'Havelock's account of those successive en

mind, Havelock thus recognizes the Author | when art (should it even be of better quality and Giver of his success- Cawnpore Can- than the present) sets itself to construct a tonment July 17.-By the blessing of God, I bridge of access between the two-to introre-captured this place yesterday,' &c. Again: duce the one patronizingly to the other, and gagements to the circle at Bonn has a signifi- point out to the hearers the speaker's meancant mention of the courage of his eldest son, ing, alas for the issue! Christianity, devoutand a reference to his youngest brother ness, and true religion are not indigenous in [whose youngest brother?], which will be the human soul, but it is the most grievous deemed pleasant evidence of his habitual rec- error to suppose them unnatural. The waters ollections of home.' 'In this confidential head; but it is not necessary are changed and purified at the fountainin consequence

despatch of the undemonstrative warrior, the reader will not fail to remark his sympathy for the hardships and sufferings of the private that they should hereafter run in iron pipes soldier.' In the foregoing and succeeding and artificial aqueducts, instead of the natura. communications Havelock's specifications of channel, picturesque with all the inequalities domestic incidents will be noticed.' 'The of nature which God made for them before deep emotions of the husband and father are expressed with much force and significance in the letter whieh succeeds; 999

sin was, Christian art-which we presume may mean something else than Gothic architecture severely pointed-is indeed wholly against the system of breaking up a living person into abstract bits of qualities. On the contrary, following the great model, which has Inspiration, a higher soul than art, for its guidance, we should be disposed to say, much unlike the writer of this biography, that the genius of Christian portrait-painting was to show how livingly and truly all these qualities made one man.

and so on and on, till there are no more letters to be indexed and discriminated for the dull public which does not know, until it is told by authority, the meaning of what it reads. Poor General Havelock! he writes letters worthy of a tender heart and a devout soul-letters of a man living and not indifferent to life, the head of a family which loved him; but they all become proofs of certain qualities and sentiments, each one demonstra- Recent events have rubbed the rust and tive of one little bit of his character, which moss off that old character of soldier which his biographer seems to think may be un- we were almost beginning to forget. All the bound and separated into pieces like a bundle modern devices of education, all the flux and of sticks, in the hands of Mr. Brock. But it increase of superior knowledge, have not happens, unfortunately for this style of writ-produced a nobler development of that old ing, that a man with life in him, whose whole perennial unadvancing humanity which, with frame moves together spontaneously and with every circumstance external changed, is tonatural harmony, is an object much more day as it was in the days of Hebrew David pleasant to look upon than a man on springs, or heathen Homer, and in whose perverse however cunningly constructed; though it is and wonderful nature the stern urgency and possible the latter might be made the more stress of physical opposition, the assault of instructive of the two, so far as anatomy is fiery trials, cruelties, sufferings, and deaths, concerned. No one desires to find "evi- have ever produced signs the most incontesdence" of such and such a moral quality for- table of a higher birth and a more noble mally adduced to prove the same, in the life power. War is terrible; but war has taught of a man of whom already the world knows ourselves, when peace, with all its sweetness something, and of whom it is worth anybody's and prosperities, had almost persuaded us to while to write a memoir. Would that biogra- the contrary, but there are things in the phers in general, and, above all, the composers world less endurable than even the hardest of religious biography, could but understand agonies of nature. Civilization and safety the charm and power of every thing which is had been saying otherwise for years; and spontaneous! There is no such spell in all these quiet years had so surrounded us with the tricks of composition, in all the expedi- alleviations and solaces, so persuaded us that ents of literary ingenuity. That which comes there must be a cure for every thing, that the warm and simple from one man's heart goes common heart began to feel death, disease glowing into the hearts of other men, with a and calamity, evils intolerable, and not to be force of nature which art cannot touch; but borne. But the war has taught us all a

