate in a bare computation of bulk, motion, and relative distances. Actual calculation founded on experiment, through the medium of artificial glasses, has indeed, all know, demonstrated that the planets, and by analogy all the myriads which swell this midnight pomp," are vast globes of fire, the probable bases of animate, unknown existences, and not, as of yore, supposed created for the sole purpose of lighting a solitary world.

The speculative visions, and the theories which have, in a full and luxuriant flow of fancy, been fastened upon these amazing discoveries, have of course varied with the degree of intelligence and of judgment in him who contemplates them. But Chalmers *, amongst others, has sometimes winged his pegasus to a flight bordering on the last extremity of hyperbole and fiction. And the effects of pushing hypothesis so far as to anticipate, in all the sheer extravagance of uncurbed fancy, the peopling of such remote territories, not exactly in idea, as splendid visions of worlds and systems which may possibly exist in immensity, but treated as the actually demonstrated results of philosophical enquiry, are obvious. When this is done, and arguments designed to refute certain corollaries deduced from these visions, seriously addressed to judgment and reason, the attempt may be thought highly injudicious. When a writer, not content with endeavouring to reconcile positions in Religion with established facts in Philosophy, pushes imagination far beyond the legitimated basis of his syllogism, we do not always regard him as a sound casuist. We, on the contrary, are disposed occasionally to think that he deals rather in "poetry" than "philosophy," and cannot always implicitly accompany him in his logical postulates, when we mistrust the validity of his assumption. Chal

Dr. Chalmers, author of a series of "Discourses on the modern Astronomy in communion with Revelation."