harder lesson; the war roused us up-us | gle-minded, the ideal knight and soldier, the who cannot hear of a shipwreck or a railway Bayard of the heart. He who must meet accident without taking refuge from our hor- without shrinking every evil thing which opror at the sight of pain, in finding somebody presses nature he whose limbs may be to blame as the cause-to the length of bear- frozen, whose brain may be scorched, whom ing voluntarily such loss of life and happiness fatigue, want, toil, and hardship may all assuch rending of hearts and sacrifice of men, sault, but must never subdue-he who must as had never been known before in the expe- bear his arms and hold on his march, after rience of this generation. We have learned every faculty of his frame is exhausted, and how to send forth out of our careful homes only will and courage and a stout heart carthe very flower and blossom of our race, at ries him on-he who must rush upon his desperate peril of never beholding again death with a cheer, and rest upon the horriwhat it was the delight of our eyes to see, ble field without a tear wept over him, or a and sending them forth, with tears and friend at hand-and who does all this with prayers, but never with a grudge, into the the calmness not of a stoic, but of a hero ; midst of those old rude primitive agonies of he may be but a nameless one among many, of humanity, the battle, and murder, and a heavy-witted and unremarkable individua., sudden death, against which we have been yet he is at once the simplest and the most so long wont to pray-have learned by the wonderful instance of that triumph of spirit act that pain, after all, was not the one thing over flesh which is the grand and peculiar to be avoided, and death was not the chief privilege of humanity. of evils. Theories and thoughts do not educate so certainly as things do; it is easy enough to resign every thing in imagination for national integrity and honor, but it was not so easy to send the boys out of our hearts to dismal hospitals and deadly trenches, which even the mothers and the wives learned to do without grudging as they wept. Somehow it seems as though human nature could never show its bravest till it stood among the deadliest foes of its existence, holding its own superior part, as it must always do when driven to the uttermost, by itself, without a single secondary help. That old ideal of courage and simplicity, highest in all the forces of manhood, yet most like a child of all other men, which war has restored to our personal acquaintance, and which is the universal conception of a soldier, shows plainly enough the universa. natural appreciation we have of the results of such a practical and primitive collision between a man and the great adversaries of his nature. To go out in the face of death, and hold one's own against all its bitterness, for that spiritual and intangible something which a plain British soul calls by the modest name of Duty, is a thing impossible to conceive of without a quickening of one's heart. The superficial opinion of untroubled times is sapient about the bloody trade, the wild passions, the hired slayers of war; but through all these shines the gallant old imagination, brave, honorable, devout, and sin

And perhaps it is this purely practical contest, in which and through which he must live his life, which makes us associate a certain simple, profound, unquestioning-if one might use the word, even unreasoning-piety, with the highest ideal of a soldier. We require no speculation at his hands; he has little leisure for it. But thrown, as he is, out of all our peaceful confidence in external and secondary agencies into the far older and deeper consciousness of that life and death which lie absolutely in the hand of God, it is natural that the tone of his faith should take a literal plainness and urgency, which minds with more leisure to think, and less occasion to do, can rarely attain. Who can help recognizing this pure thread of individuality, descending from the Knights of the San Grail, from Bayard and Roland, a manly, noble, touching strain of that faith which believes "like a little child," down to the Uncle Toby of Sterne, and the still purer impersonation of Roland Caxton ? Only fiction, excellent reader imaginary personages every one-for few people care to know more fact of Roland than is told in that saddest of love-tales, which even Rhine tourists cannot make vulgar; or of Bayard, save that he was the sans peur et sans reproche, a repetition of whose praise has been the highest fame for every knightly soul since his time. Yet though they are fictitious, so true and so tender is the imagination, that it remains triumphant over all

memoirs and biographies, the real soldierly lady who writes the Memorials of Hedley ideal and type of man.

enced and acquainted with life. If ever he did write vague letters of general piety, age had taught him that words were not his vocation. General advices to everybody, and big conclusions about every thing, do not lie in the way of mature and disciplined men. Therefore there is but a meagre proportion of this kind of letter-writing, which has to be made the most of, and extended by judicious paraphrase in Mr. Brock's biographical sketch. But it is very different with the younger soldier.

Vicars does succeed in showing of her Is it a sinful act to speak of these creations young hero, is, that they could talk and of poetic fancy in the same breath with Gen- write in that style of religiousness which oberal Havelock, or with that younger and less literates all personality, and could spin out distinguished victim of religious life-writing, pious sentiments and wishes by the yard, a brave young Christian soul, but a much- skilfully keeping back behind that veil every injured man, Hedley Vicars, whose fate it sign of an individual speaker. General has been to run through some hundred thou- | Havelock lived to be an old man, experisand copies, and to give a new impetus and vigor to the art of biography, so far as its model department is concerned P. We are bound to confess we do not think so. Havelock, too has the sans peur et sans reproche which is better than the cross of the Bath; and we have not the remotest doubt that the young soldier whose name we class with his, was pricking gallantly upon the road to that same distinction. No one can read of the steady Christian efforts of General Havelock, of those prayer-meetings and instructions, and that devout supervision of his men, Oddly enough, when one thinks of it, it is which at last made his commander, in an people who die young, and have no experiemergency, "call out Havelock's saints," as ence, who are the most lavish of their admothe special portion of his forces known to be nitions to the world. It is your young heroes never incapable, and always ready-without who are at once most ready to offer, and have a respect and admiration, only shadowed by the strongest belief in, the efficacy of advice the wish that, if it had been possible, the who speak their word, in season and out of noble old soldier could have had some strain season, with a conscientious eagerness most of victory more like the occasion, than a worthy of honor, but which is scarcely so hymn out of a congregational "Selection" wise as it is brave. How far "Christian exto sing with his men. One must not be too perience" can be detached and separated particular about the hymn-though one may from human experience, it seems hard to be permitted to wish that Havelock had determine; but when one hears perhaps of a been so fortunate as to be born a Scotsman, young invalid, in the very earliest stage of if for no other reason than that he might life, whose blossom has been nipped by sickhave celebrated his triumphs in those true ness; or of a young man on the threshold of Psalms, bold Saxon and pure Hebrew, which the world, whom no miraculous decree of have found refuge in the Scottish churches, Providence has divested of the natural exuand might give a fit utterance, in their rug- berance of youth, as an experienced Chrisged nobleness, for a soldier's song of battle. tian," one wonders whether this strange But it is impossible not to recognize in all reversal of nature is indeed a fundamental these labors, in Havelock's life-long efforts, arrangement of Christianity, and whether exand the eager devotion of the young Vicars perience in spiritual, can indeed be totally to every work of charity and mercy within divided from experience in actual life. But his reach, the practical development natural however that may be, it is very certain and to the piety of men trained to the most prac-apparent that it is the young, and not the old tical of professions, and fighting their way Christians, who do the greater part of the against no metaphysical difficulties, but talk and letter-writing which form the bulk of through tangible evil. One can perceive religious memoirs.

this by inference in their biographies-but. Hedley Vicars was, we have not the slightthe biographers have no idea of exalting est doubt, an admirable young fellow, worthy that characteristic and high peculiarity. On of all praise and honor-good, high-minded, the contrary, what Mr. Brock wishes to show brave, a true soldier and Christian-but he of the General, and what the remarkable was young. In the fervor of his early faith THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE. 75

too deep for words, weeping over with hearts which break with the fulness of sorrow and of comfort. Too deep for words! if we could add a single syllable of exception to such letters as those of Hedley Vicars, it would be this: there are so many of those floats of expression which cannot go down into the depths, but must keep to the surface, that one loses sight of the reality which must and ought to remain below.

he wrote letters from which, as printed, it would be perfectly impossible to predicate who or what he was; and these letters, with the feeblest thread of story linking them to gether, from the Memorials, which are in the hundred and fiftieth thousand, or some such uncountable number. From the first few pages, which show him as a rather naughty and mischievous boy, to the conclusion, when the young leader shouts to his men, " Now, 97th, up on your pins and at them!" there Our quarrel, however, is not with Hedley is not one personal feature of identity in the Vicars, but with the compiler of his Life. It whole volume; and but for that morsel of famil- is written, this lady says, to refute "those iar slang, which throws a pathetic unexpected who, in the face of examples to the contrary, light for a moment upon the valiant young still maintain that entire devotion of the heart English gentleman rushing into the agony of to God must withdraw a man from many of battle, with no grandiloquent address upon the active duties of life; and who would be his lips, but only those common words, prepared to concede that, in making a good touched with the humor of his class and Christian, you may spoil a good soldier." time, we should have closed the book with no And to encourage" young Englishmen who more emotion than if it had been but a piece have more of Christ's religion in their hearts of mechanism adapted for writing letters, than they have ever avowed in their lives," which, by some strange chance, had come to "to emulate the noble example of a Chrisan end upon those fatal slopes of the East. tian soldier." An admirable motive; but how We have no wish to meddle with these letters this can be done by printing some scores of themselves; what a good man writes out of pious letters, in which there is very little the fulness of his heart to his own pious about the active duties of life, and still less friends, is a thing with which general criti- about the necessities of the profession, seems cism has nothing to do, and which never rather hard to see. What the book does ought to have been put under its eye. We prove is, that the young soldier was full of could easily select, as we had once thought of charity and good works, and had a pen fluent doing, chance passages from these, and from to write of sacred things; that he visited the letters of half-a-dozen other memoirs, soldiers in the hospitals, read to them, and feeling confident that no one unacquainted taught them, is to be gathered from the narwith them beforehand, nor, indeed, many who rative, but that he made large use of those had studied them carefully, could have dis- sentences which begin with "May we," or tinguished one from another; but we forbear," Oh!" and end in a note of admiration, is lest any one should suppose that we have any the chief fact proved by his Life. Are young wish to treat contemptuously or throw ridicule Englishmen to test their love of religion, the upon words, however often repeated, however the genuineness of their devotion, and the like each other, which have been the true ex- true nature of their faith by their ability to pression of a pious heart. We may regret write or speak after the model of these letthat these words are so many, and the mean-ters? Is it by practising a like exuberance ing so little varied. We might almost be inclined to say that, not after this fashion, in such a superabundance and overflow of talk, do the deepest emotions of the heart usually express themselves. We may be allowed to suppose that in this, as in every thing else in the world, there is a fashion and received manner, which people fall into unconsciously; but we cannot either blame or criticize letters which we can well understand the mother, the sisters, the devout women who have followed their young hero's course with prayers

of pious words, that the lads are to emulate this Christian soldier? Is it the beginning lesson of Christianity to enable every one who embraces it heartily, not to be taught, but to teach ? This may be the modern lesson most familiar to the religious public, but it is surely not the essence of the gospel.

Let us suppose this book put into the hands of a young man beginning life, to whom those usages of pious talk were unfamiliar, and who had no associations of reverence with them. We cannot tell-it is almost

impossible to predict certainly beforehand | thing either of living or of talking, but, far simpler and harder, of life.

It is strange to see, however, how these publications hold fast by the ancient eighteenth-century idea of religion as a thing associated with gloom and incompatible with cheerfulness, and how they do their endeavor, while denying the same in words, to prove that insane figment. We are perpetually assured that no one who ever saw this Chris

how any thing will affect any body; but the reasonable presumption seems to be, and we confess it is likewise our own feeling, that the reader, in such circumstances, who takes up this volume respectfully, with no wish to scoff at it, yet with no special prejudice in its favor, must pause, staggered and puzzled ere he is half-way through. Is it indispensable, before one dare hope one's self a Christian, to be like this model of Christianity? is it a neces-ian's radiant face, or that happy domestic sary process of grace in the heart, to convert circle, could ever venture again to say that one's home letters into vague addresses, as religion is a gloomy thing; and having said abstract as if the family there were the mem- so, biographer after biographer lapses into bers of a missionary association or a prayer- that dreary waste of letters, and takes espemeeting? Must all the personal outbreaks cial care that the social cheer of the circle of the heart be rubbed out by much diluted they instance, or the smile upon the individual repetitions of a text, or ejaculations over face, shall be thoroughly concealed from us one's own shortcomings? What is the young | under the blank wall of paper, which is all soldier-conscious of a gay exuberance of spirit which he cannot subdue, yet with a manful meaning to make his life worth living, whose heart has begun to yearn after the unseen, yet who scarcely knows the way-to make of this book when it comes into his hands? He is told that religion is not inconsistent with enjoyment, and that the Christian life expands every thing that is lovely and of good report in the natural existence, and he receives as proof of this welcome intelligence the letters of Hedley Vicars! It is possible that no alchemy in the world could wring such letters as these out of himself; it is probable that he feels no vocation at present to teach or testify, that he is shy of disclosing to any one the hunger in his heart, and that the lesson he wants is, how to be, and not how to declare himself a Christian. What is this youth's impression likely to be of the faith which he longs for without yet knowing it, when some pious friend puts into his hand the little volume where Hedley Vicars letters, enthusiastically approved and received as the type of youthful piety, are presented to him as a model and example for his own life?

pen

we get for a life. Who believes that religion is gloomy? Who does not know in his heart, with a certainty beyond demonstration, that the good man is and must be the happy man, and that there is no such certain crown and seal of earthly content as the love and the hope of heaven? But if any thing could persuade us to think so, it would be the argument of lives cut down into correspondence, or nicely picked out in choice bits and fragments labelled with the names of certain qualities. For ourselves, we cannot but think the defence and apology as impertinent as it is useless. Who, save a religious writer, dares to say that there is any popular prejudice against religion? The boldest of profane literature can only venture on abusing pretences of piety, and knows that a word against true faith itself makes an end of him at once and forever; and even caricaturists, who deal in hypocrites and Pharisees, must be very wary of their ways, and take good heed that they do not step across that fastidious and fanciful line of defence which some people call only good taste, but which surrounds, in the most common fancy, the Life is one thing and talk is entirely an- footsteps of true Christians. We do not beother; how long are we to have pious aspira-lieve there is a man, even in the lowest paths tions in the foreground, and all the origin of literature, who dares imagine for fear of and issue of them expressed in a few faint his audience, what is said complacently with lines behind? There are very many people the perfect consent of his, by Mr. Brock. who will never put their aspirations upon paper, nor tell anybody who or what they pray for,-people who could neither quote hymns nor write ejaculatory letters-and yet may be Christians; since Christianity is not a

Havelock." this gentleman informs us, "maintained that he was not degrading his intellectual nature when he became a follower of Christ-he was not deteriorating his moral nature when he sought to have fellowship with